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@chroniclesXY

A curious mind. An avid reader.

Ann Arbor, MI Katılım Ekim 2021
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Patrick Collison
Patrick Collison@patrickc·
Detroit impressions: • The downtown is full of beautiful buildings. All of them seem to have been built specifically in the 1920s. I guess that is after the city had accumulated enough auto wealth but before the twin hits of Modernism and the Depression. (I hadn't known that the GM Renaissance Center, built as a revitalization project, was at the time the largest private development in US history, and also at the time the world's tallest hotel. It may be large, but it is not pretty.) The downtown is surprisingly depopulated -- both the streets and the sidewalks feel empty. That said, it didn't feel at all unsafe. There are lots of great homes in the suburbs. • The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation is amazing, and it's worth visiting Detroit for it alone. Among many (many) other things, it contains the oldest known surviving steam engine in the world, the actual Montgomery bus on which Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, a deconstructed Model T, a deconstructed Eames Chair, and many great cars, agricultural equipment, locomotives, industrial specimens, and more. (They have the Lincoln Continental that JFK was riding in when assassinated -- which, apparently, was returned to service and used by several subsequent presidents.) • The museum made me wonder why American car design peaked in the mid-60s. (This fact is very evident at the museum.) The LLMs blame the 1966 National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act. (Not quite wtfhappenedin1971.com, but close.) • Good food exists but it is hard to find. • The Heidelberg Project also exists and is unique. • We stayed at the Dearborn Inn, which is wonderful, and contains cottages modeled after the homes of significant American figures. Dearborn (and Hamtramck) are now predominantly Muslim, apparently for reasons that go back a century to Henry Ford's $5 wage. Dearborn felt noticeably prosperous (we stopped for coffee at a fancy Japanese cheesecake cafe); Hamtramck did not. • Michigan.gov says that the Hispanic population of Michigan is just 6%. Coming from California, the absence is very striking. • The Detroit Institute of Arts is remarkable, particularly the room with the American landscapes and the section with the Dutch masters (especially The Visitation). An obvious question is why there is nothing quite like it in the Bay Area given how much richer the latter is than Detroit ever was -- we techies are just so uncultured by comparison. The Diego Rivera murals are amazing (and quite strange; you can see why they were controversial). • Detroit is full of historic plaques -- they are truly everywhere. This is presumably due in part to the fact that Detroit has a lot of history, but it still has many more than places with comparable historical depth. Some research suggests that it might be related to generous tax credits for historic preservation. Whether or not that is true, Detroit persuades me that other places should engage in more plaquemaxxing. • I recommend a visit! You overall leave with some sense for how exciting America must have felt in the early 20th century.
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xy@chroniclesXY·
@adxtyahq I am taking a small break between jobs. I read some foundational textbook, go to gym, cook, and read Dostoyevsky in the evening. It feels so great. I kinda wished I had asked a later starting date…
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aditya
aditya@adxtyahq·
we should normalize 1-year career breaks this guy worked at linkedin for years, took a year off, now at meta
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xy@chroniclesXY·
I definitely prefer opus 4.6. 4.7 doesn't push back as often, and is a lot more agreeable when i feel that it shouldn't.
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Naval
Naval@naval·
Truth, love, and beauty are all pursued for their own sake, even if they make us worse off.
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xy@chroniclesXY·
Vibe coded an app for my parents. My mom had a very positive comment! This made me very happy.
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Dwarkesh Patel
Dwarkesh Patel@dwarkesh_sp·
Really enjoyed chatting with @michael_nielsen about how we recognize scientific progress. It's especially relevant for closing the RL verification loop for scientific discovery. But it's also a surprisingly mysterious and elusive question when you look at the history of human science. We approach this question stories like Einstein (who claimed that he hadn't even heard of the famous Michelson-Morley experiment, which is supposed to have motivated special relativity, until after he had come up with the theory), Darwin (why did it take till 1859 to lay out an idea whose essence every farmer since antiquity must have observed?), Prout (how do you recognize that isotopes exist if you cannot chemically separate them?), and many others. The verification loop on scientific ideas is often extremely long and weirdly hostile. Ancient Athenians dismissed Aristarchus's heliocentrism in the 3rd century BC because it would imply that the stars should shift in the sky as the Earth orbits the sun. The first successful measurement of stellar parallax was in 1838. That's a 2,000-year verification loop. But clearly human science is able to make progress faster than raw experimental falsification/verification would imply, and in cases where experiments are very ambiguous. How? Michael has some very deep and provocative hypotheses about the nature of progress. One I found especially thought-provoking is that aliens will likely have a VERY different science + tech stack than us. Which contradicts the common sense picture of a linear tech tree that I was assuming. And has some interesting implications about how future civilizations might trade and cooperate with each other. So many other interesting ideas. Hope you enjoy this as much as I did. 0:00:00 – How scientific progress outpaces its verification loops 0:17:51 – Newton was the last of the magicians 0:23:26 – Why wasn’t natural selection obvious much earlier? 0:29:52 – Could gradient descent have discovered general relativity? 0:50:54 – Why aliens will have a different tech stack than us 1:15:26 – Are there infinitely many deep scientific principles left to discover? 1:26:25 – What drew Michael to quantum computing so early? 1:35:29 – Does science need a new way to assign credit? 1:43:57 – Prolificness versus depth 1:49:17 – What it takes to actually internalize what you learn Look up Dwarkesh Podcast on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.
