Satvik Choudhary ⚡

What we do in life echoes in eternity

Building @QASphereHQ

🇮🇳

[Satvik Choudhary ⚡ @realsatvik007]

@JustJake

[Satvik Choudhary ⚡ @realsatvik007]

@screaming__void @rider_r18355 @sama

[Satvik Choudhary ⚡ @realsatvik007]

Except its more complex so the engine can't get to the truth of the position and you as a player have vague understanding of what's going on.

[Satvik Choudhary ⚡ @realsatvik007]

Programming with agents feels like Playing Chess with an Engine helping you out with the moves.

[Ryan Dahl @rough__sea]

Introducing celld: a self-hosted, distributed Durable Objects and Workers implementation

- celld = V8 + S3 + SQLite + LTX+ Tokio
- programmed with exactly the Cloudflare Workers/DO JavaScript APIs and config
- order of magnitude cheaper at scale
- writes are durable before they're acknowledged, RPO=0
- only depends on an S3 compatible bucket - no other infrastructure
- ~4 MB memory per cell instance overhead
- hibernated cells cost ~nothing, just their S3 storage
- open source, Apache 2 licensed

[Satvik Choudhary ⚡ @realsatvik007]

@opdroid1234 Or google is clearly behind in its AI research and Sir Demis is a more proven leader. He can now give up his CEO duties and help Google Deepmind bring back to the frontier as the new Chief Scientist.

What's at stake is who gets to AGI first and we might still be decades away.

[Satvik Choudhary ⚡ @realsatvik007]

@heisenberg_2605 Its not a flex but a way to build trust sometimes when you have nothing else more appropriate.

[Satvik Choudhary ⚡ @realsatvik007]

@mitchellh Its also hard to predict what will work.

Even if a company has internal lab like structure working on competing ideas, no company can afford to release the same product with multiple different shapes.

This is also why the largest companies almost operate like a bank.

[kache @yacineMTB]

And just like that
Commoditized

[Satvik Choudhary ⚡ @realsatvik007]

Go Slow to Go Fast

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

Someone asked me recently why I’ve become interested in aesthetics after having spent most of my life more interested in STEM-adjacent topics. I hadn’t really considered the question consciously before, but I’m certainly thinking about aesthetics more than I used to. I think it’s a confluence of things:

• Many things today are ugly and far uglier than they used to be or need to be. Once you see this, it’s kinda hard to stop perceiving it. (Early twentieth century phone boxes versus modern phone boxes; old water fountains versus new water fountains; etc.) As someone with a naively meliorist assumption that most things should be getting better rather than worse, it’s all a bit perplexing: why did we stop doing things nicely? Is it a choice? Was there a malevolent spell cast upon us? This vein led me to think more about modernism and why much of art became more intentionally "challenging", grotesque, opposed to prettiness, rebarbative, dissonant, etc. Can or should anything be done about this? Is this just how things ought to be?
• Relatedly, much of modernism involved a kind of explicit repudiation of cultural continuity and represented a schism with prior practices. This is maybe most evident in American architecture, where the International Style exhibition in 1932 initiated the displacement of a rich tapestry of prior styles. This cultural break seems important and interesting to me, and I suspect that the rejection had important consequences outside of the aesthetic domain. Samuel Hughes has been exploring this question in his recent writing at @WorksInProgMag; @RuxandraTeslo is also pulling on this thread. Elaine Scarry wrote about how beauty inspires creation. If so, the inverse may also be true: ugliness inhibits it.
• It’s clearly the case that changes in the aesthetic domain can at least inspire progress in other places. Petrarch helped set some of the preconditions for the Renaissance which in turn fostered the scientific revolution and Enlightenment. Things like World Fairs (the 1851 Fair at the Crystal Palace recorded 6 million admissions when the population was 21 million) reflect the popular interdependency that used to exist between aesthetics and material development.
• @tedgioia and others have written about stuck culture and how so many domains seem to have ceased to straightforwardly advance in the way that they did up until the nineties or thereabouts. This is obviously peculiar and interesting. What changed, and what does it mean? Is it about the internet and fragmentation? Is it about a loss of supply? Is it just about having reached the zenith of various mediums?
• I’m generally interested in markets and the dynamics of creation. In aesthetics broadly, I find the reflexivity between supply- and demand-side factors to be very thought-provoking. There’s a natural desire to view satisfaction of individual preferences as the yardstick to measure market success, but things get interesting and even a bit unsettling when we start to think about how the supply might start to shape the demand. I often think about this in the context of food. Why is food so much worse in Germany than many of its neighbors? Germany certainly doesn’t have less material ability to produce good food; indeed, Germany is richer than the countries around it. There’s probably something about German food supply chains that is impoverished relative to France and Italy, but the Germans themselves don’t seem too upset about it. It just seems that the Germans are stuck in an objectively worse market equilibrium than their neighbors: the food is bad and they’ve gotten used to it. The obvious question then is where else these kinds of reflexive patterns apply, and where else we’re stuck in some objectively inferior equilibrium, even if preferences are in some superficial sense being sated.
• While this is an extremely banal and obvious point, I hadn’t until recently thought much about or internalized how much one can study reasonably objective things ("the status of women in society", say) through artwork. (Thanks to @_alice_evans for opening my eyes here.) In this vein, I’m pretty excited about the possibilities over the coming years in computational art analysis. I want something that’s conceptually similar to Google Ngram timelines but for the visual arts.
• We've always tried to do things well at Stripe. I've come to see that attempting to do them beautifully is often a helpful way to break out of standard practices and to do something with greater novelty and in a way that might have other benefits besides. (Also, excellent people want to do great work because it is intrinsically satisfying. Explicitly allowing aesthetic considerations to carry weight avoids having to justify every assessment with some kind of torturous empiricism.)
• In his Nobel Lecture, Solzhenitsyn said that, among the Platonic virtues of goodness, truth, and beauty, that beauty is special, for it possesses a unique kind of irrefutability. He notes that arguments, writing, and philosophical systems can all be predicated on misapprehensions, but that “a true work of art carries its verification within itself.” He proceeds to observe that when goodness and truth are threatened, the “ever surprising shoots of beauty will still force their way through.” There is a lot of specious and motivated reasoning in the world today and plenty of questionable value systems. I don’t think that beauty directly reflects any definitive trait, but I’m intrigued by the idea that it can be a marker of deeper metaphysical coherence.

