catgary

It’s like someone had Claude binge on Galton, Murray and Yarvin then let it loose on Hacker News.

Dropping slurs after being compared to a eugenicist is an interesting choice. Maybe you would be more comfortable in the comments of Curtis Yarvin’s blog. You’d certainly get less pushback there.

Whereas “abstraction ceiling” is hard science backed by ample literature, not a loose metaphor directly contradicted by several prominent mathematicians who didn’t quit when the going got tough.

I think the fact the Feynman took an IQ test and scored 127 is damning of the entire concept. I think what turns mathematicians off is the thought that psychologists who couldn’t tell you the difference between a scheme and a metric space think they can actually measure who has the capacity to be a mathematician and who doesn’t.

Like, why fucking bother doing anything? Why run the 100 meters at the Olympics, let’s just do some genetic testing and measurements to pick the fastest man in the world. Why teach kids music, let’s just measure hand size and do some sight singing exercises and teach the talented kids piano. This whole nonsense reeks of Gattaca-style quasi-eugenics where people get sorted into profession by people who don’t actually have expertise in any of them. You’re not in the guild, you don’t get to appoint to the guild, and you certainly don’t get to gatekeep who can apply for the guild.

Edit: Dropping slurs when someone compares your views to eugenics is an interesting strategy. Shouldn’t you be at a meetup discussing Curtis Yarvin’s work or something?

That stuff always gives me such a eugenics 2.0 vibe — no, no, the hierarchy is based on innate cognitive ability now. Gives me the creeps that they're actually in academia pushing that stuff.

Well you're just a generally rude person, aren't you.

That's far different than telling a math PhD whom you've never met that they hit their "abstraction ceiling" based on a 2/3 paragraph comment on hacker news. I'm sure you'd have said a similar thing to a young Grothendieck if he were describing his early struggles in graduate school. You're getting pushback because you were being rude and presumptuous.

> Since then I've had the chance, in the world of mathematics that bid me welcome, to meet quite a number of people, both among my "elders" and among young people in my general age group, who were much more brilliant, much more "gifted" than I was. I admired the facility with which they picked up, as if at play, new ideas, juggling them as if familiar with them from the cradle - while for myself I felt clumsy. even oafish, wandering painfully up a arduous track, like a dumb ox faced with an amorphous mountain of things that I had to learn ( so I was assured), things I felt incapable of understanding the essentials or following through to the end.

(Alexander Grothendieck, Recoltes et Semailles)

Amazing that he managed to keep going after hitting his abstract ceiling in graduate school.

Spector is 70 years old, that’s a pretty reasonable age for retirement?

This plus the zoom firing anecdote is basically confirming that Garg operates at a Cousin Greg level.

> Garg acknowledges he’s “hard-nosed” and the famous Zoom layoffs severely damaged the company’s reputation — a mistake he knows will continue to haunt him.

I really hope Garg is here reading this. It’s not just a mistake that will continue to haunt him, it’s all he’s ever going to be. It’s how he was introduced in this headline. It’s how he’ll be referred to when he starts his next venture. If newspapers publish his obituary someday, it’ll be in the first few sentences explaining why anyone knows his name.

I think, generally speaking, the decision to enforce a linter in CI/CD pipelines is well within a project lead’s or technical director’s purview, and there seems to be a pretty broad consensus that they add value, so they’ll almost always be in CI/CD pipelines. So just use the same linter locally and format on save so you catch any issues like your comment getting folded example.

I think you should just focus on the road because most of us are just trying to get home safely to our families. Some of us are even biking beside the road on a lightly-protected bike lane.

Yeah, because they aren’t in need of a social safety net.

I think you need to give some concrete examples, considering the US happily let its companies offshore a lot of work to China over the years, and Chinese funds own large chunks of American companies.

I’ve found they’re quite good when you’re higher in the compiler stack, where it’s essentially a game of translating MLIR dialects.

Because it doesn’t? Thats why the field of formal methods exists.

Because the code is the actual thing, tests can only show that the code fails in certain cases, they don’t actually prove the code is correct.

Generally speaking, I try to ensure that the LLM is using core abstractions throughout the codebase in a consistent manner. This makes it easier for me to review any changes it makes.

And even then - I still read the code it generates, and if I see a better way of doing something I just step in, write a partial solution, and then sketch out how the complete solution should work.

This line of thought is honestly a bit silly - uv is just a package manager that actually does its job for resolving dependencies. You’re talking about a completely orthogonal problem.

I think there are 5-7 thousand confirmed deaths by the UN, and medical reports in Iran estimated there could be 20,000+ casualties.

I see the value of the students, it just seems like an odd thing for a government to subsidize via NIH/NSF funding. We don’t really have anything analogous to that in Canada and it just seems awfully weird that it exists in the US without the “it’s older than the country” excuse that Oxford/Cambridge have.

EVs should do much better on brake dust thanks to regenerative braking, no?

Luckily, the LLM has the text to cite, it can be passed in at inference time, which is legally distinct from training on the data.

Because text analysis is substantially easier than video analysis?

Sure, in the sense that any belief about the law isn’t cut and dried until a judge has explicitly dismissed it in the court of law.

Are you implying that an LLM needs to be trained on a specific piece of text to answer questions about it?

You don’t need any rights to execute the feature. The user owns the book. The app lets the user feed the book into an LLM, as is absolutely their right, and asks questions.

I work on a much easier problem (physics-based character animation) after spending a few years in motion planning, and I haven’t really seen anything to suggest that the problem is going to be solved any time soon by collecting more data.

I think this is an interesting direction, but I think that step 2 of this would be to formulate some conjectures about the geometry of other LLMs, or testable hypotheses about how information flows wrt character counting. Even checking some intermediate training weights of Haiku would be interesting, so they’d still be working off of the same architecture.

The biology metaphor they make is interesting, because I think a biologist would be the first to tell you that you need more than one datapoint.