winstonBosan

Karma: 248

winstonBosan Mar 20, 2025, 12:30 AM
12 points
3
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Richard_Kennaway’s Shortform
If “you can make a decision while still being uncertain about whether it is the right decision”. Then why can’t you think about “was that the right decision”? (Lit. Quote above vs original wording)
It seems like what you want to say is—be doubtful or not, but follow through with full vigour regardless. If that is the case, I find it to be reasonable. Just that the words you use are somewhat irreconcilable.

winstonBosan Mar 19, 2025, 10:50 PM
4 points
4
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Richard_Kennaway’s Shortform
I’m very confused. Because it seems like for you decision should not only clarify matters and narrow possibilities, but also eliminate all doubt entirely and prune off all possible worlds where the counterfactual can even be contemplated.
Perhaps that’s indeed how you define the word. But using such a stringent definition, I’d have to say I’ve never decided anything in my life. This doesn’t seem like the most useful way to understand “decision”—it diverges enough from common usage and mismatches with the hyperdimensional-cloud of word meaning for decision sufficiently to be useless in conversation with most people.

winstonBosan Mar 11, 2025, 10:59 PM
1 point
0
on: The Social Economy
I am curious, and you have probably thought much about this. But how would the transition happen from the existing economy to this new economy? How do you convince existing property owners to give up their “out-of-proportion” ownership claims? (Would it just be political coercion like in the post? Then who/how would we convince the state?)

winstonBosan Mar 3, 2025, 8:59 PM
15 points
−11
in reply to: Daniel Kokotajlo’s comment on: Daniel Kokotajlo’s Shortform
Note for posterity: “Let’s think step by step” is joke.

I downvoted this and I feel the urge to explain myself—the LLMism in the writing is uncanny.

The combination of “Let’s think step by step”, “First…” and “Not so fast…” gives me a subtle but dreadful impression that a highly valued member of the community is being finetuned by model output in real time. This emulation of the “Wait, but!” pattern is a bit too much for my comfort.

My comment hasn’t too much to do with the content but more about how unsettled I feel. I don’t think LLM outputs are all necessarily infohazardous—but I am beginning to see the potentially failure modes that people have been gesturing at for a while.

winstonBosan Feb 25, 2025, 5:07 PM
1 point
0
on: Economics Roundup #5
Prolific as ever! Small nitpick—the SBF interview link appears to be pointing at something else?

winstonBosan Feb 14, 2025, 6:16 PM
6 points
0
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: ≤10-year Timelines Remain Unlikely Despite DeepSeek and o3
FYI I do find that aider using a mixed routing between r1 and o3-mini-high as the architect model with sonnet as the editor model to be slightly better than cursor/windsurf etc.

Or for minimal setup, this is what is ranking the highest on aider-polyglot test:
aider --architect --model openrouter/deepseek/deepseek-r1 --editor-model sonnet

winstonBosan Feb 13, 2025, 5:01 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: gw’s comment on: 2025 Prediction Thread
Is the bet for general purpose model still open? I guess it depends on the specific resolver/resolution criteria—considering that OpenAI have gotten the answer and solution to most of the hard questions. Does o3′s 25% even count?

winstonBosan Feb 12, 2025, 4:40 PM
5 points
0
in reply to: Daniel Kokotajlo’s comment on: What About The Horses?
The “biologically imposed minimal wage” is definitely going into my arsenal of verbal tools. This is one of the clearest illustration of the same position that has been argued since the dawn of LW.

winstonBosan Feb 12, 2025, 4:34 PM
3 points
10
in reply to: Bitnotri’s comment on: The Paris AI Anti-Safety Summit
I think this is a rather legitimate question to ask—I often dream about retiring to an island for the last few months of my life, hangout with friends and reading my books. And then look to the setting sun until my carbon and silicon are repurposed atom by atom.

