breuleux

9 ms·

61.
by breuleux 9mo ago
It is also a courtesy that free countries respect US copyright. I wouldn't be surprised if EU countries have already started ramping up corporate espionage and are making contingency plans to seize all data and assets on their territor
62.
by breuleux 9mo ago
I think so, yes. We rely a lot on eloquence and general knowledge as signals of competence, and LLMs beat most people at these. That's the "usually" -- I don't think good human bullshitters are more obvious than LLMs. Th
63.
by breuleux 9mo ago
What we observe is also consistent with the idea that when humans have no idea what they're talking about, it's usually more obvious than when LLMs have no idea what they're talking about. In which case the author is lulling
64.
by breuleux 10mo ago
But why do you think that? Energy use is a matter of availability, not purely of technological advancement. For sure, technological advancement can unlock better ways to produce it, but if people in the 50s somehow had an infinite source of
65.
by breuleux 10mo ago
I agree that people won't accept degrowth. This being said, I think that the alternatives are wishful thinking. Better efficiency is often counterproductive, as reducing the energy cost of something by, say, half, can lead to its use b
66.
by breuleux 10mo ago
Well, yeah, sort of. Why do you think the environmental situation is so dire? It's not exactly the first time we make this mistake.
67.
by breuleux 10mo ago
There is a relatively hard upper bound on streaming video, though. It can't grow past everyone watching video 24/7. Use of genAI doesn't have a clear upper bound and could increase the environmental impact of anything it is u
68.
by breuleux 10mo ago
As someone who does that a lot... I agree. Self-indulgent is the word. It just feels great when the implementation is a perfect fit for your brain, but sometimes that's just not a good use of your time. Sometimes, you strike gold, so t
69.
by breuleux 10mo ago
I think it ultimately comes down to whether you care more about the what, or more about the how. A lot of coders love the craft: making code that is elegant, terse, extensible, maintainable, efficient and/or provably correct, and so on
70.
by breuleux 10mo ago
In my case, it really depends what. I enjoy designing systems and domain-specific languages or writing libraries that work the way I think they should work. On the other hand, if e.g. I need a web interface to do something, the only way I c
71.
by breuleux 11mo ago
Eh, biking in the cold isn't really worse than walking in the cold. The snow is a bigger issue.
72.
by breuleux 1y ago
I am curious if there is a proof for the less obvious case, though. Could a function be greater than BB most of the time? What are the conditions, exactly?
73.
by breuleux 1y ago
But does "a computable function that grows faster than BB(N)" actually mean that f(N) is always greater than BB(N), or could it be taken to simply mean that f(N) > BB(N) for a proportion of N that trends towards 1? In other wor
74.
by breuleux 1y ago
If you are a highly accomplished, highly respected individual (like Linus Torvalds) telling someone 'that is just stupid' can be effective, because most people will instinctively trust that you have a good reason to say this and a
75.
by breuleux 1y ago
I don't think we can be confident that this is how it works. It may very well be that our level of intelligence has a hard limit to how many nines we can add, and AGI just pushes the limit further, but doesn't make it faster per s
76.
by breuleux 1y ago
Regarding "Alien Message", I don't find that story particularly convincing. I think it's muddled and contrived. The basic issue is that we have to deduce stuff about the world we live in, using resources from the world w
77.
by breuleux 1y ago
> If a being could fully comprehend the underlying rules of the universe, it might not need to perform physical experiments at all, it could simply simulate outcomes internally. It likely couldn't, though, that's the problem. A
78.
by breuleux 1y ago
The progression is much less clear when you don't view it anthropocentrically. For instance, we see an explosion in intelligible information: information that is formatted in human language or human-made formats. But this is concomit
79.
by breuleux 1y ago
> Looking at information systems as far back as the first coordination of differentiating cells to human civilization is one of exponential improvement. Under what metric? Most of the things you mention don't have numerical values t
80.
by breuleux 1y ago
> But a lot of technologies turn out to be S-shaped, not purely exponential, because there are limiting factors. I'd argue all of them. Any true exponential eventually gets to a point where no computer can even store its numerical v
81.
by breuleux 1y ago
We chose Python for Theano because Python was already the language of choice for our research lab. If it had been my choice, I would probably have picked Scheme (I was really into macros at that time) or Ruby (I think it's better desig
82.
by breuleux 1y ago
> we don't need to simulate physics faster than physics to make accurate-enough predictions to fly a plane No, but that's only a small part of what you need to model. It won't help you negotiate a plane-saturated airspace,
83.
by breuleux 1y ago
> Why does our intelligence only operate on simplified forms? Part of the issue with discussing this is that our understanding of complexity is subjective and adapted to our own capabilities. But the gist of it is that the difficulty of
84.
by breuleux 1y ago
Note that wheels, steam engines, jet planes, spaceships wouldn't survive on their own in nature. Compared to natural structures, they are very simple, very straightforward. And while biological organisms are adapted to survive or thriv
85.
by breuleux 1y ago
You're right, we probably have different ontologies. To me an intelligent system is a system which aims to realize a goal through modelling its environment and planning actions to bring about that intended state. That's more or le
86.
by breuleux 1y ago
> So it makes me wonder, is embodiment (advanced robotics) 1000x harder than LLMs from an information processing perspective? Essentially, yes, but I would go further in saying that embodiment is harder than intelligence in and of itself
87.
by breuleux 1y ago
You can care about your audience without needing any analytics. Usually, I would think that you personally know a few people who are in your intended audience. Just ask them. And if you can't get feedback from actual people on your wri
88.
by breuleux 1y ago
Interesting. It appears that not many systems have been designed to enable hot reload in a thorough way. Here's another fun complication: what if I have a decorator that performs a code transform on the source code of the decorated fun
89.
by breuleux 1y ago
Thanks for the tips, I'll try to look into these when I get some time! Didn't know you could modify the closure pointer. I'm not sure what you mean by "maintaining a set of old versions". It's possible I missed
90.
by breuleux 1y ago
Okay, but even in Lisp, I'm not sure that's a good way to go about it. What do you want to do when you manipulate code, generally? Oftentimes you seek to find all instances of a specific pattern and modify part of that pattern. So

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