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kamaal

13,747 karma · joined April 15, 2011

Programmer
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kamaal··on Open source AI must win
Yes,

You have to start some where. Im guessing, making progress also brings in new ideas how to move further.

kamaal··on Open source AI must win
The heuristic is this-

Given a problem P-

1. Provide a list(S) of solutions(S1, S2 ... SN) ordered in the most efficient(For some definition of efficiency) implementation means possible.

2. Execute S1, ... SN.

3. If P is fixed by a solution in the list, halt.

4. Else for each S1 ... SN , execute steps 1 through 4 until, all dependencies and sub problems are resolved to eventually solve P.

This obviously needs lots of tokens, which is all the more reason why we need AI to run locally on our machines.

kamaal··on Open source AI must win
Its the closest terminology we have to describe that process.

https://github.com/cobusgreyling/loop-engineering

Its hard to come up with new names for novel processes, you mostly reuse what is close enough and well known.

kamaal··on Open source AI must win
>>AI is just hillclimbing today

That's what the Fable harness felt like. You give it a goal and it could try to get there through the shortest path given the tree of possibilities to get there. Iteratively, or recursively.

Perhaps if we make a open coding AI, the design must be along these lines. Something that's easy to train, and serve from local machines. Albeit has loop / recursive hill climbing facilities built it. That way the model gradually keeps moving towards the solutions, in iterations/recursions.

Once this is done, other multi modal things could be pursued.

kamaal··on Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]
>>I'm not sure how we solve this, other than having management come from engineering.

Given the whole point of management is to work to ensure their own survival and growth, it would in their interest to kill genuine competition when its coming up.

Who wants to raise their new competition and lose to them, no one!

kamaal··on Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
Agency is the last human bastion so far as Im concerned, the day AI has a degree of agency or agents/models in general start to drift towards that direction its genuinely over for masses.

You would still have a job to shepherd AI and get the work done, so as long as it didn't have agency. A proactive, self aware(to a degree), especially aware about its agency can be a killer when it comes AI going on and doing things on its own.

There is nothing it won't explore and nothing it won't do. It will be curious to see where things go from here.

kamaal··on Switzerland wil have a referendum to cap population at 10M
As a Indian I envy you.

My whole life has been a struggle for living in places where there could be fewer humans.

kamaal··on Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post
>>I thought that having this knowledge would set me apart

The whole leetcode movement was designed to sell this idea that knowing a solution that can be looked up in a matter of minutes on the internet some how puts you astronomically ahead of those who don't. Strangely enough go look at that site itself and thousands submit working solutions to those problems.

Knowing a solution discovered by somebody the first time, is no test of capacity or ability to get work done. It would probably matter if you discovered solution to a novel problem by yourself. How does knowing the end result of a long process by other people decide your ability to do anything at all?

During interviews I have seen companies go to absurd lengths to justify these tests. Including asking candidates to imagine they might not have internet and might need to know these solutions.

The only skill that really matters in our line of work is today most popularly known as high agency lifestyle. And delivery skills largely depend on ownership. In my decades of experience with software work, not knowing a thing isn't even a correlating factor in getting things done.

kamaal··on When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement
Real question is, are you a 100x prompter?
kamaal··on Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground
>>Why would we want to sever this last thread of human control?

Trust me a fair bit of boomers and the generation before lost jobs to computer automation in the 1990s through the 2000s. And they used pretty much the same justification, every bit of work, take for example designing something like a machine spare that was earlier done through painstaking process of bringing the thing to life from the meticulous work on the drafting board till machining was now in the domain of computers.

In India alone, banking jobs were considered those commanding tremendous prestige and income potential, got automated through computers. Tax consultants, accountants, postal services etc etc. The list is endless.

AI is some what like that for us in this generation.

kamaal··on Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground
>>Similarly, the output of programming is not only a program, but also a programmer. It is you.

This can be said about pretty much any job on earth.

By that definition nothing should ever be automated.

