A possible "third variable" could be intelligence. It's been shown to be strongly correlated with success in general, and it seems likely people of similar intelligence would find it easier to relate to each other.
> > It's been shown to be strongly correlated with success in general
> Has it? I was under the impression we could hardly define, much less measure that.
IQ has a strong positive correlation with life outcomes. Economic and otherwise. Whether IQ is a good measure of "intelligence" remains debated but there's no question that high scores in that measure correlate with high scores in life outcome measures: Life expectancy, economic success, relationship success, etc. Every single thing you can measure about a person's life trends upwards with IQ.
Some (maybe much) of the effect can be attributed to privilege and other covariants, so we don't know if IQ is causal for life outcomes but we have strong evidence that it's correlated.
All of these things are strong covariates, which is something the online hive-mind struggles with. It's not intelligence OR wealth OR hard work OR $thing, it's all of the above, with some weighting function that spits out high values for all factors.
And since IQ is just a proxy for intelligence (however good), it also correlates to some greater or lesser degree with the other factors.
I think we have many very decent measures of intellect. It’s true that none of them are perfect but I think it’s basically propaganda to say we can’t define or measure it at all.
> I think it’s basically propaganda to say we can’t define or measure it
I worked at a (very well known) test publishing company, for some time.
You would not believe how often someone would hear where I work and lecture me about intelligence measurement being nonsense. Almost like they were offended that the test batteries exist.
But also, they had absolutely no idea how those tests were developed and validated. They weren’t even aware of the language and cultural work involved in making test variations that validate across different people.
I would mostly shrug and keep my mouth shut. I’m not an expert on the subject. But I saw a bit of what those many smart people did at work, and I’m confident that they were better informed.
Maybe it was just silly defensiveness, but for a while I started to think all the delightful, “You’re all special in your own way.” messaging of our youth had been extrapolated into more unreasonable notions.
There is "something" that seems to correlate strongly with wealth, education, test scores across every subject/dimension, seems highly heritable from parents to offspring, and fits with both SAT and IQ test results.
It can't possibly be intelligence (would be inconvenient if it were) but there's something there. Maybe we can call it "shminshmellishence".
Those were some of the leading candidates until twin studies and controls for familial wealth invalidated them and left us only with shminshmellishence :/
Wait, flesh this thought out? Twin studies were the dominant methodology of the 1970s-1990s, until molecular genomics --- and genetic studies with controls for family relations demolished their heritability estimates. You just wrote a sentence that implies a straight line of progress on understanding this (weirdly, giving a 70s-vintage point in one direction along with a 2010s-vintage point in the other), but it's the opposite (there's a whole thing about this, the "missing heritability problem").
"Go look up twin studies" is a very strange thing to tell someone on a message board in 2026. It's like saying "go look up phlogiston".
Identical twins reared together: .85 correlation in IQ
Fraternal twins reared together: .55 correlation in IQ
Identical twins reared apart: .75 correlation in IQ
And the genetic correlation grows as children age.
No, genetic studies did not "demolish" heritability estimates, they set a floor on them. Genetic studies do not and cannot (currently) predict all phenotypic outcomes, they set the floor on how much variation can be caused by genetic differences.
The genetic predictions don't even directly contradict, never mind demolish, the twin study findings.
The "missing heritability problem" is only a problem if one believes our genetic analysis techniques are comprehensive, but we already know they're not. For example, current methods are extremely limited in detecting gene-gene interactions, which we have good reason to suspect are widespread (otherwise making new genetic drugs would be trivial).
Yes, the .85 is probably at the upper end of the estimate. The genetic studies are the conceivable floor.
I'm not sure what you mean by "hereditarian" given that even the genetic studies obviously point to significant heritability.
This is always a funny conversation because on the one side you have people saying "intelligence is both heritable and correlated with nearly every outcome we care about."
On the other hand you have people saying "nuh uh! It's only... medium-high heritability and medium-high correlation with other positive outcomes," as if it makes any material difference to any downstream question.
It's not "the upper end of the estimate"; it's no longer the estimate. Meanwhile, hereditarians believe in strong genetic determinism for behavioral attributes. I think you should probably be more familiar with this field and its terms before being this confident about your numbers.
Again, the search bar will avail, but the answers you're giving here are very early-90s.
I don't know how we can continue discussing at this point, since "hereditarian" is not a slur (it's how many in the field would describe themselves). You either follow this research or you don't, either is fine, but it's not reasonable to attack other people for being familiar with it.
It's totally OK if we're just not going to persuade each other or develop any productive ideas in this thread! I've said all I originally wanted to say.
"Intelligence doesn't exist" is just a defense mechanism for above-average intelligence people to feel like they earned all their good outcomes.
But here's the thing: even if it was all hard work and not that you were born of above-average intelligence, it's pure luck that you were born someone who works hard.
But also intelligence exists and it's wildly discrediting to insist it doesn't.
You think there are people who are fortunate enough to have the desire to work hard, but nonetheless choose not to?
No, there's actually nothing convenient about the fact that most people are accidents of their genetic, geographic, and environmental roll of the dice.
The convenient view is: I worked hard because I chose to work hard. I achieved hard things because I worked to be smart. People who did not achieve the same things did not do so because they chose not to work hard or they chose not to be smart.
I did not say what your first paragraph says. I think there are people who do not have the desire to work hard, but who never the less choose to do so, even though they don't want to.
I will grant you that there are some people who, due to handicaps or other things beyond their control, do not have the option of choosing to work hard. But I claim (without statistical proof, I admit) that by far the majority of those who do not work hard, still have the real option of choosing to work hard, but do not.
For most of those who won't, "I can't" is also "very self-serving and transparently wrong."
