gjm11

57 ms·

541.
by gjm11 3y ago
It's true that Moore's original claim was about number of transistors and not about any actual metric of performance. But "number of transistors" is like "number of lines of code": it's a cost , not a be
542.
by gjm11 3y ago
I'm in the reverse position: I have TSCM on my shelves but all I know of 99VoaP is what I can tell from Amazon's look-inside feature. My impression is the same as yours: the two books are very very different. TSCM is very much a b
543.
by gjm11 3y ago
Well, I thought I already described what seemed to me to be a charitable and reasonable take on it. "I put as much effort in as can reasonably be expected; I tried to evaluate it fairly; but the documentation and supporting code is so
544.
by gjm11 3y ago
I don't think it's "not in good faith" to say "I made a real substantial effort to understand this, and am trying to describe it accurately; if at this point my descriptions don't match the reality, it's n
545.
by gjm11 3y ago
I went into the dev tools, searched around a bit, put a breakpoint in a promising location in Walker.js, hit the breakpoint, and changed the value of walkSpeed to something larger than its default of 1. I don't know whether I've n
546.
by gjm11 3y ago
The construction works best with words of actual classical origin. When dealing with a supermarket delivery I do sometimes refer to the things that need to go into the fridge as the "refrigeranda". (There are some fairly ordinary
547.
by gjm11 3y ago
I would be extremely annoyed if the only way to get the computer's attention were to enter the Lord's Prayer (or any other text of similar length) :-). I might well express my annoyance using the word "ritual". But it
548.
by gjm11 3y ago
If "you mash these keys when your computer isn't doing what you want" counts as "symbolic significance" then so does anything you do for any reason. You turn this knob when you feel thirsty and want to drink water!
549.
by gjm11 3y ago
I don't agree with any part of that. Before I go into any detail about why, note that to whatever extent your argument here justifies called CAD a ritual, it likewise justifies calling writing the word "duck" a ritual. The wo
550.
by gjm11 3y ago
(chongli used CAD as an example of a ritual. now__what asked "is that really what ritual means?". You said yes. Of course you are not obliged to agree with chongli, but I thought that was what you were doing by saying yes.) I didn
551.
by gjm11 3y ago
The first linked paper defines a ritual as "(a) predefined sequences that are characterized by rigidity, formality and repetition that are (b) embedded in a larger system of symbolism and meaning, but (c) contain elements that lack dir
552.
by gjm11 4y ago
Nah, I think it's already been quuxed up.
553.
by gjm11 4y ago
The answer gives no evidence that the "x" is truly arbitrary and I am not inclined to believe it. "x" is one of the letters of "hexadecimal" and the letter-name sounds very much like "hex". Are we s
554.
by gjm11 4y ago
I think it means that the HN software auto-removes exclamation marks from titles, and in this case the original title began "No WIMPS!". (I don't know that the HN software does this. Maybe the submitter made a typo.)
555.
by gjm11 4y ago
I agree, it's doing spectacularly well. My point isn't "AI research is doing badly", it's "we should probably expect AI systems not to be perfectly effective optimizers of the things we try to build them to opt
556.
by gjm11 4y ago
I don't think the difference between "conscious being with a purpose" and "oblivious but powerful optimization process" is important here. (Maybe it is? A human engineer trying to design something that maximizes its
557.
by gjm11 4y ago
I, as a human (more generally, as a living thing), was purpose-built to maximize my inclusive genetic fitness. And yet, I have just the one child and no particular wish for more, and I do many things that in no way increase my expected numb
558.
by gjm11 4y ago
Well, then, congratulations on being smugly selfishly indifferent to everything other than your own convenience. But I don't understand why you expect anyone else to be interested in your lack of interest.
559.
by gjm11 4y ago
The key thing you need is that for n >= 3 the sequence of (n^1/n) is decreasing. You can get that pretty easily without logs. Look at two consecutive terms: n^(1/n) and (n+1)^[1/(n+1)]. The ratio of the first to the second
560.
by gjm11 4y ago
If that's meant seriously rather than as a joke: I think you're misunderstanding. They aren't saying "porn sites don't care about code quality", they're making a pun on the word "dirty".
561.
by gjm11 4y ago
The attribution there seems to be optimized for people who (1) recognize ANW as Alfred North Whitehead but (2) didn't already recognize the quotation as his. I suspect that's a pretty small set.
562.
by gjm11 4y ago
I don't think I buy any argument of the form "X is small, company Y is big, therefore company Y should not bother with X". I appreciate that you may not actually believe this, given your second and third paragraphs. But even
563.
by gjm11 4y ago
I agree that the article is somewhat about the idea that having a Standard Default p-value Threshold is unwise, but I think it's mostly suggesting that in its particular context it's generally better to use a larger p-value. &
564.
by gjm11 4y ago
I agree that you shouldn't look only at effect sizes any more than you should look only at p-values. (What I would actually prefer you to do, where you can figure out a good way to do it, is to compute a posterior probability distr
565.
by gjm11 4y ago
The article is all about why "0.05" might be a bad value to choose. But, more fundamentally, p is often the wrong thing to be looking at in the first place. 1. Effect sizes. Suppose you are a doctor or a patient and you are inte
566.
by gjm11 4y ago
I'm pretty sure you're right that today's LLMs don't have anything much like plans, goals, purposes, wants, etc., and that as you say "threatening you with harm for manipulating it is just a likely string of words w
567.
by gjm11 4y ago
I'm not expecting anyone to turn getfoobar into getf_oobar, no. But (1) there are cases where people might disagree about whether something is one word or two (do you want to bet no one has written "white_space" where you wro
568.
by gjm11 4y ago
An alternative design would be: when you bring in an external library, there's a mechanism to rename the symbols in it. The downside is that for each library you want to do this to, _once_ you have to spend a few minutes writing the re
569.
by gjm11 4y ago
I would in fact expect pastors to be more religious on average than their congregations[1], though not particularly more moral. And I would expect professional ethicists to be more interested in ethics than the population at large, though a
570.
by gjm11 4y ago
Thinking and pontificating about AI safety is literally his job, and Less Wrong is a thing he founded, so whatever else Yudkowsky pontificating about AI safety on Less Wrong might be, it isn't "popping up in the most random places

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