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jychang

3,002 karma · joined October 23, 2012

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jychang··on Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%
This is "Steve Jobs looking at someone on a fruit diet" and thinking "I can do it too" levels of reckless.

Hell, Dunbar's Number is 150 people, and you expect to have 50 directs? That's literally 1/3 of your 150 being occupied by directs. It seems clearly infeasible the more you think about it.

jychang··on Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%
This is stupid and irrational. It's like seeing someone eat 100 cakes, and then assuming everyone can do it. And then getting diabetes afterwards.

It seems quite counterproductive to assume such a system would scale to everyone else, or that everyone else could possibly implement this. This is cowboy levels of human resource management, not careful engineering.

jychang··on Three Inverse Laws of AI
As opposed to the PhD student, who does not sleep and is not conscious.
jychang··on Specsmaxxing – On overcoming AI psychosis, and why I write specs in YAML
Yes, I see them all the time when I drink lots of alcohol [1]. This is a common issue with humans called "hallucination" which proves that humans are unreliable.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_pink_elephants

jychang··on Specsmaxxing – On overcoming AI psychosis, and why I write specs in YAML
Yes, I agree. If you tell humans "do not think of pink elephants", they are more likely to think about pink elephants.

Therefore, you must not use humans for any important work.

jychang··on Where the goblins came from
That's an extremely high bar. To use something off the top of my head: a 19th century scientist discovered Algebraic topology, does that make Algebraic topology easy?

It's pretty clear for me to argue that those things are NOT intuitive at all, and not easy to recognize. That's not changing the goalposts at all. Would the median american voter understand Poincaré's contributions to algebraic topology? Obviously not. Things that are easy for people to recognize: "touching a hot stove burns you". Things that are not easy for people to recognize: Poincaré's contributions to algebraic topology.

Honestly, your argument falls apart the moment you think about it critically. If it was so easy to recognize bias, then wouldn't all the people in the species already recognized it and voted to shape our legal system to handle any such bias, so it wouldn't be an issue right now? Clearly, that's not the case (we're still dealing with such issues), and understanding such biases is obviously an issue for people in the general public.

jychang··on Where the goblins came from
None of those things are easily recognized though. They're not universals. A term like "cognitive biases" generally require a college level education.

If you go to a tribe in the middle of the rainforest, would they be able to explain those concepts? Of course not.

Plus, I already gave an example of a species wide bias at the end of the comment- phone addiction for kids. I'm clearly not saying it's impossible for a human to spot a bias, but rather... how many 5 year old kids recognize that phone addiction is a bad thing?

jychang··on Where the goblins came from
> We’re really not that vulnerable to such things as a species, because we as individuals all have our own minds and our own sets of biases that cancel out and get lost in the noise.

[Citation Needed]

Just because if you have a species-wide bias, people within the species would not easily recognize it. You can't claim with a straight face that "we're really not that vulnerable to such things".

For example, I think it's pretty clear that all humans are vulnerable to phone addiction, especially kids.

jychang··on Networking changes coming in macOS 27
I just did the work of the software team for them:

I got Samba 4 working on Apple Time Capsules: https://github.com/jamesyc/TimeCapsuleSMB

If you have a legacy Time Capsule you'd rather not e-waste, you can try this out. Note that this is very much beta quality software, so don't expect it to work on all configurations.

jychang··on Networking changes coming in macOS 27
For those that are interested: I've managed to build Samba 4 and get it running on a Apple Time Capsule https://github.com/jamesyc/TimeCapsuleSMB
jychang··on Networking changes coming in macOS 27
I've already built it: https://github.com/jamesyc/TimeCapsuleSMB

This runs Samba 4 on the Apple Time Capsule.

jychang··on Networking changes coming in macOS 27
I've added support for Samba 4 (running SMB3) to the Time Capsule so it can work with modern macOS: https://github.com/jamesyc/TimeCapsuleSMB
jychang··on The Prompt API
Yeah, I 100% agree with the caution in this comment.

I see the merit in such a proposal. It's the linguistic equivalent to boiling the food you consume, instead of eating it raw with all the associated bad stuff.

The problem is, as you said, that this plan is unlikely to be as rosy as it's portrayed and probably has a lot of drawbacks in real life.

Interesting to think about and explore, though.

jychang··on The Prompt API
Are humans supposed to enjoy the "flavor" of diarrhea, as the result of giving every village idiot a microphone so they can spew shit from their mouths?

Sure, you might say this sort of thing is boiling flavor out of your food, but... boiling the bacteria out of what you consume isn't a bad thing.

jychang··on The Prompt API
Actually, yeah, unironically that's a great idea.

Think about actual human psychology for a minute- modern humans are nothing like people from 500 or 1000 years ago. Before instant communication around the globe, behavior was not anonymous. You ran your mouth off, you get socially punished in your village.

Life was both more harsh (you can randomly die from an infection, etc) but also more psychologically healthier in certain ways. You had much more of a sense of "belonging" within your clan/village/etc. Being socially ostracized was a real punishment, not just people casually running off their mouths.

I think the allegations of "snowflake" would be really interesting if you flip the assumption on its head. (And I've spent plenty of time on 4chan, nothing you say can hurt me). Instead, assume "snowflake" is actually the intended default for human psychological health; and flip other assumptions, like assume groupthink is actually an evolutionary survival strategy... and then see what conclusions you draw from that.

jychang··on Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem
There's no structural difference in the brain between those who can read/write vs those who can't. It's not a distinction.

