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zmgsabst

2,384 karma · joined January 21, 2022

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zmgsabst··on Government sponsored study on alcohol doesn't stand up to scrutiny
This is important when discussing (eg) cancer treatments: a treatment may leave you alive for longer but in worse health — and therefore, it’s unclear which is preferable.
zmgsabst··on The American sports plutocracy
We’ve had the public gambling on sports off-and-on since Roman chariot racing.

People don’t have to feel any certain way, but I find many of the comments seem detached from the fact there’s millennia of history about sports, gambling, etc; with many of the same concerns articulated by contemporary authors preceding you by that vast time.

I’m just glad sports mobs don’t burn cities as often as they did in Rome — but I don’t have nearly the panic that more of the same will be the downfall of humanity or civilization.

zmgsabst··on The case for overhauling American science
For the record, the conspiracy is Obama and Trump funded the COVID-19 pandemic via EcoHealth Alliance (and Trump funded the vaccines in late 2019, before COVID was public) in direct circumvention of the Obama era prohibition on dangerous gain-of-function.

I think we need to keep our conspiracy allegations accurate:

We’re not doing anything constructive to strawman one group was a way to insult another.

zmgsabst··on The case for overhauling American science
MBAs declaring how fields they know nothing about should operate is our general model of business since the 1980s or so.

I don’t think it has worked well, but this is continuing the trend rather than a deviation.

zmgsabst··on The case for overhauling American science
That’s every administration.

See previous requirements for ideological statements to receive funding.

zmgsabst··on How Compaction Works in Pi
I do this in my own harness, where a context only exports certain messages when you step out of it — eg, my request for an essay and its final output, while dropping everything from the first draft through various intermediary edits.

That naturally trims a lot of context while removing mistakes from the context to prevent poisoning (ie, every draft but the final negatively contributes in some way — that’s why we edited them).

zmgsabst··on Principia Mathematica is modern and insightful
HoTT distinguishes equality from equivalence.

Univalence says that equality is equivalent to equivalence, ie, formalizing the notion of when we can use equivalence rather than equality as a step in a proof. In practice, we often only care about proofs “up to equivalence”.

A way to think about this:

- equality is an identity map

- equivalence is an isomorphism

For example, 2 in Z and 2 in R do not have an identity map between them — but do have an isomorphism.

I think the key insight of univalence is not collapsing equivalence into equality — but allowing it to remain a second truth relation.

We don’t want 2 in Z to be equal to 2 in R (because we collapse type distinction), but we do want them to be equivalent — so we can do equivalent reasoning about arithmetic in R to reach conclusions about Z.

zmgsabst··on What sort of maths are LLMs good at?
You’re correct that those things are also what mathematics is about — but they’re less constrained, hence current LLMs aren’t as good at them.

However, your last question is incorrect: people are working on that, but there haven’t been hugely useful results.

But as an example, I’ve been slowly working on implementing frameworks for theory distillation — eg, take a corpus of science papers and derive a consistent model of the world from them, such as in Lean. (Or more specifically, a sheaf defining what consistent theories are possible.)

zmgsabst··on The UK's war on anonymity has come to America
I’m actually talking about the period from 1950-1980 on the chart labeled: “Percentage of married men by race, 1950–2024”

You can see the collapse of black marriages started earlier and is steeper than other demographics — though eventually white marriages enter a similar decline, along with Hispanic marriages. (Asians hold roughly equal.)

This strongly suggests the effect is correlated with poverty and not race — especially with the white effect starting during the collapse of US manufacturing.

But if we agree the correlation is with poverty you haven't refuted my point — as welfare is a strong incentive structure on those experiencing poverty. That chart is perfectly consistent with what I said.

So your criticism is wrong at two levels:

- you didn’t even discuss the correct time period

- you showed data consistent with my claim

zmgsabst··on The UK's war on anonymity has come to America
The sharecropping nature was intentional, ie, their vision of subservient people generating wealth for the state which it then distributed for their basic needs rather than those people owning property by which they could do for themselves.

