Search Ideas

Hi Michael, welcome to V.

The halting problem shows that no algorithm can correctly decide, for every program and input, whether the program will halt. Yet we can understand why such an algorithm is impossible, and we can determine the answer in particular cases.

Yes, we can, but note the switch from knowing such an impossible algorithm to understanding why such an algorithm is impossible. Those are two different things.

What exactly is being claimed to be unknowable here?

A universal halting algorithm.

How I find myself using Veritula at the moment is looking at the latest developing threads. Catching up on the context of that thread through clicking “Activity” is not time-effective; it reminds me of trying to catch up with a group chat full of messages. Threads naturally become messy, and not all points serve to advance the problem (some can be misunderstandings or micro-corrections). For this reason, there should be some summary that considers the following as context:

• The thread problem + metadata
• The discussion points under that thread (considering different branches) that relate to the problem.
• A prompt that aims at addressing “messiness” minimisation.

The summary should preserve substantive developments, competing answers and unresolved criticisms, while compressing resolved misunderstandings and linking back to the relevant posts.

If such a setup, including the summary, prompt and rules for what gets included, were kept open and criticiazable, we should arrive at a good system (so there should be a thread where we can iterate on ideas).

"Veritula could be a place where people break news stories and others can quickly fact-check and improve upon reports by revising them."

I ask myself where I go when I want 'answers' to such problems and immediately I think prediction markets. It's mainly because I think the financial incentives and outcome based 'test' serve as highly reliable error correction. I wonder what different utility Veritula would add in this regard.

… if the discussion itself is clear and concise …

Sure but often they’re not…

I might do that too. It arguably already falls under the rule against sabotaging debate. But the rules already explain the need for disclosure as well.

I don’t understand why you’re fighting this rule so hard. It’s not like you’re not allowed to use AI. You are. Just disclose it.

I think you defeated my criticism. That’s kind of cool, I get it.

This could extend beyond fixing errors to improving page load times, search quality, and reducing churn, provided you can measure whether a change helped. My friend Samay co-wrote this about a similar loop using production feedback and evals to improve tax agents:
https://openai.com/index/building-self-improving-tax-agents-with-codex/

This takes me back to my startup days in Berlin. It was common knowledge among founders that anyone overly worried about telling people about their great idea because someone might ‘steal’ it was a newbie founder. It’s almost always a mistake not to tell people, for several reaasons:

1. Your idea probably isn’t new anyway. Somebody has probably already tried it before you and realized why it doesn’t work.
2. If you don’t share your idea, you don’t get any critical feedback. You’ll make more mistakes. It will be harder to launch it.
3. Most people don’t care. They have their own problems. They’re not looking to copy ideas.

Tik Tok did reels and then Instagram copied the feature. Arguably, Instagram does it better now. Imagine the founder of Tik Tok getting angry with Zuckerberg and trying to shame him online. That would be ridiculous.

As Ben points out, reels go all the way back to Vine! Which corroborates point 1 above: the idea probably isn’t new. And your customers don’t care either way. They only care that your product solves their problems better than the competitors’ products.

People get angry because they hope to control more than they actually can. Ideas spread; we can’t control people’s speech. One can’t expect secrecy from people who didn’t agree to secrecy. If it’s important, like industry secrets or product launches, one should make people sign NDAs. If something is truly secret, the only person you should tell is your lawyer. Aside from that, sharing generously and openly is more profitable for you 99% of the time anyway.

It also pays to be brief: the more you write, the more text there is to criticize. It’s in Vincent’s own interest to be less verbose. Not sure he realizes that.

I guess, the point I'm trying to make is really that it should not be coming with any form of punishment (like that this does not count for badges) IF the AI assist is clearly done in good faith.

Absence of a reward != punishment

These three paragraphs could be shortened to: ‘basing badges on non-AI use may discourage non-native speakers.’ Verbosity is a recurring issue

Fixed. The discussion title now uses title case: ‘Immortality, Billionaires, and Copying Business Ideas Is Not Immoral’.

