Viewing profile — gwd

Got downgraded from Fable to Opus after asking about the Great Oxidation Event [1], presumably because it started thinking about cyanobacteria, which made the monitor afraid I was …

There was an interview I watched with Cory Doctorow just a few weeks ago, where someone asked him, "What kind of evidence could be presented to you to make you believe that LLMs we…

Do the math: The number of professorial positions is not growing (or not very quickly). Under steady-state, each professor only needs to train one single tenure-track PhD in their …

Leveling this up: Calculate sun angles at different times of the year to simulate light entering the house. Find out if some room is going to be unbearably hot in the summer becaus…

> Exploiting multiple zero-day vulnerabilities autonomously to escape containment is pretty nuts and the first story of this kind that I've heard. But this also feels like bragging…

...and even though they've technically found the result through the non-intended route (breaking out of OpenAI's harness and into Huggingface's servers), they can then pretend they…

My interpretation was that the Damore thing was the threshold where the author finally stopped identifying as a "rationalist". After that point, they considered several times writi…

They did. The entire section starting with "Of course, despite the emphasis on reason — and the subtle implication that the out-group is more wrong — the rationalist community is s…

Anyone understand what the point is of only extending it for 5 days?

I noticed this effect really strongly at university. There was one particular lecture hall that was effectively buried in the side of a hill; I can't count how many times I had an …

I'm guessing you mean, the incompleteness theorem guarantees that nobody can prove their model is un-break-able? I don't think that's quite what it means. The theorem says that it'…

I mean, that's just not true. You're right that when people buy a Ford, they're not thinking that much about the CEO. But they certainly are thinking about other Fords they've owne…

Yeah, really enjoyed the size comparison.

I like the idea, but the "About" page triggers some warning bells: "We’re not trying to make this about us. BECAUSE SLATE IS ALL ABOUT YOU." I mean, that's fine, but... I am on you…

Important note: The cost / delay he's talking about isn't registering a company ; it's getting a VAT number . I've done both in the UK, and while getting a VAT number is significan…

That won't get you a VAT ID, which is the key thing he says he needs to be able to bill people outside of Germany. It is significantly cheaper than 9k EUR and faster than 6 months …

I've heard this called "lazy consensus". Basically, rather than say, "Is it OK if I do X?" Say, "I'm going to do X on date Y unless someone objects." Particularly useful as the num…

It's called "YouTube" because if you want to , you can be your own broadcaster. Calling YouTube "social media" because anyone can contribute (although the vast, vast majority are j…

I had the same question. I had zero problems with Fable (for those two days I had access to it). For all I know, the author has always been an a-hole to Claude, and Fable is just t…

The thing is, they've still taken the time to actually write "I get an error". So by principle of reciprocity, you can just take 2 seconds to say, "What's the error?" Usually that …

Sure; I was using shorthand. Sometimes a whole edifice of ideas rests on one shaky one; and if you can challenge that one the whole thing falls apart. But even being able to identi…

"Don't expend more effort than they are" has actually long been a good principle to have internalized. Someone done only cursory research before asking a question on a mailing list…

If you search for "Bricks and minifigs", every result apart from their main website is about this controversy. One of the values of a franchise is the branding; at least for the fo…

> If we had just trusted its output, we would now have a security vulnerability in production, allowing anyone to access other people's accounts. This is one reason you always get …

I mean, if your goal is to absolutely maximize the number in your bank account, no. But then there are other things you could be doing too -- you can do the math and cover all your…