Thoughts
I cannot think today. because I am too stressed. I am going to explode. my head is full of bees.
o3 performance is very impressive.
The o-series CoT-token approach is very inelegant, but this proves it can get the same results as human reasoning, in terms of general-purpose problem solving, self-feedback, and arbitrary-complexity algorithms. (Things earlier LLMs couldn’t do.)
We have a long way to go to make it cost effective, quick, and to shore up the remaining issues (e.g. special reasoning or letter-based questions that are limited by the linear-token-window input), but that’s implementation, that will happen eventually. (This is a subtle change from my previous stance.)
It remains to be seen if there are remaining breakthroughs that allow these problems to be solved more elegantly (e.g. using a different representation for CoT tokens, or a training breakthrough that requires a smaller training dataset).
I think the “will” question is still open; I’m kind of still skeptical this will lead to computers that are able to act independently (I.e. without prompting).
I love this image so much because you’d have to get permission from like 8 different copyright holders if you wanted to sell it.
Culture is just inherently supposed to be so referential.
This is fanart by Shepscape. They obviously have copyright on their art.
It’s fanart of the Hermitcraft SMP. You could avoid using the HermitCraft trademark when referring to the piece and so that’s probably not a problem.
More specifically, it’s fanart of Shepscape’s HermitCraft x Detroit: Become Human crossover AU. Again, I don’t think there’s anything in the image itself that would be a problem but you would have to avoid using the trademark when describing it.
HermitCraft is of course a Minecraft SMP. The only evidence of this in the image is that X is wearing an axolotl skin, which had recently been added to the game. I don’t think Microsoft would have a case that this was their axolotl design.
However, X has only mixed this axolotl design into his normal skin, which is based on the protagonist of Doom, “Doom Guy,” who is copyright id Software.
Etho’s skin is similarly from a pre-existing media, namely, Naruto.
I believe all three of the creators pictured, Etho, Xisuma, and Cubfan (the metal arm is throwing me off since I don’t follow the AU but I believe this is Cub), have copyright on their own depiction.
Now, this particular comic (of which this image is just the first two panels) is themed around Joywave’s song “Destruction,” which is copyright Cultco music/Hollywood Records.
However, the lyric in the first panel, “will the soundtrack kindly produce a sound” is a sample from Disney’s *Fantasia* (1940).
I think that covers it. I’m assuming Cub’s skin is original to him and I’m assuming the BWOMP is original to Joywave (at least for practical purposes as it’s transcribed here).
I could put up with the lack of technological details except that there’s also a lack of political details.
We’re 8 episodes in and there are no (living) named characters on Earth.
> “But the new protocols had been introduced way back in August of 2245, and we are now approaching the end of 2246. Werner himself has been on Mars for more than six months, and objectively things have only gotten worse. Back on Earth, some Omnicorp executives were starting to get concerned that the bold new direction their CEO was embarking on was taking them nowhere good.
> But Werner had two things working in his favor. First, his supporters on the board of directors were still with him. The grumbling about the new protocols back on Earth mostly came from people who had not wanted Werner to be CEO in the first place, and they were a minority.
> The majority on the board still supported him and his mission to modernize and streamline this great hulking near shipwreck they had inherited from the late Vernon Byrd. The other thing was that thanks to his centralization of control, most of the really bad stuff happening on Mars was being papered over. Earth was not really getting the whole story here.”
(Revolutions 11.8)
Compared to the same author describing the British reaction to the failed Stamp Act. (Revolutions 2.3)
> “Okay, so by the spring of 1766, the Stamp Act has been repealed, and the Declaratory Act passed.
> This formula for ending the crisis worked well for the moment, but Lord Rockingham did not long survive the solution, and in July he was dismissed as Prime Minister. In his place, George III turned to the man who had successfully steered Britain to victory during the Seven Years War, William Pitt the Elder. This was good news for the colonies, as Pitt had just come out as a full-throated supporter of American interests, but while it looked good on paper, the reality left much to be desired.
> In accepting the Prime Ministership, Pitt was also created First Earl of Chatham, taking him out of the House of Commons and plopping him into the House of Lords, where his ability to manage daily administration was much reduced. Not that it mattered anyway, Pitt was in poor health and frequently absent from London altogether. Without a strong guiding hand, the individual ministers were left to their own devices.”
