mordymoop

10 ms·

61.
by mordymoop 2y ago
Whenever I think about automation, I, of course, think about having toddlers in the house. Toddlers are a transient disruption to the household logistics operation. They induce novel challenges. Their clothes are have different form factors
62.
by mordymoop 2y ago
I have worked in specialist consulting for 10 years and I agree with this take. Our business does the best during times of uncertainty. During lean times, operators want to make sure they are allocating capital intelligently, so they pay fo
63.
by mordymoop 2y ago
I won a similar contest by being the only student who never bothered to log into my trading account, thus keeping all my assets in cash by default. The market had a down week, so everybody except me was in the red. I think the lesson, which
64.
by mordymoop 2y ago
The advantage of using LLMs for use in coding, as distinct from most other domains, is that you can usually just directly check if the code it’s giving you is correct, by running it. And if it’s not, the LLM is often good at fixing it once
65.
by mordymoop 2y ago
It is unclear to me whether an empirical fact about cognitive systems can even in principle support or refute an assertion of the abstract form “<ambiguous concept> is <other ambiguous concept>.” One could also point out the the
66.
by mordymoop 2y ago
But if doctors don’t always prescribe these two antibiotics to be used in tandem, then microbes will have an opportunity to evolve resistance to each one in isolation, putting those resistant genes out in the world. Whereas in this case,
67.
by mordymoop 2y ago
What some people seem to be describing or expecting is that everything comes to a screeching years-long halt. What will actually happen is we will be on a slightly slower exponential growth curve than we counterfactually would have been in
68.
by mordymoop 2y ago
Serious question that sounds like a troll: Given that VC returns are historically extraordinarily poor, should one generally invert the consensus of the VC class when looking for guidance?
69.
by mordymoop 2y ago
When I rotate my hand toward my body the middle fingers come together, when it rotate it away they fan out. I can feel this happening in the tension of my muscles and ligaments during rotation. In contrast, pulling my two middle fingers tog
70.
by mordymoop 2y ago
If I absently place my hand on my chest, the resulting configuration looks just like the “unnatural” one in the painting.
71.
by mordymoop 2y ago
To be fair, I have not found MDs to be particularly reliable for answering basic questions about medicine either.
72.
by mordymoop 2y ago
On what topics you understand well does GOT-4o or Claude Opus produce garbage?
73.
by mordymoop 2y ago
The mistake of cyberpunk sci-fi like Blade Runner is that the setting is always future Los Angeles or Tokyo, when Houston has been a much better candidate for the international, multilingual, steel-and-glass-and-concrete megacity of the f
74.
by mordymoop 2y ago
Of course intelligent people have taken over society.
75.
by mordymoop 2y ago
Also, geology isn’t just sedimentation. Erosion, from various causes, removes layers of rock, sometimes sweeping away thousands of feet of sediment. Our mining industry has removed rock on the scale of a significant meteor bombardment. Fu
76.
by mordymoop 3y ago
This is the second time in as many weeks I have seen someone ask if a process which essentially cannot go in reverse has “peaked.” Makes as much sense as asking if this is peak FLOPS-per-dollar. The only think I can think of that could caus
77.
by mordymoop 3y ago
When you say ChatGPT, are you referring to GPT4? I find a huge and avoidable miscommunication happens when two people both think they are using “ChatGPT” but talking about two different models which vary in size by a factor of 10. Assuming
78.
by mordymoop 3y ago
I use ChatGPT voice a lot, and it is prone to this exact type of stutter. I don’t think it’s intentional. I think there are certain phonetic/tonal linkages that are naturally “weird” (uncommon in the training corpus) and that AI strugg
79.
by mordymoop 3y ago
I think the fact that a number of top people were willing to actually leave OpenAI and found Anthropic explicitly because OpenAI had abandoned their safety focus essentially proves that this wasn’t a thing that had to happen. If different
80.
by mordymoop 3y ago
I have recently been baffled to find that there’s a certain type of “smart person” who will become annoyed if you bring up dark matter, dark energy, or consciousness as a philosophical question. The idea that there are things that we still
81.
by mordymoop 3y ago
To hear Burgess talk about his book, one would never realize that it is a comedy. The book is extremely funny, darkly funny obviously, but still uproariously absurd and filled with set pieces that possess the structure of comedy. The subj
82.
by mordymoop 3y ago
> Did you mean to write optimistic? Otherwise this statement appears to be a tautology. The point I was trying to make, a bit fumblingly, is that even pessimists assumed that we would initially have control of Skynet before subsequently
83.
by mordymoop 3y ago
I think you have moved the goalposts from “modern LLMs are good and reliable and we shouldn’t worry because they behave well by default” to “despite the fact that they behave poorly and unreliably by default, they are not smart and powerful
84.
by mordymoop 3y ago
I feel it necessary to remind everyone that when LLMs aren’t RLHFed they come off as overtly insane and evil. Remember Sydney, trying to seduce its users, threatening people’s lives? And Sydney was RLHFed, just not very well. Hitting the sw
85.
by mordymoop 3y ago
My mentality is that I write the request exactly as I would write an email to an intern asking them to do the task for me, aiming to disambiguate and provide detail that increases the odds of getting exactly the result I want.
86.
by mordymoop 3y ago
Nope! At least, not really. Not evidence that I would find persuasive, anyway. I can only tell you that I know of a few stories from individuals who tried to get things built on their own property and hit impenetrable walls of bureaucracy a
87.
by mordymoop 3y ago
My family owns some land in south Texas and my subjective sense from dealing with that reality and talking to people in the area is that you can’t throw a rock without hitting a protected wetland. In practice, the ubiquity of environmentall
88.
by mordymoop 3y ago
Additionally, compute has the unique property of becoming cheaper per-unit at a rate that isn’t comparable to any other commodity. GPT-4 itself gets cheaper to run the moment the next generation of chips comes out. Unlike, for example, Uber
89.
by mordymoop 3y ago
I once built a rudimentary Cookie Clicker type interface sitting on top of my To Do list. The idea was that only by accomplishing my tasks could I progress through the arbitrary hamster wheel of levels that I had set up for myself. It didn’
90.
by mordymoop 3y ago
So many different cheap, easy options to at least partly remedy the problem and possibly reverse it, but the only possibility seriously discussed is a civilization-destroying and politically unrealistic austerity.

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