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xy@chroniclesXY·
@kafkaswife Peter Hessler's books! Henry Kissinger's On China is also very good.
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Poppy Coburn
Poppy Coburn@kafkaswife·
Does anyone have any good recommendations for books on China / Chinese history?
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@karthickdotxyz @Yuchenj_UW Just realized that codex wrote more code for me than claude now. Claude ran out of limit for every big feature (several tasks). For codex I used extra high reasoning effort, and have no issues so far.
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Karthick
Karthick@karthickdotxyz·
@Yuchenj_UW just use codex brother, you won't face any issues in your code
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Yuchen Jin
Yuchen Jin@Yuchenj_UW·
“Claude, write this code, make no mistakes” “There is a bug” “There is still a bug” “There is still a bug” “There is still a bug, dude” “There is still a bug” “There is still a bug” “There is still a bug, ffs!” Claude: “Claude usage limit reached. Your limit will reset at 3am.”
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xy@chroniclesXY·
@karthickdotxyz @Yuchenj_UW second this. not sure what openai did for token efficiency, or maybe they are just more generous with tokens, but i never have reached the session limit with codex.
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xy@chroniclesXY·
The reason I feel Alyosha is closer to truth may be exactly because I have embodied experience of the world.
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xy@chroniclesXY·
This raises a question on large language model (llm): llm represents the world entirely by language, then how far it could go? Where is its limit, not just in terms of physical world, but even in the idea sense? But perhaps the two are related.
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xy@chroniclesXY·
Throughout reading The Brothers Karamazov the second time, I am constantly reminded the limit of language - what feels true can't be impressively argued (Alyosha doesn't have the best lines in the novel).
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xy@chroniclesXY·
@karpathy Perhaps this is the simplest version of brain-machine fusion... It starts to feel like an external brain with access of so much information about me.
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Andrej Karpathy
Andrej Karpathy@karpathy·
Farzapedia, personal wikipedia of Farza, good example following my Wiki LLM tweet. I really like this approach to personalization in a number of ways, compared to "status quo" of an AI that allegedly gets better the more you use it or something: 1. Explicit. The memory artifact is explicit and navigable (the wiki), you can see exactly what the AI does and does not know and you can inspect and manage this artifact, even if you don't do the direct text writing (the LLM does). The knowledge of you is not implicit and unknown, it's explicit and viewable. 2. Yours. Your data is yours, on your local computer, it's not in some particular AI provider's system without the ability to extract it. You're in control of your information. 3. File over app. The memory here is a simple collection of files in universal formats (images, markdown). This means the data is interoperable: you can use a very large collection of tools/CLIs or whatever you want over this information because it's just files. The agents can apply the entire Unix toolkit over them. They can natively read and understand them. Any kind of data can be imported into files as input, and any kind of interface can be used to view them as the output. E.g. you can use Obsidian to view them or vibe code something of your own. Search "File over app" for an article on this philosophy. 4. BYOAI. You can use whatever AI you want to "plug into" this information - Claude, Codex, OpenCode, whatever. You can even think about taking an open source AI and finetuning it on your wiki - in principle, this AI could "know" you in its weights, not just attend over your data. So this approach to personalization puts *you* in full control. The data is yours. In Universal formats. Explicit and inspectable. Use whatever AI you want over it, keep the AI companies on their toes! :) Certainly this is not the simplest way to get an AI to know you - it does require you to manage file directories and so on, but agents also make it quite simple and they can help you a lot. I imagine a number of products might come out to make this all easier, but imo "agent proficiency" is a CORE SKILL of the 21st century. These are extremely powerful tools - they speak English and they do all the computer stuff for you. Try this opportunity to play with one.