Would you consider Socrates not intelligent since he was illiterate and had contempt for the written word?

If you want to classify intelligence, you need to define it properly.

jychang··on Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem
There's humans that have memory issues, or full blown Anterograde amnesia.
jychang··on Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem
Technically yes, gpt-5.4-mini is available on the free plan
jychang··on Framework Laptop 13 Pro
That's not open source. That's like decompiling closed source software years after support ended, in order to make a patch.
jychang··on All phones sold in the EU to have replaceable batteries from 2027
The iPhone SE (2020) cpu is like twice as fast as the iPhone 8 cpu, lol.
jychang··on Kimi vendor verifier – verify accuracy of inference providers
Yeah, the threat model is nonexistent. Most people use a dozen or so well known providers, who have no incentives to so obviously cheat.
jychang··on Kimi vendor verifier – verify accuracy of inference providers
It's old, Kimi's been doing this for months now.

https://github.com/MoonshotAI/K2-Vendor-Verifier

https://github.com/MoonshotAI/Kimi-Vendor-Verifier

Note, this is before K2.5 and K2.6 even launched.

jychang··on Jujutsu megamerges for fun and profit
If you think about it, git is really just a big undo/redo button and a big "merge 2 branches" button, plus some more fancy stuff on top of those primitives.
jychang··on Jujutsu megamerges for fun and profit
Did you read the article?

> Basically, in the megamerge workflow you are rarely working directly off the tips of your branches. Instead, you create an octopus merge commit (hereafter referred to as “the megamerge”) as the child of every working branch you care about. This means bugfixes, feature branches, branches you’re waiting on PRs for, other peoples’ branches you need your code to work with, local environment setup branches, even private commits that may not be or belong in any branch. Everything you care about goes in the megamerge. It’s important to remember that you don’t push the megamerge, only the branches it composes.

> You are always working on the combined sum of all of your work. This means that if your working copy compiles and runs without issue, you know that your work will all interact without issue.

You don't even push the megamerge to the origin. Or perhaps you don't even need to push it. You can just... work off it.

jychang··on Stop Flock
When you put it that way, the answer is obvious:

Assume VCs are brainless profit maximizers who don't understand ethics. How do you get them to say "I'm gonna stop you right there"?

Answer: Make it unprofitable to collect this data. Change the incentives.

So really, the correct answer IS on the legal level. Make a set of laws which make it burdensome at best and completely unprofitable at worst, and then the incentives within the system aligns.

jychang··on Apple update looks like Czech mate for locked-out iPhone user
This is completely unacceptable from Apple. You CANNOT remove a key from the keyboard that's being used as a password.
jychang··on Optimal Strategy for Connect 4
OH it's that guy.

His double pendulum video was orgasmic.

Edit: Oh wait, no, I was thinking of the Drew's Campfire double pendulum video. That video was extra interesting because the creator is not a typical content producer. He just has a few videos without any views, then dropped what might be one of the best videos of all time, and then went back to his technical videos.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jVogdTJESw&t=212s

jychang··on ML promises to be profoundly weird
It’s almost like you’re intentionally trying to be wrong.

You don't seem to understand how analogies work. I’m not talking about strip mining vs tunnel mining, I was comparing scale of human powered mining to mining with nitroglycerin.

I’ll let you figure out how the scale of mining “going back thousands of years” is very different from modern explosive mining on your own. Go google “iron production by year” or something. Hint: it took generations for the Romans to strip a small hill, that a modern midsize mining company can do in a few days.

jychang··on ML promises to be profoundly weird
It's the autism. And I say that endearingly. I'm an engineer who probably likes trains way too much.

I intentionally pointed out the STEM-esque responses of pedantic correction as a symptom of a disciplinary blind spot: technically correct nitpicking that misses the forest for the trees, a tendency to atomize arguments and lose the structural point, and that tendency is a weakness, not a strength.

There's also a lack of historical training to contextualize their own objection. That's also why I brought up Devereaux as an authority hammer: the actual domain experts consider those objections and dismiss it.

jychang··on ML promises to be profoundly weird
The statement IS true anyways, the problem is that you failed to distinguish between an example and a universal claim. You want to argue on logic? I'm an engineer, I can argue on precision too:

The (true!) statement is "However, there's an immense difference in scale between post-industrial strip mining of resources, and preindustrial resource extraction powered solely by human muscle (and not coal or nitrogylcerin etc). Similarly, there's a massive difference in information extraction enabled by AI, vs a person in 1980 poring over the microfilm in their local library."

I said there is a major difference in scale between "modern strip mining" and "a preindustrial extraction method powered only by human muscle", and I made an analogous point about AI-enabled information extraction versus 1980s manual archival research. That statement is purely true. Nothing in that statement says the muscle-powered-extraction example was the only preindustrial mode of production, just as "someone using microfilm in 1980" does not imply microfilm was the only way information was accessed in 1980. The fact that other information formats existed in 1980 is irrelevant to the truth of the example.

So no, nothing I said "turned out to be false". You are attacking a claim I never made because you failed to parse the logic in the one I did. Most importantly, this direction missed the big picture dialectical synthesis that I was introducing as well, and just kept decomposing the argument into locally falsifiable atoms which lost the thread of what was actually being discussed.

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