brindlejim

why is it news that a guy quits when his boss changes, and a company doesn't do enough to criticize itself? the internet is flooded with information about the risk that AI poses to jobs. cunningham now works at one of the places that likes to write stuff like that. arguably a much better fit!

The political changes that lead to the talent exodus from Goettingen are not, in fact, so different from the ideological oaths required by much of US academia now, and seem to me to be a great way to eliminate our centers of intellectual brilliance.

> Who cares if they’re all women? What difference does it make?

One of my main beefs is the mismatch between the headline "Brilliant Thinkers ..." and the contents of the page. If they had labeled their page accurately "Brilliant Female Thinkers..." I would be less annoyed, but they sneaking their biased filter in under a headline likely to attract more readers than the page's content would if accurately described.

> All that matters is whether the content is useful to the reader.

I find it remarkably useless, especially considering the shallow exploration of the scientists' processes.

> Reducing this website to “performative sexism” feels reductive and pointless.

I was talking about the web page, not the site. And if a page is biased, or employs false advertising to attract clicks, it is right to call that out.

It's just pure sexism, an exercise in performative feminism. More absurdly, these people appear to have no idea how the dead researchers they feature actually thought. No archival references or citations to work in the original language. It's really just a marketing funnel that ends with a CTA to join their community. You too can pay for further brainwashing.

The funniest part of the OpenAI post is where someone comes in breathlessly and says "hey have you read this ACX post on why we shouldn't open source AGI" to the guy who's literally been warning everybody about AGI for decades and Elon is like: "Yup." Someone was murdered that day. There is nothing for dismissive than a yup.

Some form of at least partial superiority is inherent in the notion of "helping", as is a power dynamic.

You say that your colleague's diversity-focused activity gets results, and my question is: what results? A more diverse body of students studying neurology? And if that is the answer, then who cares? What is your argument that increased diversity makes neurology or science better?

If diversity is your objective function, fine. But there are other goals to pursue, and which should be pursued in academia by faculty. I think diversity is very far from what should be the top priority.

The advantage of diversity is that it is an easy metric to understand, pursue and make gains in.

A "sincere desire to help" is a form of self-validation, a move to serve the socially ambitious, and a show of power, in that "helping" implies superiority.

It would be great if educators they could separate the search for truth from the search for "justice". Many can't. Fields in which facts only exist to support justice narratives probably don't belong in university at all.

University faculty-activists are a perfect example of elite overproduction a la Turchin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction

We create small, smart cadres of people who watch power and wealth pass them by, and they advocate to overturn the system driving their envy.

No kidding. As they say on Twitter: "What did you think decolonization meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays?" Racialism is the stovepipe for the revolution.

Great answer. Thank you.

Does the college remain a pipeline to good schools? In the past, a very significant portion of the student body, some years the majority, transferred to tier-one, four-year universities (Harvard, Yale, Brown, Cornell, Cal, Chicago, Stanford). This ensured that it attracted smart and ambitious applicants who knew they were not giving up the chance to attend those schools. What is the current rate of admission to tier-one schools, year by year, and how does it contrast with historical rates? If it is lower, does the college view that as a problem? If the college does not view that as a problem, then what is the vision? Deep Springs' reputation was built on being excellent and anomalous in highly legible ways. It can coast for a while as a two-year associates degree on a farm, but not forever.

The brothel (The Cotton Tail Ranch) closed many years ago.

Another neat thing about the "bus stop" was that the phone booth gave you no way to dial. There was no number pad. You'd pick it up, and the call would go straight to the operator, because neither she nor you actually knew what was going on. That is, the phone was a very old one, built for a system that relied on operators to "put you through". I remember calling the school to tell them I had arrived, and having to wait for the operator to find the right instructions in the manual to do that. Even then, there were only a few of those phones left in the US.

TASP was renamed TASS a couple years ago, and it now offers only two seminars: Critical Black Studies and Anti-Oppressive Studies. The program has been taken over by woke radicals both on its board and in the administration, which is led by Amina Omari, someone with near-zero experience in education prior to her appointment. I receive desperate emails from them asking for volunteers and financial support, which suggest that they have lost some of their base due to their political choices.

Deep Springs is on a different track, but not a totally dissimilar one. That is, the school has been attempting to feminize for decades, a process that culminated in its conversion to co-education in 2018 after a long legal battle. I get the school's newsletters and see occasional land acknowledgements penned by privileged people of color, which tracks with a known trend in US liberal arts colleges.

But the real shift at DS, triggered by co-education, seems to be that it's less hard-core. One person called it "Benningtonization". The boys and girls all hive off into pairs, and the communal life of mind and labor and governance shrinks as it cedes ground to America's default version of life together, the romantic couple.

