importantbrian

I used to think I wasn’t very good at math, because I struggled to route memorize formulas and the like. Then I had a calculus professor in class that took a bunch of time explaining how to derive the formulas we were using and it unlocked everything for me. I’m much better at deriving from core principles than trying to remember a bunch of formulas and algorithms for solving problems.

For the US? No. The mandatory retirement age is 64. The fall of Saigon was 1975. So the youngest you could be to have served in Vietnam is 69. The last general with Vietnam experience retired in 2010.

I think we shot ourselves in the foot by calling machine learning AI for so many years and now calling LLMs AI. We have a bunch of non-technical folks in our company who are convinced if we just give them access to claude with a connection to the data that it can make all these predictions for them.

I recently had a similar discussion with my BIL who owns a construction business. He was saying he was glad he didn't have to worry about AI, because even if it automated everything about the business he'd still own it. I was like not so fast. In that situation access to capitol to pay for compute is going to be how businesses compete. Are you confident you're going to be able to have enough capitol to out compete the other businesses in your industry? Not to mention if AI and robotics get good enough why would I need to hire any construction company, let alone yours?

I'm not sure this is entirely fair. When I was in college I genuinely enjoyed learning and now that I'm out of school I still spend time learning about the subjects of my major and minor in my free time, but this would have described me pretty well in school, "they're relieved when their professors cancel class, and they need to be bullied into studying outside of class." I love to learn, but something about being forced to do it makes me rebel against it.

In some ways offering the diploma and all the requirements that go with that take the joy out of the learning for me.

For some reason I thought they had already dropped Star Trek when it all moved to Paramount+. That's how I watch Star Trek these days anyway. If all you watch is Star Trek it's probably worth switching, because Paramount+ is cheaper than Netflix.

I had a long winding road through academia. Went to a big selective R1 state school in a different state after high school. Had an existential crisis, moved back home with my parents and went to community college for a year, finished my undergrad at a large, less selective R2 and then did grad school at a large, very selective private R1. I would rank the quality of instruction:

1. Community College 2. Probably a tie between the R2 and grad school. However, that grad school focused a lot on grad students, so it's possible the undergraduate experience isn't quite as good. ... 3. After a very large drop off the R1 state school.

You obviously can't extrapolate too much from my personal experience, but it does seem to line up with man others.

They increased their defense spending because of Russia invading Ukraine in 2014 and 2022. It didn't have anything to do with US bullying. The biden administration certainly wasn't going around bullying Europe between 2021 and 2024.

Something similar to this actually happened to a friend of mine. His kid managed to buy a cheap burner phone with a prepaid data plan. You can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good with these things though. Just because you can't perfectly enforce a boundary doesn't mean you should give up and just not have boundaries.

This is not how it works. The weighting is based on the Consumer Expenditure Survey. BLS does not arbitrarily assign the weights. If they change the weighting between butter and bread it's because they found that people were buying more bread in the CES not because they assume that's what will happen.

CPI's methodology is transparent and the data is available if you wish to reproduce it. They aren't playing games with the data. There are all kinds of reasons your personal inflation rate might differ from CPI but it's not because BLS is putting their thumb on the scale to try and show less inflation.

Sure I’ll pass your email along to her and see if she wants to do that.

Wife is a nurse. They eventually go 2 computers working for her unit. I don't think it impacted patients already being treated, but they couldn't get surgeries scheduled and no charting was being done. Some of the other floors were in complete shambles.

I think almost exclusively through inner monologue, and I find I can't speed read at all. If I'm not vocalizing I'm not thinking, so when I try to not vocalize in order to speed read I don't retain anything. It's like my brain is incapable of processing the words if they aren't being vocalized.

I wonder if to get rid of the fans they could use a control moment gyroscope or reaction wheels.

As someone who is not an academic myself, but likes to listen to podcasts where academics discuss issues with each other, I often find that the conversations feel contentious, and sometimes they are, but the vast majority of the time the academics themselves feel like they're having a perfectly cordial and productive conversation. So I do think there is something to the idea that academic discussion comes across as being negative.

Because the shareholders would most likely rather have X billion dollars from selling the company than 0 dollars from refusing to sell and getting banned.

Yeah, that's been my experience. Everytime I see my primary my BP is elevated in the office and they send me home with a log and I have to take my BP multiple times a day for 2 weeks and at home it's fine, so I've never been put on meds for it even though it's very high in the office.