However, that is just a dream. I suspect the moral of the story is often at the end:
”Don’t panic. Don’t despair. And don’t give up.”

winstonBosan Jan 29, 2025, 9:33 PM
10 points
0
on: Anthropic CEO calls for RSI
I am a fool—what does RSI mean in this case? I couldn’t find it in the og post.

winstonBosan Jan 29, 2025, 9:20 PM
3 points
0
in reply to: Brendan Long’s comment on: Nvidia doesn’t just sell shovels
I think that is just true. Now in hindsight, my mistake is that I haven’t really updated sufficiently towards how the major players are shifting towards their own chip design capacity. (Apple comes to mind but I am definitely caught a bit off guard on how even Meta and Amazon had moved forward.) I had the impression that Amazon had a bad time in their previous generation of chips—and that new generation of their chips is focused on inference anyways.

But now with the blending of inference and training regime, maybe the “intermediaries” like Nvidia now gets to capture less and less of upside. And it seems more and more likely to me that we are having a moment of “going back to the basics” of looking at the base ingredients—the compute and the electricity.

winstonBosan Jan 28, 2025, 6:00 AM
3 points
0
in reply to: lemonhope’s comment on: Nvidia doesn’t just sell shovels
I think this category of actors are neglected as a whole. (As well as SKH, micron etc.)
TSMC makes the chips for NVIDIA and everyone—I didn’t talk too much about them because they are already a lynchpin in many countries’ AI/national security policy (China PRC, Taiwan and at least United States). And by their nature, they are already under heavy surveillance for prosaic (trad. National security and chip self-sufficiency) reasons.

Nvidia doesn’t just sell shovels

winstonBosanJan 28, 2025, 4:56 AM

13 points

4 comments2 min readLW link

winstonBosan Jan 13, 2025, 7:40 PM
3 points
0
on: Chance is in the Map, not the Territory
Great stuff! I don’t have strong fundamentals in math and statistics but I was still able to hobble along and understand the post. It reminds me of what Rissanen said about data/observation—that data is really all we have, and there is no true state of nature. Our job is to squeeze as much alpha out of observation as possible, instead of trying to find a “true” generator function. This post hit the same spot for me :)

winstonBosan Jan 6, 2025, 11:20 PM
1 point
−1
on: Meal Replacements in 2025?
p=1, Soylent still seems to be the top choice at the moment. (They are running into some supply chain problem at the moment / recently.)

(Huel seemed fine too from personal experience. If you care about refined oil/canola oil and protein sources it could be a decent alt)

winstonBosan Jan 5, 2025, 9:36 PM
3 points
2
on: A Ground-Level Perspective on Capacity Building in International Development
Good stuff! Though it did take a while for me to extrapolate what M&E is actually suppose to do and looks like; Or “What does good M&E even look like?”.

Non-profit seems quite hard and naturally easy for power to entrench (especially in an environment where people oppose legibility). I hope Abi finds their next venture more meaningful.

winstonBosan Dec 31, 2024, 1:59 AM

3 points

in reply to: winstonBosan’s comment on: The low Information Density of Eliezer Yudkowsky & LessWrong

Update—HackewNews posts today and Lesswrong posts today are very similar in length. That doesn’t mean they do an equal job at being concise—maybe Lesswrongers say preciously little for the length of their treatises. But deriving the sophistication of the posts is left as an exercise for the readers and beyond my paygrade:

Hackewnews—avg. 2876.125 words. For the current top 10 posts.^[1]

Lesswrong—avg. 2581.2 words. For the top ten post in the last 24 hrs. (God damn it Zvi)

A few problem with this 5 minute method of comparison:

Not Weighted: A better way to do this would be comparing some kind of karma weighted score. After all, the people who have high karmas are who we as a community see as people we really embody the spirit. Same with HackerNews.
Not Representative: I only took the most popular posts in hacknews today. There is no reason to think these posts today represents what HackerNews is in the last decade. Similarly, the posts on lesswrong in the last 24 hours are few and also not a very representative cohort.
Non-systematic way to throw out outliers: There was a project Gutenberg book on HackerNews today. It felt wrong to include the book and I feel justified in its exclusion. But this should be done more systematically.
A lot of discussion and culture building is in the comments, I didn’t include that: Ditto

Markdown table below incase I made a mistake:

