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theahura

2,302 karma · joined January 22, 2018

amolkapoor.com

writes at http://12gramsofcarbon.com/

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theahura··on Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid
> There is no evidence that students were actually doing this in any significant numbers.

premature optimization is the root of all evil. Seems like we shouldve actually shown that kids would do that before putting it into law

theahura··on Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid
> whats the goal of government education subsidies

a more educated populace is a public and civic good on its own terms. Public funding for education is maybe partially for economic returns, but is mostly because education is a necessary part of a functioning democracy and a necessary part of living a good fulfilling life

theahura··on Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid
imo this is pants on head backwards. The whole problem with the current university system is that it has become exclusively a credentialing system that everyone uses to justify higher salaries. We’ve completely left the education part of it by the wayside…except for the liberal arts majors who are actually there just to learn! This rule is just encoding the existing tulip mania into federal law directly, by making it clear that the ONLY reason one goes to school is for future $$$
theahura··on 30papers.com – Ilya's 30 essential ML papers, in a beginner friendly format
always a fun day when someone rediscovers these. Lucky 10000

in case folks are interested, i wrote up a ~layman's review of each paper over the course of two years a while back. Several of those reviews ended up doing reasonably well on hn. Full analysis of the ~23 docs that were papers and not massive books

https://12gramsofcarbon.com/p/ilyas-30-papers-to-carmack-tab...

theahura··on Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful
(note that I am the author!)
theahura··on Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful
> Like, if you have complaints about the thing, perhaps you should address them to your supplier directly. None of your readers can help, and nobody's magic folk solution to your problem is better than yours.

I think you may just misunderstand the point of having / writing a personal blog. I write because it's fun! Whether the reader gets any value out of reading it is almost entirely beside the point.

(Also several comments here directly post a fix to the problem stated in the blog post, so readers can and do often help)

theahura··on Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful
With the million-context-window models we never hit compaction, observed over hundreds of sessions. What are you doing that has you hitting compaction regularly?
theahura··on Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful
interesting take. I think I disagree, but I like this take a lot and I had to think about it.

First, I think that models still need a context layer. One way to think about 'context' is as a form of compression. You provide the model context because it makes it easier for the model to figure out what to do. Even in a world with infinite model capacity and infinite model context, this is still useful because it allows the model to avoid rederiving everything from first principles every time. As long as models perform better using fewer tokens and as long as we care about token spend, context is a useful (necessary?) shortcut.

Once you bite that you need some form of context layer, the question is which. Here I do agree that it is better to work with what the models will find familiar (markdown files colocated with code, for eg). But this speaks to over-engineered solutions not understanding their main user (the agent) more than it does the need or lack there of.

theahura··on Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing
starting a company that benefits from tokenmaxxing, mostly
theahura··on Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing
Hi, author here. I'm probably somewhat financially benefiting from tokenmaxxing. I also just believe compounding correctness is right, based on my own experience using the tools (which is why I have structured my life to try and financially benefit from tokenmaxxing)
theahura··on Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing
(its in the article, which predicts that there will be another round of tokenmaxxing with different underlying incentives)
theahura··on Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing
that is a better title! Added it as a subheader
theahura··on Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing
Dan Luu at MS: https://x.com/danluu/status/1487228574608211969?lang=en
theahura··on Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing
Independent of everything else, very interesting to see how polarized the comments are here
theahura··on Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing
I do abuse this title format, guilty as charged
theahura··on U.S. allows Anthropic to release Mythos AI to ‘trusted’ US organizations
> “I have determined that appropriate safeguards are in place to permit certain trusted partners to access the Claude Mythos 5 Model,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick wrote to Anthropic’s chief compute officer Tom Brown Friday

why is the commerce secretary making this decision

theahura··on U.S. allows Anthropic to release Mythos AI to ‘trusted’ US organizations
usgov picking winners and losers in AI --> usgov picking winners and losers in every industry (speedrun, any %)
theahura··on The Coming Loop
not to be dismissive, but isn't this the same as the ralph loop thing everyone was talking about 6 months ago?
theahura··on There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing
No, we use subscriptions. We wrap the underlying Claude Code with ACP. See: https://github.com/tilework-tech/nori-cli
theahura··on There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing
Not all the things that are good will rise to the top, but most of the things that rise to the top will be good. We've gotten pretty good at ranking systems as a species at this point, I'd say
theahura··on There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing
most flash games were horrible too! You had to go through a load of crap to find games like boxhead, motherload, or bloons. I'm a big believer in volume here. You don't have to be an amazing programmer to be an amazing game designer, but before, the former was a prerequisite for even getting started. The beauty of AI tools applied to games is that you can just focus on the latter. Over time the gems will rise to the top
theahura··on Anthropic's model naming, extrapolated
'we have simon willison at home'

(great article!)

theahura··on Launch HN: Runtime (YC P26) – Sandboxed coding agents for everyone on a team
we're on fly, going to add modal support soon. I dont think our users care all that much, but we care for dev ergonomics.

keys are tricky. We don't have a great answer. I mean the proxy inject works well enough for mcp, but there is just such a long tail of tools that do something like 'read a key from disk and encrypt it before sending it out' which makes proxy management just a pain

theahura··on Launch HN: Runtime (YC P26) – Sandboxed coding agents for everyone on a team
Really cool! We're working on something similar over at https://norisessions.com/

A few questions

- you mention proxying keys. One issue that we run into is that there are a bunch of tools that are really useful but require keys to be on disk (e.g. aws cli -- yes yes you can do IAM permissions but still). How do you guys think about those? (Especially since your setup onboarding is 'just install from npm or mise')

- poking around on the github, saw that you guys were at one point on fly.io. Did you guys end up switching off them? What motivated that if so?

- the CLI integration is cool! Is that actually teleporting remote sessions down to a local machine? Or is it more a window into the remote sandboxes?

would love to share notes! If you want to get in touch separately feel free at amol at noriagentic dot com.

theahura··on Agent Skills
I really wish he wouldn't use AI to write his posts. It would be faster to just post the prompt he used to write the article
theahura··on SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B
Training any large model at scale is hard, and Cursor has trained several including agentic ones. https://cursor.com/blog/composer
theahura··on SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B
hi, im the quilt.

Note that Meta paid ~16b for Alexandr Wang, and Google paid ~3b for the windsurf executive team. You are making a category error -- the talent pool isn't "ML researcher" it's "competent leader"

theahura··on SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B
Lots of people in the comments talking about how this is about training data, but surely this is actually about hiring competent people after the mass exodus/firing at xAI?
theahura··on Notes from the SF peptide scene
To be clear, as far as I am aware, there was nothing that I heard or saw that would be remotely considered non consensual dosing.
theahura··on Cal.com is going closed source
I'm sorta suspicious. I don’t really think this is why they are moving to closed source. It’s true that there is more security risk, but that actually justifies being open source, because open source tooling can spend more tokens hardening itself against security vulns than closed source tooling (at least, that’s the theory). My strong hunch is they are moving to closed source because it is now trivial to copy a product with AI clean rooms. Which, tbf, is a totally valid reason to move closed source. But I'd want to see more adoption of something like the Ship of Theseus license (https://github.com/tilework-tech/nori-skillsets/pull/465/cha...) before giving up on open source entirely
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