John Loeber 🎢
@johnloeber
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New Post on the Forbidden Website!
If you care about LLMs, you should care about their ability to do arithmetic. Arithmetic is a useful microcosm of reasoning problems on the road to AGI.
In this essay, I try to survey all relevant papers, and summarize everything we know!
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I would love an ELO-based restaurant ranking system
Yelp reviews aren’t very useful. Everything is 3.5 - 4.5 stars. Tells me nothing. Same for Google Maps. The 0-5 scale just doesn’t get used properly because of social norms toward high ratings.
What would work much better is…
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One way to interpret Starbucks’ corporate journey is that starting with the initial value of “coffee”, they have since run gradient descent to determine What The People Really Want, the answer to which appears to be some kind of combination of sugar and ice, large, with a straw
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Restaurant reviews simply based on whether one restaurant is better than another. Instead of writing a review, it should ask you which of two similar restaurants is better. That’s all you need to construct an ELO ranking scale.
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One subtlety that’s nice about this is that it allows the rating to fluctuate every day. Rather than showing a sticky average from 3,000 old reviews, on an ELO scale the rating always changes based on what’s happening recently. Great new chef? It should be reflected immediately.
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@kane
Can you imagine that with $3.2M budget the city of San Francisco is able to purchase either (1) one Sea Shadow or (2) just slightly less than two publicly accessible washrooms
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@zillowgonewild
Imagine you wake up in your idyllic forest home decorated by Herman Miller from start to finish. You're in the mood for a nice neighborhood morning walk and a coffee.
You walk 37 minutes across the interchange, along an eight-lane highway to the local outdoor strip mall. :(
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@ID_AA_Carmack
A lot of junior engineers are very very aggressive about DRY when in practice, a lot of code is similar enough to tempt to abstract, but too different to create a *maintainable abstraction*
Concern for future maintainability is key here
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Imagine being a Tunisian citizen having a normal day and then you see one of the most powerful men on earth wearing a “Carthage must be destroyed” t-shirt and you’re like STILL?? it’s been 2200 years!!
Wow who woulda thought 2024 Zuck would be wearing Cuban links while referencing war on Carthage
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@JohnArnoldFndtn
@washingtonpost
What are all these administrators even doing? In my time in undergrad, the administration was largely invisible to me.
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@StefanFSchubert
Yep! I think it would work like this: you log restaurants as you visit them. When you have recently visited two restaurants that are similar in some respect (eg both Italian, or both $30-50 range, or both high-end) then it prompts you to pick which was better.
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@zachtratar
It was a 6-person board. Whatever happened must have taken at least (or maybe exactly) 4 vs 2.
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just one more $600m bro. i promise bro just one more $600m and it'll fix everything bro. bro. just one more $600m. please just one more. one more $600m and we can fix this whole problem bro. bro cmon just give me one more $600m i promise bro. please
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@d_feldman
Look man, I love the Great Lakes more than most people do, but at that price point I’d rather hit the Antarctic
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Imagine telling a guy in 1900 that a hundred years in the future, you can fly across the country in five hours for the price of 4 ham sandwiches.
Is it dangerous? No, it is the safest form of transport
People must love it! No, it is so commonplace that people whine endlessly
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@weatherdai
You’re mistaking cause and effect: silly waste is a consequence of immense wealth, not an innate behavior. Only the richest nations can blow money on this kind of bonanza
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@_ali_taylor
Seeing as Quora has been hot garbage for 5+ years, they would be actually kinda justified in shaking things up a bit
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@wagieeacc
the reason people thought it was plausible was:
1) FTX was pretending to be raking in huge fees (profitable!)
2) Alameda was rumored to be profiting $1B/y
3) FTX had held and driven huge price spikes in Solana, Serum and others
4) FTX began selling FTT
Ofc 1 & 2 were false
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@ryxcommar
@quantian1
"Nationally Representative" SAT percentiles are:
1390 => 97th percentile
1420 => 98th percentile
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@kepano
@ycombinator
creates adverse incentives imo, encourages free-rider-ism and doesn't encourage folks to try their best because they can lean back on the bucket
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There is one good Döner Kebab shop in New York. It’s called Berlin Kebab.
