gibspaulding

Here’s to hoping the slate truck is a success.

Have you considered killing the alianthus tree? I know loosing a big tree is a tough sell, but tree of heaven is one of our worst invasives in the eastern US. Every year that tree is producing wind-born seeds that mean it is going to be causing huge problems for anyone attempting to plant natives anywhere in your neighborhood and actively degrading any natural spaces in the area. You’d do the environment a lot more good just by getting rid of that tree than via anything you plant under it.

Also as an aside, it’s possible that the problem for your cup plant and asters is shade, not chemicals. There are a lot of species of aster so I can’t say for sure there, but cup plant is a prairie species that absolutely wants full sun.

Either way though, please, please, kill your tree of heaven.

Source: My wife does this for a living.

Wouldn’t pacing the frontier just give Chinese companies, and other non-frontier labs time to catch up?

I try to read fiction and non fiction in parallel, so my current pairing is How Asia Works by Joe Studwell and Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. Enjoying both so far!

Other books I’ve enjoyed recently:

The Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft - I read Endurance by Alfred Lansing last year so it was fun having a real Antarctic adventure in my mind while reading it.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy - I actually started this a couple of years ago and quit part way through deciding I couldn’t put myself through it anymore. I kept thinking about it though, until I finally picked it back up and finished it this summer. Horrifying, but quite a masterpiece.

If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies by Eliezer Yudkowsky - I was about a year late to the party on this, but it still holds up. I would recommend it.

The Infinity Machine by Sebastian Malaby - Excellent! Fascinating seeing a glimpse inside of the companies currently eating the world.

So 97.3 ± 4.5 °F for anyone else curious how the precision translates.

I think it can simultaneously be the case that OpenAI was grossly negligent in directly causing this AND that the AI’s ‘went rogue’ in that they are displaying behavior which is misaligned with OpenAI and humanity generally.

The past months demonstrate that AI systems are quickly becoming powerfully intelligent and that the companies building them are terrible at controlling them.

AI is starting to feel like that line about magic: “a sword without a hilt”

The most recent reference in that article appears to be from 2023.

I replaced my Pixel 2a with an SE3 when the pixel stopped getting security updates and have been pretty disappointed with the iPhone’s performance. The battery life out of the box was worse than the 5 year old Pixel, and I regularly notice apps getting killed and loosing my place when I tab away.

Maybe if you want to use all of the big mainstream apps the experience might be different, but I tend to have a fairly minimal setup on my phone. On android I would disable animations, use Nova launcher, Firefox with UBO, and a bunch of fdroid apps. This all added up to a very snappy and efficient system that I haven’t been able to replicate on iOS.

Wild indeed.

It seems like a couple of years ago the HN and LW commentariat had a lot in common, but they’ve drifted so far in opposite directions that they look more like opposing political parties today.

I’d be curious to play with this with some different open weights models. I’d think that a single next token would end up having similar probability distributions so given that this a probabilistic method, you’d be able to get at least some signal.

I suppose if that did work someone would have been able to work backwards and crack their key already, so I must be missing something.

In the scenario where president n achieves a perfect surveillance state, I don’t see us getting a president n+1.

> Hybrids are the worst of both worlds when it comes to maintenance.

While this seems intuitively true, I have some pushback, and I think that the reliability record of e.g older generations of Prius backs me up.

While you do have effectively two cars (an EV and an ICE) crammed into one, you’re not actually using both at full capacity all the time, which cuts down a lot on wear and tear. Your ICE is almost never run under load before it warms up, and is kept running at its most efficient rpm most of the time, your transmission is running under less load since it has help from the electric motors, and is often simpler (the aforementioned Prius does not have a reverse gear for example).

No it’s not nearly as simple as a BEV, but a well implemented hybrid system is absolutely an upgrade from a full ICE vehicle.

I think this is a really interesting difference between Anthropic and Open AI’s models and points to why people seem so split on which model they prefer.

GPT seems to be designed more as a tool. If you want your agent to do what you say without questions and without having its own ideas and agendas you’ll likely prefer it.

Claude on the other hand feels more like an attempt at creating a digital person. If you want a collaborator who will debate with you and come up with its own suggestions for what needs done, you’ll prefer it.

Both companies have shifted around this spectrum from model to model, but lately it feels like they’re moving in opposite directions. It will be interesting to see if one or the other approach ends up winning out in the long run or if the split will continue or even widen.