IME, they’re still pretty bad at getting specific implementation details of SIMD correct. The best I’ve done so far is to harness them to an actual piece of hardware and have them iterate until they see performance improvements but 1) Goodhart’s law, they tend to overfit the benchmark suite and 2) the resulting SIMD often becomes illegible.
For a lot of SIMD applications, overfitting isn't really a concern. In my use case I need to calculate the sum of absolute difference between two vectors for autocorrelation, there's no real possibility for overfitting, either it gets the correct answer or it doesn't. LLMs are good at reading through the CPU manual and trying different optimizations.
The resulting SIMD being illegible isn't an issue in my eyes, assembly isn't a language known for it's readability in general. If you want to really understand what the assembly is doing, ask your LLM to whip up a visualization and explanation tailored to your input data where you can see how each operation leads you to the final result.
Yes, of course. It doesn’t seem to recall the specific details very well, or confuses them with x86 or ARM instructions that do similar things. And yes, my AGENTS.md says ONLY USE INSTRUCTIONS IN blah.txt.
> If some tech bro can't do the research in an afternoon with an agent, it's not worth doing at all, let alone worth paying a PhD for a tenured lifetime job to do.
The OpenAI math dump showed that it’s not worth paying hundreds of PhD-years if a tech bro can do it with an agent.
The issue with this policy is hyperbolic discounting — students are fine choosing not to do homework when the consequences (EDIT: that is, doing poorly on the exam) are still in the future, but less so when they become present.
Then they lash out at the instructor, even if it’s really their fault.
Maybe it's changed, but when I went to Berkeley, it was really common that the homework counted for next to nothing and it was on you to do it since the majority of your grade (if not all) was on mid-terms and finals. No one really complained back then...maybe it's changed a lot, but if so, I'd say they should go back to their roots ;)
>> In-class exams, either written or oral. If you don't do homework, it is only on you. And with paper and pen, the next semester, yes.
> The issue with this policy is hyperbolic discounting — students are fine choosing not to do homework when the consequences are still in the future, but less so when they become present.
For me at least, in most of my classes, the homework was a tiny part of the grade. Just enough to maybe get over what you're talking about, but not enough to really matter.
True. It was true when I was doing my classes and I have to imagine it did not get much better. And with math, there is very easy way to tell if you are anywhere close to understanding it.
"Several years ago, when I was ill, Heinlein offered his help, anything he could do, and we had never met; he would phone me to cheer me up and see how I was doing. He wanted to buy me an electric typewriter, God bless him—one of the few true gentlemen in this world. I don't agree with any ideas he puts forth in his writing, but that is neither here nor there. One time when I owed the IRS a lot of money and couldn't raise it, Heinlein loaned the money to me. I think a great deal of him and his wife; I dedicated a book to them in appreciation. Robert Heinlein is a fine-looking man, very impressive and very military in stance; you can tell he has a military background, even to the haircut. He knows I'm a flipped-out freak and still he helped me and my wife when we were in trouble. That is the best in humanity, there; that is who and what I love."
Heinlein wasn't "regressive" but conservative. Your formulation indicates that it is you who might not be progressive but regressive since conservatism - same root as conservatorship - is a legitimate and, especially in good times, logical and effective strategy: keep that which works, change only that which needs changing and be careful not to change it too much or too fast lest you destroy that which worked. Heinlein wrote this in 1952 when the sky wasn't the limit anymore and people were reaching for the "stars" - well, low earth orbit anyway - so he had plenty of backing for his conservatism.
> … keep that which works, change only that which needs changing and be careful not to change it too much or too fast lest you destroy that which worked…
Where “works” is defined as “we’re seeing a lot of very obvious problems but we have faith they’ll work themselves out over time without any intervention”, and the opposite is “we’re seeing a lot of very obvious problems and we think a change is necessary”. Note that the thing under debate has problems and it is not obvious to everyone that it “works”. The conservative says “let’s wait and see” and the reformer says “we must change this now”.
You're misstating the alternatives. Most "obvious" problems do get worked out without intervention from outside parties who have no skin in the game. Some don't--but even in those cases, "change" driven by outside third parties who have no skin in the game almost never actually solves the problem. To paraphrase the programmer's saying about regular expressions, some people, whenever they see a problem, think, I know! We'll put a reform in place to fix it. Now they have two problems.
> from outside parties who have no skin in the game
Redefining the context to include a nebulous group of people “with no skin in the game”… Why should we exclude a “conservative” who has no skin in the game from this group, but include a “reformer” who also does not?
I'm "excluding" both the reformer and the conservative from "people who have skin in the game". The difference is that the reformer wants to interfere with the people who do have skin in the game working out their own solution to the problem, but the conservative does not.
> You seem to be implying that no reformers have skin in the game though.
