spot5010 (u/spot5010)

spot5010 commented on Food, housing, & health care costs are a source of major stress for many people apnorc.org/projects/food-... · Posted by u/speckx

rtp4me · 17 days ago

Speaking as someone from the US, how is this a meaningful comparison in anyway? Honest question. Sure, wage growth sounds good in an upward trending market, but let's say the market has gone down 30% over the past five years. Would you expect everybody to take a 30% pay cut? If Walmart had a blockbuster year because their suppliers charged less (more efficient means of production), how are Walmart employee wages interconnected to the supplier charges?

I suppose what you are saying is the profits of the company should be poured back into worker salaries. I agree to an extent. But, what if the company undergoes very hard times (3-5 years of negative growth)? Should the company take back wages? I think this is a double-edge sword.

spot5010 · 17 days ago

Layoffs contribute to the average worker taking a paycut. And we are seeing layoffs even in a market that is soaring. Why do you think that workers wouldn't be affected during a downturn?

spot5010 commented on GPT-5 openai.com/gpt-5/... · Posted by u/rd

jablongo · 18 days ago

It's also worth considering that past some threshold, it may be very difficult for us as users to discern which model is better. I don't think thats what's going on here, but we should be ready for it. For example, if you are an ELO 1000 chess player would you yourself be able to tell if Magnus Carlson or another grandmaster were better by playing them individually? To the extent that our AGI/SI metrics are based on human judgement the cluster effect that they create may be an illusion.

spot5010 · 17 days ago

My guess is that more than the raw capabilities of a model, users would be drawn more to the model's personality. A "better" model would then be one that can closely adopt the nuances that a user likes. This is a largely uninformed guess, let's see if it holds up well with time.

spot5010 commented on Writing is thinking nature.com/articles/s4422... · Posted by u/__rito__

stillpointlab · a month ago

Many people here are taking away from this that substituting our own writing with the writing from an LLM is a danger for human development.

I see things more optimistically. If good writing leads to good thinking, then anything I do to improve my ability to write well transitively helps me to think well.

In that sense, I actually see a huge benefit to LLMs in improving my writing and therefore improving my thinking. Not only can I ask for detailed and powerful feedback, I can also ask for more details on background context or related topics that I wouldn't be aware of.

I believe judicious use of LLMs can make us better than we could be without them.

spot5010 · a month ago

I subscribe to this view. LLMs can be tools for thinking, not substitutes to thinking. In fact, I feel that with time, the way we think may fundamentally change, just like how reading and writing changed thinking. An LLM can be an ideal foil to test out ideas, and the process of thinking could be an iterative process with the LLM as an active participant.

spot5010 commented on Ask HN: Are you afraid to travel to US to tech conferences? · Posted by u/throwaway98342

latentcall · 5 months ago

Yes Americans are fairly unhinged and there are definitely lots of shootings but I’ve lived in this land my whole life and haven’t been shot at.

I think you’ll be fine. Shootings here get a lot of media coverage which makes it seem more common than it actually is.

spot5010 · 5 months ago

My concern is more about being questioned or unnecessarily held at the border.

spot5010 commented on The FFT Strikes Back: An Efficient Alternative to Self-Attention arxiv.org/abs/2502.18394... · Posted by u/iNic

monkfish328 · 6 months ago

Or for that matter, a transform that's learned from the data :) A neural net for the transform itself!

spot5010 · 6 months ago

That would be super cool if it works! I’ve also wondered the same thing about activation functions. Why not let the algorithm learn the activation function?

spot5010 commented on The FFT Strikes Back: An Efficient Alternative to Self-Attention arxiv.org/abs/2502.18394... · Posted by u/iNic

evanb · 6 months ago

A cartoon:

To form a coherent idea you need to coordinate a lot of tokens. In other words, ideas are long-distance correlations between tokens. Ideas are the long-wavelength features of streams of tokens.

Is it exactly right? No. But as a cartoon it can motivate exploring an idea like this.

spot5010 · 6 months ago

Right. This makes sense. But why Fourier space in particular. Why not, for example, a wavelet transform.

spot5010 commented on Ask HN: Physics PhD at Stanford or Berkeley · Posted by u/Bang2Bay

spot5010 · 6 months ago

PhD in experimental quantum optics here, but out of the field for 7 years. Message me if you want to discuss specifics about research areas / groups.

spot5010 commented on The Tsunami of Burnout Few See charleshughsmith.blogspot... · Posted by u/dxs

Centigonal · 7 months ago

> The trick is to not care enough about your job to get hurt but not care so little that you could short-term be hurt.

It really depends on your personal psychology. After I burnt out in a demanding role that I adopted as a big part of my identity, I joined a new company vowing to not take work as seriously (I remember telling myself, "if excess effort isn't rewarded, the optimal strategy is to maximize compensation, minimize necessary effort, and eliminate excess effort").

After a few months of recovery and ruminating on why I still felt so bad (plus therapy), I learned a few things about myself:

1. I feel like garbage when I'm half-assing something at work or not giving my all -- especially when the people around me are putting in the work.

2. When I am giving my all and I feel like I'm not being recognized, I begin to lose motivation and burn out. Simple tasks become very laborious. This is a gradual, months-long process that is difficult to recognize is happening.

3. When I start to burn out, I am forced by my mind and body to half-ass things, which makes me more demotivated, which exacerbates the burnout.

Putting these insights into action, I've so far been able to keep burnout at bay by finding roles where I can give work my all, receive recognition, and be surrounded by others who are putting in similar effort. This doesn't mean blindly trusting the company or destroying my work-life balance -- I believe that "recognition for hard work" includes proactively protecting hard workers from their workaholic tendencies and giving them the flexibility to take breaks. I'm lucky to work with really great people where I frequently pass along responsibilities or take work from others to avoid over-stressing any one person and enable things like multi-week vacations. I have no idea how I will change my approach if I lose this workplace dynamic or pick up more forcing functions on my workday (e.g. having kids) in the future, but it's working pretty well for me right now.

All of this is to say: for me, the low-trust "do the bare minimum to stay employed" approach didn't actually help me get out of burnout into fulfillment -- What helped was finding a work situation where I could give my all and not feel taken advantage of. People are wired differently, so I want to caution against a one-size-fits-all approach.

spot5010 · 7 months ago

Wow. How I long to be in the position you are! I got burnt out, and then learnt to emotionally detach myself from my work so that I don’t get hurt by things that are beyond my control.

But I sorely miss not being 100% dedicated. What I do for work has always been a big part of my identity. And half-assing something feels like not being true to myself.

spot5010 commented on Type 2 Diabetes and cardiovascular disease attributable to sugar beverages nature.com/articles/s4159... · Posted by u/tchalla

ketarnath · 8 months ago

Yet another article implying causation from association. The theory that sugar CAUSES diabetes type 2 fails when you look at people that eat a ton of carbs but keep the fats low: low fat vegans, fruitarians. Find one that's diabetic. They should be dropping like flies. But look at people that eat high fat >40% of calories, and the rest in carbs, and there you'll find the population of the metabolically compromised.

spot5010 · 8 months ago

Can you please cite sources for your claims?

spot5010 commented on Nvidia bets on robotics to drive future growth ft.com/content/7c3dafa8-f... · Posted by u/pella

veunes · 8 months ago

Robotics has long been an area of promise but (I think) limited returns

spot5010 · 8 months ago

Care to elaborate? I feel the. the real power of AI will be unlocked when AI can sense and interact with the world.