I am in Berlin eating what is reviewed as the best kebab in Berlin. (Pic related)
I am absolutely gobsmacked to find that Berlin Kebab in New York has tactically carbon-copied this very top-rated kebab
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@skominers
[clears throat] Considering that there's an uncountably infinite number of people who don't exist, and there's a countably finite number of people who do exist, the probability that i exist is 0
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Nobody's talking about the impact of FedNow on credit card processing/interchange fees. Am I wrong to think this is a big deal? Maybe I don't know enough, but if FedNow takes a 2-3% fee down to a few bips, that (1) enables lower-margin businesses and (2) hurts a class of fintechs
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@luke_metro
Incredible tweet coming from “the art of purpose”
Like, homie, the reason is in your name
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I kinda wish there was an 80-year-old
@bryan_johnson
At age 40-50, the impact of many health treatments is not obvious
Whereas at age 80, there’s an enormous difference between “in excellent health” and “in mediocre health”. The distribution of outcomes stretches dramatically
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@StefanFSchubert
Tyler Cowen seems to have missed the fact that Keynes basically lived in a polycule for years (“Bloomsbury group”)
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@ID_AA_Carmack
Yep! I have not-so-fond memories of exactly that. I would write a function to abstract over others, then find myself adding extra args to the function, conditioning on them inside the function, and suddenly there’s a whole hairball of complexity that has to be broken back out
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@benedictevans
I am in continuous bafflement that I know people who will pull one all nighter a week writing software from a plastic picnic chair and then complain that the flight from SF to NYC is “uncomfortable” and “hard to sleep on”
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@PradyuPrasad
I don’t think so. The shift to the three-meal pattern is mostly a 19th century western cultural standard.
The Romans took one large meal a day in the early afternoon. Many other cultures (pre 19th c US, medieval Europe, ancient China) practiced two meals a day
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Air travel is incredible. It is probably the best example of a well-regulated highly competitive market economy creating an almost at-cost public utility, ceding oodles and oodles of surplus value to the consumer
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@AviSchiffmann
Enormous amount of respect for Zuck:
(1) always doing his best to run things responsibly (clear in retrospect)
(2) dealing with an endless, multi year torrent of stress and hostility
Weaker men would’ve aged a thousand years
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@zck
If I’m on a layover between several hour-long flights, I would easily pay $100 for a good workout + shower + sauna
Business travelers would be all over it. Adds a negligible cost to $1000+ flight tickets. Baffling this doesn’t exist yet
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@devonzuegel
I’ve seen a number of coffee shops that double up specifically as wine bars at night. It seems to work reasonably well since it’s a similar setup — lots of single tables, compared to regular bars which tend to be more group-social.
Curious why there aren’t more. Liquor licenses?
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@xiu_shoegaze
@Logo_Daedalus
Request: On GP but sampling “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree” at 0:21
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@JosephPolitano
It’s a meme about 2020! Mid lockdowns! July 2020 **sucked**! This was well known at the time!
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@zackmdavis
@allgarbled
You would not believe what statistical relationships I can find with a log(log(log(x))) graph and a thick line
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weird outcome of the current FTC regime
1. Don’t let big companies do M&A
2. Big companies do pseudo-M&A by poaching key staff + licensing tech
3. Investors and especially employees get screwed
4. Conclusion: disincentivizes investors and employees from taking on startup risk
I don’t know any details beyond what’s been reported, but this new trend of giving investors a guaranteed return (2.5x reported here) to strip mine top talent from these companies seems like a real bad deal for a lot of startup employees
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@tomgara
I live in NYC and it’s actually effective. There’s an air filter inside the hood vent. I have an air quality monitor in my kitchen — baseline CO2 is 500ppm. If I cook without the hood vent, I spike it to ~1300. If I activate the hood vent, it increases only marginally.
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I wonder if the "vibecession" (cc
@kylascan
) is experienced because people are wealthy, but exposed to 24/7 consumption-inducing media in ways that prior generations or years weren't
People have better stuff than ever before, but it's outpaced by media telling them they're poor
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@levelsio
Is starlink going mainstream actually viable? Satellites have bandwidth throughout limitations. My understanding is that part of the reason why Starlink is so successful right now is because overall usage numbers are still quite low.
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@Jonathan_Blow
Think twice — there’s a good argument that the real name policy turned Facebook into the cesspool it is now
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The video game industry is well known to be a meat grinder for its employees, but every now and again it still manages to surprise you
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@StefanFSchubert
Not sure how to drive adoption :-) integration with a reservation provider would make it easy.
you could seed the network with some initial comparisons by scraping some yelp/google/reddit reviews and looking for “better than” keywords.
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@Nexuist
Part of it comes out of vesting schedules. Eventually the work is done! But the employee is still locked in for another two years. The stock is marked up, so they can’t plausibly leave. But they can’t look idle or they’ll get fired. So they have to just kinda… create work.
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imagine your home town loses a huge war, going from metropolis to rubble, and then two thousand years later people are still talking about it, like a big meme
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@lethalrejection
There’s an academic explanation: I recall a paper that showed pretty clearly that what women find physically attractive in men has much greater variability than what men find physically attractive in women
=> that ugly bf is subjectively hot to his gf; the opposite is more rare
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@htmx_org
Only <select> is real
Select maximalists, where you at
Every time I see a drop-down as a button plus divs, I wince
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Contrarian take: I think today’s kids are vastly smarter than in the past
I think folks (especially academic types) are underestimating just how low student performance was even just 20 years ago
If learning technology is getting so much better (video lectures, youtube, etc) why are the kids not getting smarter
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@wanyeburkett
Soft disagree — it’s possible to out-exercise a bad diet, but it requires incredible willpower. If you have the level of mental stamina and time where you can burn 4000+ calories a day, it’s just easier to allocate that same strength to not eating cheeseburgers
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Ice cream shops should sell tasting flights
I don’t want one big scoop
I want a little taster of each flavor
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New post on the forbidden website
Many software businesses are fundamentally about transforming and organizing data. And LLMs are really good at that, with little overhead.