[Joran Dirk Greef @jorandirkgreef]

We built an S3 client with 20x more throughput (and with a single core):

https://t.co/cVqWM1saWR

[Satvik Choudhary ⚡ @realsatvik007]

@mitsuhiko Did you consider Starlink

[Satvik Choudhary ⚡ @realsatvik007]

Current generation of NVMEs are fast enough so that may open up ways to get around this. But in most cloud workloads we rely on Network Storage so we don't get all of the benefits.

[Satvik Choudhary ⚡ @realsatvik007]

Memory is getting more expensive. This should have an impact on how much in-memory caching we can do now vs how much we have done in the past.

[Dr. Simon @goddek]

🚨UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTH: Nobody is coming. Not a party, not an election, not a better politician. The system is not malfunctioning, it is functioning, for people who are not you.

[QASphere @QASphereHQ]

QA Sphere 26W28 is out, and it's our biggest release yet. An AI assistant for your test cases, multiplayer test runs, two new reports, and deeper Jira integration. 🧵

[Claude @claudeai]

Introducing Claude Opus 5.

It's a thoughtful and proactive model that comes close to the frontier intelligence of Fable 5 at half the price.

[Ibrahim Dagher @IbrahimDagher20]

“Anth/OAI distilled the internet, so China’s just doing the same” is an unbelievably bad take.

(1) Anthropic paid the largest settlement in history for the illegal books it downloaded — good luck getting China to do the same for mass violations of ToS

(2) Training on internet data is fair-use: it’s incredibly transformative to take text and then use that to build a machine which can think. Training on copyrighted text is totally fine, so long as you buy the book. What’s illegal is *downloading those texts without paying for them*; and Anthropic now does pay for every book when it trains a model.

What China does is the complete opposite: it is a direct breach to adversarially distill Fable’s outputs to another model. If you are analogizing “training” to “distillation”, you should know that *training* was never illegal; whereas distillation is a legal breach.

Imagine you read a science textbook that you pirated, use that knowledge to invent with a new technique for building a new drug, and then start selling the new drug. Then, a competitor breaks into your lab, steals your technique, and uses that to sell a duplicate drug. That is theft, and it does not matter that you pirated the original textbook — you pirating the textbook means you should pay the original textbook authors, but it does not mean that your innovations are now open to be stolen by anyone!

(3) Setting aside all that, the biggest issue here is national security. Anthropic spends billions in R&D and compute to push the frontier of reasoning, why should Chinese labs be able to just train on those reasoning traces to uplift their models? This is a horrible setup for China-US competition, and I am frankly baffled by how Americans could be okay with that, if they are AGI-pilled in even the slightest way.

[Satvik Choudhary ⚡ @realsatvik007]

@adadithya What are you missing in goodreads. Is it recommendations, book discovery by exploring or something else?