ngriffiths

6 ms·

1.
by ngriffiths 11d ago
> only adding new things once you’ve discovered a need for them. Agree! imo this is the guiding principle that makes great tutorials great.
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by ngriffiths 11d ago
> We might say that generating ideas is the real intellectual work of mathematics. The article talks about how many new ideas are relatively worthless and the real goal is to find the "concepts that 'carve nature at its joints.
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by ngriffiths 12d ago
Completely agree. It's a choice not to observe and understand what's going on, at least a very risky one if not actively evil. There's a tradeoff though... isn't it already super hard to understand what they're doin
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by ngriffiths 12d ago
Apocalyptic predictions normally get everyone into gear to prevent the threat. Not a great argument for "let's see what happens if we just sit around this time"
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by ngriffiths 12d ago
The mental model here is that AI is a powerful tool whose main purpose is to outcompete others, increase power or provide a defense. This is not the right model! The biggest risk is not that someone discovered a big new weapon, which by the
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by ngriffiths 22d ago
Oh no The neural net engineering challenge was so awesome, I got really into it, spent way too much time and then was shocked when I actually managed to solve it. Since then I've gotten interested in... hardware. God help me
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by ngriffiths 23d ago
The post says "it might sound a bit extreme," and it does!
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by ngriffiths 23d ago
In Lathe of Heaven by Le Guin, the main character George is famously frustrating because he doesn't do much. Bad things happen to him and he basically just lets them. He thinks his psychiatrist is totally evil yet keeps going back. He
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by ngriffiths 1mo ago
I'm talking about "Interchange income - rewards expenses," where the difference is 6x higher at the highest FICO scores. And of course interchange income is not the same as cost to the cardholder but they are linked
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by ngriffiths 1mo ago
To be clear though, the higher FICO scores get hosed the most, see the graph earlier on. Your quotes are conditional on FICO so they don't take that into account. The only way I can put these things together is that at the high FICO
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by ngriffiths 1mo ago
Patio11 covered this exact topic: https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/credit-card-r... It's clearly more complex than the story these authors are telling, in particular the highest income consumers get
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by ngriffiths 1mo ago
> Over the last generation, we have solved tons of well-defined problems. We eradicated smallpox and polio. We landed on the moon. We built better cars, refrigerators, and televisions. We even got ~15 IQ points smarter! And how did our i
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by ngriffiths 1mo ago
Agreed, I loved my biology courses and lab work and had always had a similar sense of wonder about it all. It's interesting, I'm not sure that came from any teacher in particular and I bet there are plenty of people who just never
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by ngriffiths 1mo ago
When I think of Norway, the first thing that comes to mind is its willingness to commit to huge future capex spending. Not to mention, selling more than half its equities in order to buy one risky asset totally aligns with its investment st
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by ngriffiths 1mo ago
This was a fantastic year for United, and the margin is ~6%! They lost a similar amount in 2020. The earnings history definitely backs up the story of relatively low margins, weak growth and a fair amount of volatility to deal with.
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by ngriffiths 2mo ago
> For me, the affective quality of learning mathematics is empathetically tethered to an act of discovery and creation. It is social. We are conversant with another mathematician—perhaps long dead. If we follow the chain of communication
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by ngriffiths 2mo ago
> When I found myself using a corp-speak term, I questioned whether there was another word that felt more natural and communicated the same thing. In other scenarios the non "corp-speak" term feels kind of wrong and the "c
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by ngriffiths 3mo ago
> By canonization, I mean the process of taking a local, one-off formalization and turning it into library mathematics: general, reusable, coherent, efficient, and compatible with the rest I think this kind of work is constantly misunder
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by ngriffiths 3mo ago
It's complicated. If you go put some dollars down on a prediction, the median person you're in it with doesn't have much evidence to support their position and is basically gambling. The median dollar you're up against
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by ngriffiths 3mo ago
It's also super easy to apply it wrong because going above X% in one area normally means sinking below X% in another. I think a clearer way to say it is that sometimes , you have to be almost perfect, and 98% could sound like almost p
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by ngriffiths 3mo ago
Fair, but it's hard because falling behind on the models themselves is a killer. Maybe they're saying they can't spend resources on anything except staying ahead.
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by ngriffiths 3mo ago
One way of reading this is an article about how good Anthropic's product is. "Look at how many serious flaws users have been willing to accept in order to keep using this thing"
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by ngriffiths 3mo ago
But they should just stop reading. It's actually not ok that it's unfamiliar, because makes you reread and get confused and distracted, all for some silly reference that doesn't make a big difference. Life is short! You can r
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by ngriffiths 3mo ago
At my job I switch between writing analysis code for research projects and writing code for apps. The difference in mindset is so dramatic. In the same way that good software has consistent names and interfaces that are ~useless when you ju
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by ngriffiths 3mo ago
It's more exciting to think about evil people plotting how they will control the labor force and steal all its knowledge, but I think both the AI use and the alleged extraction of knowledge of design and craft are better explained by,
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Trying to fix complicated problems(blog.griffens.net)
43 points by ngriffiths 4mo ago|2 comments
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by ngriffiths 4mo ago
Yeah, because it covers all the doctors. It is literally the same as saying you will pay any price. It is a luxury good.
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by ngriffiths 4mo ago
> It’s not hard to understand why people hate health insurers. When you interact with the U.S. health care system, the providers — the hospital staff, the doctor, the nurses, the technicians — all just take care of you . > Your inter
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by ngriffiths 4mo ago
The LinkedIn post: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/incorruptible-spotify-brendan...
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by ngriffiths 4mo ago
I'm not just talking about where the initial pressure comes from, but the effects of the changes. I guess the question becomes about how easily these layers get disentangled. E.g. things investors like that then result in lower sales?

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