JonathanMerklin (u/JonathanMerklin)

JonathanMerklin commented on Jules, our asynchronous coding agent blog.google/technology/go... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

BlackjackCF · 23 days ago

The cynic in me thinks that complicated subscriptions schemes are an effective way to make people overpay for stuff.

JonathanMerklin · 23 days ago

I think it's possible that that may be an additional benefit (for Google), but to me it seems overwhelmingly more likely that the main explanation here is Conway's Law.

JonathanMerklin commented on Gukesh becomes the youngest chess world champion in history lichess.org/@/Lichess/blo... · Posted by u/alexmolas

dorgo · 9 months ago

Take the computer which beats Magnus and restrain it to never make the best move in a position. Expand this to N best moves as needed to reach 1300 rating.

JonathanMerklin · 9 months ago

You've identified a potential strategy by which a computer can play like a 1300-rated player, but not one where it will "play like a 1300-rated human". Patzers can still find and make moves in your set of N (if only by blind chance).

JonathanMerklin commented on Infinite Proofs: The Effects of Mathematics on David Foster Wallace (2012) lareviewofbooks.org/artic... · Posted by u/lordleft

lordleft · a year ago

Here is the book on Infinity DFW penned: https://www.amazon.com/Everything-More-Compact-History-Infin...

JonathanMerklin · a year ago

I want to note for the HN crowd that the book is in the "just technical enough to inform yet not scare off the layman, but not technical enough for the practitioner" nonfiction subgenre. Critically, there are a number of finer details that DFW gets wrong; if you're mathematically inclined and intend to read this, I suggest pairing it with a printed copy of Prabhakar Ragde's errata document hosted by the DFW fansite The Howling Fantods ([1]).

[1] https://www.thehowlingfantods.com/dfw/images/enmerrata.pdf

JonathanMerklin commented on Microsoft to delay release of Recall AI feature on security concerns reuters.com/technology/ar... · Posted by u/mfiguiere

vsuperpower2020 · a year ago

Was "gamer-rabble" the word of the day?

JonathanMerklin · a year ago

Perhaps not the hyphenated form, but I'd had a chat with a friend a couple days ago where we meandered around some surface level philosophy and I paraphrased a section or two from Thus Spoke Zarathustra about the rabble ([1]), so I'm sure that's why it was front of mind. I only used it twice just to be clear that it was referring to the same thing, I didn't intend for any semantic satiation or emphasis through repetition. My apologies!

[1] http://www.literaturepage.com/read/thusspakezarathustra-107....

JonathanMerklin commented on Microsoft to delay release of Recall AI feature on security concerns reuters.com/technology/ar... · Posted by u/mfiguiere

jcfrei · a year ago

Not quite true: The other huge group of customers is simply gamers.

JonathanMerklin · a year ago

Genuinely asking: is that huge in terms of their install base or revenue, or is that huge in terms of PR ramifications (like, "vocal minority" type of deal)? In my younger days I'd've had a heavily skewed pro-gamer and pro-authority-of-the-gamer-rabble viewpoint, but now at this phase of my life I can't help but feel the majority of the places I see Windows are all in business and education contexts (so just business, heyo). I'd be curious to know if the gamer-rabble still holds the kind of weight in the social media aggregate that, say, got the Kinect-as-mandatory stuff walked back.

JonathanMerklin commented on Cold showers on overhyped topics (2017) github.com/hwayne/awesome... · Posted by u/troupo

coryfklein · 2 years ago

Stepping back, is this simply pointing out that Rule 34 also applies to scientific research? If a claim can be made, there is a scientific study that "proves" the claim true.

If someone came to me with some outlandish claim, "Studies show that singing in the shower lowers cancer risk," I honestly won't be surprised if they could produce 2-4 white papers published in modern journals in support of it. So much of modern science seems to be reading between the lines and meta-analyses of scientific studies.

Scott Alexander's review of Ivermectin[0] is a great example of this. Bold claim is made, everyone divides into two camps, and in fact both camps have multiple peer reviewed studies backing their side, and to arrive at some semblance of understanding of the topic you need to spend hours diving into the studies and checking off boxes: were they peer reviewed, were there confounders, do the authors have a history of fraud, and on and on and on.

[0] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-than-y...

JonathanMerklin · 2 years ago

I get what you're saying, but "rule 34 also applies to scientific research" is a bizarre way to word it; the way I'd interpret that phrase out of context is just that it logically follows because scientific research is a subset of "things that exist".

JonathanMerklin commented on Sam Bankman-Fried Has a Savior Complex–and Maybe You Should Too (2022) web.archive.org/web/20221... · Posted by u/lalaland1125

lawgimenez · 2 years ago

> “I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that,” explains SBF. “I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.“

I don’t get the rationale behind this quote.

JonathanMerklin · 2 years ago

I don't claim to be in SBF's head, but the gist of the rationale for this type of thought is a hypercritical focus on effective usage of the limiting resource of time. Learning facts about reality is the only reason to consume text content; any purposeful reduction of signal-to-noise ratio is folly. Books should be blogposts. Blogposts should be bulleted digests. Maximize information density to minimize wasted time. Fiction is pure waste.

I feel like most people who have ever had that mental model of reading evolve past that type of thinking and settle into the "time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time" mode of thinking by the time they reach high school (yours truly included). Not to mention one often needs to take a moment for newly acquired information to "settle", and language that's (loosely) bridgework between facts is what grants that moment.