crypto420 (u/crypto420)

crypto420 commented on iPhone Pocket apple.com/newsroom/2025/1... · Posted by u/soheilpro

NickC25 · 4 months ago

>Apple's design team is now apparently unable to continue their job

Honestly id say this is a mix of both Jobs and Ive being gone.

Now under the operational maximalist that is Tim Cook, they just revert to old designs every few years and call it revolutionary. See: edges on the iPhone. First, rounded edges. WOW, revolutionary! Then a few years later, hard edges. WOW, revolutionary! Then a few years later, rounded edges. WOW, revolutionary! Then a few years later, hard edges. WOW, revolutionary!

All the while stripping actual functionality out of the devices and removing useful features like headphone jacks. There hasn't been real product innovation at Apple in over a decade.

But I digress.

crypto420 · 4 months ago

> There hasn't been real product innovation at Apple in over a decade.

Everyone says this but forgets that AirPods were released in 2016, Pros in 2020, and they're now the most popular headphones in the world

crypto420 commented on Warren Buffett's final shareholder letter [pdf] berkshirehathaway.com/new... · Posted by u/philip1209

kelnos · 4 months ago

Well, both, obviously.

But in all seriousness, if I had to choose, I think I'd rather be 25 with $1k.

I really don't need a trillion dollars, at any point in my life (and certainly not with too few years left to do anything with but the tiniest fraction of it). I don't need a billion dollars, even. I figure $20M would allow me to do anything I wanted to do, with a healthy cushion in case anything went wrong. (Well, with $20M, even if I were to triple my spending habits, I'd likely still die with more money than I started with.)

I'm not sure that I fear death, but I do recognize at middle age that time is finite, and there are so many things to do in this world. Even with close to nothing as a $1k-holding 25-year-old, I could strive to make things better for myself, and likely look forward to a lifetime of experiences. At 95 that would nearly all be behind me.

Put another way: if I was 95 and had a trillion dollars, and there was some highly advanced, crazy-expensive procedure I could undergo to reduce my biological age down to 25, even if I'd only have $1k left over afterward, I expect I'd do it.

crypto420 · 4 months ago

> Well, both, obviously.

So, 95 with 1k?

crypto420 commented on Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race nbcnews.com/politics/elec... · Posted by u/jsheard

dluan · 4 months ago

Zohran is exactly the kind of change candidate that the San Francisco machine with Grow SF would actively seek to squash.

But Zohran's not alone, today's election was a massive swing back in almost every single race. School boards, city councils, state houses and senates, all swung radically left.

It should be ringing alarm bells that the SF / YC / startup community that used to champion utilitarian, meritocratic QoL improvements as a mission, is now so deeply forked from the base that sprung today's results. Politicians like Zohran won't be bought off by Palantir money. So, what's Peter Thiel and Gary to do? Where is Marc Benioff going to park his money? Reid Hoffman, Dustin Moskovitz, Michael Moritz, Reed Hastings, Eric Schmidt, Laurene Jobs, Ben Horowitz - all of these people aren't doing the normal pay for play donations, they are interested in shaping the party in their image. Well, Zohran doesn't look like you.

crypto420 · 4 months ago

Peter Thiel and Mamdani are more alike than you may think.

https://x.com/aphysicist/status/1937879912221667792

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/billionaire-peter-thiel-warns...