I think we're going to see a lot of big companies get disrupted in ways that may not seem obvious today.
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@Johnggee
@sfstandard
@SheriffSF
“In break from historic precedent, the city of San Francisco begins half-heartedly enforcing the previously sneered-upon law”
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People talk about coming automation and unemployment, but for the most part the stereotypical “to be automated” jobs are already gone
I’m in a Domino’s pizza with one person manning the whole store. Years back, there would’ve been a whole team. Change rarely happens overnight
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Perhaps a naive question about FTX/SBF: how did the level of capital expenditure not raise red flags earlier?
Some line items:
FTX Ventures: $2B
Anthropic: $500M
Voyager: $1.4B
Blockfi: $250M
Robinhood: $650M
1/5
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@ChrisExpTheNews
@wanyeburkett
The $10k properties always owe huge back taxes and need gut renovations. Sticker price is wildly lower than the full cost of ownership
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@AleResnik
There are quite a few not on this list, and many more private companies pulling in a nice quiet $100M+ ARR and not having a public “valuation” even though they’d be priced at $1B+ if they did
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SF Residents in the 1920s: we will build these wooden clapboard houses that are super cheap and easy to replace with whatever later
Hippies in the 1960s: we will paint them teal and purple
SF Supervisors in the 2020s: sorry this flooded basement is a National heritage site
I’m in SF permitting hell.
I submitted my original permit to renovate in February 2021. I’m now all approved except the sidewalk. They missed that I’m expanding my garage a few inches to fit a modern car. They are holding the permit.
SF planning has now told me we’re at the
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@brianwilt
@Waymo
Waymo’s execution is quite literally a story of “slow is steady, steady is fast”
Interesting how they played it safe vs Cruise and Uber ATG, and now they’re so far ahead
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@tangjeff0
And bought by a company that only raised $9m…? Something strange must have happened
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@tinyrevver
The popular culture and language of therapy has given more powerful tools to those feigning sincerity. Saying all the right things, lying at greater emotional depth than ever before
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@giulio_mattioli
Old joke that goes something like this:
To a European, a Yankee lives in America
To an American, a Yankee lives on the East Coast
To an East Coaster, a Yankee lives in New England
To a New Englander, a Yankee lives in Vermont
To a Vermonter, a Yankee eats pie for breakfast
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New post on the forbidden website!
The EU must stop fining American Tech Companies.
European regulators are over-reaching, and scoring a huge own goal. If they want a seat at the table, they need to foster a tech industry, and not play games they are almost certain to lose.
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You've seen the blue roofs of Santorini. They are the famous icon of this popular island
You might picture, in your mind's eye, a whole island covered in this unique architectural style
But did you know there are only four such roofs? All pictures are of the same buildings!
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@bryan_johnson
That’s great; I’m happy to hear that! Have you considered sharing his health regimens so other folks can see what works? Or is he just on Blueprint/following your lead?
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I think this is a really good interview between
@dwarkesh_sp
and
@leopoldasch
. The perspectives are well-considered and provocative, so the transcript makes for a great read -- even if I am skeptical of some of the timelines proposed.
Check it out:
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@cremieuxrecueil
Linear algebra for sure. Calculus I can figure out. Algebraic insights are much less intuitive imo
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@d_feldman
I’m aware! I’ve looked at their Antarctic cruises before. Super nice. The only thing that has me confused is that the ships don’t seem to have a gym on board 🤔
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You: five-star hotels. Piña coladas on the beach
Me: check it out! This is the shortest possible city name!
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New post on the forbidden website!
Self-driving cars are here, they're just not evenly distributed yet. Change is coming.
I wrote 3,590 words about what it's like to ride a Waymo (amazing), their unit economics, competitive positioning, and how they will reshape public transit.
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@BucknSF
One guess is that they’re so effective at increasing prices YoY that multi-year passes might leave too much money on the table
Another guess: they have plenty of predictability given that the roll-ups operate large portfolios of ski resorts, reducing aggregate variance
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@dieworkwear
Are these companies lying to their customers in the hopes they’ll sell more product? No. That couldn’t be. That would be crazy
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@TheSeaMouse
The Moroccan high speed rail is built by a French specialist organization that built, among others, France’s National Railway.
They were hired to build CA’s high speed rail, but found working with the CA gov “too dysfunctional”, quit, and went to help Morocco instead
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There is a very underrated story in YouTube comments turning from mean cesspool to positive and well-spoken over the past few years
Perhaps it is possible to effectively fight outrage posting, clickbait, and polarization
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One of the main reasons I am such a big fan of
@farcaster_xyz
is because of its distributed architecture, which ensures that no matter what the whims of
@dwr
and
@varunsrin
are, the network is ultimately uncensorable and fully portable.
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