oersted

Well sure, who says that the oligarchs are human.

Kings didn’t have robots that gather resources and make more robots, that make killer robots, exponentially.

Although actually: that’s kind of what humans are… Hmm.

I suppose humans can’t make better and better humans, that’s the difference.

Although actually: that’s what technological progress is… Hmm.

Then we regress back to relying on the fact that the ability of an average person (not) to be violent has inherent value. This has been the dominant factor in many moments in history.

Although if you have killer robots, then all bets are truly off, and we go the way of the dodo, literally.

(I don’t actually believe in this LessWrong-esque rhetoric, reality is more complicated, but it’s fun to muse about.)

EDIT: If oligarchs with magic AGI really don’t need our labor, nor are they concerned by our violence, then perhaps we become more like ants rather than dodos: we organize to help each other, creating a somewhat traditional economy around the scraps that don’t matter to the oligarchs, relying on obscurity and harmlessness to avoid getting toyed with a magnifying glass. I suppose that’s slightly better.

I don’t think he means “tokens” as in LLM input/output units here.

He just means it as in “credits”. “Fiat tokens” as in arbitrary units that are said to have value de facto by consensus, but don’t have any inherent value.

Yeah not the best choice of words in this context. And it’s quite a LessWrong-esque leap of reasoning.

But I do get the point: either Anthropic is successful and they transcend money, and thus (somehow) screw over their investors, or they are not successful. Their investors get screwed regardless.

Again, I don’t really agree with it, but it’s an intriguing point.

Fiat Cliche :)

Some tropes become only known from their parodies, and they lead to other parodies.

That's what reinforcement learning does when done this way, the AI is literally trained to write to itself in the way that will aid it to get to a solution most efficiently. I assume they still have some additional fine-tuning on top to keep the writing somewhat natural, but still.

Just like science, open-source is a collective effort to build increasingly better solutions to the problems we have. We cannot ignore individual benefits in contributing, but that is not everything. It’s about collaborating/competing to build better things, standing on each other’s shoulders.

I have heard great things about Nim, you may be very right. It’s just that it’s impossible to ignore the benefits of a mainstream dependency ecosystem. The ecosystem is exactly what made Python and Javascript the giants they are today, despite being somewhat mediocre languages. And the Rust ecosystem is in that same league, without giving up exceptional performance, and without giving up too much ergonomics.

PS: I was very enthusiastic about Cython for a good while and I went deep into it, but I found that it is rather a mess to use in practice. Yes you get C performance within Python, kinda, but you also get all the C footguns, amplified by the complex interactions with Python features.

I wouldn’t say so… I consistently choose Rust mainly because it’s a sanely designed modern C++ alternative. It’s 20% more effort than writing Python or Typescript, and you get to use the full power of your hardware without compromise.

Safety is a nice side-benefit. The main reason why I like the safety is because it allows you to fearlessly write high-level code without being constantly paranoid about memory as in C++. It’s more about enabling ergonomics without loosing performance, rather than security or correctness.

This is the second sentence:

> Nonlinear phenomena become relevant only when the input light is very intense. Typically, in order to observe nonlinear phenomena, an intensity of the electromagnetic field of light larger than 108 V/m (and thus comparable to the atomic electric field of ~1011 V/m) is required.

I don’t know anything about this field. Can you address this point? How close are we to overcoming this in academia?

An open-source project with their success could have easily paid their bills through sponsorships and support contracts, as many others do.

But the VC path pushed them to increase costs more than they should. They didn’t need that money to deliver on the mandate of Deno, they had to inflate the vision to some grand cloud solution, which didn’t make much sense.

> then it is a failure as company

Perhaps it shouldn’t be a company at all. Private companies cannot attract the same support as open-source foundations do, since they are for-profit organizations.

It might not have been a successful project as a VC growth startup, but lots of people saw that coming here in HN when they started raising millions.

In the space of such foundational technologies, there’s always been a vast gap between the number of private vs open-source projects that succeed. Even all the way back to proprietary compilers 40-50 years ago.

If they had stuck to being an open-source project, the kind of adoption and mindshare they achieved would have put them among the most successful ever. And I am sure they would have been able get their team paid very well sustainably. The unicorn model cannot fit every single venture.

> Most expats will rarely hear or need Dutch

That is an overstatement. Dutch is the primary language everywhere like the native language of any country. It is true that in major cities most people speak excellent English and you can definitely manage easily without speaking Dutch.

But Dutch is spoken absolutely everywhere and most signage is only in Dutch. Also, as soon as you get a bit outside of the big cities, you find many people with a middling level of English, similar to most other countries in Europe. Even in cities, many working class people and actually most immigrants from non English speaking countries only speak Dutch.

Cui bono?

Most academic libraries are notoriously protective of their IP and researchers are definitely in copyright violation if they don’t pay significant fees for access.

Of course that is terrible, but it is one of the worst examples you could have given to make your point.