jebarker

11 ms·

151.
by jebarker 11mo ago
A PID doesn’t get better at learning and applying predictions. I’d argue that to do that essentially indefinitely requires intelligence.
152.
by jebarker 11mo ago
Also a decent definition of intelligence
153.
by jebarker 11mo ago
Well, we most likely went to different schools and had different parents.
154.
by jebarker 11mo ago
> A downturn in the stock market “would knock the wind out of these high income households…” What are the drivers of this? Does it imply that the income of these households is mostly from stock market returns or that they would tighten b
155.
by jebarker 11mo ago
Yep, I’ve hit this a couple of times. I think it’s the reason I left academia at the end of my PhD - that was a way of escaping the discomfort of the required hard work. The second time was as my tech career progressed and my field (ML) gre
156.
by jebarker 11mo ago
> Above all, I think the key is to tell them that it's trying hard that leads to getting what you want Totally agree. This is now the approach I’m taking with my 4 year old who is clearly quite bright.
157.
by jebarker 11mo ago
I think you’re right that I’m a negatively biased person, so the praise may have been received differently if I was a more positive person. However, the outcome of the praise was that I was never self-confident and had/have low self-es
158.
by jebarker 11mo ago
For me this has 100% been the main source of unhappiness in my life. I wish nobody had ever told me how smart I was as a child. The reality was that I was above average but in an unremarkable collection of kids mostly. I’ve done fine in lif
159.
by jebarker 11mo ago
Slightly off-topic but Scott Manley recently had a couple of entertaining videos featuring Jared Isaacman’s private Air Force in Montana.
160.
by jebarker 1y ago
I was attracted to Stoicism for a long time and still believe it has some good ideas, e.g. recognizing what you cannot control and not letting those things destabilize you easily. But overall I find it a pretty depressing philosophy. I’m su
161.
by jebarker 1y ago
Great work - needed to read this today to pull me out of a state of modern software engineering induced malaise.
162.
by jebarker 1y ago
Yes, nsys is very helpful, especially when looking at perf issues. It’s often the case that bugs present like in this blog though - you just notice that training curves have regressed somehow - so even with good tooling it can be hard to fi
163.
by jebarker 1y ago
My point is that the phrase “must pretend that we choose” is meaningless if we have no ability to choose, I.e. you have no choice whether to pretend you can choose or not, you either do or you don’t and it doesn’t matter how much you “must”
164.
by jebarker 1y ago
> but we must live as though it is not This implies you can choose how to live though
165.
by jebarker 1y ago
This is a great write up and I’d love to see more like it. Debugging this sort of thing in the megatron->pytorch->CUDA stack is what my team spends more than half of their time on as an ML research team.
166.
by jebarker 1y ago
So, did anyone here actually read the book? I’m halfway through and I think there are compelling ideas around how self-replication emerges naturally from a fundamentally computational universe and how that leads to increasingly complex comp
167.
by jebarker 1y ago
That’s a non sequitur. They’re a fairly large organization, I’d be amazed if they don’t have multiple research sub-teams pursuing all sorts of different directions.
168.
by jebarker 1y ago
Yes. I've run numerous 50Ks, 50 milers, 100ks and 100 milers. I felt like crap after 20 miles in almost all of them. Most of getting better at ultramarathons is learning to keep going when feeling like crap. Oddly, the one race that wa
169.
by jebarker 1y ago
I think about this plateauing question quite a bit. I'm 44 and around the E6 level. I think it is very challenging for me to progress much further up the ladder. I'm not confident I have the skillset required and trying to develop
170.
by jebarker 1y ago
Maybe they should rename it the Department of Education and expand the program of providing excellent education to all kids.
171.
by jebarker 1y ago
Are you still using the NixOS setup you showed in that interview or do you now use the MacOS native ghostty?
172.
by jebarker 1y ago
It was this one: https://sourcegraph.com/blog/dev-tool-time-mitchell-hashimot... They even used the quote as the title of the accompanying blog post. As I say, I didn’t mean this as a gotcha or anything- I totally agre
173.
by jebarker 1y ago
I like it when it works but I literally had to take a break yesterday due to the rage I was feeling from Claude repeatedly declaring "I found it!" or "Perfect - found the issue!" before totally breaking the code.
174.
by jebarker 1y ago
Just this week I watched an interview with Mitchell about his dev setup and when asked about using neovim instead of an IDE he said something along the lines of "I don't want something that writes code for me". I'm not p
175.
by jebarker 1y ago
> …and has more computing power than the machines that sent humans to the moon. We’ve all read this comparison many times. Is there any reason to think of sending people to the moon as a difficult computational problem though? Conversely
176.
by jebarker 1y ago
Totally agree. I work in LLM training software and I believe progress in the field is actually much slower than it should be because of the excruciatingly long feedback loops involved in development. The software stacks are deep and abstrac
177.
by jebarker 1y ago
No, it was a genuine question. Sorry if I’m asking basic questions, but I actually don’t find your questions as responses help make things any clearer.
178.
by jebarker 1y ago
> The general cost of living is sky rocketing, largely due to this push How are cost of living increases tied to AI investment?
179.
by jebarker 1y ago
Yes
180.
by jebarker 1y ago
For those looking for a good pop-sci introduction to these sort of quantum effects and why demonstrating macroscopic quantum effects is a big deal for the foundations of the field I recommend “Through Two Doors at Once” by Anil Ananthaswany

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