I am a fool - what does RSI mean in this case? I couldn't find it in the og post. 

I think that is just true. Now in hindsight, my mistake is that I haven't really updated sufficiently towards how the major players are shifting towards their own chip design capacity. (Apple comes to mind but I am definitely caught a bit off guard on how even Meta and Amazon had moved forward.) I had the impression that Amazon had a bad time in their previous generation of chips - and that new generation of their chips is focused on inference anyways. 

But now with the blending of inference and training regime, maybe the "intermediaries" like Nvidia now gets to capture less and less of upside. And it seems more and more likely to me that we are having a moment of "going back to the basics" of looking at the base ingredients - the compute and the electricity. 

I think this category of actors are neglected as a whole. (As well as SKH, micron etc.) 

TSMC makes the chips for NVIDIA and everyone - I didn’t talk too much about them because they are already a lynchpin in many countries’ AI/national security policy (China PRC, Taiwan and at least United States). And by their nature, they are already under heavy surveillance for prosaic (trad. National security and chip self-sufficiency) reasons.

Great stuff! I don't have strong fundamentals in math and statistics but I was still able to hobble along and understand the post. It reminds me of what Rissanen said about data/observation - that data is really all we have, and there is no true state of nature. Our job is to squeeze as much alpha out of observation as possible, instead of trying to find a "true" generator function. This post hit the same spot for me :)

Good stuff! Though it did take a while for me to extrapolate what M&E is actually suppose to do and looks like; Or "What does good M&E even look like?". 

Non-profit seems quite hard and naturally easy for power to entrench (especially in an environment where people oppose legibility). I hope Abi finds their next venture more meaningful. 

Update - HackewNews posts today and Lesswrong posts today are very similar in length. That doesn't mean they do an equal job at being concise - maybe Lesswrongers say preciously little for the length of their treatises. But deriving the sophistication of the posts is left as an exercise for the readers and beyond my paygrade:

Hackewnews - avg. 2876.125 words. For the current top 10 posts.^[1]

Lesswrong - avg. 2581.2 words. For the top ten post in the last 24 hrs. (God damn it Zvi)

A few problem with this 5 minute method of comparison: 

• Not Weighted: A better way to do this would be comparing some kind of karma weighted score. After all, the people who have high karmas are who we as a community see as people we really embody the spirit. Same with HackerNews.
• Not Representative: I only took the most popular posts in hacknews today. There is no reason to think these posts today represents what HackerNews is in the last decade. Similarly, the posts on lesswrong in the last 24 hours are few and also not a very representative cohort.
• Non-systematic way to throw out outliers: There was a project Gutenberg book on HackerNews today. It felt wrong to include the book and I feel justified in its exclusion. But this should be done more systematically.
• A lot of discussion and culture building is in the comments, I didn't include that: Ditto

Markdown table below incase I made a mistake:

1. ^{^}

   See Paul Graham comment for their ranking algos: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781013.

While I agree that we don't live at the Pareto frontier of conciseness, explain-ability and etc, those are some odd examples to use to support your thesis. And the comparison to the hackernews post is likely using the wrong reference class. 

Two of the three examples are heavily downvoted. Whether that's because of untruthful content or stylistic (length, tone, etc) or memetic reason (Eliezer ~ prophet), those posts are hardly the poster child of what Lesswrong can do or even is. 

As for Vanessa Kosoy's piece, the last third was filled with quotations and they had given the "stop here if you don't want my comments" warning. And it is also otherwise filled with references to many historically important posts and concepts that requires at least a quick refresher to catch the reader up to speed. I suppose Vanessa could have assumed that her readers would have been familiar with all those arguments and the nuances in different positions, but that was not her goal. 

The specific example used from hacker news is likely a HackerNews Ask - a format more comparable to the shortforms and quicktake format in Lesswrong. Full fledged posts here vs full fledged posts on Hackernews is actually very comparable. (See below for some data)

And for me, the (correct) reframing of RL as the cherry on top of our existing self-supervised stack was the straw that broke my hopeful back.

And o3 is more straws to my broken back.

Could it be worth it to buy 23andme stocks if you want some of their user's data?

Naively, the sticker price of 75M USD (today's market cap) for all of their user data might seem cheap - all together for genomes of roughly 12 million users. It seems reasonably cheap to me on a replacement cost and opportunity-cost basis.

However, the 49% basically-majority shareholder is CEO Anne Wojcicki and a "possibility is that Wojcicki has unreasonable plans to take the company private at a bargain-basement price^[1]". If you takes this path forward as a decidedly important but minority shareholder, the only clear way forward is to hope for a shareholder oppression lawsuit in your favour. And instead of cashing out, you hope you can turn your skill set of "being annoying enough" into data in-lieu of cash (Note: if this is done through bankruptcy process, I can't see the trustee agreeing to this plan.)  

Even given the obstacles, is this a deal? Or is this just a bad price for this particular bag of information? Is 23andme's information sufficiently low fidelity that it might not be useful at all except to relate yourself to fractional vikings?

1. ^{^}

   Per Matt Levine - Money Stuff, Sep 19, 2024