elliotto

10 ms·

61.
by elliotto 1y ago
I think the nature of a conversational interface that responds to natural language questions is fundamentally different to the idea that you talk to yourself while reading information sources. I'm not sure it's useful to dismiss t
62.
by elliotto 1y ago
If Volkswagen goes under, the Lower Saxony government likely loses an income stream. If Intel goes under, Taiwan becomes the battleground for WW3.
63.
by elliotto 1y ago
Why would the damage have been done by then? What does that even mean?
64.
by elliotto 1y ago
One of the most important game theory results is that in a hostile environment, asshole behaviour is rewarded, and the net group utility sucks. But in a supportive environment, virtuous behaviour is rewarded, and group utility skyrockets.
65.
by elliotto 1y ago
OP has stated that the system design interview exists as a way to performatively answer a set of questions that don't relate to actually being a good system designer. In your response, you have claimed that their proposed truthful answ
66.
by elliotto 1y ago
I've made a lot of baiting internet comments in my time, but not in my wildest imagination did I expect a response to my comment mocking Palantir to be anti-women's suffrage.
67.
by elliotto 1y ago
I think you have conflated 'build something for society' with 'build a business' which is very hacker-news-core. My mind immediately went to building infrastructure and schools in rural Nepal, not building a b2b saas tha
68.
by elliotto 1y ago
I've found the opposite of this to be the case. I've spent some time recently debugging a chatbot - when it goes astray I say 'what part of your system prompt made you do that' and it responds with the line that drove th
69.
by elliotto 1y ago
I've thought about this problem a lot too. I've wondered if it comes down to a game theory result where if you have x amount of time to distribute amongst y problems, there's more net social utility in applying a simple solut
70.
by elliotto 1y ago
Yeah turns out leeching off the surveillance state makes heaps of money. Great business model
71.
by elliotto 1y ago
The author is a New yorker columnist, and seems to be a practicing / ex-practicing doctor. They talk about their experience with their various doctors and being passed around different medications with various side effects, to some deg
72.
by elliotto 1y ago
I'm interested in this perspective, I haven't come across much criticism of Wolfram but I haven't really looked for it much either. Is it because of his theory of everything ruliad stuff? I really enjoy his blog posts and his
73.
by elliotto 1y ago
This is one of the only comments here mentioning their drugs. These guys are juiced to the gills (on a combination of legal + prescription + illegal drugs) and doing weird shit because of it. The author even mentions the example of the poly
74.
by elliotto 1y ago
I'm not at all a rationalist or a defender, but big yud has an epistemology that takes the form of the rationalist sacred text mentioned in the article (the sequences). A lot of it is well thought out, and probably can't be discar
75.
by elliotto 1y ago
I find using an AI to understand complex philosophical topics one of my most unexpected use cases. Previously, I would get stuck scrolling through wikipedia full of incredibly opaque language, that assumes a background I don't have. Bu
76.
by elliotto 1y ago
I think you are understating how difficult this is to do. I suspect there are a handful of super-geniuses who can read the philosophical canon and understand it, without some formal guidance. Plato and Dostoevsky might be possible (Socrates
77.
by elliotto 1y ago
Couldn't you take this same line of reasoning and apply it to the rationalist group from the article who killed a bunch of people, and conclude that you shouldn't become a rationalist because you probably kill people?
78.
by elliotto 1y ago
My favourite instantiation of this weird invocation is from this AI video generator, where they literally subtract the prompt for 'low quality video' from the input, and it improves the quality. https://youtu.be/iv
79.
by elliotto 1y ago
I read what you wrote and let it stand on its own. Your comment mentioned a single time the bot had failed - there was no mention of it occurring multiple times. Maybe you should flesh out your anecdotes properly. If you are treating anonym
80.
by elliotto 1y ago
Does a chess engine know, think, or deduct?
81.
by elliotto 1y ago
You're responding to simonw, the guy who could be considered the single leading voice in practical applications of llms, with an anecdote about how one time the bot gave you a compiler error, and llm coding is therefore useless.
82.
by elliotto 1y ago
In my experience the api call is trivial compared to the time taken for the LLM to compose the response.
83.
by elliotto 1y ago
It depends on your use case and scale. If you have a million records of unstructured text (very common, maybe website scrapes of product descriptions, user reviews, etc) you want to be doing an embedding search on these to get the most rele
84.
by elliotto 1y ago
We OCR them with an LLM into markdown. Super expensive and slow but way more reliable than trying to decode insanely structured PDFs that users upload, which often include pages that are images of the text, or diagrams and figures that need
85.
by elliotto 1y ago
Ah I understand. My startup provides a vector search system as part of its offering. A user can upload a dataset of records and build a vector index on one of its columns and perform searches. It honestly works incredibly well on a whole bu
86.
by elliotto 1y ago
What do you mean by automatically curated content chunks? RAG with Embedding search is the process of deciding which chunks go into the context of the bot so that it can reference them to answer a user question
87.
by elliotto 1y ago
Wow the description of the gemini personality as Eeyore is on point. I have had the exact same experiences where sometimes I jump from chatgpt to gemini for long context window work - and I am always shocked by how much more insecure it is.
88.
by elliotto 1y ago
Later in life is not guaranteed. Later in life will involve health issues, family, work commitments, fatigue. If you can go now you should go while you can.
89.
by elliotto 1y ago
Ah I understand, you're exactly right I misinterpreted the notation of P(#). I was considering each model as assigning binary truth values to the propositions (e.g., physicalism might reject all but Postulate #1, while an anthropocentr
90.
by elliotto 1y ago
I think you've fallen into the trap of Descartes' Deus deceptor! Not only is #1 the only question from my list we can definitely answer yes to, but due to this demon this question is actually the only postulate of anything at all

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