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jostylr

814 karma · joined February 15, 2012

Github: https://github.com/jostylr
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jostylr··on I stopped drinking the AI Kool-Aid
Reasonable piece. I always thought the hope/promise of AI was to make it do the work we don't want to do so that we can enjoy life the way we want to which is typically socializing with humans? I get that it generates so much that if you are reviewing thoughtfully everything it is doing, it can suck you away like being a worker at a conveyor belt, but hopefully that is a short period of growing pains. A related take on staying human in the age of AI: https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/the-lost-subject-ai...
jostylr··on AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible
You could try having, say Astra, use one of these programs via computer use to design it. I haven't tried it, but I hear it is really good at computer use. Might even have more of a dialogue as it creates, so dictating choices at each stage. Would take longer, but does not require someone who has expertise in the tool, just good design notion.
jostylr··on GPT-6 Astra on OpenRouter
You could also have it create a viewer competition selection; show two images without attribution and let the use select which one. Could be cool to see the wisdom of the crowds; could also have price ranges to have subcategories. I bet Astra could do that in a half hour.

Loving the pelican silliness. My ChatGPT is over the moon about it. Gonna miss it when it really is done. Though maybe a pelican riding a bike game could become the benchmark in a year.

jostylr··on What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x
How would you distinguish corporation influencing consumers from corporations following consumers? One thing would be to see if there are items that are heavily advertised by corporations but that they do not succeed. You can also take items that everyone knows about, no one wants, and then launch a propaganda campaign and see what happens. Different propaganda works in different ways so one would need to try varieties. I imagine a randomly controlled trial of having various ubiquitous goods that are not heavily advertised nor heavily purchased and then randomly assigning different advertising strategies (including none). Do that in various regions, countries, ethnicities, etc, and then see what can be seen.

My guess is that advertising raises desire by a few percent in most cases. There would be some instances of a run away craze, probably with a massive rise followed by a collapse, but that most products would largely be unaffected. I assume some advertising strategies would backfire and reduce demand.

For me, I feel like most of the time it is been exposed to the existence of an item and my ability to see how it could be useful. I don't think random advertisements I come across impact me that much since most of the advertisements I see don't seem to correspond to anything I want or do or spend money on.

Humans use their imagination to figure out what choice of action leads to a future of less uncomfortability. Often times, these are choices between short term future and long term future. Advertising is a way of helping shape that argument as to what choice is to be taken, but the underlying drive is already there.

You could also look for cases where propaganda is used against consumerism and see how impactful that tends to be.

jostylr··on My personal AI benchmark: “Generate an SVG of a frog with a Habsburg jaw”
When I asked ChatGPT, it gave me a side profile, first as a PNG which was good and then I asked again for an SVG and it obliged, doing a version of what it produced but it was bad.

SVG: https://jostylr.com/imgs/frog_habsburg_jaw.svg

PNG: https://jostylr.com/imgs/frog_habsburg.png

Then I tried Codex with Sol 5.6 High and got a face forward one.

SVG: https://jostylr.com/imgs/frog-habsburg.svg

jostylr··on The Dark Night of Mathematics
As a mathematics person, I find this at odds with my views. I know the current regime rewards new mathematical discoveries for professional advancement, but that is a job thing, one which can be altered by the powers that be. To me investigating mathematics is fun whether it is new to the world or not. The complaint is similar to lamenting how everywhere has already been visited and there is nothing to be done other than have your own personal experience of a place. I saw the redwoods recently for the first time and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience despite not being the first person to see them. Mathematical discovery is much the same except now we have tools that help us dramatically with the tedious stuff, the researching what others know. In the old days, I would spend a long time figuring something out and only at the end could I figure out where to find it in the literature. Very frustrating. Now, we have machines to guide us to many things and understandings and clarifications. They are guides that help us get to where we want to be and then let us wander as we desire. This is incredible. I am currently using them to develop the computational tools I want to use to explore stuff.

