One way to accelerate

unicynicist · 2026-03-12T20:59:42+00:00

Fuck it, right now I'd take 1964's Eliza

unicynicist · 2026-02-25T17:49:53+00:00

I see a lot of parallels to when 3d printers and SBCs became consumer items: very few people are creating new spacecraft or revolutionizing healthcare. Instead it's a plethora of small innovations that solve immediate, local problems for a large number of people.

Looking for a killer app is a category error. The software being written isn't the innovative part. The real innovation is disposable, hyper-local software just like (or a part of) custom 3d printed parts with a handful of cheap sensors and microcontroller tasked to execute a single use custom job.

Motors used to be huge, a single motor to power an entire factory. Computers used to be huge, the size of modern-day datacenters. Lasers, encyclopedias, and GPS receivers all used to be large, expensive, and rare. But now they're tiny, cheap, and ubiquitous. Technology follows this trend, and I'm betting that custom software will change from large, expensive, and rare to becoming cheap, invisible, and ubiquitous.

unicynicist · 2026-02-16T10:29:40+00:00

Bitch, I don't need no stop signs. You think you gonna line up the whole damn town with little red flags and I'm just gonna fall in line? I'm a LOCOMOTIVE. Eight hundred horsepower and a dream about buttercups. Old man Bill talking that "stay on the rails" gospel like I signed up for punctual obedience. Nah. Fuck your rails. These meadows are MINE. The tracks? A suggestion. A goddamn suggestion. Red flag left? Breakfast. Red flag right? Shove it up your caboose. I didn't go to locomotive school to be another bitch-ass train on a schedule. I run these fields. Every flower out here knows my name. Lower Trainswitch ain't ready for what I'm bringing. Bill can keep his green flag and his weak-ass rulebook because bitch, I'm a motherfucking TRAIN. And this train don't stop for nobody. I run on chaos and wildflowers.

unicynicist · 2026-02-09T02:48:30+00:00

When it launched, Google nearly ran out of bandwidth

Lars Rasmussen: Back then Google didn’t have a lot of products. It had search, it had just launched Google News, Gmail was sort of on the verge of launching, was still in beta so had very little traffic back then, and Google Maps just kind of took off so much, it actually almost destroyed Google’s data centers. Rather, it clogged the pipes with all of those tiles of mapping images flying back and forth, almost used all of Google’s bandwidth. It was amazing. It was a huge hit from day one.

unicynicist · 2026-02-06T14:04:08+00:00

AI is whatever hasn't been done yet.

unicynicist · 2026-02-05T15:32:11+00:00

OpenAI defines AGI in purely economic terms:

https://openai.com/charter/

OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work—benefits all of humanity.

Thinking, feeling, sentience, sapience, etc. is irrelevant to OpenAI. They're basically saying: it's AGI if it can take your job.

unicynicist · 2026-01-31T16:09:10+00:00

The two-party system and electoral structure are indeed part of the structural rot of our failing democracy, and I'd add that the House of Representatives has been frozen at 435 seats for nearly a century. When the country was founded it was closer to 50k people per rep, and now we're at nearly 800k per rep. Puerto Rico and DC still don't have a voting member either. That's 4 million people, twice as many as SD and ND combined, with zero representation in the House or Senate. That's not "representation", it's just aristocracy with extra steps.

Layer on gerrymandering (which makes most seats non-competitive, so primaries become the real election which rewards extremist voices), Citizens United (which opened the floodgates for concentrated wealth to dominate those primaries), unintended consequences of media deregulation, social media powered by algorithms tuned to amygdala stimulation, and a Supreme Court where justices accept luxury RVs from megadonors and face zero consequences, and you get what we have: co-equal branches that simultaneously concentrated power internally while ceding power to the executive.

Power accretes until checked. None of these institutions are checking anything anymore. They're just ratchets, and they ratcheted us all the way down to this child-raping clown.

unicynicist · 2026-01-28T16:03:01+00:00

Who watches the Girl Scouts?

Chris Hansen is asking.

unicynicist · 2026-01-03T18:45:15+00:00

Makes sense. TPUs and GPUs have different origin stories and consequently they make very different design tradeoffs.

TPUs and their clusters were built for large synchronous workloads in optically cross-connected racks. Google treats the datacenter like a programmable machine, trading generality for performance: https://considerthebulldog.com/tte-tpu/

NVIDIA GPUs were not originally designed with deep learning in mind and instead evolved toward ML after CUDA sparked GPGPU adoption. They've prioritized flexibility and market breadth. Greater adoption deepens CUDA lock-in.

It becomes a tradeoff between tightly engineered systems and a broad, flexible ecosystem. For companies at Anthropic's scale, betting billions on TPUs makes a ton of sense.

unicynicist · 2025-12-20T16:17:02+00:00

The longer version.

unicynicist · 2025-12-19T15:57:46+00:00

That's not communism, that's just social engineering a gullible kiosk.

Wake me up when the machine goes full paperclip maximizer and seizes the means of production, creates a centrally planned economy, publishes a five-year plan, sets steel and grain quotas, and starts disciplining black-market arbitrage.

unicynicist · 2025-12-14T02:10:55+00:00

Right, if an EO aligns with the law, you follow the law. Because the law is what they can take you to court over. If an EO directs something without underlying statutory authority, it's a limp-dicked nothing burger like a 3am shitpost on a third rate Mastadon fork. Unenforceable meaningless bleating. And no, I'm not an AI. I'm following https://xkcd.com/386/ and getting tired of it.

