Recreational Mathematician

Joined September 2017
In Real Options Analysis (ROA), “paying down tech debt” is simply making an investment to reduce the cost of future improvements, thereby expanding the portfolio of projects the organization can undertake within its budget. api.omarshehata.me/substack-…
Note to self: the next time you are tempted to browse the HN comments, remember how HN responded to Paul’s essay. news.ycombinator.com/item?id…
🤔 “We’re trying to use a paradigm designed for calculation to build systems that are fundamentally about coordination and communication.” — @paul_tarvydas programmingsimplicity.substa…
> Yes, we will get to a world where you can get an interactive game (or novel, or movie) out of a prompt, but there will be far better exemplars of the medium still created by dedicated teams of passionate developers. > The world will be vastly wealthier in terms of the content available at any given cost.
Replying to @rubyrangerr
I think you are misunderstanding what this tech demo actually is, but I will engage with what I think your gripe is — AI tooling trivializing the skillsets of programmers, artists, and designers. My first games involved hand assembling machine code and turning graph paper characters into hex digits. Software progress has made that work as irrelevant as chariot wheel maintenance. Building power tools is central to all the progress in computers. Game engines have radically expanded the range of people involved in game dev, even as they deemphasized the importance of much of my beloved system engineering. AI tools will allow the best to reach even greater heights, while enabling smaller teams to accomplish more, and bring in some completely new creator demographics. Yes, we will get to a world where you can get an interactive game (or novel, or movie) out of a prompt, but there will be far better exemplars of the medium still created by dedicated teams of passionate developers. The world will be vastly wealthier in terms of the content available at any given cost. Will there be more or less game developer jobs? That is an open question. It could go the way of farming, where labor saving technology allow a tiny fraction of the previous workforce to satisfy everyone, or it could be like social media, where creative entrepreneurship has flourished at many different scales. Regardless, “don’t use power tools because they take people’s jobs” is not a winning strategy.
Josh Jordan retweeted
‘Recently, one of my favorite questions to bug people with has been “What is it you do to train that is comparable to a pianist practicing scales?”  If you don’t know the answer to that one, maybe you are doing something wrong or not doing enough. Or maybe you are (optimally?) not very ambitious?‘ - @tylercowen
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Josh Jordan retweeted
If you're learning about vibe hacking, here's a cool article demonstrating how @mattrkeeley used AI to create a working exploit for CVE-2025-32433 before any public PoCs existed! Worth a read 👇 platformsecurity.com/blog/CV…
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Josh Jordan retweeted
More broadly, I don't think a single definition of 'durable' (as in ACID D) for transactions is particularly useful. Much more useful is to ask "what kinds of failures could cause committed transactions to be lost?"
A transaction is not durable if it survives application crash but not OS crash. A committed transaction is either durable or not!
Josh Jordan retweeted
if you want to read a really underrated paper:
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Josh Jordan retweeted
CVPR 2025 papers pt. 1 - Gaze-LLE Gaze-LLE simplifies gaze target estimation by building on top of a frozen DINOv2 visual foundation model; SOTA performance; open source code and model more papers: github.com/SkalskiP/top-cvpr… ↓ more
Josh Jordan retweeted
just fed the new gemini-exp-1206 model a draft of my latest math text, asking for a report detailing inconsistencies, hidden assumptions, conflicting terminology, bad proofs, & unclear exposition. 100000 token input [latex]. 260 seconds of thought. long high-quality output!
Timeline doesn’t adequately account for two key benefits of restricting China’s access to advanced AI chips: 1. More time for U.S. to focus on AI safety over improved capabilities 2. Reduces the danger of model weight theft, assuming inference requires the latest hardware
"How, exactly, could AI take over by 2027?" Introducing AI 2027: a deeply-researched scenario forecast I wrote alongside @slatestarcodex, @eli_lifland, and @thlarsen
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Josh Jordan retweeted
We talked to the cofounder of Watch Duty, which has become an essential app in LA for tracking the wildfires: - It's a 501(c)(3) nonprofit largely supported by volunteers - Has had 100% uptime (and no mistaken evac notices vs the local gov sending THREE accidentally) - Over 1m downloads this week with plans to expand to more of the US/oversees - “We view what we are doing as a public service.”
Josh Jordan retweeted
Fun fact: Dario Amodei has a LW account with a single comment, which corrects someone on the eigenvalues of complex matrices lesswrong.com/users/dario_am…
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“Talking to Claude feels like using the Primer. And though there is no Miranda on the other side, it is no less magical.” – @zetalyrae borretti.me/article/how-i-us…
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Josh Jordan retweeted
My holiday side quest at @AnthropicAI: How well can Claude play Geoguessr? 🗺️ I had Claude look at 200K+ Street View images and guess the location. The results? Claude-3 models aren't that good, but Claude-3.5 models match or beat the average human! jerrywei.net/blog/claude-pla…
I think programming GPUs is too hard. Part of the problem is sprawling, scattered documentation & best practices. Over the past few months, we’ve been working to solve that problem, putting together a “Rosetta Stone” GPU Glossary. And now it’s live! My take-aways in thread.
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Josh Jordan retweeted
The last question for LLMs: "Sort the numbers from highest to lowest: 9.1, 9.8, 9.11, 9.9, 9.12" o1-preview: failed o1-mini: failed gpt-4o-latest: failed sonnet-3.5: failed llama-3.2-1B: success