AIPedant

25 ms·

181.
by AIPedant 1y ago
The problem is that Trump, Musk, Lindell, etc are all extremely arrogant and constantly disregard sound legal advice. Their lawyers aren't merely associated with a controversial client; their professional reputation is put at risk beca
182.
by AIPedant 1y ago
It doesn't matter if court was adjourned, she was still at work and performing her official duties. In particular she asked the ICE agents if they had a judicial warrant and was told no, it was administrative. A federal judicial wa
183.
by AIPedant 1y ago
The part that makes it not so clear cut is that this is really a constitutional issue rather than a criminal one. It is not credible that the judge was trying to ensure the man could keep living in the US undocumented. She was defending her
184.
by AIPedant 1y ago
The Cursor founders (technically the company is called Anysphere, Inc) are all young MIT grads. What they needed is a 40-year-old with a degree from Fitchburg State who could say "Woah, don't do that! It's not worth the long-
185.
by AIPedant 1y ago
I was outraged to learn that the test is basically a combination of multiple-choice and true-false. What a misleading pile of crap this study is! a) Doing well on multiple-choice tests does not really imply anything about doing well in a re
186.
by AIPedant 1y ago
This is a frustrating comment. I said "I was surprised to learn" because I had the same impression you did, but then I learned something new. It seems like you're just rejecting my conclusion out of hand without bothering t
187.
by AIPedant 1y ago
I hated Elon Musk long before it was cool: I was a fan of Tesla in the early days, and when I read Musk's "super-secret master plan" for Tesla I thought "yeesh, the board chairman is an idiot, where did they find this bo
188.
by AIPedant 1y ago
I nominally agree with this point - AGI is theoretically possible according to the Church-Turing thesis, we can “just” solve the Schrödinger for every atom in the human body. The more salient point is that when a model reads “dog” it associ
189.
by AIPedant 1y ago
> One of the biggest pons asinorums that people get hung up on is the idea that "it just imitates the data, therefore, it can never be better than the average datapoint (or at least, best datapoint); how could it possibly be better?
190.
by AIPedant 1y ago
In a squishy philosophical sense, I think LLMs are doomed to hallucination/confabulation because we’re making systems that use language and hoping they figure out the basics of communication. That certainly is not how it works in human
191.
by AIPedant 1y ago
In an abstract philosophical sense, who knows? But any real organism in the real universe has a finite limit on how long they can be quiescent, so it is fine to say that they're alive until they can no longer be revived, even if that t
192.
by AIPedant 1y ago
The "over 100,000 deaths" seems like a slight exaggeration, this paper bounds the estimate at 40,000-80,000: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-33627-9 Wikipedia's "Epidemiology of snakebite
193.
by AIPedant 1y ago
Agreed - to be clear I was saying it confabulated analyzing the visual details of the photo to back up its actual reasoning of reading the EXIF. I am not sure that “low‑slung pre‑Alpine ridge line, and the latitudinal light angle that match
194.
by AIPedant 1y ago
One vague possibility: hallucinations are mitigated by looking at uncertainty in token prediction, the idea being that it’s a proxy for factual uncertainty, and the system is more likely to confabulate a court case or whatever if it only ha
195.
by AIPedant 1y ago
I’ve also seen a few of those where it gets the answer right but uses reasoning based on confabulated details that weren’t actually in the photo (e.g. saying that a clue is that traffic drives on the left, but there is no traffic in the pho
196.
by AIPedant 1y ago
You would think that Cursor's leadership would be aware of other cases where LLM customer support went awry - e.g. that Canadian airline whose chatbot promised a bereavement discount, ending with a judge ordering them to honor the chat
197.
by AIPedant 1y ago
My eternally grumpy point is that if we are on the cusp of human-level AGI, then surely we can make frog-level and fish-level AI right now. But ANN-powered robots (or AI agents in physics-based video games) seem extremely slow and stupid co
198.
by AIPedant 1y ago
I think a very direct answer to this is pointing to the hot water Cursor found itself in after an AI customer support agent made stuff up. - Do you want an LLM salesbot to close a deal your company isn't actually able to fulfill? - Do
199.
by AIPedant 1y ago
The dataset is not “jazz,” it’s Ultimate Guitar’s tablature of jazz songs, so the data is very low quality.
200.
by AIPedant 1y ago
Margaret Sanger's creepy and scientifically repudiated motivations are not relevant to the discussion. It seems like you are playing a dishonest word game: "eugenics" is a set of ideologies and policies which specifically exc
201.
by AIPedant 1y ago
I don’t think “organic computer” is a good way to think of a brain. The fact that human brains + some scratch paper can implement any Turing-complete model of computation is very interesting. But that’s not true of chimpanzee brains or orca
202.
by AIPedant 1y ago
I would guess it's the opposite of "bad best-practices", namely that there are no common best practices. Everyone intuitively understands how black-box redaction works, but the ways inadequate redaction fails is a bit technic
203.
by AIPedant 1y ago
Now imagine if the odds of simple life becoming intelligent life that we could detect and could become spacefaring is 1 in 1 million. Why not assume the odds are 1 in 200 million, so that there's only one such planet in the who
204.
by AIPedant 1y ago
I think the point is that they still seem too rushed (perhaps reckless is a better term), since these are causing serious problems for planes in the area and generating very nasty pollution - what if debris hits an airliner? Nobody's s
205.
by AIPedant 1y ago
These compounds are easily produced in a lab or industrially (methanol + hydrogen sulfide + aluminum oxide as a catalyst). The only known natural source is photosynthesis, but the article mentions that vulcanism/etc is possible.
206.
by AIPedant 1y ago
A key limitation is that the early universe had virtually no heavy elements whatsoever, and it is far too fantastical to suppose there might have been life in the form of hydrogen-positron crystals or whatever. It took billions of years of
207.
by AIPedant 1y ago
Orcas could very well be smarter than us, but it is extremely unlikely they'll ever evolve hands to build tools - it would be a radical and crippling change in their skeleton with absolutely no evolutionary pressure to do so. Primates
208.
by AIPedant 1y ago
Yes, "Spotify Alternative" does seem to miss that Spotify / Apple Music+ / etc are legal and somewhat ethical ways to get access to a huge amount of music that would be expensive to purchase and a huge pain to torrent. E
209.
by AIPedant 1y ago
Technically that is the only natural source, it can be made industrially with hydrogen sulfide and methanol, both of which are very abundant in the interstellar medium and on gas giants (Neptune has large clouds of hydrogen sulfide). The
210.
by AIPedant 1y ago
I think it is AGI, seriously. Try asking it lots of questions, and then ask yourself: just how much smarter was I expecting AGI to be? That's his whole argument!!!! This is so frustrating coming from a public intellectual. &qu

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