521–530 of 800 posts
You know, I've been following a rule where if I open any article and there's meme pictures in it, I instantly close it and don't bother. I feel like this has been a pretty solid rule of thumb for weeding out stuff I shouldn't waste my time on.
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Yes, I should have been more clear there: they could catch up in volume but it will require a different mindset if they want to become a net exporter of such items.
To add a meta contribution to yours using anecdotes: US pipeline for metallurgical R&D broken (by financial/cultural incentives) This guy studied metallurgy in Carleton U, Canada, switched to CS, founded YC, emotionalized the decision https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39600555 Who knows, he might have become John Carmack's John Carmack, building rockets better than Carmack or Elon
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> Nobody knows how LLMs work. I'm sorry, come again?
nobody can how how something that is non-deterministic works - by its pure definition
Despite determinism, we still do not understand LLMs.
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We really need a rule in politics which bans you (if you're an elected representative) from stating anything about the beliefs of the electorate without reference to a poll of the population of adequate size and quality. Yes we'd have a lot of lawsuits about it, but it would hardly be a bad use of time to litigate whether a politicians statements about the electorate's beliefs are accurate.
The thing is... on both the cited occasions (Nixon in 1968, Morrison in 2019), the politicians claiming the average voter agreed with them actually won that election So, obviously their claims were at least partially true – because if they'd completely misjudged the average voter, they wouldn't have won
Really it just ought to be a thing that we identify as a thought-terminating cliche. No laws needed, let’s just not fall for a lazy trick. Whether or not it is true that lots of people agreed, that isn’t a good argument that they are right.
The case of Nixon really brings that out. The “Silent Majority” was used to refer to people who didn’t protest the Vietnam War. Of course, in retrospect the Vietnam War was pretty bad. Arguing that it was secretly popular should have not been accepted as a substitute for an argument that it was good.
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That’s much more true for Nixon in 1968 than Morrison in 2019 Because the US has a “hard” two party system - third party candidates have very little hope, especially at the national level; voting for a third party is indistinguishable from staying home, as far as the outcome goes, with some rather occasional exceptions But Australia is different - Australia has a “soft” two party system - two-and-a-half major parties…
And minor parties receive funding from the Australian Electoral Commission if they receive over certain percentage of votes. It was 5% last time I cared to be informed by may be different now, and they would receive $x for each vote, or what ever it is now.
Then you automatically get paid the first $12,791, and the rest of the funding is by reimbursement of substantiated election expenses.
This is per a candidate (lower house) or per a group (upper house). And this is just federal elections - state election funding is up to each state, but I believe the states have broadly similar funding systems.
https://www.aec.gov.au/parties_and_representatives/public_fu...
https://www.aec.gov.au/Parties_and_Representatives/public_fu...
Note the US also has public financing for presidential campaigns, which is available to minor parties once they get 5% or more of the vote. But in the 2024 election, Jill Stein (Green Party) came third on 0.56% of the popular vote. The only third party to ever qualify for general election public funding was the Reform Party due to Ross Perot getting 18.9% in the 1992 election and 8.4% in the 1996 election. There is also FEC funding for primary campaigns, and I believe that’s easier for third parties to access, but also less impactful.
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Which would also mean the accelerationists are potentially putting everyone at risk. I'd think a soft takeoff decades in the future would give us a much better chance of building the necessary safeguards and reorganizing society accordingly.
This is a soft takeoff We, the people actually building it, have been discussing it for decades I started reading Kurzweil in the early 90s If you’re not up to speed that’s your fault
A hard takeoff would be the tool bootstrapping itself into an autonomous self-improving ASI in a short amount of time.
And I read Kurzweil years ago too. He thought reverse engineering the human brain once the hardware was powerful enough would together give us the singularity in 2045. And the Turing Test would have been passed by 2029, but seems like LLMs have already accomplished this.
I read a book in undergrad written in 2004 that predicted 2032...so not too far off.
John Archibald Wheeler, known for popularizing the term "black hole", posited that observers are not merely passive witnesses but active participants in bringing the universe into existence through the act of observation.
Seems similar. Though this thought is likely applied at the quantum scale. And I hardly know math.
I see other quotes, so here is one from Contact:
David Drumlin: I know you must think this is all very unfair. Maybe that's an understatement. What you don't know is I agree. I wish the world was a place where fair was the bottom line, where the kind of idealism you showed at the hearing was rewarded, not taken advantage of. Unfortunately, we don't live in that world.
Ellie Arroway: Funny, I've always believed that the world is what we make of it.
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Because they encode statistical properties of the training corpus. You might not know why they work but plenty of people know why they work & understand the mechanics of approximating probability distributions w/ parametrized functions to sell it as a panacea for stupidity & the path to an automated & luxurious communist utopia.
No this is false. No one understands. Using big words doesn’t change the fact that you cannot explain for any given input output pair how the LLM arrived at the answer. Every single academic expert who knows what they are talking about can confirm that we do not understand LLMs. We understand atoms and we know the human brain is made 100 percent out of atoms.we may know how atoms interact and bond and how a neuron wo…
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Kind of, I mean you have to verify things experimentally but thought can go a very long way, no? And we're not talking about humans thinking about things, we're talking about an agent with internet access existing in a digital space, so what experiments it would do within that space are hard for us to imagine. Of course my post isn't meant to be taken seriously, it's more of a fun sci-fi idea. Also I'm implying not n…
> what experiments it would do within that space are hard for us to imagine The only thing you could do in a "digital space" (a.k.a. on a computer) is a simulation. Simulations are extremely useful and help significantly with designing and choosing experiments, but they cannot _replace_ real experiments. > Like, the time window from the discovery of fire to the discoveries of Quantum Mechanics but in a flash. And my…
Was this ironically written by AI? > The labor market isn't adjusting. It's snapping. > MMLU, tokens per dollar, release intervals. The actual capability and infrastructure metrics. All linear. No pole. No singularity signal.
I really hate that the first example has become a de facto tell for LLMs, because it's a perfectly fine rhetorical device.