Working on math + AI at acornprover.org and telescope software at deepsynoptic.org. Formerly: Parse cofounder, Facebook, Google
Piedmont, California
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I'm happy to announce the launch of Acorn, a new theorem prover that includes an integrated AI.
Theorem provers let you write mathematical proofs that are rigorously verified. But they are notoriously difficult to use. Acorn makes it easier, by using AI to fill in the details.
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We all owe a debt to the PC gamers, who nobly funded years of GPU development before the rest of the world understood how useful they were.
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Peter Thiel on his struggle to leave California:
Seattle: worst weather in the country
Las Vegas: "not that big a fan"
Houston: just an oil town
Dallas: has an inferiority complex
Austin: government town
Miami: the vibe is that you don't work
Nashville: <just looks away>
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some programmers I know, all their work is in such a complicated, non-public domain that none of the AI tools do anything useful for them, and then they don’t get the hype
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The New York Times writes that tech companies don't care about your privacy. Meanwhile they have started blocking Chrome's Incognito mode
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5-yr-old runs in. “Daddy, I have a math question for you! Come look.”
I count up the ones. “Twelve.”
“Wrong! It keeps going and going. Infinity!”
Feel like I got tricked fair and square here
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impressed with GPT-4 today, told me "that code should work, maybe there's a bug in the compiler" and it actually was a bug in the compiler
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My son doesn’t quite understand why he’s having so much trouble with this worksheet
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Unpopular opinion: commas *should* go outside the quotation marks. They are logically part of the outer sentence, not part of the quoted phrase.
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my son has been intentionally annoying my daughter all throughout dinner, but he does it so deftly, I can’t even give a specific example
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"When there's speech that is completely forbidden and questions that are not allowed to be asked, normally, you should assume that those things are simply true."
- Peter Thiel
manhattan-institute.org/even…
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My son’s opinion of the tech giants:
Apple: inventors of the iPad and, less importantly, the phone
Microsoft: creator of Minecraft, nearly as great as the iPad itself
Facebook, Google: what’s that?
Amazon: a force of nature, like gravity. New objects appear in Amazon boxes
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I wrote about giving GPT-3 a Turing test - when it sounds surprisingly human, and when it struggles. lacker.io/ai/2020/07/06/givi…
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page fault, the process has to wait until the requested data can be read back from disk into memory
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If you want to start a company in San Francisco, you should do something practical and realistic, like making self-driving cars or launching satellites, not something crazy like selling ice cream
My latest: Remember Jason Yu and his nightmare trying to open an ice cream shop in the Mission? After nearly two years and $200,000, he’s given up. Meanwhile, Prop. H, passed in November, has led to just two small business hopefuls getting permits to open. sfchronicle.com/local/heathe…
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Are you sure? If you go back to the 60's it seems like there are many examples of public rudeness to, say, communists or black people.
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So... which one of these was Twitter? Dropbox? Stripe?
There are basically 5 ways to accumulate a billion dollars in America:
1) Profiting from a monopoly
2) Insider-trading
3) Political payoffs
4) Fraud
5) Inheritance
None of these has anything to do with being successful in the supposed free market.
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I would be interested to see a version of GitHub Copilot that doesn't write code for you, it just points to lines of code that it thinks are buggy. No IP risk, very high value if it could work....
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This is an unusual conversation.
Thiel: So we kinda stopped building new nuclear power plants.
Rogan: And also maybe the Pyramids were really power plants, and we've stopped building those too!
piped.video/watch?v=klRb0_BA…
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15-20 years ago, Google search developed a "data moat". The click data from user sessions led to search getting much better. It became impossible for Bing to match Google search quality, because they didn't have this unique data. I think this will also happen with AI products.
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Yep… his sister showed up later and eventually, together they determined “this map has two Oregons!” Completely different from my thought process, to them the east coast is like a foreign country.
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A pretty savage review of the new California Math Framework from the director of Stanford’s undergraduate math program. Accuses the CMF authors of misrepresenting the research they cite in “essentially all cases”. sites.google.com/view/public…
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Marc, do you really want to be responsible for every app on Heroku?
Facebook is a publisher. They need to be held accountable for propaganda on their platform. We must have standards & practices decided by law. FB is the new cigarettes—it’s addictive, bad for us, & our kids are being drawn in. We need to abolish section 230 Indemnifying them.
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Reminds me of hyperbolic geometry or number theory, something where early on the conventional wisdom was that it had no important real-world application
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it still took about 70 years between the communist manifesto (1848) and the first communist government with Lenin (1917)
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One day, tech companies will tell their employees, “We’re back to normal. Everyone come back to the office now.” But many key employees will have quietly moved to cheaper places during the lockdown. Most companies, rather than cracking down, will just allow remote work.
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Both of my boys absolutely loved trucks when they were 2-3 years old. Garbage trucks, excavators, steamrollers, etc etc. Where does this come from? I don’t think it can be learned behavior - their mother and I demonstrate no interest in dump trucks and the like.
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Our immigration system is pointlessly unfair to people from India. Why is it so much easier to immigrate from China, Russia, Mexico, or anywhere else? I don’t even think it’s intentional, it’s not like American politics is full of anti-India sentiment. It’s just ignored.
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Just left Facebook today, thinking about starting a startup. What should it do? RT for curing cancer, ❤️ for turning people into dinosaurs
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bowing your head in respect, you walk past the line of monks rhythmically chanting, “make something people want. make something people want.” the back row chimes in, their lower voices in harmony. “talk to users. talk to users.”
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all credit to @xkcd for creating this joke, all I did was subject my children to it
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irrational numbers were invented before infinite series. they are the result of wondering, how long is the hypotenuse of this triangle?
