mrob

3 ms·

31.
by mrob 16d ago
I believe consciousness is necessarily stateful. The LLM itself (ignoring implementation details that don't change the results) is a deterministic pure function. It's functionally equivalent to an enormous lookup table. If I accep
32.
by mrob 19d ago
Humans become irrelevant well before then.
33.
by mrob 19d ago
People seem incapable of understanding what "power" means outside of the framework of narrative. In narrative, you need conflict, so the aggressor always attacks too early and gives the defender a chance to respond. The rational o
34.
by mrob 19d ago
Calling a machine with no drives beyond maximizing a number a "slave" is far worse than saying it "thinks". The problem isn't the emotive language, it's that it implies human motivations such as self-preservati
35.
by mrob 19d ago
The existence of even one irrational actor turns it into a prisoner's dilemma. The payoff matrix in a prisoner's dilemma is defined by the value expected by each specific player. If a single player falsely evaluates the expected v
36.
by mrob 19d ago
Merzbow is not pop music, or arguably even music at all. >I threw all my past music career in the garbage. There was no longer any need for concepts like 'career' and 'skill'. I stopped playing music and went in searc
37.
by mrob 19d ago
>it's like listening to Bach through the car stereo Bach sounds great even as chiptunes. The artistic value is mostly in the harmonic development, not the timbre, so sound quality isn't so important. The organ works will suffer
38.
by mrob 19d ago
From the LICENSE file: https://gitlab.futo.org/keyboard/latinime/-/blob/master/LICE... >You may modify the software only for non-commercial purposes such as personal use for research, experiment,
39.
by mrob 19d ago
Yes, it makes more sense for the AI to use drone swarms or engineered bioweapons or something like that. It's rational to remove everything that can potentially hinder your plans but can't possible help you. It's likely not r
40.
by mrob 20d ago
As far as I know, no real progress has been made on alignment, only on convincing humans that the model is aligned. We can't even formally define what "aligned" means. Convincing humans to click the "aligned" button
41.
by mrob 20d ago
>the Wikipedia article on ColorChecker[2] has a listing of the exact colors in the ColorChecker That's only exact under CIE Illuminant C lighting, which approximates overcast outdoor lighting. Most indoor lighting has a lower color
42.
by mrob 20d ago
But Orwell's rule 4 should be ignored: >iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active. Orwell himself routinely ignores it, even in the first sentence of the essay: >Most people who bother with the matter at all would ad
43.
by mrob 21d ago
There was an obvious path that the environmentalists mostly opposed. A decade is plenty of time for massive scale buildout of nuclear power. If we'd started that a decade ago we'd be in a good position now.
44.
by mrob 22d ago
>the most likely outcomes are not AGI So long as it's non-neglible, it doesn't change the rational strategy. Uncertainty about whether ASI is achievable only reduces the magnitudes of the expected values of the payoffs, not the
45.
by mrob 22d ago
It's a simple prisoner's dilemma scenario. If you focus on safety, you're still exposed to all the risk of extinction when your competitor achieves ASI first, but you lose the upside of potentially becoming king of the world.
46.
by mrob 24d ago
As somebody who cycles as a primary form of transport, I prefer plastic. It weighs less, it's more compact, and it's waterproof (important when it's raining). If I had to use cotton that would incentivize using a car instead.
47.
by mrob 25d ago
How is simonw to blame for somebody else submitting it to HN?
48.
by mrob 25d ago
Reading causes insignificant wear ("read disturb") that likely isn't a problem, but I don't think it's possible to issue pure reads to modern SSDs. The NVMe spec mandates tracking the amount of data read, and this h
49.
by mrob 26d ago
There is no objective definition of "extremely long". Whatever value you choose will be incorrect for some readers. Therefore the correct place to set it is in the web browser's preferences (or the window manager if you prefe
50.
by mrob 26d ago
For photographic images, dithered PNGs have worse quality:size ratio than JPEGs. If you want small files and are willing to sacrifice quality you can turn the JPEG compression up or reduce the resolution.
51.
by mrob 26d ago
Middle mouse button is often mapped to "paste selection", which is dangerous to accidentally trigger. If the side buttons on a mouse are easy to trigger by accident it means they're positioned wrong. My mouse is shaped so tha
52.
by mrob 27d ago
Useful things to know, but how do they undo a designer wasting my screen space? If you're going to tell me to learn something, it should be CSS. At least Firefox can still be configured to follow its traditional role as "user agen
53.
by mrob 27d ago
>Floating point matrix calculations are non-deterministic. This is not inherent to floating-point math. That actual (true) claim in the article is that different hardware and different hardware configurations produce different results. B
54.
by mrob 27d ago
The bad text formatting in printed works (including the bizarre decision to sacrifice useful vertical position cues ("ragged right") to imitate the technique medieval scribes used to reassure their patrons they weren't wastin
55.
by mrob 27d ago
>What's wrong with the following CSS snippet The problem is you're imposing your own idiosyncratic preferences on strangers. Your "improvements" cost valuable screen space. I paid good money for my screen space and I
56.
by mrob 27d ago
>so that the "back" button is at the top left corner of the screen "Back" is used so frequently that I consider any mouse lacking a side button for "back" to be incomplete. You don't need to put a high
57.
by mrob 27d ago
The author uses LLMs for research but writes the articles by hand: "with LLMs, it's so much easier to look at data and figure things out, but the time it takes to write something up hasn't fundamentally changed"
58.
by mrob 27d ago
No. Designers shouldn't force their own preferences on third parties. Everybody likes different text presentation, so websites should stick to the defaults and let readers configure their browsers as they prefer.
59.
by mrob 28d ago
Everybody has some minimum text size they're comfortable with. If you make the text bigger than that, they're forced to scroll unnecessarily, which is less usable. But the size differs from person to person, so it should be config
60.
by mrob 1mo ago
>while I definitely believe that European hospitals and retirement homes sadly need ACs now (thanks global warming), I'm not sure everyone and their dog needs one. If a 10-day heat wave cuts work productivity by 10% (which is optimi

More ›