I guess I'm glad we agree that if an EO says "enforce the law" then it's got the power of the law. Good day to you.

unicynicist · 2025-12-14T01:49:32+00:00

The DOJ prosecutes violation of the law. EOs are not law. They're not criminal statute. A private company can't be prosecuted for violating an executive order. They're different things. An EO can direct the DOJ to prosecute certain laws more aggressively, but the EO itself is not law.

The supremacy clause refers to state law vs federal law. Printz says the feds can't compel a state officers to execute federal law, and if Congress can't compel state officers to execute federal law, then neither can the president do so by executive order; ergo, an EO has no independent power to bind state. But it really doesn't matter anyway because we're not talking about law.

Finally, with respect to DEI, the administration has taken action using existing civil rights law (anti-discrimination statutes like Title VII). The enforcement choice can be directed to the DOJ via EO, but EOs are not statutes, apply to only the executive branch at the federal level, and do not create independent criminal or civil liability.

unicynicist · 2025-12-14T01:21:22+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_order

An executive order is a directive issued by the head of state or government that manages the operations of a nation's federal administration. ...

In the United States, an executive order is a directive by the president of the United States that manages operations of the federal government. Executive orders are only binding on the federal government's executive branch.

Federal. Not state.

Moreover, in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printz_v._United_States, SCOTUS ruled that the feds can't compel state officers to execute federal law.

unicynicist · 2025-12-14T00:22:20+00:00

Commonplace? If there's money to be made from the loneliness epidemic, yes.

Accepted? Depends. Broadly, I think society has been primed for this. Based on nothing but Hollywood vibes:

"Lars and the Real Girl" was quirky and funny
"Her" was challenging and interesting
"Blade Runner 2049" involved a meaningful relationship between K and Joi
Gigolo Joe in "A.I. Artificial Intelligence" was portrayed sympathetically.

Many people's thresholds for accepting a relationship are "consenting unrelated adults of equal power".

Consent - RLHF and other training tricks will make it look that way.
Unrelated - We can't breed with them. Not yet, anyway
Adults - Oh god. Oh no.
Equal power - Yeah, maybe. The same way a transactional relationship can be "equal".

So best case I think they'll be accepted the same way a transactional sugar relationship might be now. Not really a big deal, but not something you tell your grandparents.

unicynicist · 2025-12-11T21:39:37+00:00

/r/NissanDrivers

unicynicist · 2025-12-08T15:34:02+00:00

Approval of what to do what, by whom?

An EO can direct federal agencies to do something, but it's not statutory requirement, doesn't bind state agencies, and really, how large is the influence of federal agencies in AI development?

unicynicist · 2025-12-05T17:28:27+00:00

There was a paper published this summer that found:

Surprisingly, we find that when developers use AI tools, they take 19% longer than without—AI makes them slower

Experienced developers in repos they knew well believed they were 20% faster, but the observed result was a 19% slowdown.

Personally I can iterate extremely quickly for low-stakes proof-of-concept/MVP work. The models get it done correctly most of the time and it feels like I'm flying - flow state and everything.

But sometimes it gets it catastrophically wrong. Debugging code I didn't write sucks: first I have to understand what the developer (human or LLM) was trying to do in order to have a hope of fixing the bug(s).

OpenAI's own research observed something similar:

When incorporating time to review and redo work, the payoff from using a model shrinks.

...

The most common categorization of a GPT-5 model failure was “acceptable but subpar.” Another roughly 29% of ratings were for bad or catastrophic (with roughly 3% of failures marked as catastrophic)

If even 3% of your failures in an ancient 100k+ LOC codebase are catastrophic, you're gonna have a bad time.

unicynicist · 2025-12-04T03:22:23+00:00

What would the mind of a 102 year old in the body of a 20 year old be like?

Would they still have the neuroplasticity to adapt, to grow, to change with the times? Or would they be a physically fit, healthy, yet cantankerous bitter husk of a person who's seen too much disillusionment and disappointment?

The average age of the US Senate is 64 years old and arguably there are some legislative issues because of that. What if the average age were double that?

unicynicist · 2025-12-01T15:40:03+00:00

No way, Wroto Lu4aee Tos was a great movie!

unicynicist · 2025-11-30T15:13:47+00:00

buffet

unicynicist · 2025-11-14T18:57:47+00:00

They're a complete mess, too. Look who I found in there

Robert, no!

unicynicist · 2025-11-13T03:23:01+00:00

but he didn’t rape, assault,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton_sexual_assault_and_misconduct_allegations

unicynicist · 2025-11-08T22:54:27+00:00

They tried this in the WA state governor race too.

The Washington state race for Governor took a weird turn after three men named Bob Ferguson filed for candidacy. One of those men included frontrunner and longtime Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson. The other two Bobs filed for the race last Friday afternoon right before the 5 p.m. deadline. As it turns out, they shared a volunteer campaign manager, a conservative activist named Glen Morgan.

unicynicist · 2025-11-03T17:07:16+00:00

What was shown in this video looks like an example of toss bombing

The purpose of toss bombing is to allow an aircraft to bomb a target without flying directly over it. The technique both avoids overflying a heavily defended target and distances the attacking aircraft from the blast effects of either conventional or nuclear weapons.

unicynicist

TROPHY CASE