wodderam

Defaulting on the debt is not going to happen but the consequences of avoiding default will not be good.

Of course, DOGE isn't really going to do anything to fix this either. Complete theater that the fixes will low and behold happen to work in the financial interest of those running DOGE.

The young who don't think the debt matters are almost guaranteed at this point to have to deal with US fiscal dominance in their lifetime. That is going to be a brutal lesson in youthful ignorance and stupidity.

The problem is we stupidly branded the field "chaos theory" and made it sound like bullshit so the ideas of non-linear dynamics have largely been lost on several generations at this point.

Not just chaos theory but "chaos theory" + psychedelic fractal artwork. Then the popular James Gleick book, "Chaos: making a new science" just sounds like complete bullshit and it sold a ton of copies.

I only started studying non-linear dynamics in about 2015 after first running across it in the late 90s but I literally thought it was all pseudoscience then.

Between "chaos theory", fractals and a best selling book it would be hard to frame a new scientific field as pseudoscience more than what played out.

My experience is that for certain tasks LLMs are great, for certain tasks LLMS are basically useless.

The best prompts though are always written in a separate text file for me and pasted in. Follow up questions are never as good as a detailed initial prompt.

I would imagine well formulated questions to solve the problem at hand is a skill but beyond that I don't think there is anything special about how to ask LLMs a question.

In areas the LLM is rather useless, no amount of variation in prompting can solve that problem IMO. Just like if the tasks is something the LLM is good at, the prompt can be pretty sloppy and seem like magic with how it can understand what you want.

This is basically a chaos magic book updated for the next generation. Like an anime/video game culture version of Peter J. Carroll - Liber Null & Psychonaut.

Crowley on the other hand is basically a trust fund kid rebelling against Victorian and Christian morality. I don't think what he was doing makes all that much sense in a secular society because much of the taboo is lost.

You would need something like 1000 instances of each LLM putting on trades and have a 1000 random walks to judge an average sharpe ratio or something along those lines.

As is, this means absolutely nothing and not understanding the problem.

Adding a random walk to this would mean you have 4 random walks instead of 3.

There is also the problem that it is tough to make a prediction for tomorrow that is better than today's close.

Kai-Fu Lee gives great insight into the engineering culture in AI Superpowers.

What I get from that book is they have a culture of a free for all that anything can be copied and ripped off so there is no standing still to admire your work.

Innovate or get copied and innovated out of existence.

A stark contrast to what we have evolved in the US. Innovate and then use the profits of innovation to buy legislation that eliminates competition.

There is no mystery how this plays out over a 50 year time window.

It feels like an exercise in anthropomorphization to me.

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is generally not considered to be reality. It makes intuitive sense but is wrong.

There are hours of podcasts with Chomsky talking about LLMs. The gist of which is that LLMS are extracting surface level statistical structure of language that will be good for routine coding and not much else. It is easy to infer that Chomsky would believe this idea to be utter nonsense.

I believe even the idea of getting a 1000 people together and we agree to label a rock "rock", a tree "tree", a bird "bird" is not even how human language works. Something that is completely counter intuitive.

Reading the paper, no one believes a hidden markov model is creating some kind of new thought process in the hidden state.

I certainly though could have no idea what I am talking about with all this and have pieced together parts that make no sense while this is a breakthrough path to AGI.

Kai-Fu Lee describes the culture so well in AI Superpowers. The roots are well before GPU restriction. Absolute cut throat competition.

Imagine Sam Altman throwing a chair out a window in a meeting lol.

The message of AI Superpowers is that China will lag the US at first but once things stabilize this will happen because China has a lot more engineers and a lot more data.

Anyone who hasn't read AI Superpowers should really make it a point to read it in 2025. It is an incredible book.

I use KDE Neon because Windows seems almost childish in comparison.

I use KDE Neon because I haven't bought a Mac yet but I don't know if that would be an upgrade. Neon is just superb.

I just can't imagine how anyone could get use to Neon and then use Windows without thinking it is a joke. Especially if you turn off the bells and whistles, everything is instant and instantly responsive.

I barely know any linux commands but installing software has been trivial in various software managers and apt get.

Beyond that everything just works. I think this experience is predicated on not playing games though. I have no idea what the state of games are for Linux, Windows or Mac.

As long as Neon has a critical mass to exist I could absolutely care less if more people use it or not.

This is what the field of complex systems and complexity economics tries to deal with but it doesn't seem like complexity economics has taken off.

With economics too there is a problem that a correct prediction that is acted on will be gamed and become a self defeating seemingly "wrong" prediction.

I think the 2022 recession calls were probably a good example.

If everyone believes there is going to be a recession in the future and everyone acts to avoid the recession we can't know the counter factual in the economy of not predicting the recession to know what was the right prediction.

I have read this process referred to reflexivity but even a best selling trading book by George Soros himself didn't get this idea to stick in the popular mind.

It seems like prediction is not even the right word to use or we should have a different word for a prediction that can influence the outcome of what it is predicting. Then there is even strong and weak versions of this process that we haven't bothered to separate from the proper word prediction in the sense of weather prediction. That the prediction is basically independent of what it is trying to predict.

I just ordered the book.

This thread though really sums up this site. 100 comments about an article no one read about a book no one read.

Everyone is just so obsessed with their own political bullshit.

It is just so boring.

Suno to me has only produced the most trivial garbage but music is really hard to produce.

I could see how someone with no background in music could feel a sense of accomplishment with this.

It is like a gen z version of playing the ironman or smoke on the water riff on guitar. It is just not that hard to play the ironman riff either.

As someone who has put thousands of hours into learning music, anything that gets people into music is a positive to me.

It seems like generative AI art and music really triggers tech people who have nothing to do with art and music.

"Kids these days starting off programming a web app with a language model. In my day we had to take adderall and debug assembly code just to print an underscore to a dot matrix printer. That is the right way to start and anything else is WRONG"

It is quite impressive to test a model on all human tasks in order to know this.

Especially if it takes so much compute to do any one task.

Sounds legit.

To me this is besides the point.

LLMs obviously have use cases but the market has practically priced in "AGI".

The danger is not that LLMs take jobs. The danger is that we are in a massive bubble and while these are nice tools they are not worth anything close to the trillions of dollars bet on them.

IMO the psychology at work here is basically denial that we can both be in the biggest bubble of all time in terms of dollars and LLMs are useful. Just not THAT useful.