Nobody wants to hear this because it departs from the 'billionaire bad' trope. But Thiel has been remarkably consistent in his criticism of housing being the center of all of the Millenial economic woes.

crypto420 commented on ICE and CBP agents are scanning faces on the street to verify citizenship 404media.co/ice-and-cbp-a... · Posted by u/samfriedman

oceansky · 4 months ago

I wonder who is storing this data, I would bet Palantir. Possibly Oracle too.

crypto420 · 4 months ago

Not Palantir. Their CEO has explicitly said that they don't collect data on US citizens.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-IH7EVrBbQ

crypto420 commented on I'm drowning in AI features I never asked for and I hate it makeuseof.com/ai-features... · Posted by u/gnabgib

dcre · 5 months ago

On the first section, this is sort of funny. This guy is complaining about Android and Windows. Meanwhile, Mark Gurman is reporting every week how behind Apple is on their LLM integration. So here I am on iOS and macOS and I don't have any of these problems because Apple can't get their shit together to mess up my experience.

crypto420 · 5 months ago

The whole point of Apple intelligence is that it shouldn’t feel like you’re talking with an LLM, it’s that it fades into the OS but delivers new features that make the OS more intelligent. I’m actually very bullish on it

crypto420 commented on How Does Claude 4 Think? – Sholto Douglas and Trenton Bricken dwarkesh.com/p/sholto-tre... · Posted by u/consumer451

crypto420 · 10 months ago

All of this, as well as the crazy weird behaviors by o3 around it's hallucinations and Claude on deceiving users - is pointing to an interesting quote I saw about scaling RL in LLMs: https://x.com/jxmnop/status/1922078186864566491

"the AI labs spent a few years quietly scaling up supervised learning, where the best-case outcome was obvious: an excellent simulator of human text

now they are scaling up reinforcement learning, which is something fundamentally different. and no one knows what happens next"

I tend to believe this. AlphaGo and AlphaZero, which were both trained with RL at scale, led to strategies that have never been seen before. They were also highly specialized neural networks for a very specific task, which is quite different from LLMs, which are quite general in their capabilities. Scaling RL on LLMs could lead to models that have very unpredictable behaviors and properties on a variety of tasks.

This is all going to sound rather hyperbolic - but I think we're living in quite unprecedented times, and I am starting to believe Kurzweil's vision of the Singularity. The next 10-20 years are going to be very unpredictable. I don't quite know what the answer will be, but I believe scaling mechanistic interpretability will probably yield some breakthroughs into how these models approach problems.

crypto420 commented on Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist research.google/blog/acce... · Posted by u/Jimmc414

crypto420 · a year ago

I'm not sure if people here even read the entirety of the article. From the article:

> We applied the AI co-scientist to assist with the prediction of drug repurposing opportunities and, with our partners, validated predictions through computational biology, expert clinician feedback, and in vitro experiments.

> Notably, the AI co-scientist proposed novel repurposing candidates for acute myeloid leukemia (AML). Subsequent experiments validated these proposals, confirming that the suggested drugs inhibit tumor viability at clinically relevant concentrations in multiple AML cell lines.

and,

> For this test, expert researchers instructed the AI co-scientist to explore a topic that had already been subject to novel discovery in their group, but had not yet been revealed in the public domain, namely, to explain how capsid-forming phage-inducible chromosomal islands (cf-PICIs) exist across multiple bacterial species. The AI co-scientist system independently proposed that cf-PICIs interact with diverse phage tails to expand their host range. This in silico discovery, which had been experimentally validated in the original novel laboratory experiments performed prior to use of the AI co-scientist system, are described in co-timed manuscripts (1, 2) with our collaborators at the Fleming Initiative and Imperial College London. This illustrates the value of the AI co-scientist system as an assistive technology, as it was able to leverage decades of research comprising all prior open access literature on this topic.

The model was able to come up with new scientific hypotheses that were tested to be correct in the lab, which is quite significant.

crypto420 commented on AI founders will learn the bitter lesson lukaspetersson.com/blog/2... · Posted by u/gsky

jillesvangurp · a year ago

I think this is largely right. I look a this space as somebody that plugs together bits and pieces of software components for a living for a few decades. I don't need to deeply understand how each of those things work to be effective. I just need to know how to use them.

From that point of view, AI is more of the same. I've done a few things with the OpenAI apis. Easy work. There's not much to it. Scarily simple actually. With the right tools and frameworks we are talking a few lines of code mostly. The rest is just the usual window dressing you need to turn that into an app or service. And LLMs can generate a lot of that these days.

