kriro

Seems pretty ignorant. If you take a historic perspective, the WWW and things like HTML, HTTP, URLs etc. are technically from a British guy working in Switzerland (CERN) but I suppose crediting it to any country is kind of pointless. These days a lot of it runs on machines that run on a Linux kernel, also technically from Europe. Python/C++/PHP/Erlang/Prolog/Pascal and many others I'm probably forgetting on the programming language front.

If you're talking about current VC-backed hyper accelerators...there's probably also plenty. I think there's also a lot going on in the non-IT sectors (medicine, pharma, genetics, energy etc.)

But the bigger question is...does it really matter which country innovation comes from these days? As an end-user/customer I certainly don't care too much.

Nvidia is being smart. They see that AI-paddlers are currently in a strange our-doomsday-is-the-worst race and offer to sell an anti-doomsday chip. Clever play.

Spoken like someone with no friends or relatives that live far away. Screens can also be extremely connecting. They are a tool and as such value neutral. Is it evil that I can have a weekly video-call with family members on another continent when the alternative would be...simply no contact at all, super expensive phone calls or letters. I don't think so.

Get more people to turn on telemetry.

Seems a bit too dogmatic. I can nudge someone into intrinsic motivation with extrinsic incentives. It's hard to discover something you're not really looking for but if some other incentive lets you discover it then bingo.

Some examples from my own life: Paying someone's first climbing session -> lifelong climbers. Offering 5$ if you can beat this bot in chess -> obsessed with chess. Etc.

Interesting. Singapore certainly tries many things to nudge their citizens to a better life. I also recall from a documentary I watched that they have a system where you get shopping vouchers for logging certain sports activities and similar things (I think there was also some incentive system for healthy food).

This is really cool at first glance and very HN worthy. I've bookmarked it and will look into it deeper. Recreates roughly my first PC setup though I think I had a Matrox Mystique so that makes it even more interesting. And I've been looking for a "I build something cool with an FPGA" kind of project to look into for a while now.

Maybe send this question to the Anthropic legal team. I'd be curious if you get an answer and what it'll be.

Thanks for motivating me to work a bit on non-LLM things again :)

Pretty cool. Would love for her to somehow work with the people who make the Mausritter RPG :D

Very nice. I love the "mirror shot" and the one with the two stools in the foreground. Very fair prices for the coffee :D

My personal litmus test is a pourover not an americano because I usually don't go for the espresso-based drinks.

Higher level languages are still formal languages. I think there's a conceptual difference between moving from one formal language to another (machine instructions to asm or asm to C) and moving from a formal language to natural language. So yes, developing, looking at and understanding a formal description of your system has benefits for an engineer compared to handing off this step completely.

As someone who also dabbles in writing fiction (unpublished) I'm less pessimistic. I keep hearing less people read and the end of long form writing is near. To me this signals a great time to write and publish because the smaller the niche, the happier the people who get quality stuff in it.

The "book bubble" of avid readers is the most anti-AI community I am a member of which is a very interesting perspective (I do research in AI as my main job). I don't touch AI for writing/editing etc. because I see it as a creative endeavor and enjoy spending time with a blank piece of paper or an empty latex file :D

The counterpoint to this comes from chess. High level engines "prove" certain lines correct (not in the mathematical sense) but those "engine lines" are really hard to explain to humans, even by GMs. They can sort of explain that something is a good line but not why. Engines crush GMs and are considered ground truth even if noone really understands what is happening. Would it be a nightmare if math was the same, not sure. Especially for counterexamples LLM solutions seem fine. They stop humans from wasting time on pointless things. For proofs it gets more hairy but I think if it is formally verified a proof is a proof. Attribution is a problem (should the person who wrangled the answer out of an LLM get the credit, I guess so).

I think these are non-trivial epistemology and science theory problems.

This was me as well. +HCU and searchlores.org were so much fun. The coolest thing I remember was the hash-maze but I couldn't find it again. I saw Fravia live in 1999 :D

Switching 0x74 to 0x75 and vise versa lead to me ordering the free Intel books and diving into assembly and osdev for a while. There was something zen-like wading through disassembled code with a complete beginner mind and looking for patterns. This and reading Phrack around the "Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit" times are probably my favorite memories related to computing because I only had a very vague understanding of what was going on mixed with a sense of "wait you can do this" and a lack of readily available information.

Where does this supposed saying come from? All I hear is PostgreSQL is the database intelligent people use, Git or GTFO and I don't even know what a closed source programming language is. Apache and nginx, Linux, DNS infrastructure.

In an agentic world, why do I want closed source software that my agent can't adjust and adapt to my needs for...anything?

Ok, I'm a dummy: https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/pi_agent_rust

"pi_agent_rust is a from-scratch Rust port of Pi Agent by Mario Zechner (made with his blessing!)."

