Spencer Nelson

@lalkaka @usefiretiger @simonw A good deal of this originated from your writing on the red-green agent engineering pattern, thinking about how to lean into the most testable sorts of software... parsers seemed like an ideal fit! Basically, turn any problem into something *absurdly* testable

we all know LLMs are good at _writing_ software, using whatever programming language you want. turns out they're also good at _creating_ new programming languages and tool chains, and then using them. more on how we do this @usefiretiger here: blog.firetiger.com/custom-program…

generating and using domain specific languages with agents is a sick fit: - allows humans to precisely constrain outcomes and impose determinism even with agent-generated code at run time. - increases token efficiency! - easier testing surface - etc

@ggddmmmm @eshear I dont think so; my post was a silly joke about how theoretical results in machine learning move the goalposts

@swnelson_ @eshear Are there ideas for a sortedness-detector algo which are constant time in a list of arbitrary size? I suppose you check a sub list of size K for sortedness, then it is O(K).

There’s an old programming joke about the easiest way to sorting a list: re-order it at random until it’s sorted. The more machine learning I think about the less funny it gets.

@cowenconvos @DouthatNYT Oof, it is frustrating to hear this quantum woo, and I wish TC were better prepared on this front. The double slit experiment is sufficient to puncture Douthat's claims.

New ep! For Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT), phenomena like UFO sightings and the simulation hypothesis don't challenge religious belief—they demonstrate how difficult it is to escape religious questions entirely. His new book makes the case for religious faith in an age of apparent disenchantment. DOUTHAT: I won’t say the deepest level. At the quantum level of reality, it seems, as far as we can see with our perception, that in order to go from contingency to reality, you need an observer. You need measurement. How do you get measurement without consciousness? What does measurement even mean absent consciousness? @tylercowen: Electrons bump into each other, something. You don’t need consciousness. If you had a measuring stick in there, that would collapse — DOUTHAT: Who puts the measuring stick in there? COWEN: Humans, but when they’re not watching, the wave function still collapses, right? DOUTHAT: But does it? COWEN: The measuring stick says it does. DOUTHAT: We made the measuring stick. COWEN: We’re not watching. You don’t need subjective consciousness. You need some process of resolution. DOUTHAT: I deny that you can have a measuring stick without a process of consciousness. The measuring stick without a process of consciousness is itself just a ruler. Absent your consciousness, a ruler is a collection of atoms and molecules cut out of a tree with some markings on it. In order for the ruler to be an instrument of measurement, you, Tyler Cowen, have to be perceiving it and be conscious of it. COWEN: I think the ruler suffices. DOUTHAT: No, you can’tsay the ruler suffices.

@eshear i would say they learn off of signals of headcount and budget. and they sure seem to turn cancerous pretty quick!

@swnelson_ Organs on the body!

Bureaucracies are approx. PPO reinforcement learners whose reward signal is budget and headcount, and whose policy space is process design.

@mjuric @griefcliff The sad truth is that AWS computes billing in a nightly job. A very small number of services (as of 2020) have realtime billing. Mostly historical reasons, but also to manage blast radius of billing system bugs.

@griefcliff We haven't found any :( There are various hacks with hooking budgets alarms to lambdas to kill your resources, but at best they lag ~hours behind the spend. So by the time they run you may already be 10s of k$ in the hole.

This (and the storage cost) is why we've started retreating to on-prem. In our case, it was only ~$3,000 after a student didn't realize the S3 uploader follows links and proceeded to upload ~200M objects. I want a fully prepaid cloud plan: out of credits, out of service.

@mjuric Yep. The finest software I have ever used. And I love their open-source, closed-contributions approach. Also they do other “forbidden” things, like made their own VCS to match how they work. Fearless!

SQLite is just amazing. And maintained by three committed guys who don't take patches.

@eshear Flexible mirror with actuators to deform it, use light to turn on relays that drive actuator motors

The question is — can you shape a lens with light?

@simoj_ Drills are, to my knowledge, the only carpentry tool that was genuinely novel to Japan when it came from the west and was instantly adopted, obviously superior to gimlets and awls. Transformed boatbuilding overnight. Real and unique tech (and fiddly to make!)

Also giving horrible Vernon a job managing a drill maker is an example of the harmful bits-over-atoms mindset. Drills are pretty cool! Drill innovation is probably important for the West’s hoped-for manufacturing revival

I think the Dursleys are kind of an offensive stereotype. “White bread” middle class folks as thoughtless unpleasant red-faced piggy bores with essentially pointless lives Nobody’s perfect, but IRL nice Privet Drive families are probably about the best place an orphan could land

@eshear When someone new moves in on the block, say hi with a gift early. Bring flowers and/or wine, introduce yourself, and be really interested in this new person. This is a critical moment.

@eshear Sometimes, I just need someone to hold the baby for a minute - I have an HVAC guy coming over to give a quote, or whatever. I go next door and ask "can you watch her for fifteen minutes?" (obviously, lots of trust already built up, in both directions!)

People who live in dense cities and have strong connections with your neighbors: what do you do regularly in order to stay connected with your neighbors? What methods have you used to find or create local community?

@eshear Parenting studies seriously make psych and diet studies look like Michelson and Morley. Kind of insane, its such a high leverage intervention point, but here we are

Parenting and education studies be like, “to get children out of their personal mazes we tried the always-turn-left, always-turn-right, and zig-zag-alternating interventions. Zig-zag performed the worst, and we saw only mild lift from always-turn-right and always-turn-left.”

@mjuric Yeah. I think setuptools could have been totally fine, just a bit tiring/verbose. Lots of those alternatives came from the Pythonic obsession with DRY and ergonomics and minimizing boilerplate, which turns out to be a false god

@swnelson_ It's evolved from "there's this one thing that's (to be polite) not ideal but it's a one-time cost to figure it out" to "now there's a plethora of tools (pdm, poetry, hatch, setuptools, ...) that are not ideal & that I'll need to figure out". I.e., worse.

God created Python packaging to train the faithful.

@mjuric I mean, I agree it's awful. But "worse than before" - can you elaborate? When was it good?

It's discouraging that after setuptools, easy_install, distutils, distutils2, distribute, pip, buildout, pyproject.toml, poetry, hatch, etc... things are now in many ways worse than before. Language-level packaging should have one, standard, stable way of doing it.

@eshear Regarding implementation, This is a property of your font, not Unicode. OTF added support for SVG in fonts, including animations, in 2016. A few browsers even render them: pixelambacht.nl/lapislegit/

@eshear Explicitly supported today. Quoth the unicode spec: “Emoji characters can have two main kinds of presentation: - an emoji presentation, with colorful and perhaps whimsical shapes, even animated - a text presentation, such as black & white” #Design_Guidelines" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">unicode.org/reports/tr51/p…

When will the first animated Unicode emoji be released?

@eshear @nnotm Not sure if this is sarcasm but the Unicode Consortium provides extremely little guidance on how glyphs should look. #Design_Guidelines" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">unicode.org/reports/tr51/p… is comically loosey-goosey

@nnotm Sure you *could* do it that way, but Unicode is quite prescriptive about how the various glyphs should look. There aren’t any glyphs where a compliant implementation must make them animated.