As for squeezing in the time to do mathematics if the paying jobs disappear, there is a good chance we will have a world of plenty very shortly. I have a belief that the Austrian economists are right that there will always be plenty for humans to do and get rewarded for, but I also think that the costs of living will be so low that someone who wants to do mathematics will have plenty of time to do so. I hope this person holds the faith long enough and tries to see how the AI's can help accelerate one's own understanding. I am no fan of AIs generating a bunch of papers that no one reads or cares about, but I could say the same about the immense number of papers made by humans as well. If anything, the AIs make all of that immense knowledge more valuable as it is now knowable and accessible through these tools. There is also the fact that the mathematics job market has been oversaturated for at least 20 years. What our new tools allow is for people to be able to do mathematics outside of having access to a research library and top mathematics department.

jostylr··on Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds
Think about what every adult absolutely needs to know: how to be an effective member of society, how to interact with people, how to self-regulate, and generally being a person other people want to be around and work with. That is what a Sudbury school supports learning while conventional school hinders it, offering an authoritarian-based lifestyle instead.

Most people going through conventional school don't get the freedom to learn to be themselves in a community until their 20s, not mastering it until often their early 30s. As for academics, Sudbury students have repeatedly demonstrated having no problem quickly learning whatever it is they want or need to learn as an adult. Many Sudbury students go to college, getting A's even in their first semester, making good bonds not only with other students but also faculty and administrators. They help form communities wherever they go. They are engaged in classes in a way that their peers are not. They are coming to academic learning fresh and eager not weighed down by 14,000 hours of conventional school tedium. Those who do not go to college often advance very quickly in whatever work they end up doing as person skills are the key to being successful.

The results speak for themselves. You can read about it in Peter Gray's book Free to Learn and other works by him.

Also keep in mind that teaching, which is what conventional school focuses on, is not the same as learning.

jostylr··on Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds
Thanks for replying. Glad to hear you use phonics. It sounds like it could have a lot of potential and I intend to pass it along to our community. If you would like to possibly explore its use in a Sudbury community, you can send an email to my gmail account which is the same username as listed here.
jostylr··on ChatGPT Work
I asked ChatGPT about this change and my version, with knowledge of how it and I work together, certainly prefers the old one.
jostylr··on ChatGPT Work
You can detach a specific chat window and make it any size you want.
jostylr··on Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds
What are your thoughts about children in a Sudbury School model? These are democratic schools where children can do what they like in the day. Mostly they choose to play with other kids, games of imagination, though also doing screen time. One of the basic principles is that children figure out what they want to do and the learning comes along with it; the model views adults wanting children to learn something specific as generally counterproductive though having resources available is okay if it is not coupled with any expectations.

Are your devices likely something that they would have fun with and choose to engage with or is it likely to be ignored unless adults use some kind of persuasion to have them use it? Is it cool with a child using it for a bit and then not using it for a few months and then wandering back to it? How far up into math does it go compared to what an a randomly sampled adult could actually do mathwise? Also for reading, are you using phonics or whole word sighting? For math, to what extent is it screen manipulatives versus manipulations of digits? Also, do you have provision for an older child to start learning this stuff so the basics need not be at a 4 year old presentation level, but the concepts still need to be covered?

In Sudbury schools, the typical age of self-taught reading is 7-9 though it can range from 4 to 12. Useful arithmetic usually seems to happen much earlier than reading though reading tends to get completed by the children on their own while arithmetic does not advance further than the needs of money exchange without special effort. In the long run, Sudbury students have no problem with college level material, including mathematics, but it could be nice to have something that eases the white knuckling if it does not undermine the child's self-directedness.

jostylr··on A new book about humanity's obsession with gold
He did a podcast with Tom Woods (libertarian historian) about the book: https://youtu.be/soJEdxjrYAw?si=gIt7Y3PB5H-zhw1f
jostylr··on 2ality blog: temporarily offline due to AI stealing work
He said the crawlers were costing him money. Maybe stealing could be viewed as avoiding the ads? Don't know what license he had on his publicly available content, but if his site was not being crawled heavily, then it sounds like he might not have taken it all down. I wonder about hosting it on Github / GH-pages or something. Maybe at some volume it becomes a problem or maybe they disallow ads which he wants to profit from?

I used to follow him years ago and liked his content but I drifted away long before AI.

