a-dub

the dynamics of discovery on a population level are also not fully understood. there's no doubt in my mind that the machines will grab all the low hanging fruit in terms of novel ideas through mechanical recombination of existing public science, and they will do so faster than humans can. what is not understood is whether they will plateau.

today they benefit from human willingness to share publicly and improve ai systems, but once those systems start to threaten their livelihoods, will those dynamics change? can the machines push the frontiers or is the global network of human creativity and tenacity necessary?

i like to write and then workshop with the ai. i find that i have to push back on tendencies it (has less of these days) has to rewrite my work in massive ways. it also can help with writers block sometimes, or parts of a paragraph i'm not that interested in.

> There’s a wonderful book, How to Prove It by Daniel Velleman

the name sounds familiar but i don't think i have read that one, i did enjoy "introduction to mathematical reasoning" by eccles.

personally my relationship with mathematical proofs has been complicated. it took some work to understand basic proofs (dedekind cuts, ideas vs. instructions with mathematical notation), but all of the theory of computation proofs, which supposedly are difficult for many, were completely intuitively easy for me.

i think mathematicians are facing a similar confusion as computer programmers. the medium used to require precise thinking and the simple act of reading, writing and composing it was a mechanism for thinking and learning. in the llm era, the question is: should there be a new mechanism and if so, what should it look like?

i bet if you mmap'd a big file and then dirtied a ton of pages and then exited and watched the file on disk, you'd see writes occurring after the process exits as well.

yeah in that case, use a binary for "did you do it that day?" and a measure for "how much of it did you do that day?". loop habit tracker supports both, i bet this one does too. a built-in stopwatch to make time tracking specifically easy would be cool.

i have done things like "do x at least once three times a week" and then had a separate counter for how many times. it's good to track intensity or progression, but i think the most value comes from "did you do it at all that day?" and then sticking to a plan that involves n days a week.

the finer grained tracking can contribute to "i am not on target, so maybe it doesn't matter" sort of thinking where maybe the most valuable thing is "i am setting time aside n days a week and sticking to at least attempting the activity on that schedule."

ymmv of course, this stuff is deeply personal!

i don't think that computer vision gates or even an ai agent trying to enforce accountability are going to help all that much in that case. maybe try a therapist or a real-life accountability partner.

i would say, be generous with yourself in terms of tracking showing up at all since that alone is huge (and most important for sustaining the behavior). if you notice that you're slipping and showing up late too often, maybe create another habit for being on time?

i don't understand the rationale behind cheating one's own self improvement journal. what's the end game?

writing well still works. it also still can be quite hard depending on the circumstance.

> You watch input to output delay on a scope and look for outliers.

better to acquire these or use timestamped gpio and compute real statistics- but for the sake of illustrative metaphor, sure.

this is exactly what these weird operating system age tracking laws are codifying which is terrible. it forces consumer operating systems to become trusted computing bases that don't work for the consumer.

upgrading to adult content when a credential is provided at the protocol level rather than forcing the operating system to track the state means that consumer operating systems don't have to be secured against their own users.

i wonder what they're all up to. i imagine some are scraping datasets for pre-training, others are probably real-time scrapers looking for security bugs, even more still are agents working on coding tasks and looking at the kernel. also interesting to think about solutions: does everything need to be optimized now for weird access patterns that proliferated ai creates? do the ais need to have behavior trained in to be better netizens? is this the end of anonymous browsing and the beginning of an era where one has to attach an identity to all requests? or the end of community hosted free information services more broadly?

i still think this should be solved at the protocol level. if you want to access the adult stuff, you have to staple a non-identifying zk-proof-of-age to your http/spdy/etc requests, otherwise it all just operates as usual.

san francisco had that cool, edgy, gonzo art scene happening in the 90s. also survival research laboratories and their famous pitching machine, the omnicircus, chicken john, laughing squid, critical mass/commute clot, santarchy/santa con (before it became the weird frat thing it is today). similar things in brooklyn in the '00s like the madagascar institute, black label bike club, idiotarod, etc.

in the 2000s, there was kind of an interesting tech meets countercultural art thing where a lot of the more interesting tech people would pour their disposable income into interesting burning man art projects (nimby's ddi, jabba's sail barge) but it does seem like in recent years with the real sf affordability crisis that came with internet business actually taking off the creativity went down and the money seeking people showed up. i guess that's also true of sf (and brooklyn) more generally.

it was a fun time. i was a swe intern in the mid 90s and would marvel when the engineering team would disappear to the desert for a week and come back with colored hair. my boss drove a psychedelic school bus to work sometimes. in south of market on 6th street in sf, there was a building that had furniture welded onto the exterior like it had all come to life and was trying to escape the building.

the internet is home to plenty of predatory cesspits, but the real stuff is still there too. it's not as convenient or addicting as content that doubles as a funnel for the ad machines, but the real spaces and media that aren't dominated by the advertising industrial complex still exist- just like in other forms of media that preceded the internet.