gjm11

14 ms·

121.
by gjm11 9mo ago
I'm not sure I agree. "GSM" is three syllables, versus four for "grammes per square metre". You can write it correctly using only characters everyone knows how to type quickly on their keyboard, versus either findin
122.
by gjm11 10mo ago
> no one actually wants to buy a tungsten cube Apparently some people do and don't even regret the purchase: https://thume.ca/2019/03/03/my-tungsten-cube/
123.
by gjm11 10mo ago
Those metrics are all aggregate ones. A group containing Bill Gates plus one destitute homeless person $1M in debt has great metrics of that sort. Total debt is a tiny fraction of total income. Income per person is huge, and doesn't
124.
by gjm11 10mo ago
Are you sure? I can't find any trace of any book by Richard Dawkins with a title much like that, and that doesn't seem like a very on-brand sort of cover pic for a book by him, and an image search for "Richard Dawkins book co
125.
by gjm11 10mo ago
I feel that my life has been improved by all three of these. I hadn't seen the "hysterical clickbait" one before you pointed it out, so thank you even though clearly that was the opposite of your intent.
126.
by gjm11 10mo ago
I am not 100% convinced by this. The matchup between their painting-based economic index (it's the first component from a PCA analysis, the data for each painting being a vector of pixel-counts for colours in each of 108 bins based on
127.
by gjm11 11mo ago
Right. But (1) no longer needing the skill of thinking seems not obviously a good thing, and (2) in scenarios where in fact there is no need for humans to think any more I would be seriously worried about doomy outcomes. (Maybe no longer
128.
by gjm11 11mo ago
For the avoidance of doubt, I was not claiming that AI is the worst thing ever. I too think that complaints about that are generally overblown. (Unless it turns out to kill us all or something of the kind, which feels to me like it's u
129.
by gjm11 11mo ago
As someone else said, we don't know for sure. But it's not like there aren't some at-least-kinda-plausible candidate harms. Here are a few off the top of my head. (By way of reminder, the question here is about the harms of L
130.
by gjm11 11mo ago
The "obvious" thing to try, which presumably some people are trying pretty hard right now[1], is to (1) use a mathematically-tuned LLM like this one to propose informal Next Things To Try, (2) use an LLM (possibly the same LLM) to
131.
by gjm11 11mo ago
I think it's fair to say that summing the series directly would be slow, even if it's not slow when you already happen to have summed the previous n-1 terms . Not least because for modestly-sized target sums the number of terms y
132.
by gjm11 11mo ago
Nah, look at their posting history. In the last hour they've posted a whole slew of comments with the same sort of tone and the same AI-ish stylistic quirks, all in quite surprisingly quick succession if the author is actually reading
133.
by gjm11 11mo ago
For that sort of task: no, Tao isn't all that much better than a "regular researcher" at relatively easy work. But the tougher the problems you set them at, the more advantage Tao will have. ... But mathematics gets very spec
134.
by gjm11 11mo ago
Could you name a specific person whose estimate of when we might get AGI has doubled twice since 2022? Or do you mean you found one person with a really short estimate in 2022, another person with a longer one in 2024, and another with a lo
135.
by gjm11 11mo ago
That description is obviously written by an AI. Has anyone actually checked whether it's an accurate description rather than just yet another LLM Making Stuff Up? (Also, I don't think there's anything very NSFW on the far e
136.
by gjm11 11mo ago
Fun fact: in the original radio-series version of HHGttG the name was "Paul Neil Milne Johnstone" and allegedly he was an actual person known to Douglas Adams, who was Not Amused at being used in this way, hence the name-change
137.
by gjm11 11mo ago
> Who is we? No, "you are he", not "who is we". :-)
138.
by gjm11 11mo ago
Note that at the time this was written the word "quaint" had both (1) roughly its modern meaning -- unusual and quirky, with side-orders of prettiness and (at the time) ingenuity, fastidiousness, and pride -- and also (2) a rather
139.
by gjm11 11mo ago
The Guardian attempts to stop you accessing its articles if you are using an ad-blocker and don't have a paid subscription. (They didn't always do this. I don't know whether they do it uniformly to everyone or whether e.g.
140.
by gjm11 11mo ago
I think companies always prioritized their own interests. A company can increase its profits (1) by improving their products and services, so that they'll get more customers or customers willing to pay more, or (2) by increasing how mu
141.
by gjm11 11mo ago
You're absolutely correct! The em-dash isn't just another character—it's the foundation of good writing style. Would you like me to show you some examples of how important em-dashes are for good writing? (Sorry.)
142.
by gjm11 1y ago
What looks like the relevant table has a summary line saying "geometric mean: 1.45x" so I think that in this case "45% slower" means "times are 1.45x as long". (I think I would generally use "x% slower&quo
143.
by gjm11 1y ago
It doesn't particularly matter, but it looks to me as if there are a couple of errors in the fragment of transcript provided by the author. It says "the regular exercise thereof" where the scan looks to me much more like &quo
144.
by gjm11 1y ago
"At the end of July, Amazon reported second quarter results which beat Wall Street expectations on several counts, including a 13% year over year increase in sales to $167.7bn (£125bn)." The stock-owning class is in a boom. The wo
145.
by gjm11 1y ago
> The text adds some pieces of information you wouldn't get from the images alone But this is exactly where being AI-written bothers me! I don't really mind the style (the LLMs have learned to write a particular way because 1.
146.
by gjm11 1y ago
The text claims "Always at least one exploding head" and the number of exploding heads in the 20 posters shown is zero. It lists a number of "favourites from the genre" not one of which is actually shown. The text, as yo
147.
by gjm11 1y ago
> although it isn't listed in the references. Third item under "Further reading". (Though maybe that was added between when you wrote the above and now.)
148.
by gjm11 1y ago
I think there's some correlation but no, you can be amazingly strong at chess and not super-intelligent by other measures, or be incredibly good at physics or philosophy or poetry or whatever and have no talent for chess. But, having w
149.
by gjm11 1y ago
The context is that rwaksmunski implied that people have been saying "AGI is 10 years away" for ages, and I was pointing out that the sort of people who say "AGI is X years away" have not in fact been setting X=10 unti
150.
by gjm11 1y ago
You say that as if people had been saying "10 years away" for ages, but I don't think that's true at all. There's some information about historical predictions at https://www.openphilanthropy.org/res

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