Tell that to the generation of autistics roaming America that were never properly diagnosed in their youth. High intelligence, often even high paying jobs, but all the other 'success' metrics will probably end up looking very wavy.
I'd argue that mildly autistic people had much better outcomes decades ago before we started thinking it was something to diagnose. My grandfather was probably autistic, but there was no internet to sink into so he had to interact with people and build some basic social skills. Out of high school he joined the Navy as a radar technician and lived in a structured environment that taught a lot of life skills. Then he went to college for engineering and was set up on dates with my grandmother (as a bit of a matchmaking thing). Suburban house, 4 children, married for decades, church. Generally a very normal and happy life, even if he was considered eccentric and sensitive to noises. I don't think anybody ever thought to diagnose him with it.
My brother is mildly autistic, too, but he has always had the option to skip out of socialization in favor of the computer, and we've lost the societal structure that helped my grandfather thrive.
I strongly disagree that getting diagnosed causes worse outcomes in such cases.
I'm not sure what the link is between your brother getting diagnosed, and him having the option to skip out on socializing. Undiagnosed people frequently make the same choice under worse circumstances, since it's hard to name why they want to choose this escape. I wouldn't be surprised if the undiagnosed made this choice more often, as they struggle in ways most people around them don't seem to, which naturally leads to the struggling seeking community in other places (= digital ones).
It may well be that a life journey like your grandfather's was more likely for mildly autistic people 50 years ago (though I'd urge you not to forget that many in that situation just break and die early), but the world has fundamentally shifted since then. IMO not getting diagnosed wouldn't improve things, people would largely live the same, but with much greater self-doubt, anger and broken relationships.
it depends what you do with the diagnosis. Once you have that label, does it make it an excuse or an explanation for the behavior. Do you go "I'm autistic so I get a pass" or is it "I know I'm autistic so I have to work harder just to keep up with everyone."
That benchmark ranks Kimi K2.6 and K2.7 Code near the bottom. Both are below Ornith 35B. It ranks Gemma 4 26B much higher than GLM-5.2. The results don't make much sense.
It looks like they're comparing Orinth 9B to Qwen 3.5 35B, not Qwen 3.6. I guess it kind of makes sense since it's a finetune of 3.5, but I totally missed until I looked closely.
In my brief tests, Ornith 35B performed quite well. It won't replace DeepSeek V4 Flash for me, but if it was fast and cheap enough it might.
I don't remember being super impressed with Ornith 9B, but I could see it being on par with Qwen 3.5 35B.
A 9B model with the capability of the 35B SOTA from last February is too good to be true, and a wild claim to make IMO even if there's a newer 35B SOTA. I'll need to make time to take it on a test drive and see how it holds up.
It should improve agents' action selection by allowing them to evaluate actions' effects before performing them.
An agent using only a regular LLM has no real way to predict the results of its actions. It has to just take an action based on its training data and hope it's the right one. With a world model like this, it could do a second pass before each action to catch mistakes.
I don't know if this actually delivers yet, but if it does it might help make agents more usable.
One can only imagine how much money Intel would have made from Optane during the ongoing RAM shortages. It would be absolutely perfect for warm KV cache, and potentially good for MoE expert offloading.
The silenced errors aren't guaranteed to be memory leaks or use after frees. There are some situations where memory is being handled properly, but the borrow checker isn't able to prove it.
One example might be a tree-like struct where a parent and child have references to each other. Even if everything is cleaned up properly, the borrow checker has no way to know that when the struct is created. Solving it requires unsafe at some point, usually through something like RefCell.
If speed is a concern, why did you all stick with Synapse (essentially single-threaded due to the GIL) over moving to Dendrite? As far as I can tell, Dendrite is, for all intents and purposes, abandoned.
Because we didn't have enough people or cash to do a good job of simultaneously writing two servers, and as Synapse had gone into production across *.gouv.fr and other critical deployments, we instead frantically backported Dendrite's main novelties to Synapse - adding instead worker processes to Synapse so it could easily scale beyond the GIL: https://matrix.org/blog/2020/11/03/how-we-fixed-synapse-s-sc...
The hope was always that we would then get back to Dendrite and be able to invest in it and migrate over, but the cash situation got worse in 2022 due to Matrix being more and more successful (causing the available $ in the industry to be flow to integrators rather than the upstream project), and instead we had to essentially park Dendrite dev in 2023 other than for critical fixes.
Meanwhile, to try to fix the $ situation, we added Rust workers to Synapse as "Synapse Pro" to give customers a reason to actually route money to us as the upstream project, and nowadays Element is actually on a more economically sustainable path. However, at this point the likelihood is that rather than progressing Dendrite we'll instead look to add more Rust to Synapse and fix its resource usage. That said, others are of course very welcome to continue progressing Dendrite forwards, and I personally find it super depressing that we failed to progress both servers at the same time.
Matrix team is doing a solid job of running - Keep it up and keep eating the Slack/Teams marketshare up with competitive features and pricing. Additional business considerations like HQ location costs, tax liabilities, and talent pool availability on paper also affect what you have to work with. London tax, talent, and labor pay versus Austin for example.
Also I got your name wrong last time - I apologize for that.
What’s the best way to fund development of this stuff? I’m aware of donating to the matrix.org foundation, but as far as I can tell none of that goes towards funding server and client implementations since those are Element instead of the foundation.
> the likelihood is that rather than progressing Dendrite we'll instead look to add more Rust to Synapse
I thought the goal of Dendrite was decentralization done right? Namely, the ability to run a homeserver from the very phone one is using the client on?
Dendrite did subsequently switch to powering the P2P Matrix work… which also got paused in 2023. We’re currently resurrecting it, but it’s not clear whether Dendrite will be the clientside server impl.
