joshmarlow

7 ms·

31.
by joshmarlow 1y ago
The older I get the more convinced I am that "math is not hard; teaching math is hard".
32.
by joshmarlow 1y ago
The sudden desire to add a small LLM and speech synthesizer so the mower can yell for help in a stranger danger scenario.
33.
by joshmarlow 1y ago
It's been a few years since I've touched OCaml - the ecosystem just wasn't what I wanted - but the core language is still my favorite. And the best way I can describe why is that my code generally ends up with a few heavy fun
34.
by joshmarlow 1y ago
VSCode has a pretty good Gemini integration - it can pull up a chat window from the side. I like to discuss design changes and small refactorings ("I added this new rpc call in my protobuf file, can you go ahead and stub out the parts
35.
by joshmarlow 1y ago
Fun (?) fact - with this protocol you could use a trained Hawk as a firewall.
36.
by joshmarlow 1y ago
To clarify, I'm focusing on the costs of ramping up a startup. Currently VC has a great deal of power because up-front investment is required to hire staff and other expenses until the startup can become cash-flow positive. When a lone
37.
by joshmarlow 1y ago
> Right now those with assets are compelled to transfer them to those without because they have a need for the labor. Yes - and those without are compelled to trade their labor for assets. My point is that the assets themselves mean less
38.
by joshmarlow 1y ago
I've gotten some pretty cool things working with LLMs doing most of the heavy lifting using the following approaches: * spec out project goals and relevant context in a README and spec out all components; have the AI build out each com
39.
by joshmarlow 1y ago
I agree AI can change the balance of power but I think it's more nuanced. When expertise is commoditized, it becomes cheap; that reduces payroll and operational costs - which reduces the value of VC investment and thus the power of p
40.
by joshmarlow 1y ago
If this thread interests you, you should check out "Blood Music" by Greg Bear. It's pretty old but the premise is that a researcher 'closes the loop' in a bunch of cells by making them able to edit their own DNA - t
41.
by joshmarlow 1y ago
To your point - we do have some chokepoints in supply chains here and there but I often wonder how much of that is due to the learning curve. As in, things are centralized because just how we as a civilization learned to build things in our
42.
by joshmarlow 2y ago
Interesting - I wonder if the author was gesturing at Erewhon which was published a few years earlier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erewhon
43.
by joshmarlow 2y ago
Fascinating read! > Theophrastus closes by asking whether human consciousness is a ‘stumbling’ on the way to ‘unconscious perfection’. This reminds me of a line from the scifi novel Echopraxia where one of the characters explains that as
44.
by joshmarlow 2y ago
> make the balance between capital and labor even more uneven. I think it's interesting to note that as opens source models evolve and proliferate, the capital required for a lot of ventures goes down - which levels the playing fiel
45.
by joshmarlow 2y ago
There's no reason to assume that SpaceX/Musk will be the only launch providers long-term. They proved out reusability and are proving out the benefits of the Starship design and there are multiple startups working to emulate them.
46.
by joshmarlow 2y ago
The most exciting answer to your question about applications is that "We don't know yet, it's a platform." The inventors of the internal combustion engines likely didn't imaging interstate systems and long distance
47.
by joshmarlow 2y ago
And in 2002 a neuroscientist hooked a camera to a blind man's brain and he could see well enough to drive a car around an empty parking lot without running into things. And yet there are still many blind people. Doing something cool on
48.
by joshmarlow 2y ago
I'm kind of surprised about how simple a lot of the core concepts are. I think one of the most insightful pieces of the Bitcoin systems is the realization that with proper incentives, human behavior (ie, the miners) can be reliable eno
49.
by joshmarlow 2y ago
> AI will only advance as fast as it can search, it's not a matter of pure scaling of computation, we need to scale interaction and validation as well. I think Kevin Kelly made a similar point in explaining his skepticism around int
50.
by joshmarlow 2y ago
This dovetails with something I've been thinking lately; the foundation of civilization is standing on the shoulders of giants (ie, I might make small contributions but I didn't invent compilers, CPUs, mining, agriculture, etc). P
51.
by joshmarlow 2y ago
I think it's also interesting that we don't always know the applications for mathematical insights. IIRC, Euler invented graph theory (even the traveling salesman problem) and basically wrote that he knew of no applications for it
52.
by joshmarlow 2y ago
Can you explain your reasoning? To many these numbers seem to suggest the exact opposite.
53.
by joshmarlow 2y ago
Well I loved A Deepness in the Sky and Blindsight so now I'm adding Children of Time to my ever growing list.
54.
by joshmarlow 2y ago
I'm curious how similar F* is to Lean Prover (which I've dabbled in).
55.
by joshmarlow 2y ago
Is there a particular term for concatenative languages with this property?
56.
by joshmarlow 3y ago
I built the image processing/volume estimation/3D display core of an iOS app used for planning treatments for aneurysms. I've not been associated with it in more than a decade but I still count it as probably my greatest cont
57.
by joshmarlow 3y ago
That's a great short story. The clinical ambience of it's description really amps it up. Real Black Mirror stuff. I haven't read Permutation City (on my list) but I really enjoyed Disaspora by the same author (Greg Egan). S
58.
by joshmarlow 3y ago
IMO, for many real business use cases, the hallucinations are still a big deal. Once we have models that are more reliable, I think it makes sense to go down that path - the AI is the interface to the software. But until we're there,
59.
by joshmarlow 3y ago
Not sure if this is where your head is, but I think there's a lot of value in integrating LLMs directly into complex software. Jira, Salesforce, maybe K8s - should all have an integrated LLMs that can walk you through how to perform a
60.
by joshmarlow 3y ago
The SSE sounds kind of like Land's notion of techno-capitalism being an AI assembling itself from the future (which was always somewhat pharmaceutically inspired).

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