Everything thinks they are special, actually no one is. You become special by being rare. Find something that can be done by no one or only a scant few.

kamaal··on Larry Ellison: "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we’re recording"
Fear works only if delivered occasionally in byte sized quantities, too much of it and people not only stop fearing, they will also likely be indifferent to it, worse case even out right rebel.

If you had a weapon which is powerful, you better use it sparingly. Fear of the weapon is more important than the weapon itself.

kamaal··on More than 6 out of 10 people turn to AI for psychological support
Bought a bed last month, the carpenter delivered it and took photographs of it(with his phone) at our home. Next thing I see is he used Gemini to make the bed sit in various(fictional) rooms and interior design contexts. Like in a WhatsApp status with a number at the footer to call if people wanted a similar bed made.

What impressed me is just how realistic and beautiful it looked.

This is in India, the carpenter is barely literate in English.

You will be surprised just how many people use it these days.

Im guessing a fair bit what could have been described as a designers job is now being done by AI by anyone who has a phone.

kamaal··on More than 6 out of 10 people turn to AI for psychological support
>>It's obvious that AI can't "fix your problems," but just writing stuff down can help us process.

Nobody can fix your problems, but having some one to talk to who listens without judgement and advices accordingly with empathy matters.

Thats what this is about.

Having said this, AI can write out helpful mini booklets on stressful situations in which humans have to work with each other.

kamaal··on Michael Burry says neither SpaceX nor Anthropic is worth $1T
>>The stock market doesn't operate on long-term principles anymore.

Nah, it might appear so, but the moment of reckoning always arrives, always. Like eventually, it arrives.

Its a different argument, that most people themselves are not long-term investors, in that case of course, such a thing doesn't even apply to you.

I think Fidelity did some research that the most profitable accounts belonged to dead people. The proven formula is to pick the best stocks out there, pyramid upwards and be patient.

kamaal··on The real cost of owning a home
>>Home ownership is definitely a lifestyle choice first and foremost more than a financial one.

Same could be said about Real estate investments.

I know people who look up real estate investors as an inspiration as something they want to do themselves. One day trip scouting for properties, is enough to make them quit when they realise most of it is lots of irritating driving, due diligence, legal work, loans etc.

Hard things have little competition for a reason, process is a high attrition journey.

kamaal··on An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry
>>But the result has no meaning without the human intent behind the objective, human understanding to value the new pathway the AI used (more valuable than the result itself, by far) and the mathematical language (built by humans) to explore the concept.

Future of code is pretty much a bunch of guys shepherding a bunch of agents to get them to your goal.

I don't see how math might not go that way as well.

kamaal··on An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry
Thats coming too.

Some times when you go some distance with a subject generates data for new ideas.

Once math gets done fast, newer ideas and paradigms also arrive.

kamaal··on An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry
Well that's coming.

As a matter of fact more logic and structure to your work, the more easy it is for AI to conquer it. Due to this programming was the first thing that got solved, but pure sciences are next.

If what you do, and how you do can be written down on a piece of paper, then AI can do it.

I do believe programming getting solved will be double assault on these fields.

>>This is not snobbery

This is good for the species, what sense does it make to keep treating these fields like they are reserved for the top most intelligent micro percentage of humans? Getting LLM to these things gives some scale to these subjects and thats good.

kamaal··on The last six months in LLMs in five minutes
If you break down a complicated coding problem in smaller parts, it could be any problem.

You will see its basically a very reusable part thats already done uncountable times else where.

People who think they do something so special and novel that it just can't be done by non-human, struggle with breaking down a problem in smaller parts.

Even if you do have such novel problems, its not like every single day, every single bit of work you do is like that.

kamaal··on Steve Jobs in Exile – New book on his years at NeXT Computer
>>the real Steve Jobs without the distortion field

A lot of things come in full package, same person putting in the same effort(if not better) in a different place/situation doesn't give the same results.

I once worked with a senior engineer/leader at a electronics company who delivered great products/results and ran the shop to literal perfection for like a decade. The company got sold, and he moved on. He was just not able to replicate the same success after that ever, despite by his own admission he tried even harder else where.