Midnight Ride: Production Errors That Fix Themselves (Almost)

blog.dennishackethal.com

Midnight Ride: Production Errors That Fix Themselves (Almost)

Midnight Ride, my new Rails gem, sends production errors from Solid Errors to Telegram and starts a Claude Code session that opens a PR with the fix.

Reels go all the way back to Vine!

We’re talking about a friend of yours who you think might have a problem, but who hasn’t even signed up never mind voiced that concern to me directly. This is all hypothetical. I’m not gonna relax the rules just because one person who isn’t even a member might possibly not feel accommodated. If some day ten non-native members actually try and make an effort and then all tell me the same thing, now that would be a good reason to relax the rules.

Eh. Being a non-native speaker myself, I have no sympathy for other non-native speakers. Tell your friend to work harder and get better at English. Badges are rewards for personal effort, and I can’t reliably tell that apart from AI usage. The badge logic stays until further notice.

I’m not using AI for this response and will not do so moving forward on Veritula to respect the rules and what seems to be the sentiment behind these rules (unless they change).

As written, the forum rules don’t ban AI. They say to disclose it. Someone may voice a preference about AI use and it’s up to you to honor it. Their preference doesn’t bind you like the forum rules do. But members will make decisions about who to spend time discussing with. Our discussion about animals, if you choose to continue it, will probably go better if you don’t use AI.

That said, it’s a good idea, especially for new members, to get a feel for the platform, study the rules, and understand the culture better before going full-steam ahead and submitting dozens of AI-assisted ideas. It’s best to exercise care when entering a new space and prove that you’re worth engaging with. (I’m not only talking about you specifically, I mean new members in general.) Checking a checkbox indicating AI use is a small cost, and it’s a good way to be transparent with readers of one’s ideas.

To that end, it pays to show an understanding that Veritula isn’t a debate club, and that the goal isn’t to win an argument (although winning and losing do happen here, in an objectively recognizable sense – though finding an error is rarely an actual ‘loss’). The goal is to find a bit of truth. It pays to show that you can change your mind, eg by saying things like ‘I never thought of it that way – you’ve given me a new way to look at things.’ Having your AI say something like that on your behalf obviously carries less weight than if you said it yourself. And excessive use of AI gives the impression that someone is just trying to win an argument. (Not saying you specifically – again, this is about the forum rules in general.)

My English is not great but the English from a Spanish friend of mine is considerably worse, and I wonder if I should tell him about this platform, because he would usually use AI to polish his English.

Your English is fine. Clearly good enough to have discussions. As for your friend, he can enlist the help of AI to translate ideas. Again, he’d just need to disclose it.

AI-generated text is notoriously verbose regardless of who came up with an idea.

Summary feature proposed in #4727 is for discussions not ideas.

I think this did not address what I think is the key part of the question which is 'how can something have an intrinsic value if value is subjective'.

I simply do not think all value is subjective. One can alter value through their own subjective experience. I personally still hold on to a paper napkin from a sentimental trip that I went on, and that creates a personal premium value for that napkin that goes above the utility and scarcity conditions of that napkin's value.

The contrary is obviously true. I doubt there are many monks that intend on buying Ferraris, even if they had the means to do so, so their subjective value impacts what would be considered the total of a Ferrari.

However, to speak of the 'intrinsic' side. I think value is best split into a multiplicative relationship between utility and scarcity. A toll road is a great example. Many times, there aren't many alternative roads, if any, and its utility at getting you to where you need to go should be non-zero assuming you intend on going where that road takes you. So, if a toll road were to crop up on the market selling for $1 dollar, assuming no 'strings attached', that would be a clear mispricing one could diagnose on an 'intrinsic value basis'.

I think it's incorrect to say that something cannot be intrinsically valued due to subjectivity being the primary motivator for humans, and so since subjectivity drives exchange, valuing that relationship is not possible. We can have long lasting theories of human behaviour or social systems that allow us to assign an objective/intrinsic value.

It doesn’t play the whole codebase at once. It walks through the code line by line, and when a file changes, it jumps to the changed lines and plays an accent made from them, rising or falling with that file’s health. So a small change in a big codebase is as audible as one in a small codebase. What’s quieter in a big codebase is the overall stage, and that’s on purpose: one long function shouldn’t make a whole healthy codebase sound sick. Bugs are the exception, since they count in full. One syntax error drops even a huge project from beautiful to meh.