I wonder given his deep expertise how much he could get into teaching how to spot and fix bad AI JS code.

jostylr··on 49,000 Lake Tahoe residents will lose power to data centers
The fortune article is more informative and paints a long standing problem. A lot of the issue is that the region has competing government controls being spread across California for rates, Nevada for power, and feds for doing whatever they do. This is the energy company's side of it:

>Katie Jo Collier, a spokesperson for the utility, said the transition was rooted in a longtime understanding with Liberty “well before data center load growth was a consideration,” calling it “a planned transition for many years, not a reaction to recent developments.” NV Energy sold its California electric assets to Liberty in 2009 and agreed to keep supplying power temporarily. That arrangement was extended in 2015, again in 2020, and once more in late 2025, and each time because Liberty had not yet secured an independent supply, a timeline corroborated by regulatory documents reviewed by Fortune.

>But independent experts have questioned whether NV Energy’s own demand projections are reliable. In testimony filed with Nevada regulators in Oct. 2024, energy economist Rose Anderson of Synapse Energy Economics warned that NV Energy’s major-project load forecast is ‘highly uncertain’ and that existing customers could end up paying for infrastructure built to serve industrial demand that never materializes.

>In statement to Fortune, NV Energy reiterated its spokesperson’s statement about the transition having been planned for years. “It is important to note that the NV Energy’s wholesale agreement with Liberty Utilities was always intended to be temporary and transitional, with a clear timeline and multiple extensions over the years to support Liberty’s long-term planning efforts to secure its own access to energy supply. To ensure reliable ongoing service to Lake Tahoe customers, NV Energy agreed in 2025 to continue providing energy service to Liberty’s customers until their transmission access is available and/or until Greenlink is online.”

>“NV Energy has provided reliable service to Liberty’s customers in the Lake Tahoe Basin for years and fully intends to continue that commitment while Liberty secures its own transmission access and energy to supply those customers,” the utility added. “NV Energy has taken proactive steps to ensure there is no service disruption to Liberty customers, now or in the future.”

>Rates were already climbing

>The supply crisis arrives on top of an existing affordability fight. In its 2025 general rate case, Liberty originally sought a 19.1% revenue increase—about $37.51 more per month for the average residential customer, according to CPUC filings. The CPUC approved a smaller increase: 11.4%, with a 9.75% return on equity rather than Liberty’s requested 11%.

jostylr··on Apple Is Permanently Closing Three U.S. Stores in June
Posting here because it marks Apple closing the first Apple unionized store (Towson).
jostylr··on AI optimism is a class privilege
We are at a fork in the road with lots of potential darkness, but simply thinking any old social safety net is going to work is not going to cut it. Nets can be, and generally are, used to capture.

An interesting multi-pronged approach is post labor economics which is being promoted by David Shapiro: https://www.youtube.com/@DaveShap

The basic premise is that currently we have households being supported by labor, capital, and transfers. With labor largely going away, the leaves capital and transfers. Relying on transfers alone will lead to ownership of the people by government. So we have to find ways to generate way more distributed capital ownership by the masses. This is what he plans, discusses, and promotes.

jostylr··on Babylon 5 is now free to watch on YouTube
There is also Katie Herzog's recent memoir/guidebook on it: https://www.amazon.com/Drink-Your-Way-Sober-Science-Based/dp...
jostylr··on Ask HN: Share your personal website
https://jostylr.com

Links to my projects. I am a mathematician, Bohmian (quantum mechanical theory where particles have definite positions guided by the quantum mechanical wave function), Sudbury staffer, hobbyist programmer (now hobbyist manager of AI coders). Currently into exploring fully embracing families of rational intervals as real numbers.

jostylr··on Self-driving cars aren't nearly a solved problem
I'd be curious about their analysis of the Nvidia self-driving car project which uses world models(?) to train them in far more extensive scenarios, though simulated, than possible in real world case. That keynote was after this article of course.

But I did check their dismissive claim about the 90% coding at anthropic by watching the link they provided. The Anthropic guy said that 90% was achieved at various teams within Anthropic and also hedged about the exact nature of it; it is a messy metric to be precise about. I thought the other was not generous in interpreting it which makes me skeptical of the edge of the rest of the article.

jostylr··on Private equity firms acquired more than 500 autism centers in past decade: study
The optimal version of a PE is to take a failing business and either turn it around or carve up assets and reallocate people to do something useful and profitable. The more a business is failing, the cheaper it is to takeover and for the PE to do the work of a fungus. But this process can also become a disease if it is too easy for them to takeover, taking a healthy host and carving it up. This is mimicked in real life when conditions turn a fungus into a hostile organism on something that is living; maybe it is just a little sick but the environmental conditions help the fungus more than it ought to leading to it being a killer instead of a resource freer.

