bob the mongoose
37 posts


The Pope is making exactly our point. LLMs “may imitate or even simulate, but they do not understand.” This is the core epistemic fault line. Most AI evaluation is still based on one assumption: if a system statistically approximates human behaviour, then it is close to human intelligence. But approximation is not intelligence. Simulation is not understanding. LLMs can produce the right answer without knowing why it is right. They can simulate empathy without feeling. They can imitate judgment without responsibility. They can generate coherent explanations without having a world to which those explanations are accountable. Stop confusing behavioural similarity with cognitive equivalence. Human understanding is embodied, affective, relational, motivational, and normative. It is not just the production of plausible text. * Full paper in the first reply





quant firms would almost never hire someone who'd drop out of college to join a startup especially for trading roles quant attrition has a uniquely high impact on their PnL since your value compounds forever and is initially quite low. if you leave even after 2 years, the firm is likely at a loss (this is the main reason the comp scales upwards forever) so kids who could be convinced to drop out of school to join startups would be huge liabilities/flight risks. those firms want teachable people who will stay for many years—that's their success function. you can have a high risk tolerance when trading THEIR money, but your personal risk tolerance must be negligible i had to learn this the brutally hard way when i was cut from SIG in their final round of big cuts. i was so so pissed because i had literally carved myself into a new person to fit their mold of what made a technically strong trader. but i couldn't change certain aspects of myself and it is a good thing i didn't, because those are the same traits that will let me cripple quant/casino revenues by changing the outside world. if you have any such desires, you're MUCH better off in startup land (they'll sniff you out very quickly anyway)



Science fiction nerds are gonna hate me for saying this but the Great Filter is that interstellar travel is probably more or less impossible and there is no reason to come up with any other explanation for that.

Mathematician reacts to OpenAI's recent proof:



My intuition about geometry was catastrophically wrong. I never knew that, in high dimensions, spheres effectively disappear. By 100 dimensions, an inscribed sphere occupies a smaller fraction of its cube than a proton occupies of the observable universe. By 500 dimensions, the volume is smaller than what standard floating-point arithmetic can even represent. The equations are real. Here’s the wild horror hidden in higher-dimensional geometry:





why are people clowning this signing







