rsp1984

You can start with plain language and work your way up towards the math. But it doesn't work the other way round.

The problem is that equations give the illusion of conciseness and brevity but in reality always heavily depend on context.

You give a physicist an equation of a completely unrelated field in mathematics and it will make zero sense to them because they lack the context. And vice versa. The only people who can readily read and understand your equations are those that already understand the subject and have learned all the context around the math.

Therefore it's pointless to try to start with the math when you're foreign to a field. It simply won't make any sense without the context.

Don't despair. The key to becoming proficient in advanced subjects like this one is to first try to understand the fundamentals in plain language and pictures in your mind. Ignore the equations. Ask AI to explain the topic at hand at the most fundamental level.

Once the fundamental concepts are understood, what problem is being solved and where the key difficulties are, only then the equations will start to make sense. If you start out with the math, you're making your life unnecessarily hard.

Also, not universally true but directionally true as a rule of thumb, the more equations a text contains the less likely it is that the author itself has truly grasped the subject. People who really grasp a subject can usually explain it well in plain language.

It's distribution. Guy's got a brand name now. People and investors recognize his name. It's a lot easier to find an absolute quantity N of investor money for a fraudulent but well-known name than it is for an unknown upstart.

The fraud might have a low close rate but the top of the funnel is huge. The unknown upstart can't even get meetings.

This is the classic flawed reasoning on the left. Capitalism & free markets =/= lawlessness.

A small & focused government would have more resources, not less, to function in one of its core tasks, which is enforcement of law. Environmental protection is very compatible with a small govt and free markets as long as the legal system can focus on enforcing those environmental laws.

On the other hand, in a dysfunctional bloated government (as in large parts of Europe and the US) the legal arm is overburdened and suffocated by an ever-growing body of laws and regulations whose enforcement remains out-of-reach in any realistic scenario. Add in rampant lobbyism, lawmakers who are corrupt and dumb as sh*t, and and a fast-growing subset of the population that doesn't share the values of liberal democracies (thus keeping police and courts busy) and you have the perfect breeding ground for high-level lawlessness.

And to your question: while Europe's population looks stable from the outside, an "exchange" in happening in the background. If the working man's net pay is ~ 34% of the gross pay, while at the same time, a small family can get ~3k EUR per month in govt handouts + free healthcare without anyone working, it's not exactly incentivizing high performers to stay (and yes, many are leaving and for good reason).

> you seem to suggest that The Free Market could correct our path to fascism, and that pesky human services and wanton over-regulation are what are really preventing us from reaching our final enlightened form...

Not quite. I am merely pointing out that capitalism and free markets are not the enemy and that larger, more involved governments, which the political left (to which I'd assign the author) support, are a perfect breeding ground for sleaze, corruption and nepotism. This effect btw. can be observed in all of the states in which socialism has been tried. Each and every time, without exception, citizens are fleeing from these countries into capitalist countries and it's never the other way round.

The obvious problem with the 5% rule is that voters who don't like any of the established parties are faced with the decision between voting for something they don't like or most likely throwing away their vote.

As someone who writes algorithms for a living I can think of ~ 100 ways to resolve this bug without limiting the original intent. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to come up with one. However the fact that this %5 rule hasn't been changed tells you everything you need to know about the legislators.

The boring but true answer is that the only thing people should be protesting for is a change of the electoral law. Everything else is downstream of that.

In the US, it's a de-facto duopoly on power, held up by a number of "winner-takes-all" rules. Politicians of either party will do everything in their power to keep "outsiders" (i.e. people/parties that are not entrenched in the two-party system and might actually drive positive change) from ever gaining a foothold.

In Germany it's the famous 5% rule that virtually ensures that every new party must maximize populism or perish.

I'm sure it's very similar in most other "democratic" countries.

Laws aren't perfect. In fact they often are buggy as hell. The electoral law is certainly no exception. However it is ultimately the law that matters most as it determines who can raise to power and who can't. Ensuring it fair and democratic should be the #1 civic duty.

> Manus is running $5000 credit for 2000 people.

How would this work though? They give out free "credits" and then claim usage of those as ARR? That would be outright fraudulent, no?

Who is paying for those "Manus Credits"?

While I have no issues believing that the outlined strategies are effective, and I sincerely congratulate the author on his journey, there is a flip side to engineering "social normalcy" that IMO the author is missing:

Any reasonably "normal" person (anyone that's not severely autistic) will find there are people that we effortlessly connect with and many others we don't. It's the natural state.

Now in any sufficiently intelligent and psychologically OK person the act of eliciting / pushing emotional connection with people from the latter group (where there's no natural connection) should trigger a certain amount of internal disgust.

The fact that it doesn't seem to be the case with the author would indicate that he's more of an outlier. Based on his writing he does seem intelligent and psychologically OK, so there might be other factors at play. My point is that his journey might not be transferable 1:1.

Excellent, thanks. So basically this is saying: "our pixels-to-token encoding is so efficient (information density in a set of "image tokens" is much higher as compared to a set of text tokens), why even bother representing text as text?"

Correct?

Can someone ELI5 to me (someone who doesn't have the time to keep up with all the latest research) what this is and why it's a big deal?

It's very hard to guess from the github and paper. For example, there is OCR in the title but the abstract and readme.md talk about context compression for LLMs, which I find confusing. Somebody care to explain the link and provide some high-level context?