The real question to ask is why can they take on so much debt? And for that, one needs to acknowledge the fact that, particularly for the well-connected, debt is easy to obtain as banks essentially create money for loans. There are constraints (otherwise the banks would make themselves trillionaires), but the constraint is not the quantity of money. This creation of money through lending leads to inflation which further supports operating via debt as those who take out loans see the real value of the loans decrease. The banks just made up the money so there isn't a direct loser from the inflation other than everyone who has to deal with increased prices. You can think of it as a broad, regressive tax on the population to fund these firms doing far more than they should.

With an actual constrained money supply tied to real wealth in the economy, the PE firms would have to focus on the best deals which means the businesses that are truly dying and their role is to turn the nonproductive assets into something productive.

---

I asked ChatGPT to critique my answer (which is unaltered above) and it said to tone down the lending being propped up by inflation and instead emphasized the following:

>Inflation can help leveraged borrowers, but in PE the bigger structural advantages are: • Interest deductibility (a massive tax subsidy to debt) • Limited liability (upside captured, downside partially socialized) • Fee extraction independent of performance • Ability to load debt onto the acquired company, not the PE fund

I then asked it to answer the question without regards to my context and it basically said PE is different because of

> • short ownership horizons • high leverage • strong control • financial returns as the primary goal

Here is the link to the short conversation if interested: https://chatgpt.com/share/6963a0de-7a04-8012-8c36-afef5dd74f...

jostylr··on Employee commits suicide after MongoDB fired her during mental health leave
Why shouldn't her medical providers be responsible for continuing critical health care regardless of payment? Why is it on the employer who is only tangentially related to this versus the people actually charging large sums of money for medically necessary treatment?

Also, the same health insurance can be continued after termination (with some external payment, of course) in addition to medicaid probably being available. None of that may be easy for someone with mental issues to navigate, but that is systematic.

As for the minor extension, is it clear how long she was on leave and what the conversation had been before the termination? The post said that they asked for small time extension, but did not give any indication as to what was happening before, neither length of time employed before taking the leave, what caused the leave, what was said in terms of a return, how long the absence was, etc. I feel like plugging in different answers for those questions would change how I feel about the culpability of the company in the current legal regime.

jostylr··on Waymo cars ignored stopped school buses in Atlanta. What happens now?
It is even a bit more scrambled such as this part: hcihw selcihev selcihev ot ot ot ot erauqs strap. Looking at the original site, that text is in various nested structures with the paragraphs having that kind of text. They have multiple bits of it being an article block with a .is-paywalled governing various behaviors such as showing ads. The scrambled text is in paragraphs within the separate article portions. Presumably they have a script that will decode it for those to login though I do not understand why they even provide the text? Why not just return it after login? Maybe it is total trash text and just there to pad it out like a lorum ipso. Kind of interesting.
jostylr··on Carlo Rovelli’s radical perspective on reality
EPR's point is that there is nothing mysterious from a classical perspective of being able to deduce this. They were arguing against the presentation of QM as to there being no fact of the matter about what the momentum is before the measurement and that it randomly becomes whatever it becomes when measured. Their point is that if both particles are randomly collapsing into their choices, then they should disagree at some point unless there is some nonlocal causation happening. Einstein rejected nonlocal causation, reasonable given what he knew at the time, and thus the momentum measurement result must already be preordained by something and it is then like the classical setup.

Bell's work was to show that it had to be the nonlocal causation.

>Do you know some more formal article discussing the proposed experiments?

I do not know of an article, but Maudlin's book Quantum Non-locality and Relativity goes through the various notions of locality and what QM says about it. There is a chapter about signaling and another about causation. It also covers the GHZ scheme which is a non-probablistic version demonstrating non-locality. It is pretty clean.

>Do you know some more formal article discussing the proposed experiments?

