Viewing profile — PollardsRho

What about bets without insider participation, where you want the market to function as an aggregator of educated guesses? OP has one reaction to insider trading, but I imagine a v…

A lot of expressions in English started out as calques, outputs that process: you're paving the way!

All models are wrong; some are useful. Cognizance of that is even more critical for a model like exponential growth that often leads to extremely poor predictions quickly if uncrit…

> Given consistent trends of exponential performance improvements over many years and across many industries, it would be extremely surprising if these improvements suddenly stoppe…

Students shouldn't be treating class material as something they "do not care to know." AI can be used in ways that lead to deeper understanding. If a student wants AI to give them …

If you have many metrics that could possibly be construed as "this was what we were trying to improve", that's many different possibilities for random variation to give you a false…

Advantage, sure. I just don't think that advantage is particularly meaningful in situations a human has virtually no chance of escaping. Humans also have a lot of their own advanta…

If someone who is so good at manipulation their life is adapted into a movie still ends up serving decades behind bars, isn't that actually a pretty good indication that maxing out…

I don't think there's a confident upper bound. I just don't see why it's self-evident that the upper bound is beyond anything we've ever seen in human history.

People are hurt by animals all the time: do you think having a higher IQ than a grizzly bear means you have nothing to fear from one? I certainly think it's possible to imagine tha…

Why is 2) "self-evident"? Do you think it's a given that, in any situation, there's something you could say that would manipulate humans to get what you want? If you were smart eno…

Thanks for sharing this proof! As someone who enjoys math but never got myself through enough Galois theory to finish the standard proof, it's fantastic to see a proof that's more …

At that point, you'd be better off just using a recursive algorithm like the one in GMP. You're swapping out arbitrary-length for arbitrary-precision.

The compound-interest intro to e (the value of 1 dollar compounded continuously for a year at 100% interest), to me, has several useful advantages over different introductions that…

I will die on the hill that TOML should be used for the vast majority of what YAML's used for today. There are times a full language is needed, but I've seen so many YAML files tha…

They then say there's an approximation for Fibonacci, which makes me think that's what they're calling Binet's formula. (I'd also expect an author with this mathematical sophistica…

I don't think it's controversial to say that asymptotic analysis has flaws: the conclusions you draw from it only hold in the limit of larger inputs, and sometims "larger" means "l…

Very cool! What's meant by "it’s already too much to ask for a closed form for fibonacci numbers"? Binet's formula is usually called a closed form in my experience. Is "closed form…

It seems to me that much of recent AI progress has not changed the fundamental scaling principles underlying the tech. Reasoning models are more effective, but at the cost of more …

It's not that technical work is guaranteed to be in your codebase 10 years from now, it's that customers don't want to use a product that might be good six months from now. The act…

Previous experience isn't manual edge cases, it's training data. Humans have incredible scale (100 trillion synapses): we're incredibly good at generalizing, e.g., how to pick up o…

The time span on which these developments take place matter a lot for whether the bitter lesson is relevant to a particular AI deployment. The best AI models of the future will not…

> The models keep getting better at an exponential. Isn't it the opposite? Marginal improvements require exponentially more investment, if we believe Altman. AI is expanding into d…

The math underpinning an AI model exists independent of the hardware it's realized on. I can train a model on one GPU and someone else can replicate my results with a different GPU…

What incentives do any humans have to so totally delegate the functioning of the core levers of societal power that they're unable to prevent their own extinction? "Better machine …