gabriel666smith

7 ms·

31.
by gabriel666smith 3mo ago
The metadata matters in a different way. A single piece with a single composer can be interpreted very differently, over time, by different conductors and orchestras. This means classical music is very badly organised in most streaming apps
32.
by gabriel666smith 3mo ago
Lol, I'm personally too broke for a Spotify subscription - as in I couldn't sign up this month with the cash in my bank account - and that has often been true during the periods of my life I have not spent working in tech. I don&#
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by gabriel666smith 3mo ago
You're mostly correct - I was absolutely generalising, using internationally known examples (like the BBC), to be more comprehensible to the international audience here about cuts to public arts spending. The BBC was a silly example of
34.
by gabriel666smith 3mo ago
Yeah - I used "austerity" as a slightly sloppy shorthand in my comment. My two closest local libraries were closed due to cuts made during "the credit crunch" by the coalition government (from memory!), when "auster
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by gabriel666smith 3mo ago
I work as an author. I believe this is total bullshit, from beginning to end - the ruling, the settlement, and the suit itself. In the UK, we have a thing called the Public Lending Right [1]. This pays authors a fixed sum each time their bo
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by gabriel666smith 3mo ago
It is a shame. I think it’s especially a shame for children and young people. A counter to radio remaining relevant is “I can listen to whatever I want, via this digital technology”. Fine - but young people don’t yet have a complete mental
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by gabriel666smith 3mo ago
You can personally work out how apply this one in engineering today! If you have a spare hour or two, I'd encourage you to have a go at learning (however you learn best - I like just asking smarter people or robots stupid questions) wh
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by gabriel666smith 3mo ago
I don't think this is necessarily going to prove to be true. I often see the sentiment: "the Chinese strategy only makes sense in the context of undercutting American labs' profit margins". If, for example, you are a com
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by gabriel666smith 3mo ago
It's an interesting question, I think, because GGP is correct to say that geopolitical discussion dominates posts about work done by Chinese developers and organisations. That work is fascinating and innovative. On the one hand, those
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by gabriel666smith 3mo ago
I don't think you're taking the good-faith reading of the sentence's grammar here, which is: "[When China is mentioned] the comments section stops discussing [technical aspects], and instead starts going on about [non-te
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by gabriel666smith 3mo ago
Word. In terms of game level design, I think SSX Tricky’s Tokyo Megaplex is one of the most interesting, complex, simple, comprehensible, fun, beautiful, and downright cool pieces of work of all time. I can’t have played it in fifteen or
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by gabriel666smith 3mo ago
I think one of the beautiful things about America is its formation as a country contains so many nations, and in a way America’s cultural history is inseparable from those nations it contains (newly formed) extensions of. America is a young
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by gabriel666smith 3mo ago
It's a product that's so deeply dependent on lifestyle, and on physical needs. My fiancee is technically partially sighted (nystagmus from albinism) and I was surprised to learn when we started dating that the RNIB has 3% of the U
44.
by gabriel666smith 3mo ago
The creepypasta operates as such an interesting cultural object: Whilst having an original - often anonymous - author, a creepypasta is often built upon quickly and communally, making it strongly akin to a folk tale that develops at a previ
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by gabriel666smith 3mo ago
This looks nice - I think ‘small enough to be pocketable’ is an important form factor. Reading preferences are a very personal thing, and for people like me - who feel they internalize more effectively when reading from a physical book bett
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by gabriel666smith 3mo ago
When I'm doing it, it depends on whether the agent has ownership of an MD (or other) doc in the flow. If they do, this remains either in-context or greppable, each fresh-context turn. If not, my agent-level chains just look like: &#x27
47.
by gabriel666smith 3mo ago
For me: Kind of. I find agents will reveal information marked as "lore" (or similar) almost immediately once it's in-context. One thing I've tried when playing with longform fiction or screen stuff, where you have an exp
48.
by gabriel666smith 3mo ago
Uplift on "random dictionary words" (excluding 'stop words' & proper nouns) was ~20%; uplift on "random words from my local epub library" (same exclusion rules) was ~40%. The random words from my local epub
49.
by gabriel666smith 3mo ago
The whole thing was borne out of wanting to keep costs low! My favoured approach (last time I was doing this) is using only a tiny sliding context window based on message pairs, rather than tokens, and only for the agents that need it. Amen
50.
by gabriel666smith 3mo ago
This is also the best approach I've found thus far when I'm seeing how well LLMs can form narrative content. I don't frame its prompt as antagonistic though - I've found in the past (with weaker models, so YMMV) that thi
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by gabriel666smith 3mo ago
I'm with the pedants on this one, in that I'd argue the prologue is inseparable from the novel, and the first line would be either be: "(Supplied by a late consumptive usher..." or: "The pale Usher-threadbare in coa
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by gabriel666smith 3mo ago
I was taught to use the term "action sentence" for an opening line that actually does something to a reader, and to aspire to that. I think it's a Gordon Lish-coined term, but it might not be. Hard to pick an absolute favouri
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by gabriel666smith 3mo ago
There's definitely a tonne of signal in those, and it's a critique made from a place of strong support of your basic thesis. There's always been a tonne of signal in traditional customer support requests that goes un-used b
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by gabriel666smith 3mo ago
I built an in-house version of this a couple of years ago for where I was working. My concern would be that by excluding observability, you might end up creating a really selective dataset, whose conclusions you're then asking companie
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by gabriel666smith 3mo ago
Honestly maybe my favourite part of being an author is being able to get briefly and deeply obsessed with any topic I choose - it's a rare privilege. Beginning and then almost immediately dropping niche hobbies (eg flight simulators, p
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by gabriel666smith 7mo ago
Late replying - I don't think you should have been downvoted so much. You're right that I was using a comically simple example for comic effect (though I'm certain it is something that happens a lot), and also that LLMs are v
57.
by gabriel666smith 7mo ago
Inconsistent capitalisation ('Twitter' vs 'reddit'); subtly using the outdated name for 'Twitter' as most humans do; the genuinely hard-to-parse final clause of the comment. Though I note it didn't say &qu
58.
by gabriel666smith 7mo ago
Quite! It's very easy to send a HN link to one of our new artificial friends to see what they have to say about it. Subsequently publicly posting the inference variation you receive strikes me as very self-centered. Passing it off as y
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by gabriel666smith 9mo ago
I wonder if the adverts in the "personal super-assistant", per the blog post, ("that helps you do almost anything"!) will have the same triggers as the shopping assistant, which pops up underneath messages right now in t
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by gabriel666smith 9mo ago
This is fun! Given online is now bot-riddled, I half-finished something similar a while back, where the game was adopting and 'coaching' (a <500 character prompt was allowed every time the dealer chip passed, outside of play) a

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