ViscountPenguin

5 ms·

61.
by ViscountPenguin 7mo ago
The wheel isn't that useful if you live on terrible terrain and have nothing to drive it with.
62.
by ViscountPenguin 7mo ago
The only real metric by which financial terminals are judged is "Why don't we have any bloombergs? The bond traders are throwing a hissy fit."
63.
by ViscountPenguin 7mo ago
Medium sized hedge funds are a good portion of the market, and only really want to hire just enough tech people to keep the quant pipelines running.
64.
by ViscountPenguin 8mo ago
Good fucking on anthropic, I've long held that they seem like the AI company best handling existential risk, and this elevates that opinion. If you don't want terminator, not helping people invent terminator is a good first step.
65.
by ViscountPenguin 8mo ago
The context of the comment being a Jane Street blog post is why I singled out HFT. I think we're probably roughly in alignment w.r.t. other forms of finance, but the market liquidity gained by a marginal HFT employee almost certainly i
66.
by ViscountPenguin 8mo ago
I would imagine that increasing crop yields would do social good primarily via decreasing the amount of cultivated farm land, especially since we're well past Jevons paradox territory with calorie intake I imagine. While the pharmaceut
67.
by ViscountPenguin 8mo ago
As someone who has worked in the industry, I've yet to see any compelling argument that high frequency quants are making any meaningful contribution to society. Maybe on the low frequency end, but slightly higher market liquidity doesn
68.
by ViscountPenguin 8mo ago
Unless the hard problem of consciousness was solved when I wasn't looking, we have absolutely no idea what class of objects are conscious. Given that a panpsychist would argue that even a rock has consciousness, I don't think you
69.
by ViscountPenguin 8mo ago
Given that this is being done in large part to appease Trump the fact that it's a red state surely has something to do with it too.
70.
by ViscountPenguin 8mo ago
This has been a thing in the USA for a long time hasn't it? Iirc, they have (legally not mandatory, but functionally mandatory) pledges at the start of every school day right?
71.
by ViscountPenguin 8mo ago
Maybe incredibly low is an overstatement, but Nigeria for example could easily add another 18 years of life expectancy (to match that of white Australians) at age 15 if their economic issues were resolved.
72.
by ViscountPenguin 8mo ago
The earliest bits of the paper cover the case for significantly smaller life expectancy improvements. Given the portion of people in the third world who live incredibly short lives for primarily economic (and not biological) reasons it seem
73.
by ViscountPenguin 9mo ago
Possum => opossum is erroneous. I was planning to list both species, it wasnt a typo.
74.
by ViscountPenguin 9mo ago
Schild's ladder by Greg Egan is a pretty good novel for this. You have groups of people vying to collapse and try to coexist with a new but threatening form of nature, and I think both are treated as reasonable actors.
75.
by ViscountPenguin 9mo ago
As of yet, the AI models doing important work are still pretty specialized. I'd be happy to pitch in to run something like an open source version of alpha-fold, but I'm not aware of any such projects. I have trouble seeing LLMs ma
76.
by ViscountPenguin 9mo ago
Any chance of raising the paywall on this article? I was quite enjoying it, but then the paywall hit me right in the middle of the chemical synthesis section. I have no problem with you wanting to earn money from your work, but it's a
77.
by ViscountPenguin 9mo ago
I'm not sure that I'd call [2] it not working out, just like I wouldn't call the equivalent pressure from the USA to dismantle medicare our public health system not working out. The biggest issue with the scheme is the fact t
78.
by ViscountPenguin 9mo ago
It's surprising to me that investors have been so wrong about combinator IPOs. I wonder if this has been driven my retail, or by the expectation of a small probability of enormous success.
79.
by ViscountPenguin 9mo ago
Y combinator has funded a significant portion of the most harmful tech companies of this century. They're profoundly amoral, just like you'd expect from a profitable venture capital firm. On the bright side, they also hire dang, s
80.
by ViscountPenguin 10mo ago
Parliamentary question time is pretty good for that here in Australia, I'd recommend giving it a listen every now and again.
81.
by ViscountPenguin 10mo ago
Public funding is kind of a cheat, but if we're gonna include them, I'd like to spruik that the ABC still technically has functional rss feeds: https://james.cridland.net/blog/2025/abc-news-australia-rss-
82.
by ViscountPenguin 10mo ago
I suspect that it would fail terribly, it wasn't until the 1900s that the modern definition of a vector space was even created iirc. Something trained in maths up until the 1990s should have a shot though.
83.
by ViscountPenguin 10mo ago
A cube-sat casino is an interesting concept for sure.
84.
by ViscountPenguin 10mo ago
I don't think it would "solve" little any of the legal issues with Child Pornography (not if the owner lived on earth, at least), but it would make a great and politically convenient target for space to earth weaponry.
85.
by ViscountPenguin 10mo ago
I strongly suspect that opposition to surveillance technology doesn't manifest along a simple progressive-conservative divide. In my experience, a sizable chunk of people who are anti-surveilance are pretty staunchly rightwing. This is
86.
by ViscountPenguin 11mo ago
Even if they dejure meet the requirements, I suspect that IANA would be under heavy political pressure to deny the claim.
87.
by ViscountPenguin 11mo ago
Do you live out in Siberia or something? Seems like a rough environment for most tech. Sounds like a very unique experience :)
88.
by ViscountPenguin 11mo ago
3Blue1Brown has a great video which frames this as a cultural problem that also exists in mathematics pedagogy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltLUadnCyi0 Personally, I find a mix of all three approaches (programming, pen
89.
by ViscountPenguin 1y ago
To be honest, I think this is somewhat assymetric, and kind of implies that openai are truer "Believers" than Microsoft. If you believe in a hard takeoff, than ownership of assets post agi is pretty much meaningless, however, it p
90.
by ViscountPenguin 1y ago
Huh, that's an interesting idea. If you get sick of MILPs, maybe you could use a representation of your finite field instead of the field itself? That way you could do everything in C^n, and preserve differentiability to use SGD or som

More ›