It's pi, not pi.dev

Agreed. The author in question (Linnaeus) was from Sweden and professor at a Swedish university (Uppsala). Latin was used across the board in "traditional" sciences in northern Europe at that time and in fact the distinction of disciplines was not as clear as it is today. Linnaeus was a professor of medicine formally but focused on botany. He traveled a lot and had many international "contacts", especially in the Netherlands. His correspondence was usually a mix of Swedish and Latin (which I find interesting because I assume Swedish was not widely studied at the time) but his professional publications were in Latin.

But it was an interesting time as slowly native languages became more common. The chair for economic sciences at Uppsala was specifically to be taught in Swedish (1741).

Southern and central Europe were ahead of the curve a bit and it was more common to see French, English and German for example (French and English scientific journals date back to the 1660s).

For more information, I can recommend "Languages of science in the eighteenth century" by Britt-Louise Gunnarsson which specifically focuses on Linnaeus. It's Open Access: https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/97831102...

Philosophically, pi.dev is exactly what I'm looking for. Minimalist and explicit (YOLO by default, we know it can be trouble but we tell you so).

Anyone here using the Rust rewrite of pi.dev as their daily driver? It's endorsed by the author of pi.dev and looks pretty attractive to me being both minimalist and not having npm attached. Any info "from the trenches" are appreciated (setup with sandboxing, extra niceties etc).

Very enjoyable article.

Isn't the harness basically where the frontier model companies can capture value and create a moat of sorts? I am also curious about building a harness for fun but would expect it to be more interesting in a scenario where I can self host an open weight model.

What motivates the people who build their own ChatGPT/Claude harness for example? And how do you keep it tuned with the rapid development of frontier models.

"""People are, in heavy LLM systems, realising that the most valuable commodity is engineers knowing WTF is going on, and that loss of understanding of your codebase is the #1 blocker to actually getting things done."""

Very much this. It is also true for non-LLM code bases. I still remember my first job at a company with a bigger codebase than my typical "university project code base". It was a full fledged ERP system and just learning the lay of the land and understanding what lives where and why took quite a bit of time.

Interestingly, I think LLMs can be used for this "self-onboarding" and codebase-browsing/understanding. I've experimented a bit with treating an LLM as a guide of a bigger codebase it has "ingested" and having dialogues about it. Works reasonably well, I'm curious if there are companies out there that use this approach.

This mindset is called "death of the author" [1] and the quick summary is that the author's intent doesn't matter. Most book people I know disagree with it.

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

""" Another prediction is that MOST readers will care about machine-vs-meat as much as they currently care about publishing imprints, which is to say almost none. """

This does not align with what I see in the fiction book space at all. At least in the communities that I frequent (fantasy, sci-fi, horror) there is no AI publication that I am aware of that is good. And readers react allergically to any notion of AI involvement be it for covers or the actual writing. I think people will gladly pay a premium for human written texts just like people gladly play chess in fact the number of chess enthusiasts has drastically increased despite engines being able to crush the best players in the world. Writing is art and art requires a human soul for lack of a better word.

As for proving that you wrote it...yeah that could be tricky. I do all my writing in Latex tracked in git. I guess if the AI accusations get really wild one could add some sort of proctoring for the writing process (film yourself while writing).

I'm pretty sure there are plenty of folks at Google who wish they never published the transformer paper.

This is also in line with my subjective experience as someone reading quite a few papers in the field: """The preprint also found that firms based in China consistently published more papers than their counterparts based in the United States."""

Looking at the table of contents, I see no mention of Gödel/incompleteness theorems or limitations which is not a great sign. It does look well structured though but I'd probably recommend just going with "Introduction to Logic" by Tarski and "Metalogic. An introduction to the metatheory of standard first order logic." by Hunter. Those served me well and are fairly understandable for a non-mathematician (imo).

Alternatively hop straight into Prolog (Art of Prolog, Craft of Prolog).

""" Beyond Zero shifts the trust boundary from the application to the action being performed on a piece of data in realtime—and from after-the-fact investigation to in-the-moment evaluation and containment. It augments BeyondCorp’s foundational identity with a “brain” capable of reasoning about the context and intent of a specific request in realtime. """

Doesn't this simply shift the attack vector? Compromising this overlord brain now becomes a new target.

This seems overly pessimistic to me. Of the recent shows I have watched, Andor contradicts it in my opinion. Might even be one of the best shows I have watched. Granted I rarely watch movies/TV shows these days so my random sample might just be lucky.

I think it's a good time to re-read "A Short History of Financial Euphoria". A classic I always recommend :)

I had the same problem, playing with the speed helped for me. Similar to meditation, I also learned to focus more on the listening. I completely agree that text is better for jumping and audio might also not be perfect for everybody. For fiction audio it also depends a lot on the narration for me. It needs to be top notch or I "check out".

Listening to audiobooks for me is a learned skill. when I started my mind used to wander off and I couldn't tell you what I just listened to. Now for autopilot activities I'm hyper focused on the books. I have increased the speed to roughly 1.3x which seems to be the sweetspot for my brain. Faster sounds like robot-voices to me and slower made me wander off.

I completely agree with the "mental health" boon to taking time, slowing down and focusing on an activity. This can be done with audiobooks, too. I sometimes sit on my couch and listen to an audiobook, too.