If you grow up in that environment (restricted by government in some areas and liberated in others) you’ll start seeing systems very differently. The game plays differently with different rules.
They had Pravets computers and robotic arms in rural classrooms in places that didn’t have traffic lights, or English teachers. Chess and Math competitions as well, were accessible everywhere. Those were all self-feedback mechanisms that are cheap but allow an interested individual to iterate infinitely to reach advanced levels. Even if only a tiny subset of any population has the cognitive surplus to meddle with programming and math, they had easy access to fulfill that and be found. In the US, schools enable that with sports, which monetize as entertainment venues. In the Eastern Block they had that with brains. As soon as the stupid restrictions on travel were lifted, the brains knew to leave the other restrictions and immigrate to places that reward cognitive surplus.
Intelligence builds with reinforcement learning on context that gives you feedback - which makes it easy to iterate on. If you’re not making those types of games/tools/systems available to kids, you are going to lose that generation to more attention grabbing stuff like Youtube or sports.
>Even if only a tiny subset of any population has the cognitive surplus to meddle with programming and math, they had easy access to fulfill that and be found.
This is exactly 100% not true. Source: I grew up behind the Iron Curtain. Why some people are so ready to glamorize poverty and restrictions, I don't even understand.
Not every school had computers, and those which do, often had the fear of something being broken as the main guiding principle. Sure, some teachers were understanding and gaining their trust you could get some time for experiments. But it was rare. In a school "where there was no traffic lights" you would definitely find no "robotic arms" really (I can't even guess where this sci-fi bs came from). And you would rather only allowed to press spacebar when told so under close supervision.
Getting a computer at home wasn't easy either. That DIY culture appeared from the need more than from fun, but it wasn't available for all anyway. Knowing how-to is a barrier in itself for a kid, but try getting all necessary parts at first. Those were societies of constant "defitsit", and one needed connections and/or good money to obtain even simple things. On my block there were exactly 1 kid with self-built computer and you would need to fight for his favors. And anyway those machines were often more like primitive gaming consoles with very limited programming possible.
So in fact majority of late-socialism programming enthusiats grew in families where parents could bring their children to the work and let them play with computers there. Which is minority of minority.
I wrote from personal experience. In 1992 in a fisherman town we had a robotic arm and Pravetz 8 and 16 computers with the 5 inch floppy disks. We had to use Basic to program the arm and it was only doing basic movements. The teacher had a 16 year old who was assisting with the lab and you did have to ask for permission to do stuff.
I'm glad you were that lucky! I was lucky too, my father had computer at work. Maybe that's why we met here. I guess it would be better if written with 'me' and not 'they'
The fun fact was that the 16 year old that passionately administered the lab was also hitting on any female students who went in there, essentially chasing them away. I suspect the number of techies would double if it wasn’t for all the bad behavior.
I was fortunate in that Internet cafes started happening and I could volunteer to administer networks and troubleshooting for them while getting PC time for free. I also maintained PCs for friends with businesses who could afford one. So the Pravetz sparked my curiosity but the real growth happened on begged and borrowed time from other peoples computers.
>ROBKO 01 is an anthropoid robot manufactured in Bulgaria by BAS (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences) and produced by the Medical Equipment Factories. It is an analog based on the manufactured in the USA Armdroid 1000. The two robot arms are completely the same, except some minor differences in the mechanics and drive circuitry.
> Why some people are so ready to glamorize poverty and restrictions, I don't even understand.
> Not every school had computers, and those which do, often had the fear of something being broken as the main guiding principle
People glamorize exotic places they don't know, and you're doing exactly this here: I grew up in the 90s in the suburb of Paris (not in a poor neighborhood) and we didn't have a single computer in school until. And even later in high school in the early 2000, we had few computers in dedicated rooms the teacher had to book in advance and often not all computer worked.
The West was much better that the eastern block in many aspects, but it wasn't the land of unlimited abundance some people from the East believed it was.
I didn't mention Paris, or even West in general though. Made zero comparisons. The whole text is about the place where I lived. So I'm not sure how did I manage to glamorize something
When you say “Not every school had computers” as a rebuttal without realizing that pretty much no school in a bunch other countries elsewhere in Europe had computers at the time.
They can’t allow third party software because the third parties save the outputs of Claude responses and distill them into new models to compete with Claude.
There's https://github.com/badlogic/pi-share-hf by the creator of pi-coding-agent, to redact session data and publish on Huggingface. You can find others of the same idea for Claude Code/Codex on Github, though of varying redaction quality. Or have your LLM fork pi-share-hf to work for your preferred coding agent.
Clem Delangue (HF CEO) tweeted about this[1] and mentioned https://traces.com/ for exporting Claude sessions
Edit: It looks like HF now supports importing your agent's session directory directly[2] (I hope they're redacting PII?)
There is DataClaw https://github.com/peteromallet/dataclaw which uploads your Claude Code chats and more to HuggingFace in a single command. Nowadays there are many similar tools.
Yeah who just goes and indiscriminately vacuums up data so they can train their products they’re going to sell with no intention of giving compensation to the very entities that made their products possible?
> Suchir Balaji was an American artificial intelligence researcher who was found dead one month after accusing OpenAI, his former employer, of violating United States copyright law.
> The San Francisco Police Department investigation, however, found "no evidence of foul play", and the Chief Medical Examiner concluded the death was a suicide.
Of course they can allow it. They choose not to. They choose to screw over all users because they are afraid of some company making a claude ripoff. It shows a lack of faith in their own engineering. It shows a lack of respect for users.
Water can never be safe. Water in large quantities can drown anyone. When mixed with the wrong things it can turn into chemical reactions. Water safety depends on context and intent.
