Second-highest P/E is Tesla, currently at 97. Apart from Palantir and Tesla, the other big companies are trading at what would historically be considered reasonable P/Es given their growth rates and profitability.…
Japan is a classic example. You can drop your wallet there and someone will send it to you with all the cash intact. It makes you realize how much overhead it causes when you need to guard against cheaters and thieves.
I was an undergrad at Caltech in the late 80s and likewise it never even occurred to us to cheat on take-home exams. Maybe things have changed. People did plenty of collaboration on homework sets. Some of the harder…
Academic integrity committees at prestigious schools are horribly lax. They want these types of issues to go away quietly. I have a friend who in college had another student take his test from the "complete" pile, erase…
This is exactly right. Gone are the days when you could get a C+ average at Harvard and still land a good job or a spot in a prestigious law program – purely by virtue of having gone to Harvard. Everyone is in…
If you posit that Altman suffers from main character syndrome (as many CEOs do), then he likely believes that he alone can lead OpenAI to success. In this case, doing whatever it takes to get himself back into the job…
CEOs are hired to run companies and make themselves, and their investors, wealthy. That is their prime directive and CEOs are the ultimate partisans. If a CEO feels that bending the truth, or outright lying, will…
> You cannot be sure that anyone other than yourself is conscious. It is only basic human empathy that allows people to believe that. In Bayesian terms what makes it reasonable to ascribe consciousness to other people…
Bitcoin attempted to replace cash, but failed because the transaction costs are orders of magnitude too high. The high cost of zero-trust makes it a desirable medium of exchange only for criminals and scammers. In an…
I can see Apple's position: The Mac has been through four major ISAs and the value to most users of maintaining that entire stack indefinitely in the current macOS is nil. A number of digital preservation standards are…
In fairness to all concerned, the MacOS to MacOS X transition was brilliantly executed. These days we take VMs for granted, but back then it was a novel idea to run MacOS 8 as a process inside of MacOS X (the "blue…
Agents playing the iterated prisoner's dilemma learn to cooperate. It's usually not a dominant strategy to be entirely sociopathic when other players are involved.
What hit me when I read Rama in the 1980s is how alien it all was. This is not Star Trek where the aliens speak English and look human-ish. There's a lesson there for AI I think. We anthropomorphize AI in the media but…
Well said. Another factor that nobody in the EU likes to talk about is regulations like worker protections that make it hard to do layoffs. Such regulations are popular but they strongly favor large predictable…
Yes, and housing is priced by competitive auction so if you drop out of the rat race and other people don't, you'll just get out-bid.
Yes but the thing is, most people don't actually want realistic movement. They want to be Neo in The Matrix, not some average schlub that gets easily winded and jumps six inches high. Lex Fridman's interview with Todd…
> Intel is strategically important. Fab capability on US soil is strategically important. Intel is one of many possible routes to that.
Intel should have spun out their fab in 2009-2010 when the signs were clear: Mobile was taking off, AMD spun out their fab, Intel had missed the boat on mobile CPUs, and Apple had acquired PA Semi and was investing…
I attribute the curriculum shift to something slightly different, which is the changing perception of CS as a career. When I was in college in the late 1980s, CS was not perceived as the moneymaking career it is today.…
The problem isn't that time blindness is a fake issue. The problem is that many people incorrectly self-diagnose as suffering from conditions like time blindness. Which they do for a variety of reasons: To externalize…
> Over the years, the magic was never lost on me. However, I can never see LLMs as more than a "token prediction machine". The "mere token prediction machine" criticism, like Pearl's "deep learning amounts to just curve…
You raise a good point that this isn't a low marginal cost business like software, telecom, or (most of) the web. Efficiency will be a big advantage for companies that can achieve it, in part because it will let them…
Interesting that they converged on a memory/network architecture similar to a rack of GPUs. - 152 cores per chip, equivalent to ~128 CUDA cores per SM - per-chip SRAM (20 MB) equivalent to SM high-speed shared memory -…
I've always found it amusing that mathematically it should be the rule of 70, but it's commonly rounded to 72 because the latter has more convenient divisors. 70 is divisible by 1, 2, 5, 7, 10, 14, 35, 70 72 is…
Unfortunately C++ ended up with a set of defaults (i.e., the most ergonomic ways of doing things) that are almost always the least safe. During most of C++'s development, performance was king and so safety became…
Second-highest P/E is Tesla, currently at 97. Apart from Palantir and Tesla, the other big companies are trading at what would historically be considered reasonable P/Es given their growth rates and profitability.…
Japan is a classic example. You can drop your wallet there and someone will send it to you with all the cash intact. It makes you realize how much overhead it causes when you need to guard against cheaters and thieves.