I'm only describing that case (for both reformers and conservatives), yes. Historically, that seems to be the most relevant case, at least if we want to talk in terms of size of human impact.
To put it another way: if the problem (if there is one--see further comments below) can be solved by the people who do have skin in the game working things out among themselves, the labels "reformer" and "conservative" don't even come into play. You just have people who have to find some way of working together, doing it. So the only cases where those labels even arise are the cases where the people who do have skin in the game can't work things out among themselves--or at least that the people looking in from the outside, who don't have skin in the game themselves, think so.
The term "reformer", historically, does have another meaning: people who have some grand idea for how society should be organized, observing that it currently is not organized that way, and treating that as a Problem even if others don't agree that it is. A "conservative" seeing that would just say, look, you can't just impose your own idea of how society should be on everyone else. But historically, "reformers" in such cases have always framed things in terms of there being a Problem that isn't just "society isn't the way I think it should be"--the workers are oppressed, or the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer, or whatever, and using that as an excuse to implement their ideas for the ideal society. Which has never worked out well.
Ah I see so for you “conservative” and “reformer” are labels that have lost all meaning, they are wielded by busy-bodies who poke their nose at where it doesn’t belong. Whereas for me the words describe what people are trying to do in practice, regardless of political labels. (Canada had a “Reform” party for a while, which was conservative, so personally I don’t give the labels much credence either. Shame on me for assuming the words could be used at all without the baggage.)
> they are wielded by busy-bodies who poke their nose at where it doesn’t belong
I never said that about conservatives; indeed, I said the opposite.
"Reformers", yes--but I don't think the label is one I just made up. I think what I said is true of most people that call themselves "reformers".
> Whereas for me the words describe what people are trying to do in practice, regardless of political labels.
Since this is exactly how I was defining the labels--by what the people do, not what political party they claim to belong to or support--I am confused about why you think you are doing something different.
> To put it another way: if the problem (if there is one--see further comments below) can be solved by the people who do have skin in the game working things out among themselves, the labels "reformer" and "conservative" don't even come into play. You just have people who have to find some way of working together, doing it.
… where you’ve hand-waved away the debate within the group about whether to do something or not.
I haven't hand-waved anything away. I said there are cases where the people who do have skin in the game can't work things out among themselves. What you're describing is one case of that--those people can't even come to agreement about whether something needs to be done or not.
I did qualify my statement with the caveat that whether people looking in from the outside, who don't have skin in the game, think there's a problem that the people who do have skin in the game can't resolve among themselves, doesn't always match whether there actually is such a problem (a caveat which I could argue that you have hand-waved away). But I am not saying that all cases are like that.
What I am saying is that, even in the cases that aren't like that, the cases where the people who do have skin in the game really can't resolve a problem by working among themselves, that does not mean that reformers coming in from outside can do any better. I think such outside interventions, through human history, have a very poor track record of working. A quick summary of my point about conservatives and reformers would then be that conservatives recognize this unpleasant truth of human history, whereas reformers don't acknowledge it and are way, way too eager to make such interventions, and end up making things even worse.
So basicly, you are making people and historical events up in your head so that you can criticize imaginary "repformers" and praise imaginary "conservatives". Where conservatives want no change, (expect a bunch of new laws which does not count as change for reasons).
1.) Conservatives oppose reforms by "directly affected people with skin in the game". They opposed those reforms even when they themselves have zero actual skin in the game.
2.) Conservatives themselves frequently demand changes to things that work just fine for affected people. They want reform, because the world does not conform their ideological vision to how it should work.
Now we're just quibbling over labeling. By "conservative" I mean the kind of conservative that the GP of my original post in this subthread said Heinlein was. If you want to use "conservative" to mean something else, well, then we're just talking past each other.
We can use the terms “conserve”/“reform” to describe what someone does on a particular issue (e.g. does not or does “demand changes”), or we can use the terms in the very loose way we often do when describing political parties. No party is uniformly “change nothing”/“change everything” so parties aren’t particularly useful for clarifying what “conservative” or “reform” mean.
No, the conservative says, even if there are problems, that doesn't mean everything is a problem, nor does it mean that you, looking in from the outside, can dictate a solution.
> the reformer says “we must change this now”.
No matter how much has to be burned down to do it. This mentality killed well north of 100 million people in the 20th century.
Conservatism is humility. Progressivism is hubris.
That is not what conservativism as political ideology is. Like common, not clearly that and we have multiple years where this was made super clear by conservatives themselves.
Conservativism has nothing to do with "conservatorship". They are not trying to conserve, they are trying to force radical change - sometimes to imaginary past and sometimes toward something completely new. And then violently keep it there regardless of needs of other people.
It’s one of those cases where the label has stayed the same, but the thing it commonly describes has changed so much that the word just has multiple completely different meanings.