The worry for VC funded companies in this space is that a lot of stuff is becoming a commodity. For example, the llama and phi models are pretty decent. And you can run them yourself. Claude and OpenAI are a bit better and larger so you can't run them yourself. But increasingly those cheap models that you can run yourself are actually good enough for a lot of things. Model quality is a really hard to defend moat long term. Mostly the advantage is temporary. And most use cases don't actually need a best in class LLM.

So, I'm not a believer in the classic winner takes all approach here where one company turns into this trillion dollar behemoth and the rest of the industry pays the tax to that one company in perpetuity. I don't see that happening. The reality already is that the richest company in this space is selling hardware, not models. Nvidia has a nice (temporary) moat. The point of selling hardware is that you want many customers. Not just a few. And training requires more hardware than inference. So, Nvidia is rich because there are a lot of companies busy training models.

crypto420 · a year ago

> So, I'm not a believer in the classic winner takes all approach here where one company turns into this trillion dollar behemoth and the rest of the industry pays the tax to that one company in perpetuity.

I agree with this sentiment. There are a lot of frontier model players that are very competent (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Amazon, DeepSeek, xAI) and I'm sure more will come onboard as we find ways to make models smaller and smaller.

The mental framework I try to use is that AI is this weird technology that is an enabler of a lot of downstream technology, with the best economic analogy being electricity. It'll change our society in very radical ways, but it's unclear who's going to make money off of it. In the electricity era Westinghouse and GE emerged as the behemoths because of their ability to manufacture massive turbines (which are the equivalent of today's NVIDIA and perhaps Google).

crypto420 commented on The Future Is Getting Farther Away marginalrevolution.com/ma... · Posted by u/eitau_1

varelse · 4 years ago

So this root cause of which you speak? You're not actually going to say what it is you're just going to complain about it and allude to it, am I right? And in doing so how are you anything but more Bread and Circuses?

If the West had always been this risk averse with respect to science and technology, we wouldn't have gone to space let alone the Moon. We wouldn't have antibiotics and we probably wouldn't even have flight. So tell me how to restore America's healthy level of risk tolerance? Because taking medical advice from online pundits is incredibly risky and yet it's seen as safer than trusting science by a disturbingly large minority. And that's just one example of how badly we gauge risk.

And to be fair, I have the same viewpoint about the irrational fear of nuclear power.

crypto420 · 4 years ago

I wonder if its just about having competent adversaries? The West has always consisted of near-powers competing for resources and technology. A notable exception is modern history, where America hasn't had a serious technological adversary since the Space Race in the 1960s, and we've sort of slumped into this malaise. China appears to be a serious adversary now, but I don't think many Americans seriously possess the will or the skills to take on China.

crypto420 commented on The Future Is Getting Farther Away marginalrevolution.com/ma... · Posted by u/eitau_1

convolvatron · 4 years ago

doesn't that...worry you?

crypto420 · 4 years ago

It most definitely does.

If money is a medium for people to convert goods and services from one form to another, then in a technologically advancing world where things become cheaper in terms of SI units, we should expect the value of money (relative to other items) to become higher, or for goods and services to become so cheap that we don't even bother about their prices.

In a technologically stagnating economy, we can expect the opposite: we can expect that if technology becomes worse off, then the value of money will get worse and the same physical item will become less valuable i.e will cost more in money. We see this happening with oil prices which are at the heart of energy intensive economies - gasoline is MORE expensive than in the 1970s even when adjusted for inflation. Same goes for other goods central to the economy, such as housing, healthcare and food. The more likely outcome is that to artificially stimulate the economy, central banks will keep printing more money and devalue goods in a never ending cycle. The only things that can really save us is technology that can make things cheaper.

https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/gasoline-prices-adjust...

It seems that Peter Thiel's ideas of a technologically stagnating society are making more and more sense.