chris muscarella

When the intended decompressor is very lossy (like a human mind), overspecifying the representation with lots of synonyms and syntactic sugar seems prudent. When the intended decompressor is closer to perfectly lossless (as LLMs are rapidly becoming), it makes less sense. (5/12)

Growing suspicion that there are vanishingly few use cases for consumer agents. People don’t do work in their personal lives. The only people who do are sf dorks using spreadsheets to plan trips to tahoe

A publicly listed Nigerian salt company just put out a public announcement begging its biggest shareholder to please call them back. Union Dicon Salt Plc, listed on the NGX, says its largest shareholder, a Brazilian firm called Aims Limited, owns 64 million shares which is 40% of the entire company. And they can’t reach them. At all. They’ve tried multiple times over a prolonged period and got nothing. So the Company Secretary literally published a notice on March 3rd asking Aims Limited to contact them via their office in Kirikiri, Lagos, or call his phone number or email him. A whole publicly listed company is out here posting “please call me” to the entity that owns 40% of it. Quick history. This company was founded in 1984 as a joint venture between Aims of Brazil and Nigeria’s Defence Industries Corporation. Aims was the technical partner with 40% ownership. The company processed and packaged raw salt until it was shut down temporarily in 1988 then merged with Union Salt Limited in 1991 to become Union Dicon Salt Plc. Now here’s what makes this matter. A 40% shareholder has serious influence over board appointments, strategic decisions and shareholder voting. If they can’t be reached, the company can’t hold proper AGMs, can’t get key approvals and governance basically stalls. Meanwhile the stock is up 141% year to date. Went from ₦6.90 to ₦16.60. Up 68% in the last four weeks alone. Somebody owns 40% of a company gaining 141% this year and can’t be found. Nigerian stock market will never bore you.

Anthropic published a blog post one hour ago. Cybersecurity stocks have lost $10B since. CrowdStrike -6.5%. Cloudflare -6%. Okta -5.7%. One blog post. One hour. $10B gone.

Let me be more clear. Currently 4/1000 returns are audited. Soon 1000/1000. Currently it’s estimated that 15-20 percent of people cheat on taxes. Thats a lot!

Christopher Alexander has an observation about problem solving that I like: you should always be focusing on solving the part that has the fewest degrees of freedom. When figuring out how to design a kitchen, for instance, there are a bunch of subproblems to solve: where to put the stove and the windows and the kitchen table. And which of these have the fewest degrees of freedom? The windows. If you want good light, there is going to be only one wall where you can place the windows, and at best two spots on that wall where the window looks natural. So you put the window there. And now what? The kitchen table, because you want to have that where the good light falls. The stove can wait because that can sit nearly anywhere. If you start by placing the stove, there is a big risk that you block the only good position for one of the other subproblems that have fewer degrees of freedom, and so the whole design will suffer.