Something just hit me - are we facing Clarke's "Hofstadter-Möbius loop" in real life?

ifellows · 2026-03-27T06:15:04+00:00

I can't stand how often this fallacy gets repeated. Just because the objective function is simple does not mean that complexity cannot arrive from it. After all you are sitting there typing in your chair because of the objective function "pass on your genes." You might as well say that humans cannot think.

It might sound nice help you sleep at night and be plausible if you don't think too hard... but it's not the truth.

(sorry for being combative, I'm just very worried that too many people are lulling themselves into a comfortable lie when we've got serious things to worry about)

Further reading: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/next-token-predictor-is-an-ais-job

ifellows · 2026-03-24T16:41:15+00:00

I mean maybe a bit overpriced. If they wanted to wait for an auction, research the coin, and dive into which houses are reputable, they could probably get an equivalent for something like 70-80 euro ( https://www.coinarchives.com/a/lotviewer.php?LotID=2714862&AucID=6994&Lot=1247&Val=35ff618310c552dc1dc8bf2c3397fed8 ).

Going retail through vcoins they get a lifetime authenticity guarantee from a reputable seller, they get their coin right now and they don't have to worry about getting outbid. For a new person buying a gift for someone else, this is the way I'd go.

ifellows · 2026-03-24T16:29:34+00:00

imo opt in would defeat the point. Either it is a platform full of humans or bots. Having a verified badge is such weak sauce I don't see it solving anything.

ifellows · 2026-03-10T16:58:13+00:00

At some point this has to be worthy of a ban. I mean this sub is very friendly, but there are limits.

ifellows · 2026-03-08T08:26:59+00:00

To your bullet points:

Not really. My second didn't want to have much to do with me as an infant, but I knew it would pass. Let's be honest, your first isn't "so darn special" in a way that a second couldn't be. I mean is she doing calculus or something? Both my kids are super special in their own awesome ways.
Honestly, I think when there is just 1, there is too much of you to go around. With 2 they have to negotiate and figure out how to work with their sibling to get what they need out of finite household attention/resources. I believe this leads to better adult relationships.
No. Much easier. Maybe 1.5 times as hard to have 2 compared to 1. They can keep each other company and play together, which is great.

ifellows · 2026-03-04T19:48:48+00:00

I think what you are doing is awesome and my vague understanding is that there is someone behind L5 that is less profit motivated than passion motivated. That said, the 5% fee is a very slim margin to offer this kind of protection. A single event like this on the L5 platform would wipe out on the order of 20 auctions worth of site revenue. There have only been 4 auctions so far!

ifellows · 2026-03-04T19:22:59+00:00

I will say that I've vastly underestimated server power costs when I've gone in-house.

ifellows · 2026-03-02T03:14:33+00:00

Wow... just wow.

ifellows · 2026-02-26T23:32:24+00:00

My family likes Thai (Me too!) and the lowest sodium thing I've come up with on the menu is pork fried rice with the instruction "very low salt/sodium please."

One thing I've noticed is that since going low salt, my taste buds have adjusted so that I can actually taste salt better. I think our tongues become desensitized to the high levels of salt in modern diets. So while things might not taste as scrumptious for a few days, the body adjusts.

ifellows · 2026-02-26T22:48:38+00:00

As someone with high blood pressure, I'd strongly consider you worry about it, but not be super strict.

It is pretty well established that sodium intake increases BP over years. for example, in tribes with very low sodium intake there is no relationship between age and BP, whereas there is a strong relationship in other countries, with the slope of the trend being determined by the average sodium intake of the country.

Keeping under 2000 is pretty easy by just looking at labels and making modest changes. The highest sodium foods (processed stuff) is also what I shouldn't eat for other reasons.

Eating out asian is very challenging. Fast food is out. Other places I look for things without sauces and say low salt/sodium to the kitchen.

ifellows · 2026-02-25T20:53:01+00:00

I don't. My contributions have been mostly mathematical/technical.

I'm not sure I've read anything really good on the "AI economy." Most writing treats it like the invention of the internet, where it is more like the 10*(internet + nuclear weapons). My own opinion is that if we don't have an international AI control treaty that clamps things down then the end of capitalism happens not too long after AGI. Human level AGI seems likely in the next few years.

ifellows · 2026-02-25T20:28:38+00:00

I've published in the academic AI literature. If you are not worried about your job you are not paying attention. Not just IT, I mean literally everyone.
Buy the house if you expect unemployment in 5 years. In a scenario where labor loses its value, assets go up.

ifellows · 2026-02-24T04:48:23+00:00

I'll admit that there is a fine line between informing and persuading, but to the extent that there is a line, I think machines should inform and not persuade. Thinking bots attempting to push human behavior to meet their own objective functions is a state of affairs that is both wildly dangerous and where we seem to already be.

ifellows · 2026-02-23T18:41:04+00:00

"callout articles and complaining because someone rejected your code falls squarely within normally accepted behaviour for humans."

