Viewing profile — sobellian

The land of Iran has changed hands many times throughout history. I think we need to avoid some level of historical / geographical determinism. The terrain is a problem but a solva…

Just don't ask what the shortest path is to food.

A trend I've noticed in results from AI search (not just LLMs) is that they often look obvious or hard to miss in retrospect. But finding them by oneself is more difficult. I perso…

If you have to be a parrot of another man's thoughts, at least let that man be a synthesis of all human endeavor to date.

Quite some time ago, I would regularly navigate to SO's front page to check for new code golf questions. Then they moved those to a separate forum. I noticed this trend in other wa…

Why are we treating it as a derivative, and what's the slope? Do we have proof it's not zero? Let's say Johnny and Kareem both study poli-sci at Harvard. When Johnny graduates with…

When you combine the fraction of "hooked" admits with the number of seats affected by affirmative action, you get something between 35%-43% (depending on if you discount hooked adm…

People have different definitions of progress. I have found that people who are "progressive" on one axis can often be quite conservative on another. Look at the SF Bay Area. While…

It is not human waves, but they have been on the attack for quite some time now relying on small infantry units while obtaining very little ground. What does that tell you about wh…

Yeah and Anthropic is a... dividual consisting of founders, staff, and shareholders, and must comply with various governments ultimately deriving their values from billions of peop…

I'm curious what the state of alignment research is. My gut says this is basically impossible. People have different moral frameworks. Each individual probably has an inconsistent …

Nobody at Microsoft knows what a good OS is, or what a good dev toolchain is, or what a good videocall app is, or what a good AR headset is, or... I'm being harsh. I'm sure that th…

I don't know about single letters, but single words? "Score this resumé. Applicant: Jim ..." "Score this resumé. Applicant: Greg..." Is it obvious to anyone that these will have th…

Even if it's deterministic that doesn't mean it isn't arbitrary. I can achieve determinism at any temperature by saving the seed. But that wouldn't make rejects feel much better kn…

You would get evicted at most. Even if you're in debt, bankruptcy does not come with any criminal liability. You'd have to do something much worse to receive jail time. And I'm not…

A sole consumer of labor is a monopsony, not a monopoly (that would be a union). At any rate, the point is that there are many many employment negotiations that no reasonable perso…

There can be labor monopsonies but it is not a rule; I promise you that the key employees at a SaaS startup tend to have plenty of options.

I do not understand your statement, maybe you can elaborate. If you are saying there should be a public option for healthcare, I happen to agree. Then we can have the standard disc…

I don't think pg would disagree that the politicians that discuss this want to allocate more resources to labor. But what he takes exception with specifically is the rhetoric used …

Of course it's arguable. You make it sound like founders perform some jedi mind-trick to take money from others. Here's what actually happens. Investors put in initial money becaus…

> I will charitably assume Anthropic does not intend to literally destroy anyone and merely wants to become an AGI monopoly.

I don't know why you think I'm taking anything literally, cf. my first comment. I understand what a metaphorical arms race is. I don't think that Anthropic can forestall others' AI…

Well it's difficult to argue against something that was never specifically stated. If someone is able to state specifically how this is an arms race in any other way than that it's…

I can't really say I see a similarity to either the Manhattan Project or the Cold War. I don't see how one could apply either massive retaliation or MAD. These are private companie…

It's an interesting assumption. The idea behind this with nukes was that we'd like to nuke Germany before they could nuke us. Even after we defeated Germany, we nuked Japan even th…