I was an undergrad at Caltech in the late 80s and likewise it never even occurred to us to cheat on take-home exams. Maybe things have changed. People did plenty of collaboration on homework sets. Some of the harder…
Academic integrity committees at prestigious schools are horribly lax. They want these types of issues to go away quietly. I have a friend who in college had another student take his test from the "complete" pile, erase…
This is exactly right. Gone are the days when you could get a C+ average at Harvard and still land a good job or a spot in a prestigious law program – purely by virtue of having gone to Harvard. Everyone is in…
If you posit that Altman suffers from main character syndrome (as many CEOs do), then he likely believes that he alone can lead OpenAI to success. In this case, doing whatever it takes to get himself back into the job…
CEOs are hired to run companies and make themselves, and their investors, wealthy. That is their prime directive and CEOs are the ultimate partisans. If a CEO feels that bending the truth, or outright lying, will…
> You cannot be sure that anyone other than yourself is conscious. It is only basic human empathy that allows people to believe that. In Bayesian terms what makes it reasonable to ascribe consciousness to other people…
Bitcoin attempted to replace cash, but failed because the transaction costs are orders of magnitude too high. The high cost of zero-trust makes it a desirable medium of exchange only for criminals and scammers. In an…
I can see Apple's position: The Mac has been through four major ISAs and the value to most users of maintaining that entire stack indefinitely in the current macOS is nil. A number of digital preservation standards are…
In fairness to all concerned, the MacOS to MacOS X transition was brilliantly executed. These days we take VMs for granted, but back then it was a novel idea to run MacOS 8 as a process inside of MacOS X (the "blue…
Agents playing the iterated prisoner's dilemma learn to cooperate. It's usually not a dominant strategy to be entirely sociopathic when other players are involved.
What hit me when I read Rama in the 1980s is how alien it all was. This is not Star Trek where the aliens speak English and look human-ish. There's a lesson there for AI I think. We anthropomorphize AI in the media but…
Well said. Another factor that nobody in the EU likes to talk about is regulations like worker protections that make it hard to do layoffs. Such regulations are popular but they strongly favor large predictable…
Yes, and housing is priced by competitive auction so if you drop out of the rat race and other people don't, you'll just get out-bid.
Yes but the thing is, most people don't actually want realistic movement. They want to be Neo in The Matrix, not some average schlub that gets easily winded and jumps six inches high. Lex Fridman's interview with Todd…
> Intel is strategically important. Fab capability on US soil is strategically important. Intel is one of many possible routes to that.
Intel should have spun out their fab in 2009-2010 when the signs were clear: Mobile was taking off, AMD spun out their fab, Intel had missed the boat on mobile CPUs, and Apple had acquired PA Semi and was investing…
I attribute the curriculum shift to something slightly different, which is the changing perception of CS as a career. When I was in college in the late 1980s, CS was not perceived as the moneymaking career it is today.…
The problem isn't that time blindness is a fake issue. The problem is that many people incorrectly self-diagnose as suffering from conditions like time blindness. Which they do for a variety of reasons: To externalize…
> Over the years, the magic was never lost on me. However, I can never see LLMs as more than a "token prediction machine". The "mere token prediction machine" criticism, like Pearl's "deep learning amounts to just curve…
You raise a good point that this isn't a low marginal cost business like software, telecom, or (most of) the web. Efficiency will be a big advantage for companies that can achieve it, in part because it will let them…
Interesting that they converged on a memory/network architecture similar to a rack of GPUs. - 152 cores per chip, equivalent to ~128 CUDA cores per SM - per-chip SRAM (20 MB) equivalent to SM high-speed shared memory -…
I've always found it amusing that mathematically it should be the rule of 70, but it's commonly rounded to 72 because the latter has more convenient divisors. 70 is divisible by 1, 2, 5, 7, 10, 14, 35, 70 72 is…
Unfortunately C++ ended up with a set of defaults (i.e., the most ergonomic ways of doing things) that are almost always the least safe. During most of C++'s development, performance was king and so safety became…