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akozak

1,010 karma · joined August 26, 2010

https://twitter.com/alexkozak
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akozak··on M5 Ultra Mac Studio Review
"a total cost of $0" Uhh ... how much is that hardware?
akozak··on Samsung is using Claude to verify chip designs. It's not going smoothly
The source article in Korean actually seems to tell a somewhat different story, that it's been a massive productivity boost in their early experiments. You could focus on the points of friction, but that isn't the main takeaway I think.
akozak··on How Claude marks AI-generated content
Most likely this method https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.10226 (EDIT: and Google's SynthID paper which builds on it https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08025-4)
akozak··on Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic
Lower real operating costs isn't the same thing as below cost pricing.

US law here is nuanced. Good quick primer https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...

akozak··on U.S. government takes 10% stake in Intel
A lot of people are commenting on this without reading the actual content of the deal, which is spelled out in Intel's press release: https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1748/...
akozak··on Sanitarium
I had somehow completely forgotten about this game, but I remember being absolutely absorbed. It was in a separate class of storytelling at the time. Come to think of it, you can probably draw a line from it to Disco Elysium.
akozak··on A relativistic framework to establish coordinate time on the Moon and beyond
It's a neat idea that you could publish a paper like this that establishes a framework for thousands of years.
akozak··on The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs
This won't be a satisfying answer (and won't work for startups), but the solution I saw most frequently was to assign them dedicated diplomats or maintain a middle mgmt class who are well suited to coddle them, absorb most of their emotional energy, and channel it productively (or not) into the wider institution.
akozak··on The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs
I have a lot of experience working with the weird nerd archetype and watching them navigate large orgs.

First it's absolutely true that orgs that purport to support weird nerds will revert back to rewarding politicians. I've seen it happen, and typically has to do with who is doling out money.

However, in my experience the vast majority of brilliant nerds way overextend themselves, and are much too confident outside their domain. They're also much more likely to be jerks and will tumble from conflict to conflict until they get their way by attrition or status. Conflicts are strangely more personal because so much ego is tied up into it. They're more likely to assume they're right in every (non-tech/science related) situation.

My advice to weird nerds (assuming emotional intelligence isn't an innate skill) is: Find a way to turn your brainpower onto this challenge as equally important as your core interest. Treat interacting with your institution like a long term engineering project or investigation. Think long term and be strategic, create and track longer term plans, try to learn what people respond to, what works and what doesn't. Always try to be kind and maintain some humility, but assuming you aren't sure what that really means, then ask for lots of feedback. Or you can just find someone you trust and delegate all of this to them, like a technical founder hiring a CEO.

(Edit: relatedly, if you work for or with weird nerds in a support role, my advice is to take full advantage! They might have a useful point, so set your own ego aside, don't take it personally (they are weird), and try to listen charitably. Their work is what you're here to support, after all.)

akozak··on Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting
I've seen the "coup" framing a lot I just don't see how that's justified. They're the board of directors! Hiring and firing the CEO is core to the job (as is maintaining mission alignment, in the nonprofit world).
akozak··on Thefastest.ai
Probably highly volume dependent, but still useful!
akozak··on Thefastest.ai
It'd be nice to have a similar site but cost per token.
akozak··on Two lifeforms merge in once-in-a-billion-years evolutionary event
Nice. We'll have to check back in 10 million years to see how it went.
akozak··on [dead]
Yea there is no way. Everyone seems to be misinterpreting the situation.
akozak··on We need to rewild the internet
Great meta-comment: The attention economy has changed a lot over the last 2 decades.
akozak··on Can Xerox's PARC find new life with SRI?
Right that's the most likely strategy, but would also be Apple deciding to get in the licensing business (potentially with complications for their core biz) and is also something they could reasonably compare as an option against other ways of spending $10B.
akozak··on Can Xerox's PARC find new life with SRI?
Figuring out the right amount of endowment is quite difficult, but you certainly need a LOT to get the outcomes like PARC. Are you running it off interest or burning down the pot? Also possible that we are simply in a different techno-economic and scientific moment than those researchers were (ie it was cheaper for them).

Also once you start framing it as investment or a biz decision in a big public company, the natural question is whether it's the best use of capital for Apple. It's not really about short vs longterm thinking either, it's about the deployment with the highest likelihood to return on any timeframe.

akozak··on Bunk beds in aircraft cabins: the realistic prospects
What a bizarre thing to say to someone!
akozak··on Meta AI releases Code Llama 70B
I would guess mindshare in a crowded field, ie discussion threads just like this one that help with recruiting and tech reputation after a bummer ~8 years. (It's best not to overestimate the complexity/# of layers in a bigco's strategic thinking.)
akozak··on AI can catalogue a forest's inhabitants simply by listening
Yea, the bigger issue is that the maintenance itself is expensive and disruptive.
akozak··on Medieval staircases were not built going clockwise for the defender's advantage
I love this. Naive feudal lords as the historical equivalent to high net worth preppers.
akozak··on I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/504
akozak··on I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
Pretty sure that's not how copyright damages work. Don't take legal advice on HN folks.
akozak··on Xerox PARC's NoteCards in a Nutshell (1987) [pdf]
A counter point you often hear is that this way of interacting with computers is only appropriate or enjoyable to a small number of people.
akozak··on Brain images just got 64 million times sharper
Huh interesting. Based on my searching it seemed that light sheet microscopy required dealing with brain slices.
akozak··on Brain images just got 64 million times sharper
Lot of folks seems to be missing the fact that they slice the brain up afterwards and merge those scans with the MRI data.
akozak··on Tesla Master Plan Part 3 [pdf]
I'm not sure in what sense this is a "plan". Looks more like a decarbonization feasibility napkin sketch.
akozak··on Google was beloved as an employer for years. Then it laid off thousands by email
Yes it's true! People with non-economic viewpoints are vulnerable to being hurt or taken advantage of by management. It sucks.
akozak··on Google was beloved as an employer for years. Then it laid off thousands by email
Not everyone sees work in that way. Human psychology is complex and often times it's difficult to reduce workplace relationships down to simple economic relationships. You might argue that people should view all work relationships as transactional, but I'm not ready to agree with that (I think it is better to see coworkers as complete human beings), and in any case that just isn't how many people think as a matter of fact.
akozak··on San Francisco Bay Area to phase out natural gas heating appliances
It seems like a very specific scenario you're concerned about, which doesn't necessarily force one to conclude we need to keep gas heating. I'm skeptical a 20 unit building would buy enough battery storage for long duration electric OR gas furnace heating during an outage. Probably not too difficult to do some napkin math on the cost of that system.
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