Viewing profile — programjames

Yes, people can always claim that wasn't their intent, but what you see quite often nowadays is people openly saying their intent is to get people to take action. "I wouldn't perso…

The standard can be, "don't utter words with the intent of spurring others onto antisocial actions."

Where is the "tab" autocomplete?

I skimmed through the book, and it's lacking the information theory foundations. For example, "trust region methods" come from maximizing the policy's relative entropy (to a refere…

Standard Intelligence released one two years ago: https://si.inc/posts/hertz-dev/ It's only 8.5B and doesn't sound like it's quite conversational.

Didn't Standard Intelligence release a duplex model two years ago? Sounds disingenuous to market this as a new generation of voice models, when it is really OpenAI finally catching…

Logicians' training is so different from philosophers' that it should be considered a separate discipline, or under the branch of computer science.

The appearance of a logical argument is easier to achieve and often good enough for their purposes (publishing papers, winning lawsuits).

Optimizing for the metric involves: 1. Optimizing for generally applicable skills that the metric is trying to measure. 2. Optimizing adversarially to hill-climb the metric. You wa…

Nondeterminism is also a feature, not a bug. If you don't want people to optimize against your filtering process, you have to make it somewhat nondeterministic. For example, better…

1.0 is "natural units". If your energy corresponds to nats, you should be using temperature 1.0. If your energy corresponds to bits, you should be using temperature ln(2) ~= 0.7. T…

You should include the error correction code length in the description length. This means Newtonian mechanics was a much longer theory to describe Mercury's orbit than general rela…

That is very unlikely due to Solomonoff induction...

You should look into Solomonoff induction. Nature and physics, absolutely, tautologically, have to follow the "shortest explanation is more likely principle". https://en.wikipedia.…

They're likely talking about style transfer from a decade ago: https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.07004

My perspective is it is impossible to cut through the three layers of bullshit between you and anyone who knows what they are talking about. The only way to do this is with brand-n…

"A handful of years"? This is like the trend in K–12 education of blaming all issues on the COVID-19 pandemic. No, education was in a visible decline for five years before COVID, w…

If you click the website's name to the right of the title, it pulls up all the submissions from the same site: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com/philipl

My experience was pretty contrary to points (1) and (4). My best teachers/professors directly conveyed information or skills. I found most students did the bare minimum to pass the…

Your question is easily resolved by looking up how much American schools are funded, compared to historical funding, other countries' funding, and their relative successes.

People have more wildly different definitions for "fair" than "equity".

Not only is that implication rude, it's just not true. I am at least in the 95th percentile of amount of reading. I just think the article is poorly written. Not everyone is a good…

I clicked on the article to learn, "why Japanese companies do so many different things," and then got hit with pages of low-bitrate context, such that my eyes started glazing over …

The primary objective of the United States, at least according to their leaders, is suspiciously absent from their comment. If we're being charitable, it is clear they disagree wit…

So, to clarify, you were just trying to spread the meme that Iran giving up its HEU was equivalent or inferior to just holding to Obama's deal, in spite of your belief the commente…