surprisetalk

Tangentially related

I think it’s a mistake to equate the United States with “America”. I prefer calling Americans “Yankees” or “Usonians”.

[0] https://taylor.town/yankee

I rather like this paper, but I think it is generous to say their benchmarks measure "intelligence".

[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1911.01547

We have no dang clue what intelligence is, nor how to measure it.

[1] https://taylor.town/crowpower

"The new bound saves a factor of ≈ log_3(n) over the prior record by Ford-Green-Konyagin-Maynard-Tao from 2018. The result is also now formalized by Alexeev in Lean."

I've been told that prediction markets provide reasonably good forecasts compared to most other methods. Could you help me understand why that might not be true?

This seems like a very clever product move from X.ai

I wonder if they're going to try and compete against Slack with X.com chat?

This reminds me of those pareto-style speedrun record charts when a new glitch is discovered.

[0] https://taylor.town/silver-landmines

When I see dramatic leaps like this, it tells me that the important hacks haven't yet been discovered.

I built myself a little tui that lists all my projects and moves claude code sessions to the foreground/background:

[0] https://taylor.town/toil.png

(The $ estimates in that screenshott are wildly incorrect! haha)

I wrote a thing in 2023 about why I'm still using Elm:

https://taylor.town/elm-2023

It's 2026, and I'm still using Elm for all the same reasons :)

As an added bonus, Claude seems to play very very nicely with Elm:

https://taylor.town/diggit-000

:-)

The Eric Trump insider-trading solicitation story is its own weird rabbit hole:

https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/daniel-cormier-eric-trump-...

This is so beautiful and relevant that I'm going to add your quote to the essay just as written here :) Thank you

For those who don’t know: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_Day_%28psychedelic_hol...

Right now it feels a lot more like Rust, but I'm hoping to make it feel more like that smooth Elixir experience via opinionated APIs.

If we build everything right, only library maintainers should really ever feel the borrow checker.

For example, I've been experimenting with a new primitive that creates a sort of Agent/GoFunc thing:

  'count-channel
    ('sum let 'msg let sum 1 plus) server
    def
  0 count-channel
    1 send
    1 send
    1 send
    recv 3 eq
    free

But I'm really not sure where this whole thing is headed yet :)

This book was SO GOOD.

It's bleak. I always imagined that rich/powerful people only created suffering if that suffering was required for certain goals. It's easier for me to bear injustice when it's a zero-sum game. But the story of Facebook is not that. Facebook didn't make ethical sacrifices for profit -- its executives just didn't care to understand the consequences of their actions. I wish those folks could feel how much harm they've caused.

There are more productive ways to vote with your money than tax evasion.

You can make tax-exempt donations, or start your own non-profit organization.

Some people hoard money without building businesses, without participating in government, without contributing to welfare. People who take more than they give are assholes.

Yeah, I'm admittedly pretty clueless! I'm trying to learn

Very sorry I rubbed you the wrong way. I wanted to share some things that have helped me, but it may have come off as prescriptive/condescending. Sorry about that

I'd love to help, but I need more info please :)

It sounds like you're navigating a really dark time, man.

Some things that have helped me reset in the past:

• the easiest way to make friends is to go volunteer somewhere. doing hard things with people is the only way i've found to deepen relationships. you will want to hang out with people you've picked up trash with, but maybe not folks you've played pickleball with

• block your phone from everything for 30 days: https://shiftyourphone.com

• spend 12 hours bicycling in one direction on Saturday, and then bicycle back home on Sunday

• no booze, no weed, no cigs

• it sounds like you also want companionship. the way to find a life partner comes naturally from the other things: making deep friendships via volunteering, resisting the algos, being healthy, etc.

• all of these probably require energy that you don't think you have. set a 5:00am alarm and your brain will eventually accept that your body wants to do the new thing

Thanks for sharing. It's terrifying to be so tight on finances.

What region are you based? Do you have a portfolio I can share? Feel free to email me at hello@taylor.town if you don't want to share publicly

> OpenAI exec becomes top Trump donor with $25 million gift

> https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/brockman-openai-top-trum...

This book is soooo good!

From the official @WhiteHouse twitter:

https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/2027497719678255148

https://xcancel.com/WhiteHouse/status/2027497719678255148

I'll add it! Thanks.

EDIT: Actually, it's not quite "ML-family" enough for this post. But it is a remarkably cool project! :)

I decided to post to my blog and share with more context (and better formatting). I couldn't delete the prior Tell HN post.

That example was not there when he wrote the comment :) I snuck it in after all the helpful feedback in this comment section haha

The example wasn't in the essay when he wrote the comment :) I just added it thanks to the helpful feedback