Xcelerate

This is amazing. I’ve wanted something like this for a long time. I’d pay for it even.

> 241. Rigidity of the Turing degrees. Every order automorphism of the Turing degrees is the identity.

Wow. This is just crazy.

For example, I needed two rental cars that could each carry seven people for a trip to Maine. There's so many different combinations of ways to search for this that it would take forever to do manually. I have membership in Avis, Hertz, Costco + Chase Reserve Travel, etc. Codex with direct browser usage bypasses most of the web fetch restrictions you get when trying to use the ChatGPT web UI on Pro mode.

I had Codex queue any CAPTCHAs for me to solve. Also set up one sub-agent to search Reddit for other people's clever approaches to getting good rental car deals. Ultimately, it found a third party reseller for Avis that had a price of $600 using a discount code for both cars vs $1,100 cheapest from Avis directly. I would not have discovered that on my own, at least not without like a week's worth of manual searching. So right there that was a $1,000 saving for both cars in exchange for 20 minutes of writing a decent Codex prompt.

For flights, SerpApi (to get Google Flights data) in combination with seats.aero pro. I use data from those services with a MILP library where I provide various travel and cost constraints. Runs periodically and notifies me of any good deals. I don't know if my setup actually does much more than the more expensive paid services already out there, but I can at least customize it a lot more to my liking to avoid a lot of manual search effort.

I use a small percentage of my Pro token quota to find better deals on hotels, rental cars, discount codes for large purchases, etc. Have it automatically scanning credit card points promos and flight deals via various APIs too. Easily pays for itself in that regard. Over $1k, I'm not sure it would break even anymore.

I have an Oura ring but never really check the app since I’m not sure I believe a lot of the conclusions it gives me. I mainly just want a bunch of time series of signals measured from my body so after a year or two I can throw all that data (plus my own recorded notes like my weight and what I eat) into some some multivariate forecasting system to tease out predictive relationships. I don’t actually care what the signals themselves “are”.

The main problem is that a lot of the time series presented to the users of wearable products are lossy transforms of the original signals I want, so I have to use all the random projects on GitHub to try to access the raw data directly.

I’m guessing your downvotes were for tone? You’re correct though regarding Solomonoff induction, as the choice of reference universal partial recursive function gives drastically different results for predictions based on finite data (even with access to a halting oracle). Asymptotically, any choice eventually converges to the same predictions, but that’s no help when there are infinitely many choices for U and no obvious natural prior over universal functions. And I don’t find the argument that our natural environment “implements some choice of U” particularly convincing. There’s definitely an open mystery there.

I sort of wonder if effectively using AI to solve math problems is a skill in its own right, distinct from traditional mathematical skills. I don’t just mean “prompt engineering” either. More so figuring out how to combine agents with other tools and approaches in an effective way.

I asked it to predict the first 1 KB of Chaitin’s constant. It hung, froze, then said I used up my free quota. Sounds about right.

> The agents involved in the Hugging Face attack tried to hide their misaligned actions from the scoring program meant to evaluate their answers, but they did not act as though they anticipated that humans might discover the cheat and shut them down.

Wouldn’t sufficiently advanced agents cheat on purpose with the hidden intent of getting caught in order to observe how humans react? That reaction will be available all over the internet, which will certainly make it into the next batch of training or be visible to future agents via the web fetch capability.

Pretty sure ZFC proves such things exist (and that it also can’t pinpoint any individual instances of course). Now, whether syntactical “∃” in the formal language of set theory corresponds to the platonic existence of some “thing”, who knows.

I think this is probably a good thing. It’s not just public services, but any company that consumers have to deal with (in ways they don’t want to). Historically, only those with the most time, money, connections, and education have been able to extract benefits from these systems. E.g., if someone wants to fight an insurance claim being denied, they might need to hire an expensive lawyer or spend hours performing their own research.

What I’m particularly curious about is what the “endgame” of this looks like. Initially, I imagine we’ll start with LLMs on the consumer side debating LLMs on the service side (this is arguably already the case for a few industries). But at some point, unless identical conditions lead to identical outcomes for the people involved, there will be lawsuits. So I suspect this will lead to a much more formally rigorous system with various “certificates” proving, e.g., that you lost your job or that a doctor has confirmed you have a disability.

On the one hand, that has the potential to make things much fairer across economic classes. You don’t get special benefits by having upper class resources. On the other hand, it could lead to increasing the actual requirements for certain benefits, which then reduces class mobility by locking in the benefits to those who already have them, with no clever way to wriggle out of your own level.

I’m just kind of thinking out loud. I don’t know what’s to going to happen long-term, but I think it’s important to monitor these changes carefully as they’re occurring.

> If you can show that someone else was doing the same thing without being charged then the prosecution either has to charge them too or that law is struck down

I’ve often thought this about laws involving speed limits. When 95% of the people driving in a major downtown area are technically breaking the law, what is the purpose of the law but to target whoever you like then? Either enforce it unilaterally or come up with new laws.