Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47433828

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

This means that the related parts in the inputs and outputs are recursively as close together as possible.

There's a reason humans don't type and read http/json on the command line. It's hard to read and reason over that type of syntax. json is made to be easy to parse for simple algorithms, not meant to organise info in an easy to reason about layout.

AIs benefit from the easy to reason about layout. It's not just about being able to fit in the context window but about the contents of that context window being organized such that the attention mechanism doesn't have to stretch itself out trying to connect far apart related pieces. It doesn't have to try to match brackets to disambiguate information. CLIs tend to use formats that are obvious at a glance for humans and LLMs alike.

It's about the entropy of the formats. https://benoitessiambre.com/entropy.html

The probabilistic version of "Do No Harm" is "Do not take excessive risk of harm".

This should work as AIs become smarter because intelligence implies becoming better bayesians which implies being great at calibrating confidence intervals of their interpretations and their reasoning and basically gaining a superhuman ability for evaluating the bounds of ambiguity and risk.

Now this doesn't mean that AIs won't be misaligned, only that it should be possible to align them. Not every AI maker will necessarily bother to align them properly, especially in adversarial, military applications.

Open source solutions like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu could become more prominent. There's even interesting non us hardware options like https://starlabs.systems/

The US has had an unfair advantage in tech, defense, science and finance because it hosted the global hubs of the free world. This attracted eye-watering amounts of money to places like SF and NY. With the newfound isolationism, tariffs, threats etc. reducing the viability of hosting the global hubs, there's massive opportunities opening in europe and elsewhere, especially if governments can help bootstrap these sectors with efforts like these.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46747596

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

Open source is the global alternative you're looking for. There's even interesting hardware options like https://starlabs.systems/

The US also has had an unfair advantage in tech/defense and finance because it hosted the global hubs of the free world. This attracted eye-watering amounts of money to places like SF and NY. With this newfound isolationism, tariffs etc. reducing the viability of hosting the global hubs, there's massive opportunities opening in europe and elsewhere.

They are split on whether his thoroughness is just fueling false hopes and sending patients down unnecessary rabbit holes or if he could have potentially identified a real issue.

Unix was an effort to take Multics, an operating system that had gotten too modular, and integrate the good parts into a more unified whole (book recommendation: https://www.amazon.com/UNIX-History-Memoir-Brian-Kernighan/d...).

Even though there were some benefits to the modularity of Multics (apparently you could unload and replace hardware in Multics servers without reboot, which was unheard of at the time), it was also its downfall. Multics was eventually deemed over-engineered and too difficult to work with. It couldn't evolve fast enough with the changing technological landscape. Bell Labs' conclusion after the project was shelved was that OSs were too costly and too difficult to design. They told engineers that no one should work on OSs.

Ken Thompson wanted a modern OS so he disregarded these instructions. He used some of the expertise he gained while working on Multics and wrote Unix for himself (in three weeks, in assembly). People started looking over Thompson's shoulder being like "Hey what OS are you using there, can I get a copy?" and the rest is history.

Brian Kernighan described Unix as "one of" whatever Multics was "multiple of". Linux eventually adopted a similar architecture.

More here: https://benoitessiambre.com/integration.html