heisenzombie

Regarding adding higher level functions to spreadsheets in general. For people using Excel (at least, a modern-ish version that has LAMBDA), LLMs are shockingly good at writing LAMBDA functions. Especially if you have the “Advanced Formula Environment”, which lets you write whole modules of multi-line functions in text files.

I’m personally allergic to ever using macros in Excel, and this is basically a better version of that for many (not all) purposes.

For a stupid example, I had Opus write a bunch of linear algebra functions, including stuff like computing eigenvectors, culminating in a single function that computes rotation matrices for point-cloud best-fitting (ie the procrustes problem). Yes, I’m fully aware it’s sort of cursed to do that, yes it works, and yes normal people can use the resulting spreadsheet fine, they just magically have an ALIGN3D(frompoints, topoints) function.

If a person creates a design, they are a designer

∀x ∀y [(P(x) ∧ D(y) ∧ C(x, y)) → R(x)]

The people who create the worst designs are designers

∀x ∀y [(P(x) ∧ D(y) ∧ W(y) ∧ C(x, y)) → R(x)]

I dunno, I have a closed-loop insulin pump / CGM and it pisses me off that the algorithm on which my health and life depend is not available for me to look at, understand and evaluate. Likewise there are all sorts of artificial limits on getting even read-only access to my data, such as blood glucose. It feels wildly disempowering to me.

I imagine I would feel similarly about a pacemaker. How does it work? What algorithm does it use to determine what to do at any given moment? Does it have settings? Are they optimally chosen? Are there bugs? Security flaws?

The first map on that page is a classic #mapswithoutnz. New Zealand (Aotearoa) IS in the full pdf version, though what did we do to get put in the naughty corner?

Yes, I actually think this sort of self-aware silliness (also hot dog sandwich, etc) could be looked at as kind of “koans” of rationality. Ultimately the goal might be to recognise that pure rationality is incompatible with the inherent nebulosity of applying “meanings” to the world, and to embrace that interplay!

Or more likely i’m overthinking it and they’re just a way to have a funny argument with friends.

There are MANY packages in this space: Labs love to invent their own versions powered by the hubris of grad students. Anyway a random sampling of some I’ve come across is:

  - EPICS
  - TANGO
  - Bluesky (not that one)
  - QCodes
  - Sardana
  - yaq

The general problem is (1) i have a heterogeneous mix of hardware that speaks a bunch of different protocols from SCPI serial commands to VISA over USB, to bizarre proprietary things and (2) I want to be able to talk to it from one central computer and (3) ideally have some level of standardisation or abstraction so I can express an experiment like move <stage> from <x> to <y> in <n> steps and at each step fire <laser> and measure <signal> while logging <temperature>.

Anthropic seem to be creating the n+1 version of those packages and presumably doing some harness work to make Claude good at using it.

L

It bears really thinking through the alternative:

So we're going to have some engineers specify suitable digital replacements given the process/environment/safety requirements. We'll procure those (noting that an industrial digital pressure transducer can easily push up towards $10k), schedule a plant shutdown (how much does that cost?), then pay a pipefitter/boilermaker to replace the old gauges with new pressure transmitters (do you need a hot work permit for that? Did you get your engineer to sign that off?). Then, your controls sparky has to find a way to route a drop back to your marshalling cabinet for connection into your fieldbus/HART/modbus/whatever network (do you have one of those?) so that your SCADA system can talk to it (do you have one of those?).

Obviously it's not really an apples-to-apples comparison, but I think the costs involved with making "simple" changes in industrial settings are easy to wildly underestimate.

I did (using Claude Code) something that sounds very similar to this. It’s a bunch of bootstrapped Unix tools, systemd units, and some markdown files. Two comments:

- I suspect that in this moment, cobbling together your own simple version of a “claw-alike” is far more likely to be productive than a “real” claw. These are still pretty complex systems! And if you don’t have good mental models of what they’re doing under the hood and why, they’re very likely to fail in surprising, infuriating, or downright dangerous ways.

For example, I have implemented my own “sleep” context compaction process and while I’m certain there are objectively better implementations of it than mine… My one is legible to me and therefore I can predict with some accuracy how my productivity tamagotchi will behave day-to-day in a way that I could not if I wasn’t involved in creating it.

(Nb I expect this is a temporary state of affairs while the quality gap between homemade and “professional” just isn’t that big)

- I do use mine as a personal assistant, and I think there is a lot of potential value in this category for people like me with ADD-style brains. For whatever reason, explaining in some detail how a task should be done is often much easier for me than just doing the task (even if, objectively, there’s equal or higher effort required for the former). It therefore doesn’t do anything I _couldn’t_ do myself. But it does do stuff I _wouldn’t_ do on my own.

Well nothing, I think what is being proposed is to trigger existing capital gains taxes when an asset is borrowed against, the same as if it were sold. Most places exempt personal homes from capital gains taxes already, so it wouldn’t affect them. It would affect

- someone who bought an investment property, which then appreciated, and then they wanted to take out a larger mortgage against the appreciated value to leverage it into buying another property.

- Someone borrowing against stock to avoid realising gains by selling it

That seems… reasonable to me?

I was under the impression that everyone (ie US, UN, EU) basically agreed they complied with the JCPOA right up until the US pulled out of it? Is that not accurate?