That it destroyed black families (among others) is merely happenstance rather than intentional racism — stemming from the overall failure of technocratic managerialism.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/UPxpKe4N8b8

zmgsabst··on The UK's war on anonymity has come to America
In the case of food stamps, that was the leverage by which social engineers destroyed the black family via incentives for single mothers — collapsing from 75% married (circa 1950s) to 25% married (modern).

The “Welfare State” is nothing but modern share cropping from the party of Jim Crow.

zmgsabst··on Don't be a meat proxy
If you use the definition from On Bullshit, then bullshit is a statement made without regard for truth value because of its utility to the speaker.

As such, LLMs can only bullshit.

zmgsabst··on Don't be a meat proxy
…yes?

The amount of text isn’t equal and the benefit is primarily that I can push the LLM into a basin you don’t know the keywords for — something that takes a few minutes to type a couple sentences and me scan the results to make sure they’re roughly on track. And much, much less time than me trying to (re)write a treatise on a topic.

Dropping you an LLM reply is the equivalent of dropping you a link and telling you to learn about the topic — and appropriate in roughly the same circumstances.

zmgsabst··on Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid
Engineers are part of the petite bourgeoisie so they need to speak appropriately to the monied class.
zmgsabst··on Small AI Models Gain Traction In places with unreliable networks
Option 1 sounds better:

I’m only out the cost of the drive, which is like $40 and doesn’t require anybody on the other side cooperate with me.

- - -

More broadly…

You call it unlikely mixes, but we see it all the time:

- people already have a computer for gaming or work

- people (ie, “preppers” like we’re discussing) buy a generator for emergencies

- local emergency response sets up mesh networking during disasters, both official and unofficial

Have you ever tried to use a handbook you’re not intimately familiar with during an emergency? It’s rough.

For personal preparedness, nothing replaces familiarity and practice — eg, weekend survival trips and reading your manual ahead of time.

But for providing information in a random lookup manner to unpracticed people who weren’t prepared? Yes, I think an LLM/chatbot is the practical way to operationalize all that information which you stored (eg, survival guides or machine manuals).

Also, it’s unlikely a general purpose chatbot would be superior at survival advice to one specialized for that purpose — and indeed, is likely to refuse your questions as “unsafe” or “criminal”.

zmgsabst··on Small AI Models Gain Traction In places with unreliable networks
You can run a small model off a home generator — so in an emergency, you’d turn on both the generator and information service, eg, a mesh for “quick” responses querying that huge collection of information.

That way your machine that, eg, normally plays video games or does AI work can support relief efforts by supporting emergency response IT. You don’t need to mothball the machine, just have an “emergency” boot USB than can run the services from your home generator.

You don’t even need to bring it with you: turn it on and leave it “best effort” at home, while you continue to use it via WAN.

zmgsabst··on Using precision editing to study human embryo development shows master gene
Perfectly reasonable - eg, organ transplants were experimental in humans at one point in time, following success in animals but before widespread success in humans. People died from rejections.

My point is that if you feel that way, be loud and proud about it: having to deny the humanity of embryos suggests you’re avoiding cognitive dissonance or trying to manipulate others.

zmgsabst··on Using precision editing to study human embryo development shows master gene
Embryos have their own DNA and constitute the full amount of that cell line — unlike your skin shedding.

They are absolutely a human.

To sibling comment’s point: personhood versus humanity is already the legal distinction - eg, children and invalids are fully human but not fully people, so we don’t grant them full legal rights and instead let others exercise control over them. For children in particular, we grant them more autonomous control of their rights as they mature.

Your path of denying humans their humanity has a dark history, including within medicine.

I don’t support that, even if they’re very tiny and fragile humans early in their development — eg, if we could raise them in artificial wombs, they may have a right to life as a human, despite what anyone else wishes.

Denying their humanity is denying their right to life as a fellow human.

zmgsabst··on GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse
AWS already supports Llama and GLM in its Bedrock service for hosted models.

