birb_cromble
No bio...
User ID: 3236
birb_cromble
5d ago
If your rumored to be Mossads number 1 spy then I guess I should return your emails?
My understanding is that Maxwell was mossad's number one spy, and Epstein was mossad's number one receptionist for mossad's number one spy.
birb_cromble
5d ago
In fact, Minsky died before the transformer paper was even published.
Minsky and Epstein were in communication with each other before the transformer paper was published. I'm not sure what the thrust of your argument is? Is it that any discussion of AI before 2017 is irrelevant?
birb_cromble
5d ago
I hesitate to post this one, but I'm doing so because it hits a near-perfect intersection of the hobby horses of something like 70% of the regular posters here. It turns out that Dario Amodei's wife is in the Epstein files, after his public conviction for sex offenses.
A year later, she reached back out to Epstein. At first he didn’t remember her. She replied that they had been introduced by John Brockman a year earlier. “We have the free luxury porn company. Does that ring a bell?”
Epstein replied: “Yes, a loud gong.”
Clark joked back. “Haha, I was going to say, you would be the first person that didn’t remember us.”
She pitched him on investing in her company, saying they had just hired someone from Oprah Winfrey’s company and Ashton Kutcher’s Katalyst, the media company behind shows like “Punk’d.” “Are you still interested?”
Epstein, then a registered sex offender, replied, “Can’t do sex TV.”
There's a lot to unpack here.
First, Epstein really was balls-deep in AI research. Marvin Minsky was in direct communication with Epstein. Joscha Bach was in direct communication with Epstein. Elon Musk was in direct communication with Epstein. Eliezar Yudkowsky was in direct communication with Epstein. Noam Chomsky was in direct communication with Epstein. Overall, Epstein's emails are a who's-who of AI research. Prior to this, Amodei had no known links to Epstein, and now he has one at one remove.
While the headline story is salacious and amusing (and probably a targeted hit job on Amodei), I wand to use it as a springboard for a few other topics.
A brief, non-rigorous analysis of the files suggests that AI researchers are over represented in the files after 2011, both in frequency and in message length. A charitable person could argue that it's because the average AI researcher didn't know that Epstein was a convicted sex offender after his public trial and conviction in 2011, but I don't buy that. I was a dumb 20-something in 2011 and I knew about it. It was in the newspapers. It was on the news on the TVs at the gym. These people are allegedly smarter and more plugged-in than I am. Most of them were involved in fundraising that, if done competently, involved a due diligence component. So either they were incompetent, or chose to interact with the publicly convicted sex offender anyway.
I think it's the latter. The AI research community is deeply entwined with both rationalism and Effective Altruism, and the latter is a rehash of utilitarianism with a peculiar utility function. Artificial super intelligence, if correctly formed, presents infinite utility. If that is true, then literally anything can be justified if it moves the future toward that end.
Over the last few decades, utilitarianism really seems to have taken over popular discussions of ethics. Sometimes I wonder if that doesn't represent a failure of ethics in itself. As far as ethical systems go, Utilitarianism is easy to hack. Ignoring second order effects, choosing peculiar utility functions, using unrealistic time scales - it's all wrapped up together.
Moving on from that, I'd always known that bay area tech is pretty incestuous, but I don't think I'd realized how small, insular, and weird it was until recently. Clark having a personal relationship with Eric Schmidt and parlaying that into funding later was a surprise. Is that just how SF business gets done out there?
Overall, I'm not sure what to think about this. It feels like a targeted hit piece. I'm a cynical man, and my gut feeling is that it's a shot at pulling Amodei out of the big chair at Anthropic. I have no proof of that, but the timing relative to their alleged IPO is interesting, and coincidences are hard to believe when the players are all so tightly coupled as they are in the AI industry. If it is true, though, it makes me wonder who could be involved.
birb_cromble
7d ago
In some personal good news, TransUnion has decided that I have a credit card again, with no changes in behavior on my part. The entire saga was baffling. My credit rating is about ~6 points lower than it was when this whole saga started, but at this point I'm not going to fight it.
I'm more global news, 30 year Treasury yields are getting bonkers
A $25bn Treasury auction of 30-year bonds on Thursday drew yields as high as 5.22 per cent, according to the US Treasury department. It marked the highest yield since the 5.52 per cent paid in August 2001, after which 30-year auctions were suspended for almost five years.
I wasn't seriously investing in 2001 outside buying an S&P 500 mutual fund. Does anybody here remember what the Feds's rationale was at the time for suspending 30 year auctions?
birb_cromble
8d ago
Check out musictheory.pugetsound.edu
birb_cromble
8d ago
How highly regarded are you?
On a scale from "can read sheet music" to "can't always tell two notes apart", what's your current ability level?
birb_cromble
8d ago
Do you know if that's compatible with seamless coop?
birb_cromble
8d ago
would have stayed in a boarding house in a small room or sharing a small room
It's a shame there aren't many options like that anymore. The last SRO in the city nearest me closed down in the 1970s. I couldn't even tell you about boarding houses, though I'm pretty sure it was even earlier. These days it feels like your options go from house, to apartment, to homeless shelter, to underpass, without any real stops in between.
birb_cromble
8d ago
Do you play an instrument? I ask because scale structures never really clicked for me until I started playing bass. At that point the shapes were as plain as day.
birb_cromble
8d ago
I have mixed feelings about Clutch. The songs tend to be great, but after a while the vocals feel like they're so redlined that they lose any impact.