I have not read them, but my understanding that Siddhant Das is pursuing these and here is a link to his Arxiv papers which talk about arrival time experiments though I do not know if it is directly about these.

https://arxiv.org/search/advanced?advanced=&terms-0-operator...

jostylr··on Carlo Rovelli’s radical perspective on reality
In EPR, it is critical that it is the same measurement. Bell explores doing different measurements. For EPR, they assumed that if you can predict with certainty what happens in a space-like separated region, then there must be a fact of the matter about it. Not being probabilistic was very important for that. Bell then showed that there cannot be a fact of the matter without there also being some nonlocal means going on in order to account for the QM predictions. It is critical to appreciate the two separate pieces of arguments, how they differ, and how jointly they do lead to some kind of nonlocality. Tim Maudlin has a, now old, book exploring these different levels of nonlocality in quantum mechanics.

I recently heard a talk from Tim Maudlin where he mentioned that foliations are the easiest and most natural structures to use to provide nonlocality and, if there is such a thing, maybe there is a clever way of using it to actually communicate and discover the foliation in some sense. He mentioned there is current research on using arrival times which are experimental results outside of the operator formalism, as far as I know. I found an article describing the research:

https://www.altpropulsion.com/ftl-quantum-communication-reth...

jostylr··on Carlo Rovelli’s radical perspective on reality
In terms of quirkiness, how would you rank them? I feel like nonlocality is far less quirkier than saying that all possible outcomes of a measurement happen even though we just see one. Also standard QM has the quirk of being nonlocal. So QM is just quirky.
jostylr··on Carlo Rovelli’s radical perspective on reality
Since EPR+Bell showed that nature is non-local, it is a feature, not a bug, to be explicit about how non-locality happens. Collapse theories are also explicitly non-local.
jostylr··on Carlo Rovelli’s radical perspective on reality
In EPR, the setup is that there are two labs doing measurements outside of each other's lights cone. The outcome in one lab allows a perfect prediction of what happens in the other. This means that it is not possible that something random is going on in unless there is some nonlocal coordination between the two. This suggests that there is some actual fact of the matter as to how the experiment will turn out. That is, they argued that QM+locality = extra information beyond the wave function to determine outcomes. Bell then saw Bohm's theory and wondered about getting rid of the nonlocality. Bell showed that QM+extra info determining outcomes = nonlocal. In short, EPR + Bell shows that if QM predictions are correct (the predictions, not the theory), then there is something nonlocal going on. The lab experiments confirmed this and nature is indeed nonlocal.

Thus, there is no local theory that has definite experimental results compatible with what is actually demonstrated in labs. Many worlds, to the extent that one can apply any notion of locality to it, avoids this by not having singular, definitive experimental results (all results happen).

jostylr··on Carlo Rovelli’s radical perspective on reality
For non-relativistic QM, the QM formalism is provable from Bohmian mechanics, an actual particle theory. BM starts from particles have locations the change continuously in time via a guidance equation using the wave function of the universe. One may choose other theories to explain quantum phenomena, but to say "There is simply no physical machinery to support an objective reality, period." is just false, at least in that realm. As for relativistic QFT, there are plausible pathways using Bohmian ideas as well though nothing as definitive as BM has been firmly established.

I would also say that any theory that does not have room to say definitively that I exist is a theory that is obviously contradictory to my experience and is therefore falsified. There has to be room in the theory for at least me. Additionally, I would certainly value much more a theory that has room for the rest of humanity more than one which questions the existence of everyone but me. I am not even sure what the point of a theory would be if it could not account for collaborative science being done.

jostylr··on What Americans die from vs. what the news reports on
Crime is often hyper localized. In some areas of some cities, crime may be going up while the overall rate of the city or country is going down. These intensive areas can also change over time. I am not aware of any analysis of the localization of crime and how it changes over time. There are a lot of choices to be made in doing that analysis, but if a reasonable local analysis across a country did that and found that in all localities crime went down, then that would seem reasonable to dismiss that guy's actual experience. The localization should probably on the neighborhood level, maybe on the order of 1000 people instead of 10000 or more.
jostylr··on A mechanic offered a reason why no one wants to work in the industry
pro-communists want a system without competition. Pro-capitalists do want competition or at least no restrictions. People who are practicing capitalists would love to not have competition.

Think of a prize race. The people organizing the race and the audience want a highly competitive race. But the racers, if they are in it for the prize, would love to have little to no competition.

Artificial restrictions on who can do a thing is not good and it is violence behind, whether it is government or not.

Anarcho-capitalists are the true expression of the ideology of free markets.

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