Senior Year Undergrad Research on Phase Qubits FINALLY DONE. > derived hamiltonian for a Josephson junction-based phase qubit > mapped it to a spin-1/2 system hamiltonian under magnetic fields > studied the quantum dynamics and evolution of the hamiltonian > derived spin-flip probabilities > explored qubit control via phase shift and applied mag fields for high fidelity

this guy makes Soham Parekh look normal

it’s kinda crazy that a Canadian who did his PhD at Stanford 15 years ago, co-founded OpenAI, led AI at Tesla, and is now at anthropic is STILL not an American citizen

it’s uncanny but the people who actually change the world do not do it because they want to change the world. they do what they do in search for better explanations and as a byproduct end up changing the world

i spent way too much time thinking why a monoid’s morphisms are its elements, i need to stop taking caffeine after 2pm

we should ban agi from people who said fable-5 was agi when we actually do achieve agi

here are some interesting things that are correlated with iq (research backed): - calling out bullshit (in other words realizing wordcels are full of shit most of the time); meaning high iq people are less likely to assume that just because they don't understand something it's something smart (you see this a lot on twitter) - being the first born child - people who believe they cannot figure out solutions for the problems of the world are likely to be higher iq - near-sightedness

a good friend recently started a continual learning company, just got into YC for the second time, has raised a pre-seed and is looking for 2 people to hire (in sf): - an infra person - an RL research/eng person lmk if any of you are interested or know someone who is

hearing stuff about what SSI is doing just makes me sad given the things Ilya talked about on the dwarkesh pod about him trying out straight-shotting superintelligence and baking human value functions into machines etc.

alright hear me out: ARR-backed securities. we bundle together hundreds of startups whose recurring revenue comes from other VC-funded startups. then i buy credit default swaps on the bundle, or make banks create them and short the entire shebang.

biannual big short watch 🫡

i don’t think we spend enough time thinking about what an insanely paradoxical place California is from a socio-economic viewpoint. 40 million people churning a $4 trillion GDP. compare that to India’s GDP of ~$4 trillion with a 1.25 billion population. cali has 36x the gdp/capita compared to india that’s just insanity or even with japan it’s a 3x multiplier and the thing is it looks like a recipe for collapse: housing costs, regulation and bureaucracy, massive inequality, earthquakes, huge pension liabilities, some of the highest taxes in America, politicall polarization, super expensive infra and yet it just…keeps compounding my thinking is that it’s because it accidentally cornered the world’s most valuable industries at the same time: silicon valley (software/ai), hollywood (media), central valley (agriculture), la/long beach (trade), biotech, venture capital, defense, universities, and access to pacific markets california is basically a civilization-scale stress test for whether innovation can outrun dysfunction so far, somehow, it has and it’s incredible to say the least

everyone i talk to about continual learning has something totally different that they wanna solve

i have a hunch that being a wordcel is positively correlated to being insecure about your own smartness or how smart the world thinks you are

can anthropic just buy some treasury bonds and we all get fable back?

just heard about an AI research lab that wanted funding for long-term research, so instead of raising money they apparently turned themselves into an HFT/quant shop and are trying to bankroll the research with trading profits and say they are already set for a few years 🫪