abeppu (u/abeppu) - Readit News

abeppu commented on Wirth's Revenge jmoiron.net/blog/wirths-r... · Posted by u/signa11

vidarh · 4 days ago

Well, you can have the less capable system ask the more capable system to give it a tool to solve the problems it doesn't know how to solve, instead of solving it. If the problem really needs the more advanced system, that tool might call a model.

abeppu · 4 days ago

Or tell you how to use the tools you already have, but sure whatever. The point is, "LLMs that actually do stuff" end up partly looking like expensive logic to decide what to do (like an interpreter) and actually doing it, in terms of some preexisting set of primitives. The expensive logic does get you a high degree of flexibility for less programming cost, but you pay a lot for interpretive overhead. I really do think something that looks like a tracing hit (and a standard set of tools or primitives) could find "straight line" paths a reasonable fraction of calls. But if the interpreter is a service that you pay for by the token, and which is already losing money, why should it be written to do so?

abeppu commented on Wirth's Revenge jmoiron.net/blog/wirths-r... · Posted by u/signa11

abeppu · 4 days ago

I would love to see an llm system oriented around trying to "jit" out fast/cheap combinations of tool invocations from calls. The case where heartbeat calls Opus, where the transformer model itself doesn't know the time but has access to some tools, should be solvable if Opus has said the equivalent of "it's still night, and to determine this I checked the time using the `date` utility to get the epoch time and if it had responded something greater than $X I would have said it's morning". I.e. the smart model can often tell a less capable framework how it can answer the same question cheaply in the future. But incentives aren't really aligned for that presently.

abeppu commented on Attention at Constant Cost per Token via Symmetry-Aware Taylor Approximation arxiv.org/abs/2602.00294... · Posted by u/fheinsen

abeppu · 6 days ago

I haven't tried to follow the math closely but should there not be some concern about the region of convergence? It looks like they don't specifically discuss it. Or is there some reason this isn't a problem in this context?

abeppu commented on The Sovereign Tech Fund invests in Scala scala-lang.org/blog/2026/... · Posted by u/bishabosha

appplication · 12 days ago

I’m not super plugged into scala but I work with Spark quite a bit and my observation has been the whole scala 2.13 -> 3 transition is a huge mess for just about everyone who touches it. I don’t have enough hands-on context to understand why it’s so painful but it seems to be similar or worse to the python 2.7 -> 3 transition in terms of sticking friction.

abeppu · 12 days ago

It is a mess. I've spent some time trying to convert some academic oss projects and some removed features really force large redesigns. I think rather than funding the stuff on this announcement, I wish they would fund a team of experts to work on migration of a prioritized list of projects. This would both provide example patterns of migrating substantial projects and unblock projects who have been saying "we would like to try migrating but library X we use still hasn't"

abeppu commented on The Sovereign Tech Fund invests in Scala scala-lang.org/blog/2026/... · Posted by u/bishabosha

nish__ · 12 days ago

I learned recently that one of the killer apps for Scala seems to be in hardware design. Chisel [0] is the core technology of the best open source RISC-V chips. Chipyard [1] is designing leading edge type OOE and AI chips and all of the code is written in Scala. Personally, I can't wait for some of these designs to start being mass produced and put in laptops and phones.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chisel_(programming_language)

[1] https://github.com/ucb-bar/chipyard

abeppu · 12 days ago

So, as a justification for support of scala, the thing that seems lacking to me is that Chisel seems to still be centered around scala 2? E.g. their recommended template for getting started still uses scala 2 ... so without support to motivate them to use scala 3, it's not obvious that Chisel benefits much from current work on the scala language? I have not fully understood the Chisel project but I see they have a "compiler plugin" which suggests to me that moving fully off scala 2 requires a meaningful redesign.

https://github.com/chipsalliance/chisel-template/blob/main/b...

abeppu commented on Martin Luther King was talking about a universal basic income before it was cool businessinsider.com/marti... · Posted by u/robtherobber

abeppu · 21 days ago

> "Is money a birthright now? Do we just get born and get money from the government?" Republican Rep. John Gillette told Business Insider. "Because I think the Founding Fathers would say that is very contrary to our capitalist system and encouraging people to work."

