All of t14n's Comments + Replies

re: 1b (development likely impossible to kept secret given scale required)

I'm remind of Dylan Patel's comments (semianalysis) on a recent episode of the Dwarkesh Podcast which goes something like:

if you're Xi Jinping and you're scaling pilled, you can just centralize all the compute and build all the substations for it. You can just hide it inside one of the factories you already have that's drawing power for steel production and re-purpose it as a data center.

Given the success we've seen in training SOTA models with constrained GPU resources (Deepseek), I... (read more)

I have Aranet4 CO2 monitors inside my apartment, one near my desk and one in the living room both at eye level and visible to me at all times when I'm in those spaces. Anecdotally, I find myself thinking "slower" @ 900+ ppm, and can even notice slightly worse thinking at levels as low as 750ppm.

I find indoor levels @ <600ppm to be ideal, but not always possible depending on if you have guests, air quality conditions of the day, etc.

I unfortunately only live in a space with 1 window, so ventilation can be difficult. However a single well placed fan facin... (read more)

Want to know what AI will do to the labor market? Just look at male labor force participation (LFP) research.

US Male LFP has dropped since the 70s, from ~80% to ~67.5%.

There are a few dynamics driving this, and all of them interact with each other. But the primary ones seem to be:

• increased disability [1]
• younger men (e.g. <35 years old) pursuing education instead of working [2]
• decline in manufacturing and increase in services as fraction of the economy
• increased female labor force participation [1]

Our economy shifted from labor that required physical toug... (read more)

re: public track records

I have a fairly non-assertive, non-confrontational personality, which causes me to defer to "safer" strategies (e.g. nod and smile, don't think too hard about what's being said, or at least don't vocalize counterpoints). Perhaps others here might relate. These personality traits are reflected in "lazy thinking" online -- e.g. not posting even when I feel like I'm right about X, not sharing an article or sending a message for fear of looking awkward/revealing a preference about myself that others might not agree with.

I notice that pe... (read more)

Skill ceilings across humanity is quite high. I think of super genius chess players, Terry Tao, etc.

A particular individual's skill ceiling is relatively low (compared to these maximally gifted individuals). Sure, everyone can be better at listening, but there's a high non-zero chance you have some sort of condition or life experience that makes it more difficult to develop it (hearing disability, physical/mental illness, trauma, an environment of people who are actually not great at communicating themselves, etc).

I'm reminded of what Samo Burja calls "com... (read more)

Morris Chang (founder of TSMC and titan in the fabrication process) had a lecture at MIT giving an overview of the history in chip design and manufacturing. [1] There's a diagram ~34:00 that outlines the chip design process, and where foundries like TSMC slot into the process.

I also recommend skimming Chip War by Chris Miller. Has a very US-centric perspective, but gives a good overview of the major companies that developed chips from the 1960s-1990s, and the key companies that are relevant/bottlenecks to the manufacturing process circa-2022. 

1: TSMC founder Morris Chang on the evolution of the semiconductor industry
 

There's "Nothing, Forever" [1] [2], which had a few minutes of fame when it initially launched but declined in popularity after some controversy (a joke about transgenderism generated by GPT-3). It was stopped for a bit, then re-launched after some tweaking with the dialogue generation (perhaps an updated prompt? GPT 3.5? There's no devlog so I guess we'll never know). There are clips of "season 1" on YouTube prior to the updated dialogue generation.

There's also ai_sponge, which was taken down from Twitch and YouTube due to it's incredibly racy jokes (e.g.... (read more)