I think this is a fair comparison. They’re both trying to say the same thing but the second one is actually interesting, actually compelling, because it’s giving you some level of fact. I don’t even want to say detail because they’re both pretty high level, but naming the opposition and explaining why he couldn’t do anything is so much better than not naming the opposition and explaining why they’re completely irrelevant.
And this is where I go back to the internet technology issue—you can’t just say “Earth was not really getting the whole story” with 0 explanation. You can’t just take for granted that Werner has the ability to limit the flow of information between citizens. And I don’t need it to be believable, but you can’t pretend like all information is communicated on letters that Werner is responsible for hand-delivering. And I’m not cutting anything. The explanation for why Werner’s board of directors and shareholders supported h the New Protocols, despite their failures, was “Earth wasn’t getting the full story.”
One of my other problems with Revolutions, and a lot of sci-fi, is that entire sections of the plot fall apart if a single person has my
level of understanding of technology.
Like you can write a fantasy world without end-to-end encryption but if you write a sci-fi world without end-to-end encryption you have to explain to me why all knowledge of end-to-end encryption was lost.
Maybe if I’m bored one day I’ll run the hypothetical of ‘what if everyone in the world was infinitely smart?’
I’ve been thinking about it recently because the Martian Revolution podcast has an antagonist who is described by the narrator as extremely smart and simultaneously makes numerous awful decisions. I might’ve mentioned this before, but it’s an equivocation that I find frustrating.
The other week I listened to the album *Welcome to the Black Parade* through, and despite wanting to like MCR, I don't think I really got it
until doing that.
My last couple of thoughts, including this one, have been incomprehensible and I hate it. Explaining myself is so tricky.
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Andrew Kelley will do this thing where he responds to a simple question with a single link and no commentary. And it's iconic because it's
easier to write a single sentence, so in linking to the documentation, he's putting in more work in order to be 30% more passive-aggressive.
My parents tried to warn me that *A Tale of Two Cities* isn’t good, meanwhile I’m reading these sentences over and over to myself.
Transcript
“for these reasons, the jury, being a loyal jury (as he knew they were), and being a responsible jury (as they knew they were), must positively find the prisoner Guilty, and make an end of him, whether they liked it or not. That, they could never lay their heads upon their pillows; that, they could never tolerate the idea of their wives laying their heads upon their pillows; that, they could never endure the notion of their children laying their heads upon their pillows; in short, that there never more could be, for them or theirs, any laying of heads upon pillows at all, unless the prisoner’s head was taken off.
Blurred Zoom backgrounds are so out of fashion now that AI generate images with blurred backgrounds.
Jon Bois quoting "people who have been flattened by the Earth still live" in his own video is so funny.
"Triple to gap" joins "extraregional" in the category of Minecraft speedrun strat names that sound amazing.
The "o" in "to" is a schwa, you can almost say 'triple-da-gap' (going like Italian, not Brooklyn).
I wish my brain was awake today. I had half a margarita last night and then stayed up until 11p so I’m basically hung over.
I’m such a hater
Why do you need a relational database???? There's just no way.
I guess I shouldn't meme because I haven't actually looked at the regz internals. Maybe there is somewhere in this single-file Zig script that produces a single output where it makes sense to serialize the input into a binary format and run SQL queries against it.
microzig developers in their efforts to overcomplicate things are converting from xml -> sqlite -> zig instead of from xml -> zig directly.
Ah yes I've always wanted to store my register definitions in a relational database.
Yesterday I conducted a double blind taste-test between Liquid Death brand water, store-brand spring water, and tap water. The spring water
narrowly beat out the Liquid Death on texture. However, it was conclusive in establishing that my tap water tastes awful. The experiment identified a potential area for future study: whether my cups make water taste bad, as all three had a bitter, plasticy taste that I don't remember from metallic containers like my Hydro Flask or the Liquid Death can.
Good news. The maternal mortality rate in Seirra Leone is twice the global average.
This is unironically good news because it's down
from 5 times the global average 6 years ago, but I still think we can do better.
(This is the number of mothers who die in childbirth as a fraction of the number of births.)
Theory: songs that sounded good over the radio were very smooth because they had to survive static.
Breakcore then introduces static.