Farza 🇵🇰🇺🇸@FarzaTV

This is Farzapedia. I had an LLM take 2,500 entries from my diary, Apple Notes, and some iMessage convos to create a personal Wikipedia for me. It made 400 detailed articles for my friends, my startups, research areas, and even my favorite animes and their impact on me complete with backlinks. But, this Wiki was not built for me! I built it for my agent! The structure of the wiki files and how it's all backlinked is very easily crawlable by any agent + makes it a truly useful knowledge base. I can spin up Claude Code on the wiki and starting at index.md (a catalog of all my articles) the agent does a really good job at drilling into the specific pages on my wiki it needs context on when I have a query. For example, when trying to cook up a new landing page I may ask: "I'm trying to design this landing page for a new idea I have. Please look into the images and films that inspired me recently and give me ideas for new copy and aesthetics". In my diary I kept track of everything from: learnings, people, inspo, interesting links, images. So the agent reads my wiki and pulls up my "Philosophy" articles from notes on a Studio Ghibli documentary, "Competitor" articles with YC companies whose landing pages I screenshotted, and pics of 1970s Beatles merch I saved years ago. And it delivers a great answer. I built a similar system to this a year ago with RAG but it was ass. A knowledge base that lets an agent find what it needs via a file system it actually understands just works better. The most magical thing now is as I add new things to my wiki (articles, images of inspo, meeting notes) the system will likely update 2-3 different articles where it feels that context belongs, or, just creates a new article. It's like this super genius librarian for your brain that's always filing stuff for your perfectly and also let's you easily query the knowledge for tasks useful to you (ex. design, product, writing, etc) and it never gets tired. I might spend next week productizing this, if that's of interest to you DM me + tell me your usecase!

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Liam Fedus
Liam Fedus@LiamFedus·
RL against verifiable rewards in LLMs has clearly opened a very powerful regime. It works, and because it works, there is a strong tendency to view more and more problems through that lens. You optimize for tasks where the reward is clean, where success is easy to check, where the feedback loop closes quickly. This is productive and will keep paying off. But it also creates a bias: you start emphasizing what is legible to the training setup, not necessarily what is most valuable. Scientific reasoning is a good example. Not every step in science is something that can be cleanly graded at the moment it is produced. A hypothesis can later fail experimentally and still have been exactly the right kind of thinking at the time: creative, mechanistically grounded, and responsive to the available evidence. “Turns out to be wrong” does not imply “was low-quality thinking”. A big part of the next frontier will be AI systems that can operate well under this kind of uncertainty, just like a big part of the last one was RL against verifiable rewards.
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xy@chroniclesXY·
@TukiFromKL We need more IDEAS.md
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Tuki
Tuki@TukiFromKL·
🚨 do you understand what andrej karpathy just quietly published.. karpathy.. founding team at openai, former head of AI at tesla.. just said something that breaks the entire software industry in one paragraph.. in the LLM agent era.. there's less need to share specific code or apps.. instead you share the IDEA.. and the other person's agent customises and builds it for their specific needs.. let me show you why this is the most important thing posted online today.. the entire software industry is built on one assumption: building software is hard.. that's why you pay $49/month for notion.. $99/month for salesforce.. $299/month for whatever SaaS is sitting in your company's tab right now.. the scarcity of building = the value of the product.. it's been that way since 1995.. karpathy invented "vibe coding" in 2025.. the idea that you stop writing code and start describing what you want.. tools like cursor, claude code, and openclaw turned that into reality.. you talk to your computer.. it builds.. it ships.. it runs your workflows while you sleep.. and now he's saying even THAT is the old way.. now you don't share the app.. you share the IDEA FILE.. a document describing what you want to build and why.. and every person's AI agent reads it.. builds their own custom version.. tuned to their exact needs.. for free.. in minutes.. the scarcity of building just hit zero. every SaaS company built for "normal users" is now competing against a blank text file and an agent with 4 hours to spare.. the winners of the next decade won't be the best builders.. they'll be the best thinkers.. the people who know what to build, why it matters, and how it should feel.. that's how paradigm shifts actually arrive.
