jerf

27 ms·

391.
by jerf 4mo ago
Time to learn about the Principal Agent Problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble... Which predates "agents" from AI, but then we call them that for a reason. As their prime direct
392.
by jerf 4mo ago
In addition to the other fine answers, I personally find the additional operations that quantum computers enable to be surprisingly inapplicable to a lot of real problems. It's really kind of unimpressive when you dig down into it. It
393.
by jerf 4mo ago
It's not too bad. By the time the rest of the band is also not sounding like a sick animal the trombones have figured it out too. I'm not sure if it's something about the brass tone being more forgiving, the volume of audio c
394.
by jerf 4mo ago
It is a characteristic of neural nets that they do not have insight into their own functioning. It is arguably a characteristic of any intelligent system, that at least some part of it must be opaque to itself, but the previous sentence is
395.
by jerf 4mo ago
I can't endorse it because I've never used it, but: https://zread.ai/clojerl/clojerl/12-clojure-to-erlang-code-g...
396.
by jerf 4mo ago
The economic tension of these "run by default" AIs is quite hilarious once you see it. On the one hand, the relevant KPIs of whoever is driving this product needs to be able to show AI usage is increasing, because AI usage is obvi
397.
by jerf 4mo ago
"You just put numbers aligned with the titles." That is not a fair summarization of their point because that is not the grammar. There's commas, slashes, asterisks, combinations, and then if you want randomization you need to
398.
by jerf 4mo ago
"He’ll do anything to move the goalposts and turn his failures into successes. There is no norm he won’t violate, no boundary he won’t cross." Unfortunately, if you really start digging in to what is going on in the financial worl
399.
by jerf 4mo ago
"Wait, we're getting an influx of new users, and they actively don't want us to run the most expensive part of our search results page?" Where can I find such accommodating customers myself?
400.
by jerf 4mo ago
Indeed, but justice requires that we recursively continue all the way to the base case, until all 32-bit integers are products of 16-bit integers, all 16-bit integers are products of 8-bit integers, all 8-bit integers are products of 4-bit
401.
by jerf 4mo ago
That's some primo-grade flamebait even by The Register's standards; wrapping a fairly common, perhaps mundane at this point, observation about how what answers the AI favors will affect what answers people tend to be given if AI u
402.
by jerf 4mo ago
I think it's mostly emergent. I can even point to a plausible mechanism, which is that if you think of an organization as a network of people and how they are connected together, you can think of "responsibility" as something
403.
by jerf 4mo ago
Thinking that teachers (or AIs) are always right is the anti-intellectual way to go through life. Between a teacher or an AI just going off of its training data is a close call; between a teacher and an AI doing a web search it's no co
404.
by jerf 4mo ago
I mean as opposed to the ones the search engines provide for "free". I've lost count of the number of times they've cited a link and it said the exact opposite of what they "summarized" it as saying. At this po
405.
by jerf 4mo ago
This seems like another case where the models are acting like humans. Assuming they were not allowed to search the web, I wouldn't expect the models to necessarily have detailed information about all of these things directly in their t
406.
by jerf 5mo ago
If you are taking AI output and interactively working with it to come to some particular solution, that process of working with it is the value you are adding. The "AI proxy" is specifically about the case where you send a questio
407.
by jerf 5mo ago
If "caring about arguments" is "color" then the concept is useless and who cares? If everything is a "color", nothing is. The color concept is interesting precisely because it isn't just "arguments
408.
by jerf 5mo ago
"Just as you can "eliminate" the result type by explicitly handling the success and error cases, you could, theoretically, "eliminate" the async function by blocking on it" You really can't. Shutting down
409.
by jerf 5mo ago
This is another one of those "is your 'conspiracy theory' filter miscalibrated?" questions. It doesn't take much research at all to find many concrete, documented instances of this, organizations that do it, organiz
410.
by jerf 5mo ago
If you're in a particularly fiesty mood you can lean into that. "If all you are is a proxy to an AI, exactly what value are you adding to the organization?" While most of us actually commenting are obviously firmly on the &qu
411.
by jerf 5mo ago
This is a subtle point that I've seen missed repeatedly, but: The reason that "color" is important is that if you have a function ten layers down in your stack that is the wrong "color", you now have to change tha
412.
by jerf 5mo ago
I have no problem with anyone just sending money if that's what they want to do; I have a number of Patreon supports also. I do strongly advocate for not letting subscriptions leak out without realizing it, and less strongly for consid
413.
by jerf 5mo ago
But the entire scheme here is to not have them continually. It's better to pay month+$2 in six months when you need it, than 6*month for the months you don't. If you rotate subscriptions sensibly, they're much cheaper than th
414.
by jerf 5mo ago
You know, sometimes corporate America forgets its own principles. You know, Mr. CEO, how you don't really much care why the system went down, you just want it fixed ASAP, no excuses, just get it done? You know what? We customers are th
415.
by jerf 5mo ago
I don't think that "fixes" the problem, but it does seem to help. I also have found adding "please feel free to ask questions" seems to help it stop from making an assumption and spinning merrily onward for tens o
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by jerf 5mo ago
Bummer. I'm sure someone could build a fantastic translator with our current AI stack but I can't argue with them that the return would not be worth it compared to training another general-purpose AI. But the general-purpose AIs i
417.
by jerf 5mo ago
And for what it's worth, in the great-great-grandparent of this post, I wrote them by hand too. I've certainly seen enough instances that I know it's pretty realistic.
418.
by jerf 5mo ago
"It's not like that" That's not the point. The point is that scale matters, and that was the only point.
419.
by jerf 5mo ago
The haiku observation is an interesting one: "Likewise, he discovered that the contrast of two seeming opposites was a common feature in haiku. Ginsberg used this technique in his poetry, putting together two starkly dissimilar images:
420.
by jerf 5mo ago
It can be "playful" once or twice, especially if the text is playing with how nonsensical the metaphor is. By the twentieth time something is as tired as a willow tree on a Tuesday in May, as persnickety as an ant with a fever, or

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