Location: New York City
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: If it's on the east coast, yeah maybe
Technologies: JavaScript, TypeScript, C, Haskell, Solidity, C#, MUMPS
Resume: https://haltman.neocities.org/resume.pdf
Email: harry.j.altman@gmail.com
Hi, I'm Harry Altman! I was the maintainer of Truffle Debugger (https://github.com/ConsenSys-archive/truffle/tree/develop/pa...), a Solidity smart contract debugger, for 5 years. I eventually ended up writing my own decoding and encoding libraries to support it, as well as a bunch of other things.
I'm good at this sort of nitpicky work, spotting and thinking about edge cases. I like getting things exactly right, even though that obviously isn't always possible due to various constraints. I've been kind of wondering if I should get into embedded development; I find it appealing when things are low-level or similarly constrained. I've beaten Microcorruption. :) (The original levels, I haven't played the new ones.)
I'm also quite interested in unusual or obscure data formats, and working on Truffle Debugger and its associated libraries certainly involved a bunch of having to figure undocumented formats and interfaces. :) I put down above what languages I've worked substantially in but I'd say I'm a generalist and will figure out whatever you give me (I knew approximately no Javascript, Typescript, or Solidity when I started working at Consensys).
I'm a mathematician by background and in my spare time, so after the Truffle Debugger project was shut down I took some time off to focus on my mathematical projects, including old ones I've been shepherding through publication. But now I'm looking for work again! If you need someone like me, I'm available for hire!
Yes, I was surprised he never discussed the idea that such exponentials are typically made of stacked sigmoids.
That said... if the exponential is made of stacked sigmoids, it's still an exponential on the whole! The fact that it's made of stacked sigmoids is relevant to the engineers making it, but not so relevant to the users or those otherwise affected by it.
Either you black-box the curve and assume that you will keep stacking sigmoids for about as long as you already have already seen.
Or you white box it and make some actual technical argument about why the curves can’t keep stacking.
There are plenty of plausible arguments here. Scott is not arguing that the exponential must go on forever.
He’s making a meta-level point about the debate; you have to pick one of the above, and you can’t just argue that “now is the time the s-curves will stop stacking” without providing some justification.
Sure, but we have no prior reason to expect that the 'rate of discoveries' is going to drop off significantly in the next few years. Certainly not stop entirely.
Overall in the economy, no, rate is discoveries is not going to drop off.
But in any specific industry or area? You often get a bunch of big discoveries, and then there is a long period of no important discoveries, because we've figured out the main aspects of that technological paradigm. The technology becomes commoditized and standard.
And that's the trillion dollar question with AI right now -- will we soon exhaust the potential of the current LLM paradigm? And we'll just have 20 or 30 years of figuring out mainly how to make LLMs cheaper and how integrate them into business processes, before somebody comes up with another fundamental breakthrough?
Or are we only 10% of the way in developing the current LLM paradigm? Where a decade from now models virtually never make mistakes and are smarter than basically any tenured faculty member in their field?
We have no reason to expect anything of the 'rate of discoveries' because that is completely independent of anything to do with productionizing them.
For all we know it becomes negative because all the people who understood how to train a trillion parameter model get killed by an asteroid during a conference.
> FYI: The author has predicted that "AGI" will be here in 1-2 years and has staked his public reputation on it. He is personally invested in trendlines being lindy rather than sigmoid.
He co-authored a report, which is something more than an opinion. It may be used to inspire policy. There should be greater reputational consequences for publishing something you spent a few months studying and writing about along with several experts. Just my opinion.
I don't understand what you're trying to imply here. Yes, he co-authored a report. What is supposed to be dangerous or suspicious about this? What does your statement about "reputational consequences" have to do with your original comment, which implies that this some indicates a bias on his part?
It seems to me like you're trying to somehow imply that writing things to convince people of what you believe is somehow nefarious? It isn't! It's what we're all doing here right now! Putting it in a format that certain people will take more seriously doesn't make it nefarious either. I am quite confused by your point of view here.
There was no implication of anything you're suggesting. It's a question of correctness (bias vs facts, predicting the sun will rise vs predicting the end of the world), whether you think it's important to be correct as a matter of reputation, and how correctness should be weighed if it is indeed important to one's reputation (a once-off comment vs a full report).
