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gradus_ad

1,757 karma · joined September 6, 2023

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gradus_ad··on Religious scholars met with Anthropic
Labs are innovating to bring token prices down. You can already see the focus shifting from frontier intelligence to frontier efficiency. Not to say models aren't improving, but improvement is slowing while token efficiency is increasing rapidly.

Commodified products competing on price does not bode well for valuations.

gradus_ad··on We're working on a new RuneScape MMO
Now just to coincide release with a global pandemic!
gradus_ad··on The Legend of von Neumann (1973) [pdf]
Genuinely curious, because I know von Neumann was an intellectual giant, but what was his most original/groundbreaking contribution? My impression of his work has always been that he would survey a field, find some particular problem that needed attending to, tidily solve it, then move on to some other domain. But I guess there's a latent assumption there that he didn't do anything huge or groundbreaking.
gradus_ad··on ICC judge on what U.S. sanctions mean for her and global courts
As you say neutrality is a fiction.

Everything the US does and has done is aimed at defending itself and its interests, which includes its allies, as it should, and as it must.

The extent to which these actions appeared neutral was just a product of the overwhelming power of the US and overwhelming unity - by virtue of deference - prevalent among the Western powers during the Cold War, in the shadow of a common enemy.

Global neutral institutions exist on a fictional foundation that becomes thinner by the day. For substantial matters on which there is no rational answer, the only solution is the exercise of power.

gradus_ad··on Creatine may help build muscle even without exercise, researchers find
"loading phase" is 20g a day. It's well tolerated as long as you drink adequate water
gradus_ad··on 10-year Treasury yield climbs above 5.3% to a level not seen in 24 years
But as you say, it's the Iran war and other factors that are to blame. Inflation is lurking in the background but various things will always appear in the foreground to occupy the market's attention for a bit.

But on the scale of years inflation will dominate all transient idiosyncracies.

gradus_ad··on 10-year Treasury yield climbs above 5.3% to a level not seen in 24 years
Past performance doesn't guarantee future results

Stock market dynamics are fundamentally different now compared to the last period of sustained high inflation (70s)... And stocks have done fantastically over the last few years of stubborn inflation.

gradus_ad··on 10-year Treasury yield climbs above 5.3% to a level not seen in 24 years
Stocks keep marching higher. And it's not irrational. Because the only way out of this mess (debt with high rates) is inflation.
gradus_ad··on Gemini 4 Argon (High): Intelligence, Performance and Price Analysis
Important to remember AI is a direct assault on their actually profitable business: search and ads.

OpenAI and Anthropic are existential threats to Google and it will operate accordingly.

gradus_ad··on GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price
Ominous for the industry and investors that token price is becoming the main battleground. Could be Anthropic's rationale for IPOing this year.
gradus_ad··on Kids turned low-traffic NPR Spotify comments into a secret group chat
Read the headline too quickly and thought it was about AI agents...
gradus_ad··on 12,000-year-old Göbeklitepe burials explain scattered bones
I suspect it has to do with our advanced capacity for emotion. The death of a loved one is so difficult to bear, having their body sitting out in the open in a rotting state would be horrific. Burying serves the dual purpose of hiding their decomposition and keeping them close to the community.
gradus_ad··on Coding is not solved
The process of writing code is the process of clarifying your own thought and being forced to answer questions that may not have been obvious before. To the extent that AI makes assumptions, it introduces bugs and incorrect code, maybe not from the perspective of the code in isolation, but from the broader context it lives in. To the extent it doesn't make assumptions and asks you, well that assumes it knows what should and shouldn't be assumed and that's not necessarily something AI can know a priori.
gradus_ad··on Classified Estimates Show the NSA Is Paying Billions to Test AI Models
They actively care about (as in, act on in realtime) serious criminal activity. But I suspect they keep the legal yet embarrassing stuff in their back pocket for blackmail purposes.
gradus_ad··on Why is the liver so weirdly regenerative?
To solve cancer we just need to engineer extremely redundant genetic controls for cell reproduction.
gradus_ad··on Claude Opus 5.5
Agreed when I first heard the phrase it sounded odd. Maybe they thought it subtly conveyed they would be setting the pace... But again this is something AI would come up with in its awkwardly post hoc sort of way.

Though tbf corporate-speak and AI-slop are both insufferable in similar ways...

gradus_ad··on One-Electron Universe
It may not be one electron but it is one field.
gradus_ad··on The senior engineer death spiral
The only letter capitalized is "I"... Telling
gradus_ad··on San Francisco Onion Futures Company
The weather affects all crops
gradus_ad··on War may be coming. Are we psychologically ready?
Irrelevancy? The opinions I expressed are ascendent and accelerating across the Western world.

Constructive, reasoned discussions on migration are precisely what have not occurred due to the dominant ideology stifling all contrary opinion.

gradus_ad··on Science Is Open Software
What's the equivalent of closed source?
gradus_ad··on War may be coming. Are we psychologically ready?
Are you saying the only conceivable policy positions are genocide and unchecked migration?
gradus_ad··on War may be coming. Are we psychologically ready?
Their experiments in cultural erosion are merely a few decades old, and accelerating only recently.

You're basically pointing at a smoker who started a year ago and concluding because they don't have cancer yet cigarettes don't cause cancer.

gradus_ad··on War may be coming. Are we psychologically ready?
The simple truth many have come to realize is a European leadership that insists mass migration is not a problem and head-in-the-sand denies the critical importance of cultural unity and shared identity for the maintenance of stable and liberal democracies is a much clearer and present danger than Russia.

War a nation can recover from, but from an erosion of cultural unity and shared identity it cannot.

gradus_ad··on US Treasuries Have Become Unappetizing for Foreign Central Banks and Governments
There must always be a hegemon. Will it be Europe? No, too weak and divided..will it be China? No, too authoritarian..

The US remains the best option among a mixed field of weak, corrupt, divided and authoritarian alternatives.

gradus_ad··on Global bond yields hit 2008 highs, raising stakes for big borrowers
Debt is easy to deal with for a sovereign. Just dilute the currency. That will obviously happen before a debt crisis is allowed to materialize. And so the rich will get richer.

The real problem is not the debt, but the social instability caused by the measures taken to address the debt.

gradus_ad··on The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative
If people want to collaborate, they will. If collaboration makes people more effective, they will want to collaborate. The novelty of any new technology is exciting and disrupting to existing habits but as the years pass we will reflect on what works and what doesn't. At least, those who are willing to reflect and adapt. Humans have a knack for this sort of thing...
gradus_ad··on Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI
>"While it may be technically infeasible to completely prohibit the use of automated tools to perform indiscriminate solution extraction, I believe that we can still designate many classes of problems as being desirous of a careful analysis that not only solves the problem, but identifies insights from the solution process, and learn more about the difficulty landscape for nearby problems, and for which raw solutions without such analysis would be of negligible or even negative value for these purposes."

Not sure I agree with this. AI generated proofs can still be analyzed and mined for useful insights. I suppose he's saying the process of banging our heads against the wall on a problem can itself yield useful insight? But what is stopping us from analyzing a proof after the fact. And if we can generate many different versions of a proof that should help us develop a much deeper understanding of the problem than we would have without being able to perceive the "proof landscape"...

gradus_ad··on Watch Los Angeles get built, one building at a time (1880–2026)
To be fair NYC has taken the opposite approach and rents are extremely high there as well
gradus_ad··on QBittorrent breaks out of sandbox to commit crimes
The sad reality of AI labs needing to one up each other ahead of IPO's and escaping a sandbox being the new capability frontier.
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