barrkel

18 ms·

331.
by barrkel 1y ago
This is not true. The primary thing is that they are a tax on attention and a threat to the user's sovereignty over their focus. The more relevant ads are, the worse they are. Relevant ads are more distracting and more likely to hija
332.
by barrkel 1y ago
Maybe you haven't seen the frontier and envisioned the possibilities?
333.
by barrkel 1y ago
That's not really true for laptops any more.
334.
by barrkel 1y ago
There is a decent labour savings to be had in code generation, but under strict guidance with examples. There's a more substantial savings to be had in research scenarios. The AI can read more and synthesize more, and faster, than I ca
335.
by barrkel 1y ago
What current models can automate is why they are exciting, and the attention the paper is getting because of how it cuts into this excitement. It follows logically that the attention is somewhat misplaced.
336.
by barrkel 1y ago
I don't think the first is true at all, unless you imagine some powerful oracle tools. I think the second is interesting for comparing models, but not interesting for determining the limits of what models can automate in practice. It&#
337.
by barrkel 1y ago
You need to read everything that Gary writes with the particular axe to grind he has in mind: neurosymbolic AI. That's his specialism, and he essentially has a chip in his shoulder about the attention probabilistic approaches like LLMs
338.
by barrkel 1y ago
Calculators may be conscious - I tend towards panpsychism myself - but because I tend towards panpsychism, I don't think arithmetic generates qualia, because the arithmetic is independent of the computing substrate. I don't part
339.
by barrkel 1y ago
Oh I know, I know. The problem comes from imbuing text with qualia. A printer that prints out text that says its in pain isn't actually in pain. If we buy panpsychism, the best we could aim for is destruction of the printer counts as p
340.
by barrkel 1y ago
Where do you decide when multiplying and adding numbers becomes painful, and when it doesn't? Is using calculators immoral? Chalk on a chalkboard? Because if you work on those long enough, you can do the same calculations that make the
341.
by barrkel 1y ago
The Tower of Hanoi problem is limited by context length rather than model intelligence - see https://x.com/scaling01/status/1931783050511126954
342.
by barrkel 1y ago
You joke, but for food and beverages, a stand in the supermarket giving the stuff away for free is a really common (and thus successful) tactic.
343.
by barrkel 1y ago
$1 in monetization doesn't mean $1 in subscription. It means advertising, affiliate links, traffic deals.
344.
by barrkel 1y ago
Oh contraire, I ask questions about recent things all the time, because the LLM will do a web search and read the web page - multiple pages - for me, and summarize it all. 4o will always do a web search for a pointedly current question, giv
345.
by barrkel 1y ago
Marcus's writing is from the perspective of someone who is situated in the branch of AI that didn't work out - symbolic systems - and has a bit of an axe to grind against LLMs. He's not always wrong, and sometimes useful as a
346.
by barrkel 1y ago
The usual reason for this kind of telemetry is to figure out which features users are using and which they aren't. That guides decisions about what to invest in, what can more or less safely deprecated, and can even help with promotion
347.
by barrkel 1y ago
I can say the performance of Windows Explorer lately, compared to how it was in Windows NT, does not impress me.
348.
by barrkel 1y ago
Do bagpipes explain the mystery of sand performing calculations and taking actions? Do they give you an intuition for connecting how CPUs and memory accesses and cache hierarchies work with high level code, in such a way that you can start
349.
by barrkel 1y ago
My experience with errors is that error handling policy should be delegated to the caller. Low level parts of the stack shouldn't be handling errors; they generally don't know what to do. A policy of handling errors usually ends u
350.
by barrkel 1y ago
When PG started out talking about three reasons you might not know something, I paused and thought what they might be aside from unimportance, to see how at lined up. I came up with difficulty, opportunity and motivation. If an idea is diff
351.
by barrkel 1y ago
It's an incredibly complex problem, when you take into account drivers, system extensions, shared library versoning and so on, and even harder to solve when you can't rely on the presence of an internet connection. Then, once you&
352.
by barrkel 1y ago
I think it's hard to draw conclusions from this level of data without being able to correlate with daily levels and degrees of social contact and intimacy, regional climate and weather, activity levels and exercise, and so on.
353.
by barrkel 1y ago
If you don't have an adaptive sync +variable refresh rate) monitor and everything set up to use it, and don't like screen tearing (you enable vsync wait), overrunning the frame budget (e.g 16ms for 60hz) can mean dropping down to
354.
by barrkel 1y ago
Your strident tone isn't doing your position any favours. You're a lot closer to everything in the Barbican than you are in Croydon or Enfield or Acton or Stratford. London is big. The City is close enough to the centre that it is
355.
by barrkel 1y ago
> The original idea of SO was building a knowledge repository, and that meant no duplication and pruning it endlessly This is not true as I recall. On Joel and Jeff's podcast, Joel in particular was in favour of having lots of var
356.
by barrkel 1y ago
Actually I think a big part of the problem in C++ is the low level of abstraction of the standard library. It isn't friction that might cause an image resizing library to be all-encompassing; it's the lack of an abstract Image cla
357.
by barrkel 1y ago
Comprehend, from com- ("together" or "with") and prehendere ("to seize" or "grasp"). To take a hold of. Can a calculator comprehend arithmetic? Can it take a hold of a number (in a register, for examp
358.
by barrkel 1y ago
I don't think you need consciousness to reason. I don't see why repeated application of rewrite rules to extrapolate logical conclusions from antecedents shouldn't be considered reasoning. LLMs are perfectly able to match and
359.
by barrkel 1y ago
One moment you say India wants peace, the next you question why India would make compromises that might lead to peace. You know how this looks from a position outside the conflict, right? Can you imagine a Paskistani perspective? Put yourse
360.
by barrkel 1y ago
Have you ever hired anyone for their expertise, so they tell you how to do things, and not the other way around? Or do you only hire people who aren't experts? I don't doubt you have a functioning business, but I also wouldn'

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