breuleux (u/breuleux)

breuleux commented on “Nothing” is the secret to structuring your work vangemert.dev/blog/nothin... · Posted by u/spmvg

EdNutting · a month ago

Hear hear!

I maintain it’s because productive people know how to focus on what matters, to cut through the noise, and it’s not just by carefully thinking things through (though that’s an important skill too). It’s partly because they “just don’t see” the noise - if you like, they’re not distracted by it, they can tune it out - or rather, they don’t need to spend any energy tuning it out because they don’t ‘see’ or hear it in the first place!

I’ve frequently been: 1. Complimented on my productivity 2. Told I need a less messy workspace/environment.

One of these is true, the other is a road to depression - wasting time and energy tidying up and then feeling like I got no actual work done because, well, I didn’t!

There’s obviously a limit - continual small bits of sorting and organising ensure I can still sit at my desk and find stuff on my computer, but it doesn’t need to be the extreme clear-desk policy that proponents of Clean Work seem to be pushing. There’s a huge zone in between the two extremes.

breuleux · a month ago

I don’t tidy up very often, but when I do, it doesn’t take much time or energy. I just dump everything that isn’t version controlled into a junk folder, and it feels great.

breuleux commented on The time I didn't meet Jeffrey Epstein scottaaronson.blog/?p=953... · Posted by u/pfdietz

krapp · a month ago

Whomever controls the process that decides what a representative sample is and selects candidates is now the middleman.

breuleux · a month ago

It's generally easier to make such a process tamper-proof than an election. You can pick a cryptographically secure open source PRNG and determine the seed in a decentralized way by allowing anyone to contribute a salt into a list which is made public at the deciding moment. Then anyone can verify the integrity of the process by verifying the seed includes their contribution, and computing the candidates themselves.

breuleux commented on The time I didn't meet Jeffrey Epstein scottaaronson.blog/?p=953... · Posted by u/pfdietz

alphazard · a month ago

No they did not. It's easier for a small number of people to coordinate, than a large number. The wealthy have about as much power as the entire middle class, but can wield it better because they are more nimble.

That doesn't change the state of the negotiation, which is that cutting taxes for the middle class will also require cutting them for the wealthy. If you optimize for your own personal notion of fairness, or retribution, you may very well fail to coordinate in your own self-interest.

breuleux · a month ago

> It's easier for a small number of people to coordinate, than a large number.

That's basically my main argument for replacing election-based democracy by lottery-based democracy. Electing the right representatives is a coordination problem in and of itself, a process which the wealthy are already quite adept at manipulating, so we might as well cut the middle man and pick a random representative sample of the population instead, who can then coordinate properly.

breuleux commented on The time I didn't meet Jeffrey Epstein scottaaronson.blog/?p=953... · Posted by u/pfdietz

Jensson · a month ago

> The source of most of the corruption I see in the world today is wealth, and specifically wealthy people paying people off to get their own way

This is so wrong, its not expensive to bribe politicians so higher taxes wouldn't stop this at all. The problem is that its possible to bribe politicians, meaning government has too much power, taxes would make that worse not better. And even more important most bribes doesn't come from individuals, it comes from super PACs and corporations, and those would exist regardless how much you tax rich people.

What you need is a less centralized government so its harder to bribe a few key people to get what you want, and a more direct democracy that can eliminate politicians that takes bribes.

When voters can't punish bad politicians since the incumbents has so much power to draw voting lines and decide who is on the ballots then corruption will always escalate out of control.

breuleux · a month ago

If the government doesn't have enough power, the wealthy won't need to bribe politicians to do their bidding. They will do their own bidding directly, and there will be nobody to stop them.

It's like, if you want to sell your cyanide penis pills under big government, you need to bribe someone. If you want to sell them under small government, you just... you just sell them, that's what.

There may be ways to design a government where power is better distributed, e.g. using sortition, but ultimately it needs to be richer and more powerful than its wealthiest citizens, otherwise these wealthy citizens will assess, correctly, that when push comes to shove, the laws won't apply to them, and they do not need the government's permission to do what they want.

breuleux commented on Claude Opus 4.6 anthropic.com/news/claude... · Posted by u/HellsMaddy

esafak · a month ago

It's not meaningless, it's a prediction task, and prediction is commonly held to be closely related if not synonymous with intelligence.

breuleux · a month ago

In the case of LLMs, "prediction" is overselling it somewhat. They are token sequence generators. Calling these sequences "predictions" vaguely corresponds to our own intent with respect to training these machines, because we use the value of the next token as a signal to either reinforce or get away from the current behavior. But there's nothing intrinsic in the inference math that says they are predictors, and we typically run inference with a high enough temperature that we don't actually generate the max likelihood tokens anyway.

The whole terminology around these things is hopelessly confused.

breuleux commented on Claude Opus 4.6 anthropic.com/news/claude... · Posted by u/HellsMaddy

bopbopbop7 · a month ago

> Besides, what is the human brain if not a machine that generates "tokens" that the body propagates through nerves to produce physical actions?