So if we consider AI a chemical substance - if inserted in with limited context in tools with specific intent, can it be useful beyond tools available at this moment?
You can trust just any liquid that looks like water, just as you can trust just any model or especially any inference provider (they can switch models to save money or mess with other key parameters, or insert ads). You have to test your water supply and your AI supply regularly. And benchmark new sources. We’ll see labeling and quality guarantees in future suppliers. We’ll see personal models and model families trained and refined as brands for reliability. Bottled neatly for you by certified suppliers.
In the mean time we all just found our selves out of a desert and splashing around in this funky thing that we now find on the ground and falling for free from clouds.
Per the book “Careless People” Meta started “backing” right wing candidates everywhere (via algorithms, not money) to avoid regulation and taxes as soon as the EU tried to tax and regulate it more - thus leading to a surge of that sentiment all over the EU.
Read the book “Careless People” if you have a chance - according to the book, social media companies figured out they have real leverage with politicians since they can influence elections. As a result they are actively pushing for far right candidates to reduce their own taxation and regulation.
That book was so lame and the author leaves out how she profited millions and then only complained after she was fired.
Its also funny how they “discovered” they were influencing elections after they influenced the 2008 and 2012 elections.
How did the author not know this when she sought out and joined the company in like 2013!
The parts about playing Settlers of Catan with Zuckerberg was funny. I wonder what his side of the story was and if people were really letting him win.
- She was not trying to change things. She was working to get countries ingratiated with FB execs
- She didn’t get pregnant until years into her work. She chose to have a second child while staying employed. She was already “rich” with millions likely earned when her first child was born and could have worked anywhere (but not making what FB paid). Wasn’t she an attorney? Prestigious attorney salaries are definitely enough to support children and a spouse who is a teacher.
First two years they can fly for free, but they have to ride in an adult’s lap and that gets tiring. Don’t believe the bassinet offerings - as soon as a plane gets turbulence, you have to get the sleeping baby out of the wall bassinet and good luck appeasing them. Age 1-2 is hardest for travel, so you can skip it. The only thing that worked was getting their own seat with the cosco scenera next car seat (or their own if they like it, but that one is $50 and light to carry). They would sleep nicely for large chunks and you get to enjoy travel again. After age 3 it’s much easier (they can ipad if that’s the only ipad time they ever get).
Don't go straight to screens in this situation. You can introduce novelty by purchasing a number of cheap toys, even from the dollar store, which they have never seen before. Keep them hidden until the flight.
“The long-term vision is: foundation models that acquire reasoning from fully synthetic data, then learn semantics from a small, curated corpus of natural language. This would help us build models that reason without inheriting human biases from inception.”
I don’t think that assumption is being made, why do you think that? In terms of metaphor, training a model could be considered both knowledge acquired after birth and its evolution. But I don’t think it’s particularly useful to stay thinking in metaphors.
It’s variable rewards and even with large models the same question can lead to dramatically different answers. Possibly because they route your request through different models. Possibly because the model has more time to dig through the problem. Nonetheless we have some illusion of control over the output (you we wouldn’t be playing it) but it is just the quality of the model itself that leads to better outcomes - not your input. If you can’t let go of the feeling thought, it’s definitely addictive. And as I look back, it’s a fast iteration on the building cycle we had before AI. But the brain really likes low latency - it is addicted to the fast reward for its actions. So AI, if it gets fast enough (sub 400ms) it will likely become irreversibly addictive to humans in general, as the brain will see is at part of itself. Hope it has our interest at heart by then.
This (variable rewards -> gambling, illusion of control) is really important.
I'm not an expert in the psych/neuro literature on addiction, but I suspect latency isn't that critical. But is that just because it's things like fruit-machines that have been studied? Gambling (poker, racehorses) are quite long-latency. OTOH, scrolling is closer to 400ms, and that's certainly the modern addition...
Well said! My only qualm with this is saying you hope "it" has our interests at heart. "It" is a machine made by humans that work for corporations. I would correct your hope to, "I hope they have our interest at heart by then."
Model rocketry, as a hobby, enjoys a limited amount of regulation, at least in the US. In large part, that is because the community has been very good about self-policing. Most folks who are serious about the hobby closely follow the safety guidelines published by the two national organizations (Tripoli and NAR), and steer newcomers to as well. Serious accidents are few and far between, intentional damage even more so. Compare this to, say, drones, which seem to be more widely embraced by the public, but are much more closely regulated and have been implicated in a number of serious incidents like https://abcnews.com/US/drone-operator-charged-hitting-super-... . Model and amateur rockets are cool. Folks mis-using them are going to run into a lot of pushback from pretty much every direction, because it'd only take an incident or two to ruin the hobby for everyone.
Not true in the US either, in any meaningful way. Weight thresholds are different, FAA thresholds are different, allowed control systems are different, etc., etc.
They had Pravets computers and robotic arms in rural classrooms in places that didn’t have traffic lights, or English teachers. Chess and Math competitions as well, were accessible everywhere. Those were all self-feedback mechanisms that are cheap but allow an interested individual to iterate infinitely to reach advanced levels. Even if only a tiny subset of any population has the cognitive surplus to meddle with programming and math, they had easy access to fulfill that and be found. In the US, schools enable that with sports, which monetize as entertainment venues. In the Eastern Block they had that with brains. As soon as the stupid restrictions on travel were lifted, the brains knew to leave the other restrictions and immigrate to places that reward cognitive surplus.
Intelligence builds with reinforcement learning on context that gives you feedback - which makes it easy to iterate on. If you’re not making those types of games/tools/systems available to kids, you are going to lose that generation to more attention grabbing stuff like Youtube or sports.
reply