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nateburke

827 karma · joined June 1, 2012

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nateburke··on A misalignment of AI in mathematics
They are defending the value of their achievements!

They should explicitly advocate for the Fields Medal to weight teaching achievement more heavily going forward.

nateburke··on Who's afraid of Chinese models?
Releasing open weights that can approach frontier level intelligence (irrespective of number of tokens burned) is just a way of telling the world that anyone, even China, can serve frontier level inference if they have the chips and warm shells to do so.

What is stopping China from gaining a majority market share, then, in terms of serving inference?

AI Sovereignty -- yes

Cybersecurity concerns -- yes

Latency -- no, unlike previous emerging IT workload types , inference does not have strong latency requirements. eg 1s of additional network latency doesn't matter to a 15 min, 10-turn agent session.

Cost -- ultimately this comes down to a nations ability to plug chips into warm shells. which forks into geopolitical / trade on the chips side and energy scalability and modularity on the warm-shell side. Even if you call geopolitical / trade a toss-up, China has the US beat HANDILY on the energy front, yearly they are deploying 10x power to their grid relative to the US, which is shooting itself in the foot at every possible moment.

IMHO chip tech will travel across borders, absent a breakthrough in analog inference, energy scalability will ultimately dominate.

nateburke··on N+1
Issue 4 is incredible, I bought a damaged copy for a buck and it was the best literary dollar I have ever spent!
nateburke··on The short leash AI coding method for beating Fable
Seems like a common-sense approach. I appreciate the emphasis on understanding, humans will eventually be held accountable, blaming Claude for an outage is not going to get Claude fired.
nateburke··on Ferrari Luce
I like the ev6!
nateburke··on Lost Images from the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test Restored
Penderecki did most of the heavy lifting there
nateburke··on Anthropic forms $200M partnership with the Gates Foundation
Agreed. Curious to know if any other prominent voices have delved into the numbers in a similar way?
nateburke··on GameStop makes $55.5B takeover offer for eBay
Is this LBO a ridiculous enough of a proposition that you are going to email your senator and or representatives to complain about LBO loopholes in corporate finance law?

I didn't think so.

I wish them well!

nateburke··on Ti-84 Evo
Ti-30x is all you need.
nateburke··on If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true
Add on the compounding effect that "QA" or "test" in someone's job description was viewed as a synonym for "less-highly compensated" over the past few decades, and you have an entire generation of mid career devs with poorly adapted instincts regarding what is valuable in the process of shipping working product.

The bottleneck was never coding...

nateburke··on Filing the corners off my MacBooks
I did this at my last job, it's nice.
nateburke··on Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?
Interesting that the algorithmic finance firms are still recruiting. Perhaps they still need a pipeline of rigorous thinkers, or are unwilling to cede significant influence over P+L to llms.
nateburke··on Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters
It feels like xAI is perpetually playing catch-up.

They haven't quite committed enough to a novel direction relative to anthropic or OAI, what's described in the OP seems symptomatic of a lack of differentiation.

If you spend all your time judging yourself relative to the incumbents, there will be no time left over to innovate.

The leash is too tight!

nateburke··on OpenAI agrees with Dept. of War to deploy models in their classified network
from the tweet above: "Maybe even more importantly: Anthropic wants to control what people do with AI—they block companies they don't like from using their coding product (including us), they want to write the rules themselves for what people can and can't use AI for, and now they also want to tell other companies what their business models can be."
nateburke··on OpenAI agrees with Dept. of War to deploy models in their classified network
I think it's plausible, given the effort he seemed to put into his initial response to the ads: https://x.com/sama/status/2019139174339928189
nateburke··on OpenAI agrees with Dept. of War to deploy models in their classified network
Plain and simple this is revenge for the Anthropic super bowl ads, which were epic burns against openAI's primary future revenue stream.
nateburke··on I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a supply-chain risk
Glad there are no hard feelings after those Superbowl ads
nateburke··on Officials Claim Drone Incursion Led to Shutdown of El Paso Airport
NTS was 60-80 mi away from Las Vegas.

yes there might be safer locations for an underground nuclear test, but how many of them offer the same "F U" PR capacity relative to Mexico/Juarez/cartels, etc.

nateburke··on Officials Claim Drone Incursion Led to Shutdown of El Paso Airport
My guess is nuclear test.

Airport circle to secure the transport of the device to the ground adjacent to the test site.

Trapezoid is the test site, wider on the side that is less controllable (border-facing).

Disconnected because two separate teams executed in parallel without informed oversight.

nateburke··on AI Tribalism
where are the productivity gains in GDP?

where are the websites that are lightning fast, where speed and features and ads have been magically optimized by ai, and things feel fast like 2001 google.com fast

why does customer service still SUCK?

nateburke··on Ski map artist James Niehues, the 'Monet of the mountains' (2021)
Love everything he's ever done. Phones and skiing don't mix. Dropping a paper trail map off the lift won't ruin your run. Dropping your phone will. Why spend time thinking about wireless, bars of service etc. when you can look at ART to plan your next downhill ADVENTURE???
nateburke··on Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
Horses never figured out how to get government bailouts.
nateburke··on The programmers who live in Flatland
I really enjoyed the preemptive comments at the end of one of his other blog posts:

https://blog.redplanetlabs.com/2025/06/17/make-worse-softwar...

nateburke··on Don't push AI down our throats
Did you follow through with the full repair? How long did it take? What was the materials cost?
nateburke··on Nvidia-backed CoreWeave's shares fall. Delay hits annual revenue forecast
Curious if it's possible to back into which hyperscaler customers were impacted?
nateburke··on OpenAI’s promise to stay in California helped clear the path for its IPO
Cali could have called his bluff, he's not moving to Texas any time soon, and neither are his employees.
nateburke··on Vijaye Raji to become CTO of Applications with acquisition of Statsig
This is it. Does OpenAI have consumer DNA or enterprise DNA? It is very difficult to have both.
nateburke··on Avi Loeb: Is 3I/Atlas Our Turing Test by a Superior Alien Intelligence?
Frequency can be perceived in any unit of time
nateburke··on Avi Loeb: Is 3I/Atlas Our Turing Test by a Superior Alien Intelligence?
Interesting idea. The only response short of SENDING IT BACK I can think of would be to measure its velocity, divide by our best estimate of its diameter, and broadcast the resulting frequency over radio in all directions.
nateburke··on Tokens are getting more expensive
generalist = fungible?

In the food industry is it more profitable to sell whole cakes or just the sweetener?

The article makes a great point about replit and legacy ERP systems. The generative in generative AI will not replace storage, storage is where the margins live.

Unless the C in CRUD can eventually replace the R and U, with the D a no-op.

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