Viewing profile — defgeneric

Worth reposting a follow-up tweet from the author Tom Zahavy [1] after this made the rounds on X/Twitter recently: > A few reflections on my "LLMs Can’t Jump" paper: > My position …

> A single competent person with AI can replace an entire marketing video production department or agency. This is a good example of what I was pointing to with "fully transforms t…

I would guess if asked Harari would actually revise that lower. The point was: even those arguing most strongly that AI is an autonomous historical force can slide back into the me…

Being fairly at expert level in a "solved" domain (for some definition of solved) but also having near-expert level proficiency in a non-technical as-yet "unsolved" domain and watc…

He's saying: "Expertise improves AI-assisted work, experts can steer better and get more out of models." The obvious conclusion for anyone is "therefore experts will remain the ind…

Exactly. The post read to me as another variation of the denial that people with expertise are reaching for right now. My sense is that we as programmers went through it over a yea…

I've seen this sentiment so much in the past month that it's starting to make me worried that the labs will silently make this the default output to satisfy users. I do recognize t…

The "3 years" figure has been repeated endlessly and yet the same H100s are making today roughly what they did in Jan 2024...

We're going to see the battle intensify here because "spikes" of ASI are emerging that can't be ignored. Models are now better than humans in certain domains or for certain tasks, …

Yes, and given the nature of the current administration, whose actors are not inclined to see themselves as independent competing capitals among others, but rather as privileged ca…

This is where we need the hardware companies and neoclouds to start speaking up. The labs want to elevate matters from the level of civil society (basically, competing firms) to th…

Like all forms of eschatology it's not actually concerned with the future to come--it's real aim is to have influence now . It's just a form of rhetoric. To dismiss them, saying, "…

Approximate as a limit and not surpass, where the hidden hope actually seems to be that they don't surpass. There are lots of variations floating around, from simple metaphors like…

It's a form of denial. We're getting another "de-thronement of man" on the order of Copernicus and Darwin. Some get excited, others turn away in horror. Negation is the outward exp…

A justification for this would be: states choose these providers to accurately present building codes (keeping up with the right versions/revisions is a lot of work, etc) because t…

This is why Google is pushing SEOs to get their clients to codify and publish their domain expertise: while it gives them a way to filter signal from noise/slop right now (supposed…

In many cases the really key idea that transforms the overall system design comes from working closely on the specific implementation details. Maybe you don't redesign the system t…

> Earlier automation targeted physical and manual labor, where a worker’s identity was at least partly separable from the output. A welder is not the weld. It comes through even wo…

In case it helps anyone, in some minor cases I was able to recover and continue with /rewind.

There was also a period around the mid-2010s where I had the strong impression that lots of younger ambitious devs were fanatically promoting rust against C's undefined behavior mo…

This was based on an old project that I resurrected, improved, and repackaged with claude code. It's useful for estimating demographics in large datasets from limited information, …

It could be a symptom of how fragmented workflows are, which itself seems to be due to providers adding friction to guard against being integrated away by some larger platform.

You mention the technical aspect (readability) and others have suggested the aesthetic, but you could also look at it as a form of rhetoric . I'm not sure it's really effective bec…

The development of QM was so closely connected to experiments that it's highly unlikely, even despite some of the experiments having been performed prior to 1900. Special relativit…

I suspect the move back to pen-and-paper exams is being resisted by the teachers. It shouldn't be that hard though--when the workload became to great, most of my own professors wou…