gwern

20 ms·

331.
by gwern 1y ago
I enjoy reading obituaries, for a number of reasons. (Mostly in the NYT, but also, of course, the famous Economist obits.) But I rarely have ever gotten any creative ideas from them, and I do not recall hearing about anyone else doing so ei
332.
by gwern 1y ago
None. But then, that's still more than OP was able to adduce, as they provided no examples at all, neither groundbreaking nor creative. Which is my point: the bar of 'an anecdote' is so very low. You can provide a anecdote fo
333.
by gwern 1y ago
It might be doable soon, you're right. But there seems to be a substantial weakness in vision-language-models where they have a bad time with anything involving screenshots, tables, schematics, or visualizations, compared to real-world
334.
by gwern 1y ago
I'm not the one claiming anything specific about robotaxi economics. What has been asserted without evidence can be denied without evidence. And I can think of plenty of reasons that there could be kinks or large elasticity changes:
335.
by gwern 1y ago
The quality would not follow because Distill.pub publications take literally hundreds of man-hours for the Distill part. Highly skilled man-hours too, to make any of this work on the Web reliably. (Source: I once asked Olah basically the sa
336.
by gwern 1y ago
> Now, if the cost was 35% less per ride than it is today, how much bigger would the market be? 1.5×? It is certainly not much more. "Source?" "I made it up."
337.
by gwern 1y ago
There's lots of legitimate research related to creativity which could be discussed: the existence of the 'incubation effect' and sleep effects, the inefficacy of the popular forms of 'brainstorming' compared to the
338.
by gwern 1y ago
> It’s not just about learning new facts, of course — it’s about asking questions. Why was a British mystic in Mexico City? How did Spanish-language television evolve in the U.S.? What led someone to invent PLAX or build search tools for
339.
by gwern 1y ago
This always frustrates me about paper abstracts. Whether it's economics or AI, everyone seems to make a point of being as vague as possible, when it would sometimes take 1 tiny word to clarify it hugely . You'll see paper abstract
340.
by gwern 1y ago
Nope! The knowledge cutoff does not show lack of leakage. Even if you get a non-confabulated cutoff which was before anyone ever asked the strawberry question or any question like it (tokenization 'gotchas' go back to at least
341.
by gwern 1y ago
Probably not, as economic things like living standards or quality of life generally seem to be logarithmic and have diminishing returns, but why not make a list and show us?
342.
by gwern 1y ago
I guess I misremembered all those playdates I had as a kid in the 90s, where the other kids didn't live close enough to simply walk or bike to (which, as a '90s kid, I was still able to do, although American parents apparently sla
343.
by gwern 1y ago
I hadn't thought about mangoes but now that you mention it, it does feel like they showed up in the USA at some point since the 1990s. > - sugar free sodas I am not convinced this was actually a good thing. After all these decades o
344.
by gwern 1y ago
As an American, I do indeed have little idea what sorts of improvements people in the EU as a whole - much less any individual country - have had. I can guess at a few, since presumably a lot of my items transfer. (Pascalization for avocado
345.
by gwern 1y ago
> How many examples does OpenAI train on now that are just variants of counting the Rs in strawberry? Well, that's easy: zero. Because even a single training example would 'solved' it by memorizing the simple easy answer w
346.
by gwern 1y ago
Yeah, early 2000s lines up with what I can tell. There were a few translations like https://web.archive.org/web/20021207080806/http://www.berdya... which surfaced somewhere around 2001 or 2002, and they
347.
by gwern 1y ago
This also illustrates the bad research that goes into this sort of thing. There are no deep roots of 'TESCREAL' (which doesn't exist to begin with) in Russian Cosmism, because there are no roots of any of those ingredients se
348.
by gwern 1y ago
If you mean https://i0.wp.com/technologizer.com/home/wp-content/uploads/... It's definitely a weird image. The hands are oddly accurate, and the geometry in the background is also unusually straight
349.
by gwern 1y ago
Your link is already broken.
350.
by gwern 1y ago
I suppose if nothing else, you could encode Wang tiles ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_tile ) into knitting and then that's Turing-complete? Or would there be some better CA to encode?
351.
by gwern 1y ago
Yes, exponential smoothing in forecasting is another classic example of the robustness of simple models. You can throw all your fancy ARIMAs and Box-Cox transforms at a time-series, and much of the time, it is hard to distinguish from a sim
352.
by gwern 1y ago
> There are a few ways to look at this from the standpoint of information that is available to the decision-maker. One is that human knowledge is valuable for guiding developing the model, but once you have a statistical model, it’s a be
353.
by gwern 1y ago
Let me give you an example I just ran into now which illustrates why #1 is so pernicious. I was just linked, by an intelligent, educated, skeptical person who regularly uses AI generative tools, to an interesting report on the darknet marke
354.
by gwern 1y ago
> It doesn't make any difference and doesn't invalidate my critique. It appears to be a science communication book, so it could easily be a web page. Even if it was a LaTeXish PDF there were multiple ways to not making it a PDF
355.
by gwern 1y ago
> What I can't figure out is why you seem so confident that the OP didn't verify the LLM output and/or would have published anything written by the model, whether it was faulty or not (which again, in this case it wasn&#x2
356.
by gwern 2y ago
> Why choose a format that resembles a published article instead? ...It is in a format that resembles a published article because it is going to be a published article? "This is a preprint of a chapter that will appear in the book
357.
by gwern 2y ago
The special value doesn't stand out, though. All three examples I gave were what I thought skimming his comment before my brain caught up to his caveat about an empty third argument. The empty string looked like it was by far the mos
358.
by gwern 2y ago
Really? Your examples seem the opposite. I am left immediately thinking, "hm, is it failing on a '!', some sort of shell issue? Or is it truncating the string on '#', maybe? Or wait, there's a space in the thir
359.
by gwern 2y ago
> I don't know what the rest of your comment is talking about. Googling "Yirgacheffe" shows it's a real thing. The Safavid coffee/Qajar tea claims seem accurate as well. So you at least learned something from the
360.
by gwern 2y ago
What fancy things? There's not a single equation in the whole thing. (I don't think this is even using Computer Modern, is it? It looks like a considerably thicker serif, and some of the characters like the lower-case 'g&#x27

More ›