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Comment · 4 days ago
still cheap compared to those things. lab down the hall in grad school had an onyx [1] with the fancy polarized shutter 3d glasses for playing what we called "chem tv" or semi-empirical small molecule docking experiments - that was something like $250k or so in the early 90s.
Comment · 2 months ago
This is Amdahl's law in action. [1]
Until we figure out a good way to leverage humans in all of this ("Attention is all you need" applies equally to humans as it does to models) productivity gains for the system will always be limited by Amdahl's law. Gwern has an excellent post on this. [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law [2] https://gwern.net/guardian-angel
Comment · 6 months ago
why can't this be a cli tool? then you can get an agent to write a script that programmatically calls the cli tool in addition to the agent calling it directly.
Comment · 7 months ago
there is an activation energy cost to so many activities - so those things just never got done. many times it is because the cost-benefit wasn't clear at the start (unknown unknowns) so it never got done. kudos to op for experimenting and showing us one way of making something like this happen.
Comment · 7 months ago
then have ai write a deterministic transformation tool that turns it into the specific style and standard that is needed
Comment · 7 months ago
i had gpt-5.4 write a 6502 font version of this font [1] in between working on other things. super fun and learned a lot by watching it do its thing.
Comment · 9 months ago
tbf neither does anthropic
Comment · 9 months ago
This is what ACP and https://github.com/zed-industries/claude-code-acp enables. ACP controls agents - there is native support in Copilot CLI and Gemini and adapters for claude code and codex.
Comment · 9 months ago
Around 1980, while taking a "Saturday Morning Class" in Toronto - I discovered that there was a lab of ~24 Commodore PET 2001 (8K - blue phosphor, chiclet keyboards) at George Brown College. Spent as much time as I could there engaging with the early hacker community who all brought their shoeboxes of 5-1/4" floppies to trade programs. It was there that I had my first OMG moment when a much older kid showed me his floppy disk catalog program that could sort so much faster than mine did (he used quicksort).
Comment · 9 months ago
First thank you for coming up with this idea. Love it. In the spirit of "tools for thought" I think this scratches an important itch.
Someone called the output "egregious, obviously referential LLM dog". And someone else called this trail an example of that: https://trails.pieterma.es/trail/tempo-gradient/
What struck me when reading it was that I parachuted into that trail with zero context. So I asked an LLM to generate some surrounding context for me: this is the verbatim prompt that I just gave gpt-5.2/medium running in my own agentic harness:
> read this: https://trails.pieterma.es/trail/tempo-gradient/. then i want you to write a short essay that shows the relationship between the different quotes making sure to use each quote in the process. the narrative should help me understand the links between the different quotes in each book in context. feel free to use your own knowledge of the books and your general knowledge to make this an approachable thing. what another llm did here is cool - it found relationships between this set of quotes. now i want you to materialize them into a compelling essay that invites curiosity and teaches me something. write the essay to tempo-gradient.md and respond in chat with how you thought about the problem and whether you thought these relationships were meaningful.
This was my agent's response:
Wrote the essay to tempo-gradient.md.
How I thought about it: I treated “tempo gradient” as the shared mechanism behind all eight excerpts—mismatch in loop speed (notice → interpret → decide → act) caused by attention, infrastructure latency, organizational rigidity, system delays, stealthy manipulation, or runaway acceleration. Then I ordered the quotes from “inner time” (tennis/attention) → engineered milliseconds (HFT) → explicit doctrine (OODA) → industrial schedules (mobilization) → structural delays (Beer Game/economy) → slow covert tempo (cyber) → extreme fast tempo (AI takeoff), so each quote sets up the next.
Whether the relationships felt meaningful: yes, mostly. They’re not “the same idea” so much as the same shape appearing in different contexts—feedback delay and decision cadence determining who gets to set the terms of reality for everyone else. The only relationship that feels a bit more interpretive than direct is tennis ↔ geopolitics, but even there the bridge (“how many nows” as a controllable input to decision tempo) is surprisingly sturdy.
And this is the output: https://gist.github.com/jflam/49753b7da64a74f07e35f6e2465f1a...
Comment · 11 months ago
Totally agree with this. I have seen many cases where a dumber model gets trapped in a local minima and burns a ton of tokens to escape from it (sometimes unsuccessfully). In a toy example (30 minute agentic coding session - create a markdown -> html compiler using a subset of commonmark test suite to hill climb on), dumber models would cost $18 (at retail token prices) to complete the task. Smarter models would see the trap and take only $3 to complete the task. YMMV.
Much better to look at cost per task - and good to see some benchmarks reporting this now.
Comment · 11 months ago
I would say that "don't let perfect be the enemy of the good" here. Would universal be better? Sure. But what I saw is so much better than what we currently have here in the US.
The point is that OPEN (the name of the Delft library) is really a community center and not a library. Yes, it happens to have books. But it also has a stage for musical performances, art rooms, tables, wifi, washrooms, coffee. I would say that the only thing that is missing is a gym; there are small dance rooms in there but that's not quite the same.
But the essence here is walkable communities. Suburbs and exurbs are hostile to even small local stores because you have to drive everywhere to do anything. There is no community in visiting my Costco or even my QFC.
Take a look for yourself: https://www.opendelft.info
Comment · 11 months ago
But why do social hubs need to be places of financial transactions?
I was in Delft recently and I really loved their library/community center. Full of music practice rooms, people playing board games on the ground floor, a coffee bar and it was full of people at 8pm. It is open from 9am - 11pm M-F.
You walk or cycle there (free indoor bicycle parking). There is a movie theater across the "street" (no cars).
Comment · 1 year ago
one thing that i find works really well is to ask it to research things in the codebase and write a plan first. codex with gpt-5 is exceedingly good at doing this. then ask it to write a plan for what it would do with that information, i.e., i want you to research codebase for <goal>. then write a plan for how you would achieve <goal> given what you have learned.
Comment · 1 year ago
even with t=0 they are stochastic. e.g., non associative nature of floating point operations
My alias is jflam (at the company I work for).