fergal_reid

10 ms·

1.
by fergal_reid 24d ago
I think you are misunderstanding my point. The technology to prevent plague was beyond the population at the time. "Just use basic hygiene" is useless to a population who has no understanding of what that means. It was a real viru
2.
by fergal_reid 24d ago
I am not a biology person, but, candidly, this is a bad article, because the author is generalizing from the properties of viruses that tend to arise naturally, and using this to argue about the properties of deliberately designed viruses.
3.
by fergal_reid 1mo ago
I have no specific context here, but in case it's not obvious, I think you have to read the exchange in the context of British, and I guess RAF, indirectness and understatement. I'm guessing the air marshal means "what the
4.
by fergal_reid 3mo ago
Yes - but this will be the year of Linux on the desktop.
5.
by fergal_reid 4mo ago
Well, you could conclude the world is now more dangerous for any kid let wander - even if fewer do, and even if the observed average risk to any kid is lower (given they are allowed wander a lot less). I don't want to be on the 'o
6.
by fergal_reid 7mo ago
My story of kids growing up in a post AI world: There's a gag in Star Trek 4 where Scotty goes back in time, and tries talk to a computer. The gag is funny because he is from the future where you talk to computers normally. When the co
7.
by fergal_reid 1y ago
I think the most direct answer is that at scale, inference can be batched, so that processing many queries together in a parallel batch is more efficient than interactively dedicating a single GPU per user (like your home setup). If you wan
8.
by fergal_reid 1y ago
Yes we're familiar with the terminology and framing of gofai. Fwiw I read (most of) the 3rd edition of Russell and Norvig in my undergrad days. However, the point we're trying to make here is at a higher level of abstraction. Basi
9.
by fergal_reid 1y ago
At Intercom we've also a lot of experience here. I disagree, basically. In our experience actual real world processes are not compactly defined, and don't have sharp edges. When you actually go to pull them out of a customer they
10.
by fergal_reid 1y ago
You are correct that variable results could be a symptom of a failure to generalise well beyond the training set. Such failure could happen if the models were overfit, or for other reasons. I don't think 'overfit', which is p
11.
by fergal_reid 1y ago
Strongly agree. This seems to be very hard for people to accept, per the other comments here. Until recently I was willing to accept an argument that perhaps LLMs had mostly learned the patterns; e.g. to maybe believe 'well there aren&
12.
by fergal_reid 2y ago
As an Irish person when I saw the article title, I was immediately sceptical. I personally believe most articles about the famine shy away from the horror of it, and also from a frank discussion. Going to give some subjective opinion here:
13.
Claude code can autonomously accomplish tricky tasks(twitter.com)
8 points by fergal_reid 2y ago|2 comments
14.
by fergal_reid 2y ago
Similar arguments to LeCun. People are going to keep saying this about autoregressive models, how small errors accumulate and can't be corrected, while we literally watch reasoning models say things like "oh that's not right,
15.
by fergal_reid 2y ago
I think the authors misunderstand what's actually going on. I think this is the crux: >They are vastly more powerful than what you get on an iPhone, but the principle is similar. This analogy is bad. It is true that the _training ob
16.
by fergal_reid 3y ago
Yes, in parameter space. However, TobyTheCamel's point is valid in that there are some parameter spaces where the MLE is going to be much less useful than others. Even without having to go to high dimensions, if you've got a poste
17.
by fergal_reid 3y ago
Right - I think this is what's at the heart of the original question. I know they asked with a continuous example, but I don't interpret their question as limited to continuous cases, and I think it's easier to address using
18.
by fergal_reid 3y ago
I think most of the replies, here and on stack exchange, are answering slightly the wrong question. It is fair to ask why the likelihoods are useful if they are so small, and it's not a good answer to talk about how they could be exp
19.
by fergal_reid 3y ago
> Lizzie was joking Well, obviously we shouldn't get too hung up on what a fictional character thought - but I stand by my recollection. Just googling it, and finding this page: https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/pr
20.
by fergal_reid 3y ago
The Austin novels made a lot more sense to me when I started to think of them as closer to tales of corporate Mergers & Acquisitions, rather than love stories. The rich familes then were like large corporations are now, and a marriage
21.
by fergal_reid 3y ago
There's a big gap between training an algorithm on a toy problem, vs building a useful product. Software engineers often are missing key skills. They can learn them, but won't automatically get them in their traditional training.
22.
by fergal_reid 3y ago
>The retrieval part is way more important. I don't agree with this - at Intercom we've put a lot of work into our Fin chatbot, which uses a RAG architecture, and we're still using GPT-4 for the generation part. GPT-4 is a
23.
by fergal_reid 3y ago
I used to play Total Annihilation online back when I was in secondary school in the late 90s We'd hang out on IRC, and people would host a game on their IP. Eventually I got into creating new units for the game. You had to animate them
24.
by fergal_reid 3y ago
>Today's AI models are missing the ability to reason abstractly, including asking and answering questions of "Why?" and "How?" This claim seems over general, because you can ask gpt-4 'Why' and 'Ho
25.
by fergal_reid 3y ago
Spend some time around a three year old. Human, human intelligence, language skills. Then try explain quicksort to them. Obvious waste of time. They wouldn't be much threat in a zero sum strategic interaction either.
26.
by fergal_reid 3y ago
LLMs like GPT-4 'natively' speak certain syntaxes very well - e.g. Python, JSON. I'd suggest you want to take advantage of that, if at all possible, rather than embark on training or fine tuning your own LLM. If you have a pa
27.
by fergal_reid 4y ago
I personally received a letter to: "Fergal Reid, Longford, Ireland", in the late 90s. Ireland had no postcodes at the time. I lived in a small village on the edge of a county called Longford; my name isn't that unique in Ire
28.
by fergal_reid 4y ago
Is this actually true, or BS? If true, can someone explain? My mental model is that vsync will lock the framerate to the same as the monitor refresh. So if monitor is 60hz, my games graphical update rate runs at 60fps. Let's say withou
29.
by fergal_reid 4y ago
Well, the stall he sets out is about 'generative models' generally: "In the future, what role will these generative models play in assisting a programmer or mathematician?" I think the fact that we've other generati
30.
by fergal_reid 4y ago
Huge respect for Norvig, but I think this is a shallow analysis. For example, I just took Norvig's 'backspacer alpha' function and asked ChatGPT about it. It gave me an ok English language description. It names the variables

More ›