Where the AI market is talking

Why I didn’t sign the Fields medallists’ letter

This was also guest-posted on Tao's blog. Tao has a flood of guest posts that cope in a varying degree. Most start with empathy, move on to inevitability and emphasize human understanding. Few of them mention research theft, none of them mentions concentration of capital and resources. The fact that Gowers quotes Tsimerman (OpenAI employee) says it all. A couple of mathematicians are determined to bulldoze forward with AI, and I suspect Tao will also continue after the meek concern letter and the cleverly worded guest posts that are subliminal ads for AI.

A warning about 'model welfare'

I will say it's not a bad theory in the sense we can attempt to falsify it. The one thing about an EM field in particular I have questions about, is why don't our brains turn off under even moderate electrical and magnetic fields. Note that they actually do under strong fields (Transcranial magnetic stimulation). The strength of these fields should be weak enough that even a bar magnet should mess with us. We need something else on top of what we know to explain the field coherency if this is the case. This is where most mind theories do have issues, how does it stay stable. Quantum theory of the mind has a lot of the same problems, though we are finding some interesting structures that could have explanatory power. Another thing I read recently that I found interesting is on platonic mat…

Small programming tricks

This will probably seem to obvious to mention to many, but it took me a few years to realise that you could replicate the "BREAK XYZ" from languages of yesteryear: FOR I = 1 TO 10 FOR J = 1 TO 10 FOR K = 1 TO 10 DOSOMETHING I, J, K REM Breaks out of the middle loop, continues next I iteration IF SOMECONDITION(I, J, K) THEN BREAK J NEXT K NEXT J NEXT I in modern languages by refactoring the loop you want to break out of into a function and using return instead: def inner_loops(i): for j in range(10): for k in range(10): do_something(i, j, k) if some_condition(i, j, k): return def fn(): for i in range(10): inner_loops(i)

Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes

I feel weirdly stuck on both sides of this. I haven't been in a full-time "code writing" roles for years, so my own personal usage of LLMs for anything is roughly nil right now, just because I continue to be able to get done all tasks I wanted to get done in the time I have using tools and techniques I already had available, and have seen little need to adopt new ones. The exceptions have been around things like using the text interface for diagramming tools to at least get the initial scaffolding set up without having to learn the specific quirks of that tool, then spending maybe an hour or two at the end to clean up and make it look nice and ensure it's actually coherent and has no mistakes. This is a task I have to do maybe two or three times a month, so it isn't a huge win, but it's n…

AWS says it can't restore some data from mideast facilities struck by Iran

My org isn't a Backblaze customer but a Wasabi one. Wasabi offers the ability to replicate buckets to other zones at double the cost, of course. I would imagine Backblaze would offer something similar for original data storage for their customers to choose.

Canada welcomes EU proposal to become 'associate member'

Because he can't string together a coherent sentence?

Backups Aren't Simple

Yes, yes they are simple. Btrfs and zfs have incredible snapshot and replicate

The Relation Between Mathematics and Physics by Paul Dirac (1939)

I sort of have this suspicion that the kinds of phenomena that we can even apprehend are pretty closely related to what we can reason about mathematically, and the reason that math seems to work so well to model behavior that we understand says more about how our brain works than how the universe works. If a phenomenon isn’t model-able by relatively simple math it doesn’t even look like a phenomenon to us, it looks like a chaotic mess. Which is to say that unless something has mathematical coherence it is more or less invisible to our experience.

Backups Aren't Simple

We actually do use some of our backups in anonymize -> test environment pipeline so it gets dual use on top of just testing restores. We also use S3 versioning in case something gets the keys and just erases it. Then it's replicated to the cloud S3-compatible store to get the offsite location. Only feature I really miss is "turn this restore into .tar", both for testing restores and for convenience when we get requests of "we need this directory from 4 weeks ago"

Neovim have a ~$800k Bitcoin donation sitting untouched since 2023

“Yeah no.” Ah yes let’s ignore the tons of energy being used in giant data centers run by visa and Mastercard to operate the payment cards used by billions of people around the world. “Yeah no.” You know what happened in USA? A lot of people got their cash stolen. Your arguments are as coherent as the dissonant “Yeah no.”

Ask HN: Where is all of the AI coded software?

It's all over a lot of niche subject areas and industries. Lots of mobile apps that go viral for a bit turn out to be AI coded, and there has been an explosion of vibe-coded software in the retrogaming scene (for mods, recomps, PC ports, ROM hacks, etc). But there are reasons that well known software isn't being replaced with AI coded alternatives. First, the network effect is pretty strong here. Even many longtime competitors to things like Photoshop and Office struggle to get noticed, let alone some fly-by-night deal someone coded over a weekend. It's possible these alternatives exist, but you haven't come across them because they haven't blown up online yet. Secondly, the type of software you mention is incredibly complex, and packed with features that hard to replicate regardless of h…

Cloudflare/Security-Audit-Skill

Shameless plug: in case someone finds this requiring too many tokens, we shared the recipe on how we built our own in house audit skill so that it can easily be replicated and tuned to different environments https://www.synthesia.io/post/automating-code-security-revie...

Backups Aren't Simple

So you delete a file by mistake and it replicates within seconds? Not exactly a backup. And a malware will do that to all of your files.

Backups Aren't Simple

Using this in production for 5 years now. We have a replicated MongoDB and one replica lives on a ZFS doing snapshot backups via syncoid. Love it.

AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

The role has changed from writing code to writing skills and reviewing code. And this has to be done by a software engineer not a PM or Designer. A software engineer can now replicate his/her skill faster.

ElevenLabs Launches Reception

Although a lot of people don’t like talking with automated call centres (press 1, if you want to continue), ElevenLabs’ service focuses on helping plumbers etc. where there aren’t so many incoming calls that it could fully employ someone.

OpenAI's Hugging Face Hack Is the Best AI Safety Opportunity So Far

ElevenLabs Launches Reception

Common Crawl Data Stored on a Hugging Face Bucket

A warning about 'model welfare'

> does a hydrocarbon have feelings? what about a mitochondria? a cell? a neuron? what about a collection of neurons? how many neurons before it has "feelings"? The best theory I have heard is that subjective experience is a field of some sort (the EM field, maybe?). The brain and its neurons etc. are essentially an antenna. They both modify and stabilize the field, and read off changes in the field and translate these into actions (firing motor units, etc.). The subconscious is computation done either only in neurons (no coherent field) or in various topological pockets not directly connected to the main topological structure in the field (which is "your experience"). Since transistors etc. do not work in this same way, they are essentially entirely subconscious, with no coherent, cent…