Viewing profile — whakim

I agree that there's plenty of footguns with async python, but I think the hype is a bit overblown. A few sensible defaults in the standard library would go a long way, e.g. requir…

> But as the environment of the organism gets more complex, reflexive avoidance behavior isn't sufficient for competence. For an agent in a complex environment, competent damage av…

> For example, phenomenal pain brings with it competence at protecting bodily integrity. The memory of pain becomes part of the explanatory narrative for the monitoring function th…

Sure. We can't prove that other organisms experience qualia; we can only look at the effects of qualia (e.g. behaviors that are likely to be the product of emotions) and assume tha…

> The recognition of oneself as situated in the world is crucial to coherent engagement with the world. It is how an entity can ensure its body parts are moving towards the same go…

Isn't Maturana's theory that consciousness has to do with language, and the use of language to make distinctions about ourselves and others? To me, this seems clearly insufficient …

What a wild take. The straightforward takeaway from the end of ZIRP and the resulting increase in focus would be that you need to say no to more things, not fewer? You have to real…

I don't think we should undersell that transformers and semantic search are really powerful information retrieval tools, and they are extremely potent for solving search problems. …

I'd argue the author missed a trick here by using a fancy embedding model without any re-ranking. One of the benefits of a re-ranker (or even a series of re-rankers!) is that you c…

For technical domains, stuffing the context full of related-and-irrelevant or possibly-conflicting information will lead to poor results. The examples of long-context retrieval lik…

There is no reason to believe that the foods humans have historically eaten are safer/healthier than "industrially processed/extracted/refined" food simply because we have historic…

Yes; you can phone it in post-tenure. But just because it is possible doesn't mean (in my experience) it is common; and I don't think it's helpful (as TFA claims) to equate this po…

Worth noting that the filtering implementation is quite restrictive if you want to avoid post-filtering: filters must be expressible as discrete smallints (ruling out continuous va…

> Most of the time you don't need a different Python version from the system one. Except for literally anytime you’re collaborating with anyone, ever? I can’t even begin to imagine…

I don't really understand the point around error handling. Sure, with structured outputs you need to be explicit about what errors you're handling and how you're handling them. But…

In my experience the semantic/lexical search problem is better understood as a precision/recall tradeoff. Lexical search (along with boolean operators, exact phrase matching, etc.)…

Doesn't this depend on your data to a large extent? In a very dense graph "far" results (in terms of the effort spent searching) that match the filters might actually be quite simi…

Thanks for the reply! This makes much more sense now. To preface, I think pgvector is incredibly awesome software, and I have to give huge kudos to the folks working on it. Super c…

> maintenance_work_mem begs to differ. HNSW indices are big . Let's suppose I have an HNSW index which fits in a few hundred gigabytes of memory, or perhaps a few terabytes. How do…

Interested to hear more about your experience here. At Halcyon, we have trillions of embeddings and found Postgres to be unsuitable at several orders of magnitude less than we curr…

Ok, but what was the cost of labor put into curation of the training dataset and performing the fine-tuning? Hasn’t the paper’s conclusion been repeatedly demonstrated - that it is…

No offense, but this software engineering elitism does no favors to perceptions of the field. In reality, most other fields are complex and the phenomenon of believing something is…

You enforce them; if I get a ticket for parking at an intersection, I won't do it again! (Also, in the specific context of this discussion, parking restrictions near intersections …

No, I don't; there are plenty of places you can't legally park that do not have painted curbs or "No Parking" signage. Do we also need curbs and signage near every fire hydrant? Ho…