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The Eternal Sloptember

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Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#371

Post by nathan_compton »

bruce511 wrote: post #197
soperj wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny, but the more I know about the true Luddites, the more I see their point of view. " the original Luddites were primarily protesting against machinery used to "fraudulently and deceitfully" manufacture inferior goods, bypass labor standards, and strip skilled artisans of their livelihoods."

Goods are usually (although not always) inferior when made by a machine. A hand-crafted solid wood table is still superior to something from Ikea. Of course hand made tables are expensive. They service a sliver of the market. Ikea serves the rest of us who'd prefer not to eat off the floor. Fundamentally, Luddites didn't like being replaced by a machine. They were skilled workers, who used to have very desirable skil…

But there was also a lot of hard work to push legal reforms and protections to ensure quality and a good living for people displaced by or pressed into work by the new models. It isn't just an "adapt or die" situation on a personal level. Society itself must adapt to produce a healthy human condition.

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#373

Post by c0de517e »

Voultapher wrote: post #369
IdiotSavage wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point was to show that machines can produce knifes with precision. The other commenter stated that "CNC can't do the tolerances needed behind the apex.", whatever that means exactly.

Long story short, your point was that machines can do many things better than humans and I argue they can't even do kitchen knives better. How easily and well you cut through things depends on the thickness of the blade wedging them apart. Especially noticeable on denser food like carrots. The apex is the actual pointy part of the blade, and the thickness of the part after the apex and overall blade geometry dictate…

I'd wager that razor blades and scalpels and many other things sharper than kitchen knives are made by machines. Sometimes we don't automate fully expensive things because handmade is also a premium, not necessarily because if we were to dedicate engineering resources to the problem it would be impossible to automate. That said there are things that machines currently can't do despite good efforts to solve the problem. That's true

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#374

Post by swordsith »

swiftcoder wrote: post #336
swordsith wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice reusable libraries are still a core part of most AI projects, but honestly I think it's not a terrible approach with all the updating dependency malware issues with stuff like NPM.

> I think it's not a terrible approach with all the updating dependency malware issues with stuff like NPM I think in this instance, the only thing worse than a zero day in your dependency tree, is a zero day you don't know your LLM vendored directly into your codebase...

Personally I feel a vulnerability in local code (unshared ai slop) is much less likely to be exploited, than for say a npm package update that will pwn you as soon as it loads up.

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#375

Post by BoingBoomTschak »

Earw0rm wrote: post #283
BoingBoomTschak wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real problem is that today, you rarely can pay more to get better. If you pay 3x more for your appliances (TV, dishwasher, oven, etc...) you don't get something 3x more reliable/better engineered. Because that requires manufacturers ready to give up stealth corner cutting as the cornerstone of their earnings in favour of the hard and long task of developing an image of reliability. ------ Three cases I know enoug…

"If you pay 3x more for your appliances (TV, dishwasher, oven, etc...) you don't get something 3x more reliable/better engineered." You do at the bottom of unregulated markets. For dishwashers and ovens, safety regs generally impose a high floor on the market. There is no $40 oven, because it's physically impossible to make a safety-compliant oven for $40. If it weren't for market regulation, $40 death-trap ovens wou…

>ADAM Audio loudspeakers are pretty good or were last time I bought a pair. They're designed as studio monitors but great for listening too. Perhaps they've gone downhill since being bought by a listed company a few years ago?

The Focusrite buyout (unless there was another after it) seem to have improved quality and transparency (i.e. publicly available official measurements for their current range). Still, performance remains lacking for the asking price of the A/S models; the A7V has a massive port resonance near 650 Hz, for example.

Interesting post about an old Adam engineer reminiscing about A5X issues: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/a...

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#376

Post by noIdeaTheSecond »

hu3 wrote: post #68
bandrami wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're already hitting some logistical limits. Even if transformers don't have an inherent capability plateau, we only have so many GPUs and so much power to improve them, and we're finding it very difficult to expand that infrastructure. Something like 6 GW of new DCs have been announced over the past 2 years of which less than 1 GW has actually been turned on and started serving, and the deliverable dates for the re…

Sounds like we just need a Dyson sphere. Besides, I have been hearing "this is the limit" since the doomers of "this is just a markov chain and can't be useful". Yet the limits keep being broken.

Markov chains are very useful and imo so are LLMs, the issue I believe stems from calling it "inteligence" which creates some expectation which is often not met

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#377

Post by seanmcdirmid »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #364
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You wouldn't be surprised how often chinese learners say 一双裤子 (one pair of pants) rather than 一条裤子 (one long slender flowing pants).

All learners of Chinese, or just the ones whose native language is English? I figure the most natural mistake to make when counting pants is to use 件, since that's the measure word that applies to "clothes", but you'd have to already know at least some Chinese in order to make that mistake.

Ah, the ones coming from English of course. I don't have much experience in how Koreans or Russians learn Chinese (although I had plenty of non-English classmates when I took language lessons at PKU).

I'm thinking more Kouyu than writing. If I didn't think hard about it, I might say yi shuang kuzi or even, for some reason, yi jian kuzi.

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#378

Post by account42 »

ahartmetz wrote: post #370
IdiotSavage wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But can you show me a "top of the range" product? Not Ikea's top range, but "high end" in the common sense.

They don't have particularly high end products, which is not what I claimed anyway. But they have good quality for the price, which extends to medium prices.

You didn't claim it but the comment that spawned this chain did claim that Ikea sells "both ends of the range" which is simply not true. They do sell products made of real wood but they are still optimized for transport rather than quality.

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#379

Post by exallocatepool2 »

neerajsi wrote: post #107
vips7L wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don’t know what library to use in your specific language, do you think you know enough to have an LLM generate most of it?

I just joined a new team and have been using copilot with opus models. We have our core code in a weird dialect of C and rust. C I know well, but not rust. Our tests are in Python. The pipeline descriptions are in Yaml. Outside of the core code there are so many arcana to learn. Writing syntactically and semantically correct yaml/Python test code would be a nightmare. The Agents have flaws, but they provide a huge le…

What do you think about using AI when dealing with more complex matters (I'm thinking of Ke and friends)? Is it at least viable for testing purposes?

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#380

Post by cesarvarela »

albinn wrote: post #100

> It’s definitely a better Google for most searches I can't agree with this. You tend to get one point of view, often without any actual resources and references so you have to go look it up yourself, on [insert search engine]. Plus, what does it say when we consider an AI the one stop for our data intakes.

If you ask it to return only data with references, it will do so.
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