Plethorae

Renaissance baby. Searching spaces.
International AI conference best paper.

[Plethorae @9th_dev]

The most important question for this century:

What’s the cost of not owning?

[Plethorae @9th_dev]

Everything inorganic - what successful growth pyramids an network effects create.

[Plethorae @9th_dev]

Best growth model:

Each week, give away equity to the most successful outreacher.

[Plethorae @9th_dev]

reality is always giving people what they want...

but the people are retarded, so they often forget their actions are asking for this.

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

And you will most definitely not complain.

[Plethorae @9th_dev]

Exploration is an entropy budget. In high dimension you should spend nearly all of it at t0.

Otherwise you'll perform random search in name of diversity maintenance.

[Plethorae @9th_dev]

@yunta_tsai a cool feature of all these coding tools like Cursor, Codex, Claude Code should be seamless weekly or daily summaries of what one did in terms of technical/architectural design decisions on all our worksessions.

there's a lot of intelligent co-design decisions i quickly forget.

[Plethorae @9th_dev]

@zcbenz Where can I read about your work with them?

[Plethorae @9th_dev]

@yunta_tsai Any human

[Plethorae @9th_dev]

@nic_carter @sama Bro this reads as “I’ve been religious before you”… there’s a million ways of landing that without sound like gatekeeping religion

[Plethorae @9th_dev]

@TheGregYang ur a goat that's what goats do

[Plethorae @9th_dev]

Non-smart people be like:

[Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_]

This is why IQ tests don't work too well on really smart people.

Because sorta smart people tend to give the expected answer.

And really smart people tend to point out that the question is wrong, and start arguing with the test, or trying to correct it, thereby making the test impossible to grade and annoying everyone.

The expected answer to this is 72.

Because 2*2*2 = 8 and 5*5*2 = 50, so 6*6*2 = 72.

But the (really) correct answer is "I don't know."

Because what you have is two points on a 3 dimensional graph (x,y) -> z.

z = 2*x*y is one surface that can be drawn through these two points. And I suspect it's the simplest formula for a surface that can be so drawn, although I haven't bothered to check.

But an infinite number of contiguous surfaces can be drawn in three dimensions that encompass these points (2,2,8) and (5,5,50).

Each of these surfaces can be described by its own formula. Some of them will also touch (6,6,72). But others of them will touch (6,6, {something else entirely}) instead.

This might sound really, really pedantic. But it's not.

Everyone knows that the expected answer is the simple one, but that's only on a test... a fake artificial made up problem.

When we start trying to do this in the real world, which, after all is what this "IQ" thing is actually for, then using the same kind of "IQ test thinking" can get you in trouble.

"My 3-month-old son is now TWICE as big as when he was born. He's on track to weigh 7.5 trillion pounds by age 10." -@pronounced_kyle

Fitting the simplest-formula curve, as opposed to the correct curve, makes our predictions of real-world stuff dead wrong.

So this kind of test question promotes a dangerous habit of thought.

But, Devon, I hear some of you ask, doesn't the principle of Occam's Razor demand that we fit the simplest curve?

No. No, it does not. It does not require that we select the simplest possible answer, given what we have currently seen. It requires that we prefer hypotheses that make fewer assumption to those that make more.

These are two different things entirely.

If I see one black sheep, the simplest hypothesis is that all sheep are black.

The hypothesis requiring the fewest assumptions is that at least one sheep is black on at least one side.

You will note which of these is correct.

All of this is, of course, irrelevant to questions on IQ test. But questions on an IQ test only matter as much as they are relevant to the actual universe...

Where ideas like this are very relevant indeed.

[Plethorae @9th_dev]

@juleslogs And a larger % of them are not even accurate and you would only get that intuition from implementing

[Plethorae @9th_dev]

@dhasandev @RepoPrompt @OpenAI @romainhuet Are the credits only for buyers of the permanent version? I payed monthly for a looong time and I got the email saying he was going to openAI and software becomes free but not the tokens one…

[Plethorae @9th_dev]

@nicknorwitz @EnemyGatelsDown Is pinealon one of those easy to recommend things or does it have side effects that make you not be super outspoken about it?

[Plethorae @9th_dev]

Disagreeable people agree with reality way more than the rest.

But don't be a disagreeable grifter.

[Plethorae @9th_dev]

Are tokens freedom? Freedom is so cool.

[Plethorae @9th_dev]

Actually they are the only ones concerned with reality.

[Pedro Domingos @pmddomingos]

Mathematicians are a dangerous lot because they're not concerned with reality.

[Plethorae @9th_dev]

Life isn't PVP if it's all NPCs.
Life during the 21st century is PVE, enjoy.

[Plethorae @9th_dev]

Well played, energy-maxxers. By all means necessary, never let anti-humans stagnate or decrease energy creation and consumption.

[Plethorae @9th_dev]

The world is about to figure out the hard way that the lookup table will never stop needing guidance. And that guidance takes energy. And that energy was already being deployed... so it's just a rotation of energy deployment + semantics holding this oversold current state of AI.

[Plethorae @9th_dev]

This guy's flex is that silicon valley is himself and it's not even false.

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

Overhead in Silicon Valley: “‘Jevon’s Paradox’ is Seattle-speak for ‘elasticity’.”