sigbottle

6 ms·

61.
by sigbottle 2mo ago
I personally think that this kind of behavior is necessary, unavoidable, and actually good for society, precisely because no one has access to this thing called "rationality", if it even exists. The alternative is variants of auth
62.
by sigbottle 2mo ago
I don't directly interpret Camus, but I think to my interpretation of Dostoevsky's underground man. He knows he's irrational, can "rationally prove" he's irrational, yet still lives on anyways. There's a s
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by sigbottle 2mo ago
XY problem, don't expand the design doc before you have the idea for the design. Don't compile down into lower abstraction levels until necessary
64.
by sigbottle 2mo ago
A lot of bias here around non-extended theories of cognition. We're already well past the point of trying to correspond the internal "brain chemistry" of an LLM to a thing called "reasoning". True reasoning, if ther
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by sigbottle 2mo ago
I can't tell if you're joking or not, but this is a legit position and I don't think it's that crazy. The alternative is to posit that you know the True Definition of thinking, which is kind of absurd. Some things, like
66.
by sigbottle 2mo ago
I looked this up, and sure enough, Ernst Mach was the one who lead the charge (a self proclaimed positivist, which is a position that many scientists would gladly say they support). Sure enough, it's what I thought - you don't mea
67.
by sigbottle 2mo ago
Yeah I have my own forks for it, it's just annoying since usually I want to just install things on a machine and just "have it work". Mosh is also extra annoying because it depends on ssh and libcrypto stuff, which I have n
68.
by sigbottle 2mo ago
Looking really cynically, it does seem like it might transition into some kind of cloud-development situation. Your "one access to all development" is one ssh away from our mega 24/7 online compute farm, since we need to ke
69.
by sigbottle 2mo ago
I feel like the main benefit of such a thing would be centralization. Part of the issue with the terminal ecosystem is precisely that everything's so fragmented and everybody needs to support arcane terminal protocols and wrap a billio
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by sigbottle 2mo ago
Yeah I remember being in sophomore year of college, watching Anders Hejlsberg's video on "the new way to build compilers" or something and having my mind blown. But I only ever looked at the source code for Rust when it came
71.
by sigbottle 2mo ago
I've always thought this was fascinating, but the only incremental compilation I knew was obscure programming languages and Rust. Oh yeah, I guess Roslyn? Really fun and fascinating problem to work on.
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by sigbottle 3mo ago
The more technical you get, the more subsitutable you become - or at least, people think of it in that way, because the whole idea is "It's not me, or the people, it's the raw technical prowess that earns its keep in this pla
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by sigbottle 3mo ago
To further onto this, humans could technically simulate Turing machines themselves but they don't. Efficiency and finding the right abstractions and tradeoffs is literally identical with making new capacities and capabilities. If all o
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by sigbottle 3mo ago
Following this. my plan has been to start simple and eventually build out the inference stack piece by piece, however simple. Take some open weights model and from first principles build kernels and a harness for it. Given that AI is alread
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by sigbottle 3mo ago
I'm curious if it's possible in general for an AI to achieve this without some evolutionary forcing function that actually threatens their "biology". Not talking about prompting Claude "please write me a philosophic
76.
by sigbottle 3mo ago
Do people actually do systems design with control theory? I know the authoritative question to possibility - yes, my company does it. But I'm wondering about say, an industry standard formalism to it, such as like how DDIA is household
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by sigbottle 3mo ago
This is how it is with all of these guys, their only principle is "what's good for me", and will twist all narratives to fit it
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by sigbottle 3mo ago
I will readily admit that I didn't read Dostoevsky, and I don't continue to read Dostoevsky, because I've compared him against a swath of other fiction writers and authoritatively determined with some objective reproducible s
79.
by sigbottle 3mo ago
But a property of intelligence is to know when to stop, if we treat intelligence as some sort of search and not some a priori intuition of the entire space. Seems kind of hard, if not impossible, to train for specifically that.
80.
by sigbottle 3mo ago
Really? Not my experience at all. If you're saying that math has a consolidating network effect, sure. There are a lot of people who think similar problems are important. I guarantee you that when math was small, that is not the case,
81.
by sigbottle 3mo ago
Completely unrelated, but I'm seeing people and especially LLMs using causal/intervention so much it's kind of driving me insane. It's actually a very goated term but not everything is causal, it also has precise technic
82.
by sigbottle 3mo ago
Ah, I see. We don't care at that level because we aren't trying to reproduce deterministic replicated simulations as the HFT industry often wants. SDRs have their own noise and the physical world is uncertain to where, as long as
83.
by sigbottle 3mo ago
Hmm - I think you mean to say that when interoperability is not a core constraint, then there won't be an incentive for an open standard. That's important because in plenty of other software - databases, OSes, compilers and bina
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by sigbottle 3mo ago
I've used LLMs to bootstrap successfully in a decent amount of things at this point. Anyone trusting AI as the single authoritative source of information is stupid - but this follows from the fact that trusting anyone as a "singul
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by sigbottle 3mo ago
For physics simulations, or even in RF work, the tolerances you need are quite a bit more than say, AI work. For example, for one of our RF algorithms, we "have" to use doubles (I actually can think of an optimization that can let
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by sigbottle 3mo ago
The standards of proof are different from the fundamental operation of "OK, cool, you solved this problem. Why does this problem matter? Isn't it useless? Senseless? Meaningless?" You have this same question whether or not yo
87.
by sigbottle 3mo ago
I'm going to keep on repeating this on HN threads until I'm blue in the face, but: There are two ways to solve a problem. Either solve the problem, or deem it irrelevant. The implication here is that, you, the human operator, clea
88.
by sigbottle 3mo ago
A lot of philosophy starts from the fundamental observation that, to solve a problem, you could either solve a problem, or state that the problem is ill-posed in some way (and dissolve it). Either answer the question, or question the questi
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by sigbottle 3mo ago
A lot of the AI game is still integrations and getting entrenched in processes. It has the double whammy that you get to train on their data (not talking about ALL enterprise contracts - but cursor pretty explicitly has this business model.
90.
by sigbottle 3mo ago
I have a sinking feeling that AI models have gotten so good internally, and/or the GPU guys in their labs have found a good enough processes, that AI is doing the research behind the doors right now (it should be at least capable, at h

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