AI Engineer at the @USTreasury @gauntletai Cohort 2 (S25)
Washington, DC
Joined May 2008
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Andrew Shindyapin retweeted
imagine doing the safety review for cars before cars existed.
what are the operators doing at 70 mph?
texting. some are also eating McDonald’s.
and how much flammable liquid is on board?
25 gallons of gasoline.
how much training do they get?
enough to pass a short test at 16.
any more training after that?
no.
what separates them from oncoming traffic?
paint.
what if it snows?
they guess where the paint is.
anyway, it mostly works.
i guess the moral of the story is that hardly anything ends up being as bad as imagined? maybe the singularity won't be as bad as it *could be*?
"If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room."
Thankfully, there's One in any room I am in, whose peace transcends all understanding.
Andrew Shindyapin retweeted
people are always trying to gaslamp me by using slightly wrong words and phrases
To this day, it is 10x easier for me to say “love you” to my wife and kids in English than in Russian.
My friend Ayako has translated American movies and TV shows into Japanese subtitles for 22 years.
Above her desk, taped to the wall, is a handwritten list.
"American sentences that do not exist in Japanese."
She let me copy it.
1. "I'm good."
Means yes. Means no. Means I'm full, I'm fine, I'm leaving, and please stop asking. She has translated it 31 different ways. She thinks she was right about half the time.
2. "Bless your heart."
She translated it as a blessing for six years. Then a woman from Alabama explained it to her, very sweetly. She had to go back and fix four movies.
3. "Hold my beer."
Japanese has no phrase for the moment right before a man does something stupid for a cheering crowd. She subtitled it "Someone please call an ambulance." Nobody has ever complained.
4. "Love you, bye."
American men say this to their fathers. On the phone. Fast. Like "see you later." In Japanese, "I love you" to your father is a deathbed sentence. The first time she subtitled it, the whole Japanese audience thought the father was dying.
He was asking about the Cowboys game.
5. "Come here."
An American sees someone crying, says two words, and opens his arms. In Japan, we ask "Are you okay?" and look very carefully at the floor.
6. "Proud of you, kid."
Japanese has the words. Japanese fathers just don't use them. Ayako has typed this line more than 400 times. She had heard it in her own house zero times.
Her father is 78. A retired machinist. The quietest man I know. He speaks maybe ten words of English.
Last spring, he went to see a movie she had translated. Alone. He didn't tell anyone.
That night, her phone rang.
He said it in English. Exactly the way the American dad said it on the screen.
"Proud of you, kid."
Then he hung up. Immediately. Before she could say a word.
Japanese fathers have not changed that much.
She sat on her kitchen floor for an hour.
He didn't say it in English because he forgot the Japanese.
He said it in English because in English, it was allowed.
America, you think you're just talking. Love you, bye. Come here. Proud of you.
You've been handing the whole world words we didn't know we were allowed to say.
Some of us are finally using them.
Andrew Shindyapin retweeted
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of recursive self-improvement, it was the age of data center bans, it was the epoch of intelligence explosions, it was the epoch of local backlash, it was the season of acceleration, it was the season of red tape, it was the spring of superintelligence, it was the winter of compute.
Andrew Shindyapin retweeted
I used to be a language lawyer. In the late 80s I _studied_ the ARM (Annotated Reference Manual for C++). I knew the language cold, inside and out. I could make it do backflips. I shipped a lot of code using it. A LOT.
I’ve attacked other languages with a similar intensity and depth. Until recently, that was simply the only way to become adept at building software systems.
I now consider the deep understanding of a language to be a supreme waste of time and effort. I don’t want to learn Rust, or Golang, or Typescript, or any of the thousands of other languages out there. I’ll leave that to my agents.
What I need now is to understand the high level gestalt of the system. I want to see the systems and subsystems. I don’t need to inspect the cogs. If I truly need to understand a detail at the cog level, I’ll interrogate my agents. I’m not going to pretend to be a language expert anymore.
Andrew Shindyapin retweeted
Atlas shrugged, the Elves sailed into the West, and the Orbital Data Centers launched to Sun-synchronous orbit.
