robot-wrangler (u/robot-wrangler)

robot-wrangler commented on The AI-Education Death Spiral a.k.a. Let the Kids Cheat anandsanwal.me/ai-educati... · Posted by u/LouisLazaris

WhyOhWhyQ · 5 days ago

I disagree about your final conclusion. To add another aphorism to your collection, "The pendulum always swings back".

robot-wrangler · 5 days ago

I'd love to hear a good argument for optimism if you've got one. I suppose the pendulum thing works sometimes on certain timescales, but for a physical analogy "shit rolling downhill" might be more accurate. Typically doesn't roll back up and momentum builds. Just as "rich get richer" and inequality accelerates, so "bullshit makes bullshit" and things begin to spiral if truth / earnest effort is not even neutral, but now arguably a disadvantage as mentioned in TFA. Small course-corrections seem pretty rare in history or in nature without revolutions or catastrophe

robot-wrangler commented on The AI-Education Death Spiral a.k.a. Let the Kids Cheat anandsanwal.me/ai-educati... · Posted by u/LouisLazaris

robot-wrangler · 5 days ago

> the system loses legitimacy, defection becomes the dominant strategy.

Almost every sentence of this piece is a very powerful reminder that we're not really talking about education vs cheating and it's actually about real work vs optics, appearances vs reality, fake news vs information, and all the rest at the same time. A certain amount of bullshit is and always has been standard, and you see it in all kinds of folk wisdom (e.g. "the people capable of being politicians are the least qualified", "those who do not steal steal from themselves", "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent"). But in a very short period of time, society itself has shifted away from rewarding real effort or real results almost everywhere.

I agree that game-theory is a pretty good way to understand it, but the conclusions are pretty dark. Defection as the only available strategy and equilibriums that add up to large-scale attractors that we maybe cannot escape.

robot-wrangler commented on Transformers know more than they can tell: Learning the Collatz sequence arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10811... · Posted by u/Xcelerate

niek_pas · 6 days ago

Can someone ELI5 this for a non-mathematician?

robot-wrangler · 6 days ago

I'll take a shot at it. Using collatz as the specific target for investigating the underlying concepts here seems like a big red-herring that's going to generate lots of confused takes. (I guess it was done partly to have access to tons of precomputed training data and partly to generate buzz. The title also seems kind of poorly chosen and/or misleading)

Really the paper is about mechanistic interpretation and a few results that are maybe surprising. First, the input representation details (base) matters a lot. This is perhaps very disappointing if you liked the idea of "let the models work out the details, they see through the surface features to the very core of things". Second, learning was burst'y with discrete steps, not smooth improvement. This may or may not be surprising or disappointing.. it depends how well you think you can predict the stepping.

robot-wrangler commented on The closer we look at time, the stranger it gets sciencefocus.com/science/... · Posted by u/philbo

robot-wrangler · 6 days ago

IANACosmologist, but in for a penny, in for a pound. If one accepts weirdness along the lines of extra spatial dimensions and mathematical singularities made physical, why not throw in a few extra dimensions for time or why not have imaginary time (in Hawking's sense)?

> One might think this means that imaginary numbers are just a mathematical game having nothing to do with the real world. From the viewpoint of positivist philosophy, however, one cannot determine what is real. All one can do is find which mathematical models describe the universe we live in. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_time

robot-wrangler commented on Has the cost of building software dropped 90%? martinalderson.com/posts/... · Posted by u/martinald

eru · 6 days ago

> And someone who isn't interested in sharing productivity gains with coworkers is basically engaged in sabotage.

Who says they aren't interested in sharing? To give a less emotionally charged example: I think my specific use pattern of Git makes me (a bit) more productive. And I'm happy to chew anyone's ear off about it who's willing to listen.

But the willingness and ability of my coworkers to engage in git-related lectures, while greater than zero, is very definitely finite.

robot-wrangler · 6 days ago

Something that is advertised as 10x improvement in productivity isn't like your personal preferences for git or a few dinky bash aliases or whatever. It's more like a secret personal project test-suite, or a whole data pipeline you're keeping private while everyone else is laboriously doing things manually.

Assuming 10x is real, then again the question: why would anyone do that? The only answers I can come up with are that they cannot share it (incompetence) or that they don't want to (sabotage). You're saying the third option is.. people just like working 8 hours while this guy works 1? Seems unlikely. Even if that's not sabotaging coworkers it's still sabotaging the business

robot-wrangler commented on Has the cost of building software dropped 90%? martinalderson.com/posts/... · Posted by u/martinald

overfeed · 6 days ago

I'm really curious on what your role is, and which industry are you in? I'm awed by these productivity gains others report, but I feel like AI helps in such a small part of my job (implementing specific changes as I direct).

Agentic workflows for me results in bloated code, which is fine when I'm willing to hand over an subsystem to the agent, such as a frontend on a side project and have it vibe code the entire thing. Trying to get clean code erases all/most of my productivity gains, and doesn't spark joy. I find having a back-end-forth with an agent exhausting, probably because I have to build and discard multiple mental models of the proposed solution, since the approach can vary wildly between prompts. An agent can easily switch between using Newton-Raphson and bisection when asked to refactor unrelated arguments, which a human colleague wouldn't do after a code review.

robot-wrangler · 6 days ago

Claims about agentic workflows are the new version of "works on my machine" and should be treated with skepticism if they cannot be committed to a repository and used by other people.

Maybe parent is a galaxy-brained genius, or.. maybe they are just leaving work early and creating a huge mess for coworkers who now must stay late. Hard to say. But someone who isn't interested in automating/encoding processes for their idiosyncratic workflows is a bad engineer, right? And someone who isn't interested in sharing productivity gains with coworkers is basically engaged in sabotage.

robot-wrangler commented on Nook Browser browsewithnook.com... · Posted by u/ray__

monooso · 9 days ago

Both the browser and the website look remarkably similar to https://zen-browser.app/.

robot-wrangler · 9 days ago

Switched to zen recently, and although I only expected a slightly different experience to firefox, it's hugely better. Profiles/containers/workspaces especially are great.. this level or organization fits my mental model much better and and I never need to manage bookmarks or use multiple windows. (Performance with large numbers of tabs seems much better too, presumably inactive workspaces are reclaiming the memory in smart ways).

robot-wrangler commented on Wolfram Compute Services writings.stephenwolfram.c... · Posted by u/nsoonhui

robot-wrangler · 9 days ago

So "use our proprietary service to scale our proprietary language" is a great pitch for people who are already all in. Increasing spend among existing customers won't help you get new ones though. And it kind of feels like a prelude to nerfing non-cloud based usage.

Typical example of a extraction/exploitation mentality where innovation would be better. Wolfram is in an amazingly good spot to spin up better "simulation as a service" if they would look at fine-tuning LLMs for compiling natural language (or academic papers) into mathematica semi-autonomously and very reliably. Mathworld is potentially a huge asset for that sort of thing too.

robot-wrangler commented on Show HN: The notepad that thinks in numbers numla.app... · Posted by u/daviducolo

robot-wrangler · 9 days ago

Hard to decide use-cases without much discussion about how it works. It converts 2 hours to seconds but not 2 pb to gb. Does this use frink under the hood? If not.. maybe it should. An AI front-end that's fine-tuned to quietly "compile" to frink on the backend feels sorely needed.

My next go-to test for this kind of thing would be converting bananas to petabytes, hoping the backend is smart enough to try and use the bekenstein bound. Wolfram (still) fails this kind of test at the moment.