ip26 · HackerLangs

vor 7 Stundendiscuss

My assumption is somewhere in the harness toolchain there's a prompt inject that says:

    - Always sign commit messages

In which case, Claude is being given conflicting instructions, which is a different class of problem than too many instructions.

ip26

vor 7 Tagendiscuss

The basic purpose of patents is to make it worthwhile to develop something new and valuable. They are unnatural - but useful. Working backwards, if we want people to spend time and money developing new breeds of plants, you arrive at these kinds of rules.

ip26

vor 26 Tagendiscuss

[dead]

ip26

vor 26 Tagendiscuss

Regardless his actual private beliefs, one of his "jobs" is to create new unicorns ycombinator can invest in. So evangelizing startups in general and spurring new entrepreneurs is very much in his interest, and spreading this kind of mythology seems like a useful step to that end. He only needs a small number of people to buy into it.

ip26

vor 26 Tagendiscuss

You don't need to project to the heat death of the universe to get Facebook without Zuckerberg.

ip26

vor 26 Tagendiscuss

Parallel invention would like a word. Elisha Gray registered a patent for a telephone the same day as Alexander.

It's impossible to fully prove a counterfactual, but few things "wouldn't exist at all" if "that one person" hadn't done it.

Netflix is a decent example. Many people saw the coming of video streaming. We would still be able to stream videos today even if Hastings had stayed at Rational.

ip26

letzten Monatdiscuss

Infinite tokens rate-limited to 10 tok/s is 26MTok per month.

ip26

letzten Monatdiscuss

A never had the authority to contract the land as a park indefinitely ... once C owns it they own it

That's not what a deed restriction is.

are you stuck with passing that obligation forward

Generally yes. Which is why the deed restriction can affect the market value of the property.

ip26

letzten Monatdiscuss

Hard to assign that a value before you are a parent though. You can only understand it in the abstract.

ip26

letzten Monatdiscuss

I probably interpret the message incorrectly, because to me "the hardest thing" is usually some class of some famous unsolved problem. The thing is, to be famously unsolved, many of the world's most brilliant people must have already tried and failed to solve it. There's a chance I have an edge they don't, but it's probably not wise to track your career path to the darkest of dead ends purely on the merits of it being particularly dark.

Example: you know what would be harder than anything we're talking about here? Quadrupling the performance of the best compression algorithms. It's hard. In fact, maybe there's some information theory that even says it's mathematically impossible. That makes it really hard, which makes it what all of us should immediately start working on.

The author writes elsewhere that you also have to have an edge, but that's frequently omitted from this "hardest thing" advice.

ip26

letzten Monatdiscuss

You’d think Berkshire would be at least passingly aware of that principle, though.

ip26

letzten Monatdiscuss

Depends on the quality of your validation loop. Can the agent find the bug in a five second unit test, or does it have to run the full deployment test?

It also presents tradeoffs in compute budget. Cycles spent executing large arrays of tests could mean less tokens spent debugging.

ip26

letzten Monatdiscuss

That's the exactly the role talent scouts fill - spot the ones that show glimmers of promise before it's obvious, and offer them opportunity.

ip26

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

We went through exactly this with Google. People argued that once they were the only way anyone found websites, they were merely collecting undue economic rent.

ip26

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

They specifically describe that exploits are usually multiple small vulnerabilities chained together. With that understanding, it sounds like closing vulnerabilities isn't the same as discovering an exploit. Instead, you're leaving fewer small gaps behind, to make it harder & harder to put together a working exploit.

ip26

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

Are you familiar with why movie theaters offer matinee tickets at a lower price?

ip26

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

The counterweight has been, after using it for a bunch of projects, I have internalized that it will very, very quickly get me to maybe 60% and then I'll have to take it the rest of the way mostly by myself (or handholding it tightly for the remaining 40% at a much slower pace).

In other words, the initial implementation is practically already there, already done. So there's no rush left in generating it - it's only worth bothering if I'm prepared to see it through to 100%.

When it is worth pushing through to 100%, it's pretty great for getting the inertia going though.

ip26

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

On the other hand, I have paperback books I loved as a kid that were my father's when he was a kid. I carefully saved them for decades. One more generation and they could be considered family relics or something. I quickly realized the flaw with this plan as I tried to share them with my kids, who cannot be expected to treat brittle middle-grade and young-adult novels as museum pieces.

I am not entirely ready to part with the books, but I'm also unable to bear watching them get thoughtlessly destroyed by my kids. Digital has made it very easy to get copies of all of them; plus others I didn't manage to hold on to.

ip26

vor 3 Monatendiscuss

If companies are faced with the choice between:

- employ you at 60k/yr

- replace you with a machine that costs a lot of money, and also send you UBI of 60k/yr

It should be obvious the latter is not an option that is ever going to happen.

ip26

vor 3 Monatendiscuss

all risk comes with some small chance of tragedy

This part. I’m not going to assume what that person meant, but there’s always a few people about in these conversations lamenting that when they were six, they were certainly never hit by a car, and really you have to let your children take a few risks etc…

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