I think this is actually more urgent for the new crit tree view on the right side.

For ex., this just shows:

1. Not if the...
2. A discussion can...
3. How is this a...

It could say something like:

1. Not if concise
2. Long discussions
3. No real criticism

Relatedly, I think in the future, software engineering will mostly be you talking to voice agents and looking at diagrams the agent is generating and constantly updating to help you understand the code/ideas. This is kind of how students already learn in the classroom, where there's a teacher who talks them through a drawing on the board, etc.

organization of information processing

What does this mean if nothing physical? You mean the structure of their code?

Until about a week ago, when I debated this with my friend Tom Hyde, it seemed incredibly obvious to me that wanting to be rich is rational but I could not explain why. Fundamentally I agree with Popper and Deutsch that all life is problem solving. Throwing a birthday party is solving a problem, and so is stopping an asteroid that is heading toward Earth. But is not having a mansion on Lake Como a problem? Is not being immortal a problem? How do we decide between these?

The lone scientist obsessed with some theoretical problem strikes most people as weird. How can someone toil for 30 years on a problem, living on a modest salary, without any desire to accumulate massive wealth? According to the Popperian view above, that is completely rational. The scientist is fully engrossed in problem solving.

If that is true, why am I and most people so drawn to solving my problem of not having a mansion on Lake Como, driving a Bugatti hypercar, or overlooking the skyline of NYC from a Billionaires’ Row apartment? Status plays a part, but I think I’d want these things even if nobody knew about them.

I think the two reasons are:

1. Wealth is the repertoire of things you can do. I can likely only experience these things with incredible wealth. They are a symbol of that repertoire. Some of my desires I know already, like the mansion. Most I don’t know yet. Future desires are unknowable, thus attaining wealth allows me to solve problems in the future I don’t know I’ll have.
   1. This is the antithesis to the famous fisherman story (a businessman advises a fisherman to scale up his business so he can retire and fish). The story contains the assumption that the fisherman already knows the problem he wants to solve. However, the fisherman might want to travel the world, build a school, research AI, explore space.
   2. Imagine a person 1000 years ago. They might only want better food, safer shelter, a healthy family, or perhaps a larger farm. But if they knew these things existed, they would desire flying across the Atlantic, playing table tennis, or listening to recorded music.
   3. There are clear limits to this theory. Just because I’m a septillionaire doesn’t mean I get a cure for cancer. The fundamental limitation remains the knowledge.
2. Beauty is accumulated knowledge. These experiences—the lake mansion, the hypercar, the best view of the most awe-inspiring skyline humanity has forged—are objects of incredible beauty. They are products of accumulated human knowledge. So desiring beauty is a form of desire to experience knowledge. Deutsch argues beauty is objective and improves like science. But beauty doesn’t look like a problem we need to solve. Why do we seek it out?

So how ambitious should you be? In the startup world there is this famous saying that “Starting a company is always hard and it’s about equally hard no matter what you do.” Bigger problems are riskier, but a bigger vision lets you raise more money and hire better people, which reduces the risk. So why not solve the problem people pay the most for? Or should you only be guided by curiosity, as that drive likely carries some latent knowledge about what society wants or where the most interesting gaps are? I don’t know. I suspect it is best to follow a mix of these strategies. Whatever the right mix is, I don’t think ambition is bounded.

The child who grows up knowing they will inherit several large companies might aim to build an even bigger one, while the child of, say, a cashier might aim to be a cashier. Each is working from a conjecture about what is within reach, formed from what they see the people around them do. It only gets criticized if the child asks whether they could do what someone like Elon Musk did, or something nobody has done before. That is why optimism matters for ambition. It says the only limit is what we don’t yet know.

Alexandr Wang recently said “Humans will dream bigger and bigger. Kids will dream of having their own star systems.” I think that is true. And one day kids will dream of owning several galaxies. We don’t yet know what we’d want after that. Human dreams, desire, and our future are infinite.