"I'm afraid I played you for a fool."
— 11 yo after tricking me
Paul Graham
@paulg
paulgraham.comJoined August 2010
Paul Graham’s Tweets
Hotel rates are up across the US, but not in San Francisco.
The city's politicians can blame remote work & Covid all they want - but the numbers don't lie.
San Francisco is uniquely in trouble - and it's due to policy decisions & poor leadership.
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There’s an amusing anti correlation between networking and actually working
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The scale of modern GPU computation is so incomprehensible that I regularly find that even experts underestimate it. A 4090 can do ~150 THOUSAND fp32 ops per pixel per frame at 4k 60 Hz, and can load kilobytes for every single pixel from VRAM (and more from on-die SRAM).
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"In a stunning statistic, the U.S. has exceeded the emission reduction targets of the 2009 Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill without it even being signed into law."
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Replying to
Tell me you __ without telling me you __
Never forget
Sigh
Ratio
*squints*
*checks notes*
Fellas is it gay to __
Peak __
Who among us hasn't __
I don't know who needs to read this but __
Now do __
Have you considered __
Citation needed
Nailed it
Where's the lie
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We couldn't wait until our deadline next week to address the SEC's response to the June 6 order from the Third Circuit. It is unusual for the government to defy a direct question from a federal court. But the SEC’s evasive response goes further, as we set out today. 1/5
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"Good lord what is happening in San Francisco"
"Changing customer shopping habits"
"Changing customer shopping habits? At this time of day, in this part of the country, localized entirely within the downtown metro of San Francisco?"
"...yes"
"May I see it?"
"No"
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Changing Consumer Shopping Habits
new euphemism just dropped
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I've read multiple times that Reddit 1.0 was written in Lisp. I didn't realize the source is public.
It's amazing. You can read the whole thing in one sitting. Even an undergrad could. It's like the essence of a…Reddit.
We took a wrong turn w/ software.
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I’ve yet to meet a tech bro in 17 years in the valley. I grew up on football hockey and lacrosse teams. Bro dense environments. Tech is probably the least bro’y industry in all of capitalism. Dudes, many. Bros, nope. Have you seen commercial real estate? Wall st traders?
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This was an impressive paper with some big implications
GPT-4 was given 4,550 novel questions representing the entire “MIT Mathematics and EECS undergraduate curriculum, including problem sets, midterms, and final exams”
With good prompts, it scored 100% arxiv.org/abs/2306.08997
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I have yet to hear of a school that went truly phone free and did NOT find rapid improvement of school culture. Students talk to each other directly, bonds strengthen, cruelty drops.
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Replying to @JonHaidt
We don’t just ban phones at Michaela. We have a serious policy on encouraging parents not to give smartphones to kids at home either. Makes a HUGE difference. All bullying and altercations start on social media. Kids are much happier and achieve more without them.
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So it's pretty clear that lots of people are going to have AI friends and relationships. Which probably means there will also be people with AI spouses. And some of those couples will have kids (using a donor). So there will be future kids with one human parent and one AI parent.
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The EU theory that anyone making a cutting-edge ML model needs to get a licence and provide six inches of paperwork reminds me a little of certain kinds of 20th century governments that registered and licensed typewriters and Xeroxes. At a minimum, a huge innovation tax
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Have you ever wondered what the Tesla logo means?
It's the cross-section of an electric motor. The main body of the "T" represents one of the poles that protrude from the rotor of a motor, while the second line on top represents a piece of the stator
buff.ly/3X7V3HL
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Once San Francisco's problems get fixed, no one will appreciate how much shit the people who fixed them had to go through, because it won't seem there could ever have been much resistance to fixing them.
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Controversial opinion: One reason the English celebrate gardens so much is that they don't have the money or permission to build buildings.
(Yes, gardens are wonderful things, but imagine trying to convince Lord Burghley that he should be focusing on flower beds instead.)
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A tech company is done the moment its CEO starts thinking of himself as a capital allocator.
If Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Walt Disney still could spend most of their operating time hands on, in product / engineering / marketing projects, so can you.
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If you're lax about enforcing laws, you become a destination for law-breakers.
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I’d expect many of those who use drugs publicly to be from out of town, but I’m stunned by what @SFPDChief Scott reported here — only 3 of the 45 people arrested so far for public drug use have a San Francisco address.
We should *not* be a destination city for public drug use.
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Fun fact: If you have a good musical ear, you can tell the speed of a passing vehicle by listening to the pitch interval it makes as it goes by. You don't even need perfect pitch since it only depends on the ratio.
If you hear more a major third or more, they're speeding!
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With a single day's worth of plastic catch from Interceptor 006 in the Rio Las Vacas in Guatemala.
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This is very tangential, but even among scientists, debunking doesn't work.
Let's look at some of the empirical work on the topic of replication failures.
First: papers that don't replicate receive more citations than ones that do.
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So uhm….A new meta-analysis of >200 effect-sizes (n > 60,000) in @NatureHumBehav found that on average debunking scientific misinformation had no effect
Yikes!
nature.com/articles/s4156
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This story reminds me of the boom in imaginary satanic cults back in the 1980s. These kinds of false accusations seem to be a reliable index of hysteria.
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All sufficiently organized countries can reliably teach you the basics, but none can reliably figure out what you should work on. You have to do that for yourself.
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I got a ride in a fully autonomous car tonight. It was flawless and the car was definitely safer and obeyed all laws.
This is the future, and it’s starting in San Francisco.
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"[A]ccording to new reports this week three separate Chinese government officials have all named scientist Ben Hu, who was in charge of gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as the first human to be infected with the new disease."
dailytelegraph.com.au/news/national/
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The gas stove-asthma study that bombed the news cycle a while back was based on a meta-analysis that I found was replete with errors.
After correcting them, the meta-analysis was still affected by publication bias.
A huge, high-quality study the meta didn't cover found a null.
Quote Tweet
Replying to @InternetHippo and @justanenbytwink
I’m sorry, but no. The connection between gas stoves and asthma is junk science. slate.com/technology/202
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Why ESG is the devil …
Quote Tweet
NEW: From S&P Global to the London Stock Exchange, tobacco companies are crushing Tesla in the ESG ratings. How could cigarettes, which kill over 8 million a year, be deemed a more ethical investment than electric cars?
One answer: Tobacco’s gone woke.
freebeacon.com/latest-news/ho
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Our API now supports function calling. This is the mechanism underlying plugins, allowing you to integrate with your own tools:
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A Map of the Per Capita Income of the Provinces of the Roman Empire in 14 AD, in dollars.
📷: Nep-His Blog
#AncientMaps
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Coinbase: we gonna IPO
SEC: you good
SEC: jk we suing you
Coinbase: for what?
SEC: not telling you
Coinbase: wtf
SEC: unregistered securities
Coinbase: which ones?
SEC: not telling you
Coinbase: THEN HOW CAN YOU SUE US? USA can you deal with this?
SEC: ok like Ada and… Show more
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read image description
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Kind of hilarious that when money was virtually free people were blowing it on ad spend and subsidizing delivery apps, and now that capital is extremely expensive there’s a technological breakthrough that requires insane amounts of hardware investment to play ball
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biggest questions in ai:
- since the transformer, most AI improvement was via scaling up & great engineering
- almost no algorithmic ideas have driven performance, besides RLHF
- future gains will likely require algorithmic innovation
how long will they take?
who does them?
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