I'll give the other two a shot. Thanks for the suggestions.
birb_cromble
8d ago
Maybe if you tell me some non-metal bands you like, I can recommend some albums that might serve as gateways.
Orville Peck is a good example, with the link above being a solid song.
Poor Man's Poison is another, with "Hell's Coming With Me" being their most famous song.
Billy Strings is great. I love the song "Wargasm".
I'm a big fan of Kels, with "Daddy's Got a gun" being a solid example.
The general trend is stuff that's rhythm-forward, with strong instrumentals and a solid groove.
birb_cromble
8d ago
I'm old, so "modern", probably means "post Iron Maiden".
birb_cromble
8d ago
What is it about metal that grips you so much? Whenever I listen to modern metal, I bounce off. Between the blast beats and the technical-first guitar style, it feels like it's for the players rather than the audience. What am I missing?
birb_cromble
8d ago
But there is no indication of when the crash occurred, so the officer had no grounds to suspect that the person was drunk when he crashed the car (as opposed to crashing the car and then getting drunk off the half-empty bottle of liquor that was found in the car)
I never thought I'd see a 4chan meme show up in a real life court case.
birb_cromble
8d ago
Helldivers 2 recently had a content update, so I'm back in it with a few friends. So far, it's disappointing.
I've never played a game quite like HD2 before. It genuinely feels like the developers resent the game's success.
birb_cromble
8d ago
What are you all listening to these days?
Orville Peck has a new album and the newest single dropped this morning. I love how rich the instrumentals are. It almost reminds me of old Motown or Stax recordings.
birb_cromble
9d ago
Jesus, man. I don't envy you on any of that.
It sure does reinforce my wish that public defenders like you got more cultural respect, though. What you're doing is incredibly necessary for a functioning society, and I'm glad that you've been willing to do it for as long as you have.
birb_cromble
10d ago
Spending is $3,956.81 lower than the same day last year. The contractor keeps getting cock-blocked by the weather, so my progress still looks good for now.
birb_cromble
12d ago
At that point, why not just buy the stock?
birb_cromble
12d ago
I don’t plan to exit until 2028
What happens in 2028?
birb_cromble
12d ago
Nobody's going to do it? Nobody? Alright, I'll jump on that grenade for the good of all.
To crush your enemies.
To see them driven before you.
To hear the lamentations of their women.
birb_cromble
13d ago
I'd have thought for sure Merrill would have that option
You'd be surprised how many brokerages don't offer this. They make money by using fallow cash for their own investing, and allowing an automated sweep would kill that resource.
birb_cromble
13d ago
My brokerage doesn't have an automated cash sweep either. I just go in twice a month and buy a mix of ultra short term treasury funds (like SGOV) and a state municipal bond ETF. Both are tax advantaged and have a post tax return that beats my broker's money market offerings.
It's not 100% brainless, and the duration on the municipals carries some risk, but it's not terrible.
birb_cromble
13d ago
I've tried to use Gemini 3.1 pro to handle some basic coding tasks at work, and it does not do particularly well. I don't want to give exact specifics to avoid doxxing myself, but I can give you the shape of it. Skip to the most direct example if you don't feel like reading.
I have a java project. Currently it uses all-java libraries for image processing. Java kind of sucks for image processing because the integrated entry point always loads the entire raster into memory at once. If you have a limited heap, you're going to run into a world of pain trying to work with the standard library.
To get around that problem, I've looked at a native library that has java FFM bindings. Unfortunately, to use FFM, I had to upgrade to JDK 25. We had some test failures, and I figured that Gemini/antigravity could handle that kind of scutwork. It could not. It tried to make massive, architecture-level changes to two different subsystems in our codebase rather than just fix a classloader problem. Eventually I gave up and did it myself. I lost about a day to this.
After upgrading the JDK, I handed off the work to another developer to handle writing a small wrapper around the FFM library to unpack the native libs. She immediately tried to use Gemini, and lost four days to its confabulations. She came back to me repeatedly telling me it was impossible, and that we couldn't possibly do this on windows because Gemini gave her a trivially disprovable assertion. I eventually gave up and handed it to another developer who engaged his brain and had it done in a few hours, on all our supported platforms, with tests.
The most direct example: After that, I started converting one of our image processing routines to use the native lib. I figure that since the problem was easy and both the native library and the FFM bridge are both exquisitely documented, and they're both open source, this should be trivial for Gemini. Well, it turns out that both the native lib and the FFM bridge were both mostly written after January 2025, so neither 3.1 Pro and 3.6 flash consistently had the APIs inside their training window. It also didn't really have many examples to match on because this isn't a basic Python CRUD app.
You would not believe the absolute fever dream of a codebase it tried to cook up. It couldn't get function names right, and when it could, it couldn't consistently distinguish between the native library and the bridge. It frequently failed to even be consistently wrong. Eventually it finished, and it solved the problem by importing the FFM bridge but not actually using any of the underlying native calls.
I was a little disappointed.
I specifically call this out.
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