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sdwr

2,324 karma · joined April 9, 2019

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sdwr··on GPT-6 Astra
It's really bad at game design
sdwr··on No, You Are Not Living in a Computer Simulation
I think it's a lot more interesting to look for practical markers of simulation than do a teleological thought experiment.

How would a simulated universe differ from a "real" one? How would the simulation cut corners to save resources? Maybe the laws of physics are designed not just to produce interesting results, but also to be efficient to run.

Karl Friston and Steven Wolfram are sniffing around here, with cellular automata and free energy describing ways of partitioning space so it's cheaper to update

sdwr··on "Please just use plain English, I don't understand what you're saying."
Tractable is solvable, the opposite of intractable, and a beachhead is a landing point for an invasion.

A tractable beachhead is a solvable first chunk of work that sets you up for the rest of the project

sdwr··on Terrence Tao's ChatGPT Conversation about the Jacobian Conjecture Counterexample
It's an indicator of AI progress. The solutions aren't especially revolutionary, but no person had been able to solve them after decades of collective attempts.
sdwr··on It's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership
No taxation without representation?
sdwr··on Meta loses bid to dismiss US states' claims that FB, Instagram addict children
Small social sites are just as dangerous in another way, as vessels for a toxic monoculture. Pro-anorexia forums, political radicalization, there was even a famous one that fetishized infecting people with HIV.
sdwr··on Staying Awake (2008)
Does reading books have intrinsic value, or is it just a specific (archaic?) way of transmitting information? Socrates would be a podcaster today
sdwr··on Sagrada Família Lego set
The only people I've ever met who get excited filling out forms were German
sdwr··on Werner Herzog in conversation with Paul Cronin (2014)
Art is communication. If you can convey the message to an intern on a post-it, what's the point!

My favorite art is the kind that describes to people how they already feel.

sdwr··on Private equity bought America's essential services
That's amazing! The "machines as woodland fairies" conceit imagines them as natural creatures, but nature has no laws

"In developing countries, everything is possible and nothing works. In developed countries, everything works and nothing is possible."

sdwr··on Building Pi with Pi
Yeah it's hot...
sdwr··on SpaceX S-1
They have different personalities. I can only imagine Altman wants to stay on top of the chaos, and believes he will come out ahead whatever happens, while Dario is trying to stay realistic and mitigate worst-case scenarios.
sdwr··on The Third Hard Problem
The map is not the territory!
sdwr··on Parents say ChatGPT got their son killed with bad advice on party drugs
There's soft guardrails for "reputable" content. A publishing house has to buy it, stores have to agree to distribute it, and if people are upset they can raise a stink and get the book pulled.

Technically, people can write whatever they want, but practically you can't walk into a bookstore and read whatever you want.

sdwr··on A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro
Same as it ever was
sdwr··on Poland is now among the 20 largest economies
And the EU wants to insulate itself from Russia with friendly, ideologically-compatible countries. Can't put a price tag on safety
sdwr··on OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors
Emergency medicine is the coding of medicine. Fast feedback loop, requires broad rather than deep judgement, concrete next steps.

The AI coding improvement should be partially transferrable to other disciplines without recreating the training environment that made it possible in the first place. The model itself has learned what correct solutions "feel like", and the training process and meta-knowledge must have improved a huge amount.

sdwr··on Withnail's Coat and I
Yeah, fractal means you see the same structure, or an equally complex structure, at the smaller scale. This is just details, there's no sustained complexity
sdwr··on Interview with Bob Odenkirk
So poor people and historical people are in the same bucket as dogs, got it.

How lucky we are to be the only generation in history capable of thinking and reflecting!

sdwr··on The Free Universal Construction Kit
Economy of scale, Lego can invest the billions(?) in machines and molds that don't leave connection points (?), partially by reusing pieces between sets.
sdwr··on Expansion Artifacts
This is a peak midwit, popsci, plausible-sounding but foundationally-bereft article.
sdwr··on ChatGPT Images 2.0
Yeah it's fascinating to have an alternate source for intelligence, feels like a mental Rosetta Stone
sdwr··on US summons bank bosses over cyber risks from Anthropic's latest AI model
Recklessness is based on effort, likelihood, and consequence. If you live in a small town, you might not lock your front door. No matter where you live, you probably don't lock your second floor windows.
sdwr··on System Card: Claude Mythos Preview [pdf]
Is it healthy? Maybe every company is a profit-maximizer wearing a skin suit, and people support their siblings exactly twice as much as their cousins.

When you slice down to the game-theory-optimal bone, you are, in some sense, cutting off their wiggle room to do anything else

sdwr··on Are We Idiocracy Yet?
Right, because you see the situation so much better than them ;)
sdwr··on Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold
Didn't Google give up on chromeOS? For all their faults, at least Microsoft has a desktop os
sdwr··on Embarrassingly simple self-distillation improves code generation
What's cool is that they aren't adjusting the temperature of the model live, or predicting/labeling any of the fork/lock points.
sdwr··on Gone (Almost) Phishin'
Get into the account, change the phone number, and start charging the cards on file. Or look through iCloud data for passwords/contacts
sdwr··on People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account
"Requiring an account" means leaning in the Apple/Disney direction - upselling, walled gardens and milking captive customers. Dropping the account requirement is a symbolic (and practical!) step in the other direction, towards using the product as a tool.
sdwr··on Apple says no one using Lockdown Mode has been hacked with spyware
Lockdown mode could be life or death for some users. Adding toggles and partial states increases complexity and risk.
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