nathan_compton

5 ms·

31.
by nathan_compton 3mo ago
People should never use non-hygienic macro systems anyway, but even if they are using a non-hygienic macro, they should always use proper hygiene. Its kind of dumb to make the whole system weirder just to avoid issues which should never hap
32.
by nathan_compton 3mo ago
I am a strong proponent of Lisp 1, primarily because the distinction between functions and other types of values is artificial. Functions have first class semantics in Lisp 1 and Lisp 2, but Lisp 2 makes you denote them differently but in a
33.
by nathan_compton 3mo ago
God, who the fuck are they even writing this slop for? Other machines? Neat. Maybe even deeply interesting. Absolutely garbage write up.
34.
by nathan_compton 3mo ago
Typically surveys are adjusted for sampling biases before reporting. That appears to be the case here. So there is usually some attempt to account for the biases in the sampled population. The impulse to ask "what population was sample
35.
by nathan_compton 3mo ago
I know there are different contexts, but a tensor is not a collection of numbers, in a mathematical sense. A vector is not a list of numbers. Such collections of numbers are representations of objects with very specific kinds of properties
36.
by nathan_compton 3mo ago
Run your agents in podman containers.
37.
by nathan_compton 3mo ago
Well, sure, but if you want to accept those things you have to revoke the idea that distances and times are observer independent quantities. Even physicists fail to understand this after years of studying relativity. It is very difficult to
38.
by nathan_compton 3mo ago
Which are still aggressively trained to reproduce the orthodoxy. They have to, to be viable products, since most people want to know what the orthodoxy is when they pose a question to an LLM and because not even experts can consistently agr
39.
by nathan_compton 3mo ago
Einstein's discoveries were based (to a large degree) on negating very specific parts of scientific orthodoxy and then taking the steps forward to carefully derive results with those rejections in place. LLMs are aggressively trained t
40.
by nathan_compton 3mo ago
Maybe its late enough to say maybe we don't need to be devoting half the worlds capital to building data centers.
41.
by nathan_compton 3mo ago
"Science advances one funeral at a time" Well, these AI are never going to die in any real sense, so expect them to make orthodoxy more sticky, not less.
42.
by nathan_compton 3mo ago
100k really isn't that much money in the grand scheme of things, especially because they will probably get caught anyway.
43.
by nathan_compton 3mo ago
I've got a PhD in Physics (undergraduate in Math, fair amount of self study) and I have to caution against taking what the AI's say seriously.
44.
by nathan_compton 3mo ago
This is definitely a why not both sort of situation. In fact, I think being dimwitted is often associated with being evil, since goodness is (often) just rational self-interest.
45.
by nathan_compton 3mo ago
Genuinely, from the bottom of my heart, thank you for writing without an AI.
46.
by nathan_compton 3mo ago
" A single document produces more then one embedding, depending on the complexity of the document it can produce hundreds or thousands of vectors." That typo up there is kind of endearing in the AI slop era.
47.
by nathan_compton 3mo ago
I think this is really the wrong framing. Science can't disprove religion. The question is whether it makes any sense to believe in the religion in the first place, given what observation and science say about the universe. Science can
48.
by nathan_compton 3mo ago
This book is really fascinating because it contains a surprising amount of Soviet ideology. The authors repeatedly state that mathematics is posterior to the material world, not prior to it. That is, mathematics is just the observation of r
49.
by nathan_compton 3mo ago
There are plenty of high intensity activities with low risk of injury. Rowing and swimming come to mind. I think the bigger problem is that, as far as I can tell, very few people have the appropriate personality type for high intensity exer
50.
by nathan_compton 3mo ago
Do you resent it when babies are born?
51.
by nathan_compton 3mo ago
Delegation does not have to be because of a lack of knowledge. In fact, it seems like if one delegates for this reason its probably a sign of trouble to come. We delegate because of lack of time. I guess its impossible for an executive to k
52.
by nathan_compton 3mo ago
I think this is a rosy estimate. The vast majority of what people do with these models is just the same old shit, I would be surprised if 1% of it were genuinely novel stuff worth folding back into the training data.
53.
by nathan_compton 4mo ago
I'm pretty sure I didn't provide an address or an id when I got my library card.
54.
by nathan_compton 4mo ago
Yes, it will show up on your bill as a cost drastically smaller than purchasing the equivalent amount of gas. If you put solar panels on your house you can get that cost even lower.
55.
by nathan_compton 4mo ago
One under-appreciated value of having an EV is that you don't have to buy gas. You literally do not have to buy gas. I cannot emphasize this enough: you do not buy gasoline for these cars. Not only that, but many places let you charge
56.
by nathan_compton 4mo ago
I think there is a difference here. Signal qua signal isn't dangerous. Its purely what one does with it that might constitute a criminal act. In particular, using signal is unlikely to cause problems accidentally. Driving a giant truck
57.
by nathan_compton 4mo ago
I've felt for a long time that laws should have an attached "intent" section and one function of the courts should be to invalidate laws which, after a period of being in place and some analysis, fail to achieve their stated
58.
by nathan_compton 4mo ago
"The uptick in rental delinquency isn’t new. It started six years ago , when the pandemic flung the city’s economy into chaos and plunged low-income New Yorkers into dire financial straits. But even as the city has rebounded, rent col
59.
by nathan_compton 4mo ago
Are the smartest researchers in the world out there saying there isn't a wall? I don't know of any people doing the actual R&D who frequently make outrageous claims.
60.
by nathan_compton 4mo ago
Synthesizing a bunch of stuff I've read here lately, it seems like if OpenAI and Claude have actually found product market fit (generating code) then the question of hallucination is going to get less attention in the future. If the re

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