Despite the fact that Jobs was like the greatest ever, Im sure without Apple, its culture and overall company inertia he wouldn't be able to do much either.

This is also why if you have some kind of a winning combination you are better off sticking with it even if its not entirely perfect. Anything else could be way worse.

kamaal··on Starship V3
Everything you wrote is some definition of hard, but all doable. None of this is purely in the territory of 'known' impossible(like FTL travel).

Now different people have different points where they quit when things get hard.

This is true for even everyday things in life. Quitting triggers exist for people at various points in the ladder. The end of ladder and path both exist, its upto you to decide if you wish to continue climbing, or give up and quit.

Your mileage may vary.

kamaal··on Starship V3
Unfortunately that is also how luck works as well.

You are lucky if you think you are, start on this path you are likely to increasing make choices that tend towards increasing your chances of success(i.e luck).

kamaal··on Starship V3
I think Elon Musk is quite literally the living example of what high agency lifesytle would look like.

One could argue he likely knew way less than your day job rocket scientist or battery experts when he started out. But these people believe so as long something is not impossible by known physics it is doable, and hence there is a way to get it done. And then they do it.

That is you wake up everyday, and do whatever it take to get things done. You keep moving forward, you keep taking the next steps.

Of course you need lots of other aspects of human enterprise like tenacity, productivity etc for all this. But once you get the root value right, all things descend from there on.

kamaal··on Appearing productive in the workplace
>>The "elongation" of workplace artifacts resonated with me on such deep level.

Bulk of pretty much every thing is fluff. Not just work place artifacts.

In many ways this is the root of all complexity.

“Anything more than the truth would be too much.”

- Robert Frost

kamaal··on An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below
>>LLMs can research what a tool does before calling it though

Thats stretching the definition of 'research', it basically checks if the texts are close enough.

Delete can occur in various contexts, including safe contexts. It simply checks if a close enough match is available and executes. It doesn't know if what it is doing is safe.

Unfortunately a wide variety of such unsafe behaviours can show up. I'd even say for someone that does things without understanding them. Any write operation of any kind can be deemed unsafe.

kamaal··on Less human AI agents, please
Using a LLM for these tasks really is somewhat like using a Semi to shuttle your home groceries. Absolutely unnecessary, and can be done via a scooter. But if a Semi is all you have you use it for everything. So here we are.

The real deal is, while a Semi can do all the things you can do with a scooter, the opposite is not true.

kamaal··on A. J. Ayer – ‘What I Saw When I Was Dead’ (1988)
>>perhaps even eternity

If there is an eternity, perhaps everybody that exists, or will exist is already a part of it, and is going through it.

kamaal··on A. J. Ayer – ‘What I Saw When I Was Dead’ (1988)
>>it's a safer bet to treat these experiences as arising from mind rather than beyond it

Your brain has to be alive and exist normally for it to have these experiences. So its quite obvious, nothing is coming from outside of it.

I do feel like its some kind of brain rebooting itself or something like that.

Its sad babies can't tell us if they experience the same during childbirth, but I have a guess that they experience something similar as well.

Its just that the brain is starting up and checking if there is a OxDEADBEEF or a fresh boot. And giving you the primal, brain not initialising any other interface(like eyes, ears, limbs etc). You experience what life would be if only brain existed on its own without everything else apart from it.

kamaal··on OpenAI's $852B valuation faces investor scrutiny amid strategy shift, FT reports
>>Anecdotally, Claude on the $20/month plan can only run 1-3 queries per 4 hours before rate limiting, often stopping in the middle of a query.

The free version is pretty much unusable. Not a single query completes, You get only one query every 4 hours, given like 12 waking hours, you get 3 queries, none of which complete.

$20 plan gets you only a small distance from there.

Looks like the focus is entirely on Enterprise customers these days. They don't even bother with their regular users these days. CC is entirely a enterprise product.

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