Ah yes, the brain is as simple as predicting the next token, you just cracked what neuroscientists couldn't for years.

breuleux · a month ago

The point is that "predicting the next token" is such a general mechanism as to be meaningless. We say that LLMs are "just" predicting the next token, as if this somehow explained all there was to them. It doesn't, not any more than "the brain is made out of atoms" explains the brain, or "it's a list of lists" explains a Lisp program. It's a platitude.

breuleux commented on Claude Opus 4.6 anthropic.com/news/claude... · Posted by u/HellsMaddy

itay-maman · a month ago

Impressive results, but I keep coming back to a question: are there modes of thinking that fundamentally require something other than what current LLM architectures do?

Take critical thinking — genuinely questioning your own assumptions, noticing when a framing is wrong, deciding that the obvious approach to a problem is a dead end. Or creativity — not recombination of known patterns, but the kind of leap where you redefine the problem space itself. These feel like they involve something beyond "predict the next token really well, with a reasoning trace."

I'm not saying LLMs will never get there. But I wonder if getting there requires architectural or methodological changes we haven't seen yet, not just scaling what we have.

breuleux · a month ago

> These feel like they involve something beyond "predict the next token really well, with a reasoning trace."

I don't think there's anything you can't do by "predicting the next token really well". It's an extremely powerful and extremely general mechanism. Saying there must be "something beyond that" is a bit like saying physical atoms can't be enough to implement thought and there must be something beyond the physical. It underestimates the nearly unlimited power of the paradigm.

Besides, what is the human brain if not a machine that generates "tokens" that the body propagates through nerves to produce physical actions? What else than a sequence of these tokens would a machine have to produce in response to its environment and memory?

breuleux commented on A lot of population numbers are fake davidoks.blog/p/a-lot-of-... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

jklinger410 · a month ago

I suppose we'll just have to agree to disagree. Simplicity comes from strong definitions, and "infinite" complexity comes from weak ones.

If you're always chasing the next technicality then maybe you didn't really know what question you were looking to answer at the onset.

breuleux · a month ago

> Simplicity comes from strong definitions

Sure, you can put it this way, with the caveat that reality at large isn't strongly definable.

You can sort of see this with good engineering: half of it is strongly defining a system simple enough to be reasoned about and built up, the other half is making damn sure that the rest of reality can't intrude, violate your assumptions and ruin it all.

breuleux commented on Denmark's struggle to break up with Silicon Valley politico.eu/article/denma... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

bflesch · 2 months ago

US tech workers believe their own lies and think they have some sort of magic sauce. For decades they've enjoyed government welfare and US-friendly regulation in many countries, which kept non-US competition small. An influx of non-US talent to US tech companies helped them stay innovative.

It is a courtesy that citizens from free countries pay US tech companies a middleman fee over various ways. What US tech workers fail to realize is that

  - nobody needs Facebook to chat with their family
  - nobody needs Visa, Paypal or Mastercard to pay in a local shop
  - nobody needs Netflix subscription to watch a movie created by a non-US entity
  - nobody needs to pay 50€ per month for privilege of Microsoft spying on your PC
  - nobody needs their emails/pictures held hostage by Apple or Google 
  - nobody needs Uber in order to order a Taxi

So many of these things were done due to convenience and convention, making US tech workers richer and richer. I feel people are realizing what kind of pricks not only the management of US tech companies but also the US tech workers themselves are. Especially on HN these affluent workers from US tech companies run around and parrot the most stupid talking points while thinking their wealth comes from some sort of special skill.

We made them rich. They looted our data and poisoned our societies with fake news. They show no respect towards our systems or culture.

breuleux · 2 months ago

It is also a courtesy that free countries respect US copyright. I wouldn't be surprised if EU countries have already started ramping up corporate espionage and are making contingency plans to seize all data and assets on their territory. If they manage to get ahold of source code and data, they may be able to keep some services running without US involvement.

Netflix is a good example: the functionality isn't difficult to reproduce, and the only thing that restricts its library is copyright, which the EU could just stop enforcing for American companies.

breuleux commented on LLM Problems Observed in Humans embd.cc/llm-problems-obse... · Posted by u/js216

crazygringo · 2 months ago

> when humans have no idea what they're talking about, it's usually more obvious

Is it?

That's not my experience.

breuleux · 2 months ago

I think so, yes. We rely a lot on eloquence and general knowledge as signals of competence, and LLMs beat most people at these. That's the "usually" -- I don't think good human bullshitters are more obvious than LLMs.

This may not apply to you if you regard LLMs, including their established rhetorical patterns, with greater suspicion or scrutiny (and you should!) It also does not apply when talking about subjects in which you are knowledgeable. But if you're chatting about things you are not knowledgeable about, and you treat the LLM just like any human, I think it applies. There's a reason LLM psychosis is a thing, rhetorically these things can simulate the ability of a cult leader.