I think the other perspective is that the US _has_ historically been comfortable with giving away property in the Homestead Act, land rushes, the Oregon Land Donation act etc. These were giving away _capital_, and the people needed to provide the labor to make it productive.

IDK what a future-facing equivalent should look like. Should we all own datacenter racks? Robot factory lines?

abeppu commented on Nearly 1 in 4 Americans think they have a personal social security account cato.org/blog/poll-nearly... · Posted by u/mhb

abeppu · 2 months ago

The juxtapositions in here are interesting:

- Most Americans don't know how social security is funded but

- An overwhelming majority of nonretired adults (79%) do not believe they will receive their full scheduled Social Security benefits when they retire.

- About three in four adults (77%) have heard that Social Security is projected to run short of money by 2033.

If you thought you had an individual account, and you also thought the program overall was going to run out of money and that you weren't going to get the "full benefit", does that mean you thought you weren't paying enough in?

abeppu commented on Mechanical power generation using Earth's ambient radiation science.org/doi/10.1126/s... · Posted by u/defrost

aetherspawn · 2 months ago

> the generation of >400 milliwatts per square meter of mechanical power with a potential for >6 watts per square meter.

Keep in mind the power is fully mechanical so no electricity or control circuit is required. And based on the simplicity it seems like a good candidate to power something that you need to last 100 years with no maintenance for example.

abeppu · 2 months ago

I think the "last 100 years with no maintenance" is not likely feasible with this approach. The top plate has a coating that supports high infrared emissivity -- and I think it would need to be regularly cleaned to work well. And you can't really prevent it from getting dirty by enclosing it b/c that both substantially changes the performance and moves the maintenance burden to cleaning the enclosure.

abeppu commented on Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost nbcnews.com/politics/poli... · Posted by u/jnord

randcraw · 2 months ago

The author neglects to observe that doubling tuition over 30 years equates to only a 2.35% inflation rate. That sounds pretty close to the US inflation rate during that time, so increases in tuition cost have been held in check pretty well.

abeppu · 2 months ago

No, if anything the article has a copyedit error in saying twice in one sentence that the doubling is after inflation-adjustment.

> While there have been some small declines in tuition prices over the last decade, when adjusted for inflation, College Board data shows that the average, inflation-adjusted cost of public four-year college tuition for in-state students has doubled since 1995.

abeppu commented on Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost nbcnews.com/politics/poli... · Posted by u/jnord

randcraw · 2 months ago

As the article says, this change in opinion has been very big and very recent. Don't expect universities to sit still and do nothing.

I see several possible reactions. One is to do what Georgia Tech and U Texas are doing -- to offer online degrees for MUCH reduced cost, like $10k. Will such 30 credit MS degree programs (that don't require BS first) replace 120 credit BS degrees? That makes a lot of sense to me.

The popularity of residential degree programs may be ending, due to insanely high cost and the need to retrain often as AI automation changes the employment picture rapidly and unpredictably.

abeppu · 2 months ago

> Don't expect universities to sit still and do nothing.

> The popularity of residential degree programs may be ending, due to insanely high cost.

I think the problem is that universities _have_ been changing in the direction of _delivering less_ at the same time that they cost more. The article cites public schools doubling tuition in inflation-adjusted terms since 1995, but simultaneously:

- student-faulty ratios have gotten worse

- schools use under-paid adjuncts for a larger share of classes

- good schools often trade on the research record of faculty, but the success of those prominent faculty often mean they can get course buyouts / releases, so they're not teaching anyway

- much has been published about administrative bloat in universities but for example see 2010 vs 2021 numbers here https://www.usnews.com/education/articles/one-culprit-in-ris...

Rather than trying to make new online offerings, I think schools need to lean out their staff, and cut back on programs that don't have to do with instruction. Even better would be if federal funding eligibility was tied to schools demonstrating that at least X% of their budget goes to instruction, where that X should ratchet up over time.