1		word count
	A Course of Pure Mathematics – G. H. Hardy (1921) [pdf] (gutenberg.org)	N/A—It is a book
	107 points by bikenaga 4 hours ago \| hide \| 23 comments
2
	I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps, and I can’t stop (arstechnica.com)	1443
	26 points by cpeterso 1 hour ago \| hide \| 2 comments
3
	Dumping Memory to Bypass BitLocker on Windows 11 (noinitrd.github.io)	1116
	178 points by supermatou 6 hours ago \| hide \| 120 comments
4
	I Wrote a Game Boy Advance Game in Zig (jonot.me)	2432
	52 points by tehnub 3 hours ago \| hide \| 10 comments
5
	Beyond Gradient Averaging in Parallel Optimization (arxiv.org)	6246
	41 points by shinryudbz 3 hours ago \| hide \| 8 comments
6
	Lightstorm: Minimalistic Ruby Compiler (llvm.org)	1408
	19 points by eutropia 2 hours ago \| hide \| discuss
7
	Jack Elam and the Fly in ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’ (au.dk)	2656
	51 points by chimpanzee 4 hours ago \| hide \| 9 comments
8
	LineageOS 22 Released (lineageos.org)	3778
	38 points by timschumi 1 hour ago \| hide \| 8 comments
9
	I made a tiny library for switches and sum types in Lua (github.com/alurm)	N/A Code base
	12 points by alurm 2 hours ago \| hide \| discuss
10
	Learning Solver Design: Automating Factorio Balancers (gianlucaventurini.com)	3930
	137 points by kolui 8 hours ago \| hide \| 21 comments
11
		2876.125

DanielTan	1479
AnnaSal	1565
Habryka	1562
Zvi	10212
chanind&Till	4479
alexey	148
This Post	281
Bostock	1200
	N/A ← Cant access
Vishakha	79
xpostah	4807
Avg ->	2581.2

^
See Paul Graham comment for their ranking algos: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781013.

winstonBosan 30 Dec 2024 22:09 UTC
5 points
3
on: The low Information Density of Eliezer Yudkowsky & LessWrong
While I agree that we don’t live at the Pareto frontier of conciseness, explain-ability and etc, those are some odd examples to use to support your thesis. And the comparison to the hackernews post is likely using the wrong reference class.

Two of the three examples are heavily downvoted. Whether that’s because of untruthful content or stylistic (length, tone, etc) or memetic reason (Eliezer ~ prophet), those posts are hardly the poster child of what Lesswrong can do or even is.
As for Vanessa Kosoy’s piece, the last third was filled with quotations and they had given the “stop here if you don’t want my comments” warning. And it is also otherwise filled with references to many historically important posts and concepts that requires at least a quick refresher to catch the reader up to speed. I suppose Vanessa could have assumed that her readers would have been familiar with all those arguments and the nuances in different positions, but that was not her goal.

The specific example used from hacker news is likely a HackerNews Ask—a format more comparable to the shortforms and quicktake format in Lesswrong. Full fledged posts here vs full fledged posts on Hackernews is actually very comparable. (See below for some data)

winstonBosan 20 Dec 2024 20:06 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: Hastings’s comment on: o3
And for me, the (correct) reframing of RL as the cherry on top of our existing self-supervised stack was the straw that broke my hopeful back.

And o3 is more straws to my broken back.

winstonBosan 18 Dec 2024 22:06 UTC
1 point
0
on: winstonBosan’s Shortform
Could it be worth it to buy 23andme stocks if you want some of their user’s data?
Naively, the sticker price of 75M USD (today’s market cap) for all of their user data might seem cheap—all together for genomes of roughly 12 million users. It seems reasonably cheap to me on a replacement cost and opportunity-cost basis.
However, the 49% basically-majority shareholder is CEO Anne Wojcicki and a “possibility is that Wojcicki has unreasonable plans to take the company private at a bargain-basement price^[1]”. If you takes this path forward as a decidedly important but minority shareholder, the only clear way forward is to hope for a shareholder oppression lawsuit in your favour. And instead of cashing out, you hope you can turn your skill set of “being annoying enough” into data in-lieu of cash (Note: if this is done through bankruptcy process, I can’t see the trustee agreeing to this plan.)
Even given the obstacles, is this a deal? Or is this just a bad price for this particular bag of information? Is 23andme’s information sufficiently low fidelity that it might not be useful at all except to relate yourself to fractional vikings?
1. ^
  Per Matt Levine—Money Stuff, Sep 19, 2024