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pbkhrv

232 karma · joined February 9, 2015

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pbkhrv··on I turned Markdown into a protocol for generative UI
Did you see that Claude Code just came out with "channels" that allows for messages to be injected into the session/sent out by claude via hooks and MCP server [1]? I had CC code an integration between fenced and CC using channels and it actually worked - a little clunky since there is no streaming, but very interesting nevertheless.

[1] https://code.claude.com/docs/en/channels-reference

pbkhrv··on Scaling Karpathy's Autoresearch: What Happens When the Agent Gets a GPU Cluster
> How parallelism changed the agent’s research strategy > With a single GPU, the agent is stuck doing greedy hill-climbing: try one thing, check the result, pick a direction, try the next thing. With 16 GPUs, the strategy shifts. ...skip... 12 experiments in a single 5-minute wave. This makes it much harder to get stuck in local optima and much easier to find interaction effects between parameters.

The agent can theoretically come up with a protocol to run those same 12 experiments one-by-one and only then decide which branch to explore next - which I think would lead to the same outcome?

But in this case, it just happened to have stumbled on this particular outcome only because it didn't get a chance to execute a greedy strategy after the first 1 or 2 results.

Worse experiment design + parallelism = better experiment design + serialized execution ?

pbkhrv··on I turned Markdown into a protocol for generative UI
Very cool. I'm imagining using this with Claude Code, allowing it to wire this up to MCP or to CLI commands somehow and using that whole system as an interactive dashboard for administering a kubernetes cluster or something like that - and the hypothetical first feature request is to be able to "freeze" one of these UI snippets and save it as some sort of a "view" that I can access later. Use case: it happens to build a particularly convenient way to do a bunch of calls to kubectl, parse results and present them in some interactive way - and I'd like to reuse that same widget later without explaining/iterating on it again.
pbkhrv··on Architecture.md
On Linux there is a nice little utility called “tree” https://packages.debian.org/stable/tree Not sure about Mac or Windows.
pbkhrv··on Inrupt, Tim Berners-Lee's Solid, and Me
Grassroots-level adoption was key for things like Dropbox, IMHO - it solved a real need for individual people and it worked well and was easy to use. Same for Docker - developers adopted it in droves, and then enterprises followed.

Inrupt is trying to bootstrap a two-sided marketplace of sorts: product builders won't care until enough potential customers demand support for the "data pods", and regular people won't care until "data pods" solve real everyday problems for them.

Hopefully Inrupt's team has enough business-savvy people on it to find ways to gain traction to slog through some of the tough early stages of the product adoption cycle.

pbkhrv··on Dogecoin's inventor looks to the past for insight into the future
> "In many ways, 2017 marked the year that cryptocurrency stopped being about technologically innovative peer-to-peer cash and instead essentially became a new, unregulated penny stock market."

I don't think it stopped being about tech innovation - there is a ton of stuff happening around proof-of-stake, layer 2 networks, state channels etc. It's just that the stories around the speculative aspects of the cryptocurrency assets have been dominating in 2017.

pbkhrv··on Apple shareholders push for study of phone addiction in children
My toddler is allowed about a half hour of cartoons on Youtube on the big TV per day. He's played with the iPad a few times in his life. Lots of books and Legos and physical toys in our house. Waiting for longitudinal studies to come out, not taking chances with the little brain.
pbkhrv··on The Great Attention Heist
Every other month I go on a media diet: no social media, no news, no unnecessary browsing of any kind - only books and a small number of podcasts are allowed (plus whatever Internet usage is necessary for work). I've been doing this for more than a year now, and it has helped me feel a lot less "fragmented". I highly recommend it.
pbkhrv··on The impossibility of intelligence explosion
Wait, so if I run a Go-playing program from 10 years ago on the AlphaGo cluster then it'll produce better results than it did 10 years ago?
pbkhrv··on The impossibility of intelligence explosion
> but what's to stop us from cloning big chunks of our civilizations... simulating them, but using vastly less power/resources for each simulation? Then writing software to have them pass knowledge among the civilizations? We have just a few hundred countries, what if we had a trillion communicating at the speed of computer circuitry?

The principle of computational irreducibility [1] is what will stop us from "cloning" civilizations. That and chaos theory - any tiny deviation in initial conditions of such a simulation or cloning process could produce unusable results.

"simulating them, but using vastly less power/resources" is a pipe dream.

[1] http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ComputationalIrreducibility.htm...

pbkhrv··on The impossibility of intelligence explosion
> If we have a computer program that is able to design better hardware, it can be improved by simply moving it to better hardware.

Could you please elaborate? What is it about "better hardware" that makes software that runs on it "better"? Can you define "better"?

pbkhrv··on The impossibility of intelligence explosion
But we, humans, aren't going at anything like the speed of light. What if we tweaked our DNA to produce human beings with the working memory capacity of 50 items instead of the normal 7-ish [1]? One such researcher would be able to work faster, on more problems at once, and to consider more evidence and facts. The next bottleneck for that person, of course, would be the input/output capacity (reading, writing, typing, communicating), but even with those limitations, I bet they would be a lot more efficient than the average "normal" human. The question is - would you call such a person more "intelligent"?