He wrote articles arguing that pro-AI people are dismissive of risks or even suggesting they are intellectually lazy. He's taken a side. if he's wrong I would hope he owns up to it
Yes, that's called "having an opinion". Typically people writing argumentative pieces are doing so because they have a belief about the matter. I'm not sure what exactly you expect here.
> if he's wrong I would hope he owns up to it
I think Scott Alexander is pretty good about that.
> He wrote articles arguing that pro-AI people are dismissive of risks or even suggesting they are intellectually lazy
I mean.. this is 2026 right? You're not writing that comment from 2024 or something?
We see massive problems already where photos are just not believable anymore, nor is audio, and not even video actually with many people falling for AI fake image clips from the Gaza war for example. And since then these tools are MASSIVELY more powerful. Disinformation is essentially free, and the cost of truth has been static. Meaning the "buying power" of truth has collapsed and is falling faster and faster.
Anyone who dismissed AI risks a few years ago IS ALREADY PROVEN WRONG.
I mean there are modified gravity candidates other than MOND. I think those are worth more consideration. MOND seems pretty well disproven at this point, yet somehow it's still what people focus on in terms of modified gravity! Where are the tests of other modified gravity theories?
Indeed, in terms of the negatives of MOND, I'll go further than you -- MOND barely explains galaxy rotation curves at all. When you look at the actual rotation curves compared to MOND's predictions, well, yes MOND does better than Newton w/o dark matter, but it's still pretty heavily fudged. If you have to fudge it that much, it seems to me there's no point. So I'd say that really MOND doesn't explain any of the three.
I mean, there are modified gravity candidates other than MOND. I think people should perhaps give more consideration to those and not focus on MOND as their idea of modified gravity. I feel like the evidence is pretty well against MOND at this point. But other ideas of modified gravity, that aren't MOND-like, may still be worth considering. Framing it as "dark matter vs MOND" implicitly excludes these and I think that's a mistake.
Location: New York City
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: If it's on the east coast, yeah maybe
Technologies: JavaScript, TypeScript, C, Haskell, Solidity, C#, MUMPS
Resume: https://haltman.neocities.org/resume.pdf
Email: harry.j.altman@gmail.com
Hi, I'm Harry Altman! I was the maintainer of Truffle Debugger (https://github.com/ConsenSys-archive/truffle/tree/develop/pa...), a Solidity smart contract debugger, for 5 years. I eventually ended up writing my own decoding and encoding libraries to support it, as well as a bunch of other things.
I'm good at this sort of nitpicky work, spotting and thinking about edge cases. I like getting things exactly right, even though that obviously isn't always possible due to various constraints. I've been kind of wondering if I should get into embedded development; I find it appealing when things are low-level or similarly constrained. I've beaten Microcorruption. :) (The original levels, I haven't played the new ones.)
I'm also quite interested in unusual or obscure data formats, and working on Truffle Debugger and its associated libraries certainly involved a bunch of having to figure undocumented formats and interfaces. :) I put down above what languages I've worked substantially in but I'd say I'm a generalist and will figure out whatever you give me (I knew approximately no Javascript, Typescript, or Solidity when I started working at Consensys).
I'm a mathematician by background and in my spare time, so after the Truffle Debugger project was shut down I took some time off to focus on my mathematical projects, including old ones I've been shepherding through publication. But now I'm looking for work again! If you need someone like me, I'm available for hire!
I'm good at this sort of nitpicky work, spotting and thinking about edge cases. I like getting things exactly right, even though that obviously isn't always possible due to various constraints. I've been kind of wondering if I should get into embedded development; I find it appealing when things are low-level or similarly constrained. I've beaten Microcorruption. :) (The original levels, I haven't played the new ones.)
I'm also quite interested in unusual or obscure data formats, and working on Truffle Debugger and its associated libraries certainly involved a bunch of having to figure undocumented formats and interfaces. :) I put down above what languages I've worked substantially in but I'd say I'm a generalist and will figure out whatever you give me (I knew approximately no Javascript, Typescript, or Solidity when I started working at Consensys).
I'm a mathematician by background and in my spare time, so after the Truffle Debugger project was shut down I took some time off to focus on my mathematical projects, including old ones I've been shepherding through publication. But now I'm looking for work again! If you need someone like me, I'm available for hire!
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