They’re much cheaper to run, eg, Llama 3.3 Instruct 70B is 5-10x cheaper than Sonnet 5.

https://aws.amazon.com/bedrock/pricing/

Say you have 20% of usecases that require the more expensive model — but in 80% you could just use Llama instead of Sonnet (eg, for basic queries of a document). That saves 80% of that 80%, or 65% of your total bill!

That is the kind of “swap” that’s likely to occur in automated tooling as pricing pressure kicks in — “can you save 65% on our AI bill by switching Bedrock over in 80% of uses?”

zmgsabst··on GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse
Also cases where both happened, eg, Xerox wasn’t wiped out but copiers now have multiple vendors at the high end and have commodity via other brands at the low end.
zmgsabst··on Using precision editing to study human embryo development shows master gene
How so?

A quick search suggests that we tried it a bunch on animals, failed on humans, and of the first three human transplants, you had an adult (20s), toddler (2yr), and adult (50s). All of them were due to medical necessity, as it was a high risk procedure.

Is there something you imagine the poster would be shocked by in that history?

zmgsabst··on Using precision editing to study human embryo development shows master gene
They’re a human, but not a person.

Human is a fact of DNA — of which embryos are unmistakably humans. But we don’t ascribe rights based on humanity, but on personhood, which is why embryos have virtually none.

You come across as dishonest and put people off from your perspective when you won’t admit basic facts — eg, this is experimenting on humans.

I think perhaps your aversion to basic facts is that you don’t feel comfortable being honest:

You support experimenting on living humans.

zmgsabst··on What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"
Statistical operation doesn’t preclude logical processing.

We’ve know that since 1943 when McCulloch-Pitts came up with the first “artificial neuron” definition. And since LLMs are a descendant technology — our assumption should be they’re reasoning in some internal learned logic.

This is what the evidence supports — eg, the “stochastic parrot” crowd never can explain transfer learning. Whereas for the internal reasoning crowd that is easy: removing your top level judgments from a theory still leaves you with useful terms for describing a new theory — eg, removing your judgments about “which animal is this?” but preserving the underlying structure for representing an image in your new judgments, “is this cancer?”

There’s 80 years of reason to think DNNs reason and zero support other than “sTaTs R mAgIc!” to support the stochastic parrot interpretation.

Ignorance isn’t argument.

zmgsabst··on When 2+2=5
2.45 + 2.45 = 4.9

For sufficiently large values of 2 and small values of 5, the statement holds.

zmgsabst··on Building relationships with customers through support didn't turn out as hoped
$1/day forever is around $9125 using the safe drawdown rate of 4% per year.

So if you’re a bakery and a customer offers $9000+ for a fresh roll every day forever, you should almost certainly take them up on that offer. A smart baker could probably get that number sub-$5000, but you’ll always come out okay around 25x the yearly cost (in this case, $365).

Similarly, if the amortized yearly cost of a customer is $12 (ie, $1 per month), then a $300 forever price is financially indistinguishable from a permanent subscription. (Actually, better: time value of money, they can’t cancel the annuity you buy, etc.)

So there always is a price where that is financially viable.

zmgsabst··on Building relationships with customers through support didn't turn out as hoped
How so?

I’m missing the irony.

zmgsabst··on Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected
I found I used fewer tokens by having many short prompts than long ones — because it spent many fewer tokens thinking and narrating.
zmgsabst··on As downtown Seattle offices empty, city facing years of 'zombie' towers
Lynnwood is where the fun parts of Seattle moved when rents got too high.
zmgsabst··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (July 2026)
Experienced consultant looking to help your project reach the next stage. Specialize in prototypes and zero-to-one projects.

Remote: Only

Location: Seattle, WA

Technologies: Docker, LLMs, AWS, Python, Typescript

Resume: https://zmichaelgehlke.com/misc/zmgehlke-resume.pdf

zmgsabst··on International chess federation sanctions Kramnik
Hans did plenty to damage his own career - eg, his 2024 ban for trashing a hotel room.
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