There’s the “let’s create National Parks to conserve our natural treasures!” conservatism and there’s the “let’s sell our National Parks to the highest bidder so they can drill for oil!” conservatism. It can mean fiscal responsibility and small government, or it can mean crypto scams and surveillance state.
This happens a lot when describing political positions.
The kind of conservatism that Heinlein embraced supported the idea that world government was necessary to prevent nuclear war. Today, granting more power to the UN or any other international body is ridiculed by most conservatives.
What is called conservatism in many countries today is totally different from what it was while Heinlein was alive.
No. That is reactionary. Conservatism means "government should govern as little as possible to guarantee freedoms, and no less. it should not provide services for a fee (aka tax)."
Conservatism is a vague set of ideas about promoting and maintaining traditional institutions and values. That has various political manifestations, depending on circumstances. In the UK at the turn of the 20th Century for example, it meant heavy protectionist tariffs, as that supported domestic agriculture and the landed aristocracy. Nowadays the UK Conservative party opposes protectionist tariffs and champions free trade, as that maintains the current economic climate.
It never meant that. Conservativism does not care about freedoms, except for cherry picked few freedoms for selected few. It also does not care about small government, it cares about government small in some areas and huge in others.
Conservative voters do not care about freedom, conservative politicians do not care about freedom and and considerable amounts of them are actively opposed to it.
Conservativism is consistently very authoritarian. It is about hierarchies, not freedom.
This is like how Americans of the "conservative" bent use "liberal" as a perjorative, despite holding to liberal (or, occasionally, neoliberal) economic theory. I don't get America at all.
I am not bending anything. Ibam describing belives and behavior of people who call themselves "comswrvatives".
They have known political program and agenda. They vote in congress, senate and general election. They write articles, they have tv shows, podcasts and radio shows.
They are consistently pro-Trump, pro-authoritarian, pro-war, anti-abortion, anti-whatever-not-them groups rights. Except big business, they are pro big business.
> conservatism is a legitimate and, especially in good times, logical and effective strategy: keep that which works, change only that which needs changing and be careful not to change it too much
Conservatism runs entirely on the ingroup-outgroup divide - "keep that which works for us", and be a force opposing changes sought by people for whom things are not going so well, for whom change is the logical strategy.
Honest conservatives can see past the blind spot of the divide and don't try to present their strategy as a universal ethical good.
ive seen this quote posted many times and never understood it. thanks for linking the original (?) essay, things make sense now. i do disagree with the author though; his statement is plainly defensible.
In a sense, yes. That one's usually called 'fairness'.
A corollary is that people tend not to be conservatives when they belong to the less well-off ingroup. Suddenly bringing about change becomes more important.
You're welcome. It's great that your questions came from a genuine desire of understanding. Though to be honest, that interaction - a sequence of short direct questions without further context - seemed to me like you were testing me, trying to lead me into a contradiction. I assumed less-than-good faith, I'm glad I was mistaken.
Agreed. "Moon is a Harsh Mistress" is a good example - Heinlein tries quite hard to envisage a society in which women wield more social power, but can't quite relinquish the idea that women wish and deserve to be dominated by powerful men. Worth stating that 1952 was shortly after WW2 i.e. at the start of Heinlein's "middle period" when his worldview shifted dramatically towards more right-wing values (military patriotism, anti-communism, and individual self-reliance).
Exactly my point. Some other commenters got wrapped around themselves thinking I was using regressive as a synonym for conservative, but no, I said what I meant; specific words mean specific things.
Absolutely. It’s not socialism to nationalize a company that’s gone and made itself instrumental to national security and/or foreign policy. Especially when said company seems to interfere with either on a whim, often against (or perhaps I should say, not always entirely aligned with) America’s interests.
I don’t actually dislike Krugman’s politics, in the sense that I’m also generally a market oriented economic liberal. But this is America, and here we value people who build stuff and are skeptical of people who just study stuff. It’s not just us. There’s a reason he won the “Nobel Memorial Prize” in economics and not a real Nobel Prize.
Close. The US values people who capture the hard work of others and put it forward as their own. The actual people who do the work, not valued so much, treated as replaceable and disposable cogs.
If you work hard, you’re the sucker. But running around as a thought leader on the backs of everyone else? Captain of Industry, probably mentioned in Arena Magazine or a Works In Progress publication.
Americans acknowledge that technical direction, leadership, organizing people, and allocating capital is incredibly valuable work. A guy working construction in the U.S. builds a skyscraper and a guy working construction in my dad’s village in Bangladesh builds a tin roof house. Did the first guy do 1,000 times as much “hard work” that he has so much more to show for his efforts? No, the Bangladeshi guy worked harder. If you took the first guy and put him in Bangladesh (but retaining all of his knowledge and skills) would he build a skyscraper? No, he would build maybe a somewhat nicer and better made tin roof house.