[1] http://www.human-memory.net/types_short.html

pbkhrv··on The impossibility of intelligence explosion
> Our environment, which determines how our intelligence manifests itself, puts a hard limit on what we can do with our brains — on how intelligent we can grow up to be, on how effectively we can leverage the intelligence that we develop, on what problems we can solve.

Consider internet to be the "new" environment, full of highly complex social networks, millions of applications to interact with etc. Our brains are way too limited to be able to deal with it. There's an opportunity for a much more powerful intelligence to arise that CAN effectively process that volume of data and appear to be a lot more intelligent in that particular context.

pbkhrv··on Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will
It's a firewall for attention. One day somebody will build an app like that for AR glasses.
pbkhrv··on Dell’s gamble on Linux laptops has paid off
None of the 15" Precision series laptops linked from that page seem to be available with Linux on their dedicated sales pages... Weird.

Edit: they don't list Linux as being available until you go to "Customize and Buy".

pbkhrv··on FCC plans to vote to overturn U.S. net neutrality rules in December
> Are there any movements to combat this and prevent more local papers and tv stations from becoming smaller delivery mechanisms for the same partisan bullshit?

Not sure about movements, but maybe build products and systems and infrastructure that would enable smaller newspapers and tv stations to make money while staying independent? Better crowdfunding, micropayments, better paywalls, better media distribution channels, tools for local communities to get involved? Bottom-up solutions like these are hard to implement, because they are decentralized and require an active base, but can be done.

pbkhrv··on Young men dropping out of the job market to spend time in an alternate reality
On a cynical note, "young men immersed in alternate reality" is also an opportunity:

- It's a rapidly growing market

- those people will eventually need financial support systems beyond family - new forms of annuities?

- more demand for "gig economy" type jobs

- demand for jobs that can be done inside virtual realities that are better suited for humans instead of robots - this one is a stretch

- more demand for on-demand "life support" services - food, cleaning, medical, sex

This is veering into dark-ish dystopian territory, so imma stop now.

pbkhrv··on Young men dropping out of the job market to spend time in an alternate reality
I'm with you, to some degree. By "solving problems" I was referring to the parent comment's phrase "provided we're able to keep the scarcity problem solved", which I read as "let (vague, unidentified) them solve the scarcity problem while I play video games".
pbkhrv··on Young men dropping out of the job market to spend time in an alternate reality
> and starting your career in your 20s without an inherently marketable skill is terrifying for most people

Not as terrifying as starting your career in your 40s without an inherently marketable skill because 20s and 30s were spent playing video games...

pbkhrv··on Young men dropping out of the job market to spend time in an alternate reality
> provided we're able to keep the scarcity problem solved (which I'd bet we'd be able to pull off).

I'm curious as to how we can pull that off given that an ever increasing percentage of young smart capable people are opting out of solving real world problems in favor of "toiling over their virtual realities"...

pbkhrv··on Summary of the Amazon S3 Service Disruption
> Perhaps the "index subsystem" and "placement subsystem" are small enough for full-scale tests to be tractable, but certainly not cheap, and how often do you run it?

Rough guide:

CT = cost of 1 full scale test with necessary infrastructure and labor costs added up

CF = amount of money paid out in SLA claims + subjective estimate of business lost due to reputation damage etc

PF = estimate of probability of this event happening in a given year

if PF * CF > CT, then you run such a test at least once a year. Think of such an expense as an insurance premium.

What Netflix does with their simian army is amortize the cost of doing the test across millions of tests per year and the extra design complications arising from having to deal with failures that often.

pbkhrv··on Fasting leads to stress resistance, self-renewal, and regeneration (2014)
Mainstream religions have been advocating various forms of fasting for centuries. Thank you science for explaining why and how it works.
pbkhrv··on What I Wish I'd Known About Equity Before Joining a Unicorn
You missed the second part: "But that was in the days of IPOs, now the investors prefer to keep the rise in equity to themselves. So you chances of winning the lottery are much less."
pbkhrv··on What I Wish I'd Known About Equity Before Joining a Unicorn
If you are thinking about starting a company AND doing right by your employees, consider using alternative ownership structures like ESOP (https://www.nceo.org/articles/esop-employee-stock-ownership-...).
pbkhrv··on Moral Machine: human perspectives on AI's moral decisions
Start by questioning the premise: _should_ algorithms make moral decisions at all?
pbkhrv··on Show HN: Noms – A new decentralized database based on ideas from Git
Something like this could be used as a backing store for package managers like npm or apt or ruby gems or pypi.
pbkhrv··on Our nightmare on Amazon ECS
We switched from ECS to Docker Cloud and never looked back.
pbkhrv··on Statistics for Software
Yes, the ability to quickly update software covers a multitude of sins.
pbkhrv··on How to create an AI startup – convince some humans to be your training set
Microsoft, perhaps inadvertently, did that. Tay's stream of consciousness can now be used as a training set for an abusive content monitoring AI.
pbkhrv··on Manual arbitrary code injection in Super Mario World [video]
Reminds me of what it takes to debug a dozen microservices talking to each other.
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