Wait this literally just occurred to me, what if your primary Git branch was `mistress`. I'm sure someone's thought of that before. master
is cancelled because it's gendered.
I think hannahxxrose x Feinberg is the most delusional I am about anything.
Like there's nothing there and I think they're so cute.
Still not over Definitely Typed. One of those things that you would say is impossible if it didn't exist.
There are a lot of people, me included, who try to speak with a tone above their experience. Often times, this falls flat. Zig's mlugg is
one of the people who genuinely speaks as if he is older than he is. Now, you can tell he's young because he talks about things as if he's never talked about it before, but he sounds like someone older talking about something they've never talked about before, if that makes sense.
The head maintainer of the Catppuccin org is Hammy. His area of expertise is CI. Historically, I haven’t been the biggest fan of CI, it
alway seems less exciting than “actually working on the project.” But it’s really impressive to see how Hammy is able to use it as a tool to compensate for areas he’s not familiar with and magnify the scope of what he’s able to do. By investing time to make sure that repos have CI to handles dependency updates, check builds, and publish new versions, Hammy can handle a lot of the boring and administrative parts of maintenance. There’s a Catppuccin AUR repo that uses CI to check for updates in the underlying packages and automatically publish new versions to the AUR. Hammy doesn’t run Arch; he got other maintainers or volunteers to do the actual packaging once, then he wrote the CI configuration to do it repeatedly, automatically. If someone else built the project once, you can use CI to maintain it, keep it up-to-date, flag breakages, review and merge PRs, and publish new releases *without even cloning it locally*. Definitely very cool.
"plausible...for up to a minute" Google Genie 2 marketing.
(Okay, this is a research blog post, not a product.)
But still, AI moment.
Not to be libertarian, but there's a law in America that sets a minimum medical loss ratio—i.e. it caps the percentage profit an insurance
company can make.
I'm not an economist but it seems like a bad idea because the only way to increase profits is to increase expenses. I think it was a part of ObamaCare which only went into effect in 2012, but insurance costs have been rising disproportionate of other countries since before that, so it's not our only problem.
> If you realize that you’re dying, they only thing to do is turn back toward your childhood. Oh so many people don’t realize, or realize
> too late. I saw a man getting a transfusion of blood. Though it was necessary to keep him alive, the pain of having it injected into him incapacitated him.
"If you're walking and you're frustrated 'cause you're not where you want to be yet, bro you're missing it."
https://youtu.be/dxah7uHPYo0
At some point you do have to have a goal.
There's a bit in The Great Divorce where an artist is talking about how much he wants to paint heaven. And his friend is like, 'you're missing it. When you were a kid, you didn't paint for the sake of painting, you painted to capture the beauty of the world. If you're looking at it only for the sake of painting it, you're not seeing it.' (p. 82) There's sin in both directions. There's sin in stagnation and there's sin in movement for the sake of movement. There are small amounts of Goodness in everything, but those small amounts of goodness are not God. There's a trope of Tumblr posts and modern atheist thinking that says that life is about appreciating the small things, your cat or your trip to Japan. And those things are good. And it can be dangerous, finding yourself in a place mentally where you can't see any goodness. And for that person who is in a depression, it can be easier to see the small amounts of goodness—the beauty of a single flower, or a good meal, or their family's love. And moving towards those visible good things can be a way to get out of their slump. But those small, easily visible, good things are not God. God is bigger. Your reason for living needs to be bigger.
"Glory to God in the highest,
and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!" -Luke 2:14
“you can’t just do what is best, you also have to build trust and coordinate with others so you are on the same page”
Zig programmers are driving me insane.
Zig lets you write some code without specifying the types of variables, and somehow the Zig programmers end up in a situation where they don’t know the types of their variables.
There’s a B-plot in Colfer’s *Supernatralist* about gangs that race cars, and it’s really good. The A-plot has some really weird structural
issues. So I’m really not a fan of the book. I read it back in the day, just picked up a copy to see if the car race scene was as good as I remember. It’s quick, but pretty good. (I mean, it’s a kids book.) Pages 81-111 (midway through chapter 4 to midway through chapter 5–once the race is over it’s back to A-plot).
I wish I could describe why the A-plot is so bad. I think it’s because the characters don’t have much investment in it.