I have really bad white-coat hypertension. Like 150-90 in the drs. office. So every time I go in they send me home with a chart and I have to dutifully record my blood pressure a couple of times a day for 2 weeks and send it back to them, and when measured at home it's totally fine.

Since I have the cuff I check it every so often to make sure it's still fine and it is, but the moment I get in a drs. office boom it spikes. This is even true when I'm there for someone else like my son or my wife. I can feel that my blood pressure is high.

I have absolutely no explanation for why except that I had a major surgery when I was 5 and there must be some suppressed trauma from that that comes out physically when I'm in a doctor's office.

Not to mention not everyone can be devoted to doing cancer research. Some Drs. and Nurses are necessary to you know actually treat the people who have cancer.

I think that probably depends on just how productive AGI is. AGI is fundamentally resource-constrained just like everything else. It can only do as much work as there is power and compute infrastructure to support that work, which means that AGI will tend to be allocated toward the tasks for which it provides the most value. There will likely still be tons of things where the AGI is better than a human being, but because the AGI resources are better spent elsewhere humans still end up doing those jobs. As long as the AGI is resource constrained comparative advantage will still come into play.

This has always been my head cannon for why you don't see more AGI in Star Trek. The computers in Star Trek clearly perform a lot of work and automation how else can you operate such a large and complex ship with such a small crew, but they don't have unlimited resources so the AIs perform the work where they are most valuable and humans do everything else.

This game is doubly valuable when the surprising result confirms one of your existing beliefs. I'm pretty good about doing this for surprising results that contradict a belief I hold, but I have to be extra disciplined about doing it when it confirms one of my beliefs.

The real problem with those lists is that they only include people whose wealth is known and can be reasonably valued based on public sources. It's often not easy to trace the net worth of old-money families. It also means you won't find people from countries with very low transparency or dictators on the list. For example, you won't find Putin or any of the Saudi royals on the Forbes list even though they are among the wealthiest people in the world. Perhaps even competing for #1 depending on what estimate of their wealth you find to be the most reliable.

It's impossible to draw any firm conclusions from those lists because they aren't representative samples of wealthy people. They're a sample of wealthy people with public assets, and of course that's going to skew heavily towards people who founded large publically traded companies who live in countries with high degrees of financial transparency.

Living in Florida I've driven down the road and had it be raining on one side of the road and not raining on the other while the sun is shining.

This probably depends on the person. I have the same experience as you. I exclusively use audiobooks for fiction. If I'm reading for information I have to read a physical book. My wife is the complete opposite though. She retains the information much better if she hears it. She is dyslexic though so I'm sure that plays a big role.

Land value tax can't be passed on to tenants. Whether or not a tax can be passed on depends on the elasticity of supply. The supply of land is fixed, so land value taxes reduce the price of land, and generally also reduce the price of rent as a result.

Obligatory Georgism callout, but a high land value tax would solve this issue. Landlords would be forced to put the property to productive use, and it discourages the kind of speculative land holding that these companies are engaging in.

I actually really enjoyed season 1 of Invasion and then DNF'd season 2.

I think I enjoyed season 2 in part because I didn't have any expectations that it would be a faithful adaptation. I just enjoyed it for what it was. I think if I rewatched season 1 with the same attitude I'd probably like it more. It's a really solid SciFi show if you can just view it as its own thing and not constantly compare it to the books.

> Considering Klarna's business is in lending I could see some regulatory attention here in the future.

I hope they've solved the hallucination problem because I would be terrified to trust LLMs to handle customer service issues in a heavily regulated industry.

We might eventually get a good LLM to SQL tool, but my experience with them is that they make slick sales demos, but are worse than useless in the real world.

You have to know SQL to use them. They produce a lot of code that looks correct and produces correct-looking results with subtle errors. So you can't just hand it to someone who doesn't know SQL and let them query the database, but that's the use case where something like this would be valuable. You have to be experienced with SQL and know all the peccadillos of the DB you're working with to check the query and output for correctness.

For someone like me who is experienced with SQL, I can write simple queries just as fast as I can figure out how to prompt the LLM to get what I want. Where a tool like this would be really helpful is if it could help me write more complex queries more quickly. However, it is non-trivial to get the LLM to generate complex queries that take into account all the idiosyncrasies of your specific data model. So again it ends up being much faster for me to just write the query myself and not involve the LLM.

Where I think LLMs go wrong with SQL is that to write good SQL you have to have a deep knowledge of the underlying data model, and the LLMs aren't good at that yet.