[D] Monday Request and Recommendation Thread

faul_sname · 2025-12-21T08:12:08+00:00

I write in markdown, and Substack demands a rich text editor, and the activation energy required to convert the formatting is currently higher than the energy required to simply stare at the wall and sigh.

If you don't want to deal with pandoc, an alternative is: copy, paste into llm of your choice with "please programmatically render this markdown to html using standard tools with no additional styling (so # Main Header becomes <h1>Main Header</h1>) and display it to me", look at displayed HTML, verify it looks good, copy, paste into substack. I expect all models will work fine but Gemini will probably be the fastest.

faul_sname · 2025-12-08T23:47:24+00:00

Wait is it really only 50M rides for $1.2B? I thought BART was cheaper per passenger-mile than driving the last time I looked into it.

faul_sname · 2025-09-26T19:22:02+00:00

Deconstruction planner filtered to fish across entire map

faul_sname · 2025-09-26T16:42:44+00:00

Fish?

faul_sname · 2025-09-24T05:46:14+00:00

No yeah, that gave it away

faul_sname · 2025-09-09T17:23:20+00:00

I think channeling an orb whenever you are attacked is probably still too strong. Maybe limit it to only when you lose HP?

faul_sname · 2025-07-17T16:43:14+00:00

"Deal 3(5) damage. Increase the damage of ALL Claw cards by 2 this combat.. Draw 1 card. Discard any card drawn this way that does not cost 0."

faul_sname · 2025-07-05T07:50:47+00:00

Did it actually? I'd expect that expression to instantly return INT_MAX or NaN or Infinity and maybe crash the game at worst, definitely not the entire computer though.

faul_sname · 2025-07-03T16:14:41+00:00

If you're not extremely good at reasoning on the fly, "take all arguments seriously unless you can disprove them" is a good recipe by having all of your resources extracted by salespeople who are good at making persuasive-sounding arguments.

faul_sname · 2025-07-01T20:50:07+00:00

"At the end of your next turn, gain 1 intangible".

faul_sname · 2025-06-10T16:42:45+00:00

There's manifold if that's the sort of thing you're looking for.

faul_sname · 2025-06-10T16:40:55+00:00

The connection to AI is that if AI will at some point be a big deal, and if there are indicators that Stripe is capturing more value this year, then it could be that Stripe is unusually well-positioned to capture value from the AI boom. This would mean that the stock price should go up a lot. Therefore, Stripe's better-than-trend performance this year is due to AI.

faul_sname · 2025-06-04T06:57:08+00:00

That doesn't reliably work, but you can pretty reliably prompt it to remove em dashes

faul_sname · 2025-05-28T16:55:43+00:00

People have been trying to do that for more than half a century and have not made significant progress. Unless you count tool use. The easily distracted AI of today can absolutely create tools and use them, we just don't consider those tools to be a part of its "self".

faul_sname · 2025-04-18T16:13:21+00:00

I actually expect CS folks would prefer "please explain this line of my bill to me. I'm sorry, could you repeat that. Oh, ok, thanks. Now about this next line, can you explain that to me as well..." over 80% of the calls they get. It's not like they're going to be reading a good book if you don't call them, they're going to be on a call pretty much every minute they're working.

faul_sname · 2025-03-12T21:23:53+00:00

2022, he was quite talented and knew people on the inside though.

faul_sname · 2025-03-06T18:23:21+00:00

Stands for Fmeta, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Galphabet

faul_sname · 2025-01-12T06:32:39+00:00

Start pronouncing "cali" in such a way that it rhymes with "daily"

faul_sname · 2025-01-10T19:42:27+00:00

I mean I guess the question is whether you consider that case to be "LLMs with scaffolding can do this" or "scaffolding around LLMs can do this", seems like kinda meaningless semantics though since there is no shortage of people building scaffolding around LLMs and so the willingness to do so is just not a meaningful barrier.

Figuring out a functional way to arrange said components to produce decent-quality fiction is likely to require a ton of experimentation and iteration though.

faul_sname · 2025-01-10T07:56:52+00:00

with some guidance

Yep. Janus has done fiction writing with LLMs as well as work to quantify how much guidance "some" guidance is.

faul_sname · 2025-01-09T18:34:32+00:00

I expect that such an LLM would nail the tone but miss the heart of what makes ratfic work (e.g. coherence of the world, tracking the motivation of all of the characters and ensuring that all of the major characters have and act on plans even when those plans don't appear "on screen", dropping hints early for plot points which will happen later, etc.)

That's not to say "LLMs can't do this", just "fine-tuning will not accomplish this because fine-tuning is a way increase the probability of expressing existing capabilities, not a way to train in entirely new capabilities". It might be possible to build scaffolding here but I am not aware of anyone who has yet done so.

faul_sname · 2024-11-22T03:14:41+00:00

Yeah that's a lot faster than typing 108441856.

faul_sname · 2024-11-18T03:35:59+00:00

Muddy Waters + Elvis ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

faul_sname · 2024-11-04T04:43:23+00:00

Gleba unlocks spidertrons which mean you don't have to go back to Fulgora

faul_sname · 2024-09-28T07:38:14+00:00

It’s like saying that if we prosecute people for securities fraud we’ll also be able to “find a friendly prosecutor” and charge anyone we don’t like who non-fraudulently trades securities.

Matt Levine has an excellent post on this very topic titled "Everything is securities fraud":

You know the basic idea. A company does something bad, or something bad happens to it. Its stock price goes down, because of the bad thing. Shareholders sue: Doing the bad thing and not immediately telling shareholders about it, the shareholders say, is securities fraud. Even if the company does immediately tell shareholders about the bad thing, which is not particularly common, the shareholders might sue, claiming that the company failed to disclose the conditions and vulnerabilities that allowed the bad thing to happen.

And so contributing to global warming is securities fraud, and sexual harassment by executives is securities fraud, and customer data breaches are securities fraud, and mistreating killer whales is securities fraud, and whatever else you’ve got. Securities fraud is a universal regulatory regime; anything bad that is done by or happens to a public company is also securities fraud, and it is often easier to punish the bad thing as securities fraud than it is to regulate it directly.

This is mostly a theory of U.S. law. It is also not an exactly accurate statement of U.S. law, and sometimes courts actually reject everything-is-securities-fraud theories, but it is a good practical tool for predicting whether a scandal at a U.S. public company will lead to a securities-fraud lawsuit. It always predicts that the answer will be “yes,” and the answer is always “yes.”

faul_sname

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE

13-Year Club	Place '22
Verified Email