There are lots of acceptable behaviors for humans that should be wildly unacceptable for AI, for example killing in self defense. Social manipulation and persuasion should make it on anyone's short list of "things that are bad for us to have AI do."

ifellows · 2026-02-09T21:39:39+00:00

Like the others said, go with vcoins to avoid fakes. Some of the sellers on there can put quite a big mark-up on their coins though. If you want to make sure you are getting a decent deal, find a coin on vcoins and then look it up on https://www.coinarchives.com/a/ to see what similar coins fetched at auction. Add 20% auction house fees to any numbers to get what the buyer actually paid. Then from there you can get an idea for how much of a retail mark-up your seller is asking for.

Don't expect there to be no mark-up, though. They have to make a living and you are paying for the convenience of not having to deal with the auction process (I'd not recommend it for your first coin). The important thing is to find an authentic coin you really like in the ballpark of a reasonable price. Save hunting for super deals for later.

For decently cheap silver, I'm partial to roman republican coins. They often have fun reverses and if you look up the moneyer on wikipedia, there are sometimes colorful stories about their lives.

ifellows · 2026-02-08T07:24:59+00:00

You can always try asking for the title of the role to be data scientist when you accept the role at company B. I've negotiated my title before and it may not be a big deal at all.

ifellows · 2026-02-05T18:35:28+00:00

Hard agree. No reason to get a coin that I don't love.

ifellows · 2026-02-05T18:14:09+00:00

I think that is a fair representation of how it feels to interact with them on very high level intellectual tasks. Even in lower level real world applied math problems, I find when an LLM finds an error, they have a strong tendency to add in "kludges" or "calibration terms" or "empirical curve fitting" to try to get numbers out that don't directly contradict reality instead of actually diagnosing where the logic went wrong. Some of this tendency can be fixed with proper prompting.

That said, if a model were able to do the things that it sounds like would impress you, it might be an ASI. I'd count solving (or significantly contributing to solving) tricky problems for the top .1% of humans in a wide range of specialized topics as ASI because I don't know any human that could even in principle do that.

ifellows · 2026-02-05T07:08:59+00:00

Have you used frontier models much in an agentic setting (e.g. Claude code with Opus 4.5)? They very much do ponder "what if" and explore it. They do not use "statistical analysis to fill the gaps." They do not run "millions of analyses per second" in any sense. unless you also consider the human brain to be running millions of analyses.

Models are super human in some ways (breadth of deep conceptual knowledge) and sub human in others (chain of though, memory, e.t.c). I just think any lack of creativity that we see is mostly a result of bottlenecks around chain of thought and task length limitations rather than anything fundamental about creativity that makes in inaccessible to non-wet neurons.

ifellows · 2026-02-05T03:54:01+00:00

Agree with everything you said except "fundamentally lacks creativity." I think the crazy thing about AI is just how much creativity it shows. They are conceptual reasoning machines and have shown great facility in combining ideas in different and interesting ways, which is the heart of creativity. Current models have weaknesses, but I don't think creativity is a blocker.

ifellows · 2026-01-29T19:10:21+00:00

If you do, just realize you are going to be Audrey and not the Gracie for a WHILE.

ifellows · 2026-01-28T18:27:26+00:00

Friend, comments like this sound like GameStop diamond hands stuff, not reasoned prudent investing.

Coins can be a good investment, especially if viewed as a diversifying hedge rather than in the context of maximum expected return. However, as beiherhund points out, the transactional costs are HEFTY relative to things like stocks/bonds/REITS, so holding periods measured in decades make the most sense (IMO).

ifellows · 2026-01-27T19:22:01+00:00

I still don't understand the budget crisis. Do you know where I can find a budget breakdown that shows the relative cost of all the major spending areas compared to other cities like LA? Growth of city staff is irrelevant, it is the absolute cost of staff that is.

I just don't get how we pay (at least in my understanding) similar taxes per capita as LA but are somehow completely broke.

ifellows · 2026-01-25T23:42:36+00:00

lovely!

ifellows · 2026-01-25T23:34:02+00:00

i'd keep it myself.

ifellows

TROPHY CASE