Andrej Karpathy@karpathy

LLM Knowledge Bases Something I'm finding very useful recently: using LLMs to build personal knowledge bases for various topics of research interest. In this way, a large fraction of my recent token throughput is going less into manipulating code, and more into manipulating knowledge (stored as markdown and images). The latest LLMs are quite good at it. So: Data ingest: I index source documents (articles, papers, repos, datasets, images, etc.) into a raw/ directory, then I use an LLM to incrementally "compile" a wiki, which is just a collection of .md files in a directory structure. The wiki includes summaries of all the data in raw/, backlinks, and then it categorizes data into concepts, writes articles for them, and links them all. To convert web articles into .md files I like to use the Obsidian Web Clipper extension, and then I also use a hotkey to download all the related images to local so that my LLM can easily reference them. IDE: I use Obsidian as the IDE "frontend" where I can view the raw data, the the compiled wiki, and the derived visualizations. Important to note that the LLM writes and maintains all of the data of the wiki, I rarely touch it directly. I've played with a few Obsidian plugins to render and view data in other ways (e.g. Marp for slides). Q&A: Where things get interesting is that once your wiki is big enough (e.g. mine on some recent research is ~100 articles and ~400K words), you can ask your LLM agent all kinds of complex questions against the wiki, and it will go off, research the answers, etc. I thought I had to reach for fancy RAG, but the LLM has been pretty good about auto-maintaining index files and brief summaries of all the documents and it reads all the important related data fairly easily at this ~small scale. Output: Instead of getting answers in text/terminal, I like to have it render markdown files for me, or slide shows (Marp format), or matplotlib images, all of which I then view again in Obsidian. You can imagine many other visual output formats depending on the query. Often, I end up "filing" the outputs back into the wiki to enhance it for further queries. So my own explorations and queries always "add up" in the knowledge base. Linting: I've run some LLM "health checks" over the wiki to e.g. find inconsistent data, impute missing data (with web searchers), find interesting connections for new article candidates, etc., to incrementally clean up the wiki and enhance its overall data integrity. The LLMs are quite good at suggesting further questions to ask and look into. Extra tools: I find myself developing additional tools to process the data, e.g. I vibe coded a small and naive search engine over the wiki, which I both use directly (in a web ui), but more often I want to hand it off to an LLM via CLI as a tool for larger queries. Further explorations: As the repo grows, the natural desire is to also think about synthetic data generation + finetuning to have your LLM "know" the data in its weights instead of just context windows. TLDR: raw data from a given number of sources is collected, then compiled by an LLM into a .md wiki, then operated on by various CLIs by the LLM to do Q&A and to incrementally enhance the wiki, and all of it viewable in Obsidian. You rarely ever write or edit the wiki manually, it's the domain of the LLM. I think there is room here for an incredible new product instead of a hacky collection of scripts.

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xy@chroniclesXY·
@karpathy "I index source documents...a collection of .md files in a directory structure." this design is particularly interesting, reminds me of the SKILL.md. For the moment i am using the SQLite, but perhaps .md is better data store for LLM to interact with.
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xy@chroniclesXY·
@karpathy This is such an interesting idea. When I downloaded all my reading data from Goodreads, I thought of building my knowledge bases for the books I read. What you said is so much more powerful!
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Andrej Karpathy
Andrej Karpathy@karpathy·
LLM Knowledge Bases Something I'm finding very useful recently: using LLMs to build personal knowledge bases for various topics of research interest. In this way, a large fraction of my recent token throughput is going less into manipulating code, and more into manipulating knowledge (stored as markdown and images). The latest LLMs are quite good at it. So: Data ingest: I index source documents (articles, papers, repos, datasets, images, etc.) into a raw/ directory, then I use an LLM to incrementally "compile" a wiki, which is just a collection of .md files in a directory structure. The wiki includes summaries of all the data in raw/, backlinks, and then it categorizes data into concepts, writes articles for them, and links them all. To convert web articles into .md files I like to use the Obsidian Web Clipper extension, and then I also use a hotkey to download all the related images to local so that my LLM can easily reference them. IDE: I use Obsidian as the IDE "frontend" where I can view the raw data, the the compiled wiki, and the derived visualizations. Important to note that the LLM writes and maintains all of the data of the wiki, I rarely touch it directly. I've played with a few Obsidian plugins to render and view data in other ways (e.g. Marp for slides). Q&A: Where things get interesting is that once your wiki is big enough (e.g. mine on some recent research is ~100 articles and ~400K words), you can ask your LLM agent all kinds of complex questions against the wiki, and it will go off, research the answers, etc. I thought I had to reach for fancy RAG, but the LLM has been pretty good about auto-maintaining index files and brief summaries of all the documents and it reads all the important related data fairly easily at this ~small scale. Output: Instead of getting answers in text/terminal, I like to have it render markdown files for me, or slide shows (Marp format), or matplotlib images, all of which I then view again in Obsidian. You can imagine many other visual output formats depending on the query. Often, I end up "filing" the outputs back into the wiki to enhance it for further queries. So my own explorations and queries always "add up" in the knowledge base. Linting: I've run some LLM "health checks" over the wiki to e.g. find inconsistent data, impute missing data (with web searchers), find interesting connections for new article candidates, etc., to incrementally clean up the wiki and enhance its overall data integrity. The LLMs are quite good at suggesting further questions to ask and look into. Extra tools: I find myself developing additional tools to process the data, e.g. I vibe coded a small and naive search engine over the wiki, which I both use directly (in a web ui), but more often I want to hand it off to an LLM via CLI as a tool for larger queries. Further explorations: As the repo grows, the natural desire is to also think about synthetic data generation + finetuning to have your LLM "know" the data in its weights instead of just context windows. TLDR: raw data from a given number of sources is collected, then compiled by an LLM into a .md wiki, then operated on by various CLIs by the LLM to do Q&A and to incrementally enhance the wiki, and all of it viewable in Obsidian. You rarely ever write or edit the wiki manually, it's the domain of the LLM. I think there is room here for an incredible new product instead of a hacky collection of scripts.
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