But the school has gone through many phases. This is no doubt a temporary one.

It's almost as though your physical surroundings are your true phenotype, creating a whole-brain activation with memory cues that disappear when you leave the room. The edges of the self are blurred.

China runs on Intel chips like everyone else. It's AI researchers beg for Nvidia chips like everyone else. And its mobile companies use Android.

Chips that break away from those standards have little chance of success.

I'm surprised by the cluelessness of most replies here, given that this is HN.

Hardware is only as useful as the software that can run on it. Radically new hardware requires rewrites of certain layers of that software. Ain't nobody got time for that, unless they can be assured that there will be a large number of companies and customers who need software to run on the new hardware.

Software determines whether good hardware succeeds or fails. China has yet to build successful software ecosystems on top of its hardware innovations.

DJI has been delivering payloads in Ukraine for some time now.

When I consider how much specious, fallacy-riddled reasoning is produced by EAs, all hunkered in their AI bomb shelters praying for and against the end, I suspect that the "problem" that Scott's friends face is not learned epistemic helplessness, but the simple fact he cites that other people just don't want to spend the time on their apocalyptic verbosity.

Anyone interested in the military transformation of Europe and really Eurasia should read John Keegan's excellent "History of Warfare."

https://www.amazon.com/History-Warfare-John-Keegan/dp/067973...

context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birds_Aren%27t_Real

This is fantastic. The nursing home industry is dirty and sad, with for-profit groups squeezing every cent they can out of seniors who can't advocate for themselves, out of their families, and ultimately out of the taxpayer. They do that by poorly staffing their homes, and by creating networks of other legal entities that charge the home money so it doesn't make a profit.

For example, a holding company might own the nursing home operator as well as the building owner who charges them exorbitant rent, or the service providers selling into the home. If I had one piece of advice for someone with aging parents: find a non-profit home if you need a home at all. The sisters of mercy, the Jewish community homes. For-profit nursing homes are to our era what insane asylums were to the 19th century. A horrifying disgrace.

Intel spent more than a decade under Otellini, Krzanich and Swan. Bean counters. Gelsinger was appointed out of desperation, but the problem runs much deeper. I doubt that culture is gone. It has already cost Intel many opportunities.

Fun fact: More than half of all engineers at NVIDIA are software engineers. Jensen has deliberately and strategically built a powerful software stack on top of his GPUs, and he's spent decades doing it.

Until Intel finds a CEO who is as technical and strategic, as opposed to the bean-counters, I doubt that they will manage to organize a successful counterattack on CUDA.

Reeks of self-pity.

At what point does Monroe own her choices and their consequences? She did have a child while she was economically precarious, and chose to. No one forced her.

I find this supposed expose profoundly underwhelming. So a bunch of people collaborated on private channels to promote a point of view? That happens about 10 thousand times per week. We're all living in nested, overlapping and opposing conspiracies that express themselves on social media and in policy. And of course, the people supporting Palestine or Hamas or whatever are doing the same. So what?

To the folks who want to cut Anduril slack, let me just say that these cost 5-6x a Shahed. In war, like in chess, if you manage to trade crappy little pieces for rare big pieces, you win. And if you decide that your strategy is to trade expensive big pieces for crappy little ones, you usually lose. The US has avoided losing by fighting small countries against which it has an overwhelming advantage, which keeps its hot wars short. If it were to fight a long hot war against a near peer (hello, Taiwan Straits), its dumb decisions about bloatware would quickly catch up to it.

Setting aside the budgetary considerations, quality is its own quality, as Stalin never really said. That is, if you can manufacture tens of thousands of payload-bearing model airplanes for less than the price of a Tesla, then you can DDOS any air defense system in the world. Its million-dollar missiles will soon be exhausted, and your radio-controlled offensive will have won.

It's hilarious that Anduril is proposing "more affordable" defense gear.

They are a prime wrapped in VC funding, and like most defense contractors, they are egregiously overpriced compared to the cost of materials.

I can see them capturing US DOD budgets, but predict that much more cost effective competitors emerge internationally.

The repetition of a false analogy does not make it true. They are no more neurons than transistors are "little brain cells". This is just shorthand for outsiders who can't hope to understand. But on HN, we have technologists. The nodes of an ML model are made of math and code. There is no neuron there, and those nodes work very different than neurons in their action and structure. The analogy breaks down.

This is egregiously false. ML models are math and code. They are not tissue; there are no neurons in an ML model. None. The analogy is false. And it is used here to make you think that ML models are more human than they are, or more superhuman. There is no "bigger AI waiting to get out". Shoggoth anyone? These are scare tactics from hyperventilating EAs (both Scott and the Anthropic team).