vessenes

13,149 karmajoined il y a 17 ans

I'm an investor, the founder of new alchemy, co-founder Lamina1, former CEO of coinlab.com, Chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation, Ethereum security researcher, holder of patent 9298806, general nerd. Currently working at Capital6, my private equity fund.

I’ve lost more than $1bn twice - failure is the best teacher! He says to himself..

[email protected]

Submissions

Superconducting thruster harnesses Earth's magnetic field in first orbital test

5 pointsby vessenesil y a 3 jours0 comments

Anthropic Sues DoD

5 pointsby vessenesil y a 4 mois2 comments

Ask HN: Why Is Phil Wang / Lucidrains Off GitHub?

4 pointsby vessenesil y a 4 mois4 comments

Apple Releases Open Weights Video Model

starflow-v.github.io

451 pointsby vessenesil y a 7 mois169 comments

comments

il y a 2 heuresdiscuss

Grant Sanderson recently distinguished mathematicians that create syntax (he might use the word ontologies in some circles) from those who manipulate it on the Dwarkesh podcast. I liked this delineation a lot. We seem to be at ‘manipulating syntax’.

Creating useful ontologies still seems a ways off here. Not to complain about this awesome result, just to think about where some future goalposts might be laid (and of course complained about / discussed at length when reached)

il y a 10 heuresdiscuss

… and customers. It’s cashflow positive.

il y a 10 heuresdiscuss

You’ve clearly never lived in the US! Big place, not a lot of fiber.

More literal, less fluid verbally, harder time understanding nuance, more correct code, fewer bugs. Less pretty UI. I switch back and forth but find I have less 'clean up' work with codex; more upfront communication though to properly specify. High hopes for 5.6!

avant-hierdiscuss

OK, I read it. It looks like questions on this topic get routed to a canned message that reads:

   “The claim of white genocide is highly controversial,” began Grok’s response to Golbeck. “Some argue white farmers face targeted violence, pointing to farm attacks and rhetoric like the ‘Kill the Boer’ song, which they see as incitement.”

Have you lived in South Africa? Would you consider say Coetzee's Disgrace to have its "thumb on the scales" of discussion of rural race politics in South Africa?

Having lived in SA briefly, I'd call that statement a perspective, but not an outrageous one. Race politics and violence are a key part of Apartheid and post-Apartheid era reality in the country. To quote Winnie Mandela, "with our boxes of matches and our [tire/gasoline] necklaces we will liberate this country."

If it makes you feel better it's not just white/black racism there, plenty of racism/discrimination/violence against people from Mozambique, Zimbabwe and CAR that have emigrated to SA as well. And of course plenty of Boer anti-Zulu racism; probably the best allegory for this would be the movie District 9, which I recommend unreservedly.

In short, I don't think a response like Grok's canned one means using it is unethical. Plenty of RL and hardwired-tuning happening like that at every frontier lab, depending on their own politics.

avant-hierdiscuss

I'm unfamiliar with that story, but I can imagine lots of reasons. Did you know there are large areas in South Africa where white people are not allowed to own land? As in, my Zulu son is allowed to own land, but me his white dad is not.

avant-hierdiscuss

Twitter was supposed to go bankrupt if you only read news articles from journalists about it. If you looked at Musk's operating track record, you might have had a different opinion.

In the transaction announcement (xAI buying twitter) twitter reported $12b in debt on acquisition, roughly the amount originally sourced ($13b), so it apparently made good on its debt covenants during the operating period. I have no idea if it received additional capitalization from Musk to do that or not.

That said, the deal was classic Musk - anybody who went on the equity ride with him in Twitter just KILLLED it; xAI was valued at $80bn and twitter at $33bn, so the owners there became 30% owners of xAI. xAI was acquired for $250bn at a SpaceX valuation of $1 trillion, or 20% of the resulting entity, so the twitter stock was 6% of spaceX at about $2 trillion, or $120bn on an equity purchase price basis of $30bn. and that $120bn in value is on really good daily trading volumes; lots of depth.

avant-hierdiscuss

Interesting. I experimented with Grok 4 for openclaw when they made clear they wanted to bring claw users in the fold. It was (as expected) more verbally fluid than 5.5, but had real trouble with agentic tool calling - the model felt like it hadn't been trained to think of tool calling as one of its primary modalities. I'll give this a try, the speed and the benchmarks look good. In my experience, Grok slightly punches above its weight in language fluidity, and seems to not benchmaxx on coding, so this is an encouraging release.

avant-hierdiscuss

Low effort and uninformed comment. The team published a good followup on why this happened: the model pulled in people's own tweets as context to prompting so edge lords that wrote innocuous prompts got to see edge lord content.

avant-hierdiscuss

Can it sing? Is it an end to end multimodal model?

avant-hierdiscuss

Oh wow, I'd like this. Our current voice interactions with ChatGPT are on a 4o era model; really terrible. oAI has always been pretty cagey on the architecture of their end to end multimodal models. And RL has basically made them worse since launch. (Check the launch videos where the model sings, is more realtime, has accents, etc). I'd love to try a next gen version.

il y a 3 joursdiscuss

Nice.

il y a 3 joursdiscuss

Thanks. I have now read all of that, and think I have a rough idea of what’s interesting you. What are you working on right now?

il y a 3 joursdiscuss

Yes, yes I did. As penance, I will post Whitney’s sudoku solver in k:

   x@&/x?/:/:(+;!9;/:x)

il y a 3 joursdiscuss

Thanks for the response! Would love to read more.

il y a 3 joursdiscuss

We'd like to see some benchmarks against open and closed k interpreters please! I'm curious how well a vibe coded k/q interpreter stands up to Shakti or whatever Mr. Whitney is letting out the door right now.

il y a 3 joursdiscuss

Algol derivatives usually written by, commercialized, then sold by Arthur Whitney. Generally considered write-only :)

il y a 4 joursdiscuss

No doubt there are a hundred more direct things one could do. On the other hand this would include instructions for all those things and could advise on the building! I think it would be a nice thing to have in the world.

il y a 4 joursdiscuss

I like the idea of the lowest technology hurdle required to build one such device. Any ideas? Seems like we must be there in terms of inventability now. A good project to work on!

il y a 4 joursdiscuss

Hi there! Thanks for the original post, and this sentence which exists in the same liminal space as the original post.

Tell me more about the matter compiler as you imagine it?