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I think it's a deeper problem - they're having trouble even understanding what their own products are
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Shakespeare was only the third most popular playwright in London, during his lifetime. His peak popularity was over 100 years after his death.
What geniuses are hidden now in plain sight, and popular opinion just doesn't recognize them yet?
economist.com/graphic-detail…
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I tried to get GPT-3 to give *me* a coding interview. But I didn't manage to pass the interview.
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With exponential growth, you cannot confidently draw conclusions from regional differences. A single superspreader can infect hundreds of others. If that's one of the first few cases in a region, the disease can be 10x worse there, just due to a single quirk of bad luck.
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Reading about 1938-1940, it’s striking to me how simply the Holocaust could have been stopped by those outside Nazi Germany. Almost any country could have just accepted Jewish immigration and prevented the whole thing.
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I am getting Xerox Parc vibes from the Google AI strategy. They publish in Science how great their weather forecasting is. The technology seems very impressive. Yet if I just Google for [san francisco weather] I get results from weather.com !
Excited to share @GoogleDeepMind’s newest AI model GraphCast: the most accurate 10-day global weather forecasting system in the world. GraphCast can also offer earlier warnings of extreme weather events, including the path of hurricanes. In @Science today dpmd.ai/graphcast
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We are officially in the 16th year of a "national emergency", making the word "emergency" meaningless
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It seems like Americans are freaked out about coronavirus right now, but I think in another week they will be more freaked out.
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The part of this conversation I thought was the most insightful was at the start, where he said, I complain about this a lot, but... sometimes talking is a substitute for action
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Huge if true
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I wonder if Y Combinator has enough data that it could make its own college rankings. For students interested in technology, there must be a way to rank schools that's better than US News...
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it seems like the human mind has some filter to create linear coherence from our disordered instinctive thoughts. some forms, like GPT-2, dreams, poetry, or literature like DFW or House of Leaves, mute this impulse, and let us see a bit more of what lies underneath
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after both studying AI and having kids, I have to say kids' behavior looks nothing like an AI learning algorithm. an AI learning how to walk would fall over in a million goofy ways. kids fall sometimes but look more like they first practice a hundred near-walking behaviors
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the other day I heard him muttering to himself and went up behind him to listen and he was saying “three hundred seventy one… three hundred seventy two… three hundred seventy three…”
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I’m excited to share what I’ve been working on. axiom.org is a better way to build decentralized applications.
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we did! this is why humans invented punctuation, spaces between words, and capital letters
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I wonder if this is why the LLMs love to start out with wordy rambling before answering a question, because they need to think more but the thinking they can do is proportional to the number of tokens they output
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Apps that do contact tracing seem like safety theater. Governments are excited to claim they have fancy tech, but even the most used, Singapore’s app, has 13% usage and so can detect less than 2% of transmission pairs. economist.com/briefing/2020/…
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In 2005, people at Google search quality had a very “everyone should be afraid of Microsoft” attitude, and we were quite worried when Bing launched. Internal metrics even showed that Bing search quality was better, on the day it launched. (SEOers eventually hit them hard though)
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my reaction would be, holy ****. ask it a bunch of unsolved problems. then see if the same technique will solve programming because the TAM is 1000x higher
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the responses to this tweet are so bad! alz is correct here. you are looking for *expected number of times*, so it does not matter that the 519 experiments are not independent. expected value is still additive for dependent variables
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Zoe has come to help. They are vigorously debating which state is Oregon. They have no clue about any of the east coast states in the first place
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I'm excited to finally see the secret sauce behind Twitter's machine learning algorithms
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IMO climate is very underrated by your audience here. What, is it coincidence that we got agriculture right when the Ice Age ended?
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This bill requires developers of large AI models to have "the capability to promptly enact a full shutdown" and "prevent an individual from being able to use the model to create a derivative model that was used to cause a critical harm". Impossible requirements for open source.
The thread also contains fear mongering about open source.
Unless you think catastrophic harms are going to happen left & right with open source projects, it’s absolutely false to say this “de facto criminalizes open source.”
+ these are civil sanctions, not criminal liability!
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it surprised me rereading "zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance" how several of the characters just nonchalantly left their jobs as humanities professors and found new ones whenever they felt like it
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heck, it's also easier for *humans* to write a 2500-rated chess program than to learn play chess at 2500 elo
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imagine if we had to write:
对于 n in 范围(100):
如果 n % 3 == 0 与 n % 5 == 0:
打印("Fizz Buzz")
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I felt betrayed in CS grad school the first time I downloaded some C code referenced in a widely acclaimed academic paper and realized it had syntax errors and there's no way it could possibly have worked as the paper described
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the elite high school math contest participants seem clearly better than they were back in my era (the 90s). We had to learn from books; nowadays there are many better resources online
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When a guy named Ox Harmer writing for War Zone thinks you’re being too aggressive... thedrive.com/the-war-zone/33…
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Painfully stupid. California is one of the worst states in the *percent* of the population vaccinated. But we're the largest state, so our total number of people vaccinated is the highest. I feel like my intelligence has been insulted when Gavin Newsom pretends this is good.
CA has now administered more vaccines than any other state -- getting 40% of our doses out and in the arms of our healthcare workers and most vulnerable.
Progress -- but we still need to do more. We continue to ramp up our efforts with the goals of speed, equity, and safety.
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The year is 2025. Pre-installing apps is banned. You buy an iPhone and turn it on.
.@davidcicilline confirmed that under his new antitrust legislation, @Apple would be banned from pre-installing apps on their iPhones/ read more on @TheTerminal @business
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Designing the vaccine: two days
Getting permission to sell it: ten months and 1.4 million deaths later, and we’re still waiting
One of the most insane details of our current ordeal is that the Moderna vaccine was actually designed in two days.
In January.
nytimes.com/2020/11/21/us/po…
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