You point to the skyscraper and say “the construction worker built that! Someone else is taking credit for his work! Someone is getting rich off his back!” But how is it that we ended up with a skyscraper instead of a tin roof house? Whatever it is, it isn’t intrinsic to the worker. So it seems odd to give the worker all the credit for the skyscraper when in a different context his same effort would have produced a tin roof house instead.
> Americans acknowledge that technical direction, leadership, organizing people, and allocating capital is incredibly valuable work.
How has China built far more and better than the US without great allocators of capital? I suppose because competent people in positions of power will still encourage building and progress without the capitalism performance art and theatrics.
You think America is great, I’m not going to talk you out of your religion, and believing America is a great is a religion not grounded in data and evidence. But I believe the data shows others have done far better with arguably better systems.
There’s a reason China can build 50M EVs a year and the US can barely build 1-2M, or double global annual solar PV demand, as examples. Good luck fighting a conflict with the stock market and “great allocators of capital.”
> How has China built far more and better than the US
It's not because Chinese workers put in so much more effort than American ones!
China supports my point, not your's. Since 1990, China has followed a model of authoritarian-capitalism: https://www.hudson.org/economics/china-banks-on-authoritaria.... The CCP provides broad industrial policy and leadership, while capitalist business owners provide technical direction and capital allocation. The post-1990 Chinese model bears a resemblance to Hamilton's "American System," a combination of state interventionism to build infrastructure and free markets to allocate capital: https://carnegieendowment.org/china-financial-markets/2017/0...
Notably, in 1990 China and India had the same per-capita GDP: https://www.bmsmoney.com/article/full/gdp-per-capita-india-v... (both were desperately poor). Today, China's is five times higher than India's. How did that happen? It wasn't because Chinese workers suddenly started putting in five times the effort. It's because Chinese leaders and business owners started doing better at their job of directing people and allocating capital. For the last 35 years Indian workers have been putting in just as much effort as Chinese workers. But thanks to the people above the workers, Chinese workers now get to live in a country that's on the precipice of breaking into first world living standards.
So who is taking credit for the other's work here? The worker, who puts in the same amount of effort, or the leadership who, if they do their jobs well, will turn that same amount of effort into modern China as opposed to modern India?
> You think America is great
I think China is great. America is good for Americans who are socialized into England's 800+ years of civic development. China provides a model the third world can follow.
Huh? China received tons of investment from US investors and benefited greatly from the US decision to grant China free access to the US market.
The US is self-sufficient in oil, so naturally it hasn't invested as heavily in risky ventures to reduce its dependence on oil as a country that gets most of its oil from a long supply line (past potentially hostile powers like India) to the Persian Gulf and even further through to Russia's European ports.
What has Krugman gone out and built? There are economists who helped turn around countries. The Chicago boys helped Chile become one of the richest countries in Latin America. Has Krugman done any of that?
Krugman makes me think of Ashraf Ghani, the former President of Afghanistan and academic. The guy literally wrote a book “Fixing Failed States.” Then he got the chance to put his theory to practice and he flamed out miserably. Then there’s Muhammad Yunus, another Nobel Prize winning economist who is currently shitting the bed as prime minister of Bangladesh. I’d love to see Krugman put his money where his mouth is and run even a small economy.
Yeah, you simply don’t like the guy, and it’s becoming clear that you probably don’t like economists in general.
I gave you the benefit of doubt earlier, but you can’t get through a comment without dropping a snarky jab.
Not liking people is normal. I don’t see why you thought you had to attempt to conceal your contempt (or that you could, since it’s apparently so strong).
You’re right I don’t value the opinions of economists unless they’ve applied their theories in practice. I don’t think someone who just thinks about stuff should have the power to “take Starlink away” from someone who does stuff. That’s not “snarky,” it’s a substantive judgment about the value of theory versus practice. It’s like some computer science theorist saying we should “take Linux away from Linus.”
I suppose it won't help to point out to you that it's fiction, none of it actually happened, no person was ever hurt, and this is nowhere close to ”free speech absolutism”.
It’s acceptable on AO3 to write a narrative description of a real person’s actual abuse, including their personal information (see II.F.4.a), and it only “may result in a judgment of harassment” if also the author specifically makes it available to the victim.
It's the written equivalent of deepfake porn - hugely entertaining for the creators, not so much for the victims. Especially if they're teens at school, and the creators are bullying them.
No matter what AO3 thinks, in many countries this immediately crosses the line into criminal harassment.
As for the rest - the fanfic community has been among the loudest criticising AI writing for 'stealing from real artists', which is... not exactly self-aware.
There is no contradiction here. It was founded precisely because LiveJournal started censoring sexually explicit fanfiction involving taboo subjects (particularly incest/rape/minors).
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
This is not a criticism of their moderation style, this is simply reporting how they describe it.
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