nrfulton

6 ms·

1.
by nrfulton 2y ago
The cool thing is that you can sometimes "retcon" an existing system using this approach So in that case you're not even making any performance concessions; the actual running code isn't changing. You're just imposi
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by nrfulton 2y ago
Maybe I'm missing something here, but the last type matches 2 pretty well. For example, > None of that mattered at the scope we were modeling, so we abstracted it all away: "on receiving message, nondeterministically enter sta
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by nrfulton 2y ago
"nondeterminism as abstraction" is, imo, the best example of an "FM export". Usually you think of nondeterminism as adding complexity to a system -- concurrency, randomness, etc. So it's kind of surprising to noti
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by nrfulton 2y ago
My take-away from this story is almost the opposite of yours. Nature provides a lot of valuable resources, and this story is a beautiful example of how failing to properly steward our natural environment can be extremely expensive. > In
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by nrfulton 2y ago
The AG's advisory is essentially a memo from the AG explaining how the AG thinks existing statute applies to a new technology. It's not new legislation or new case law, but it is worth paying attention to for various reasons. The
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by nrfulton 2y ago
IBM | Hybrid in Cambridge, MA (Boston metro area) | Full Time | Research Engineer The MIT-IBM Watson AI lab is hiring a Research Engineer. Information on base salary ranges etc. can be found at the posting: https://ibmglobal.avat
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by nrfulton 2y ago
> Formally proving with a system based on probabilities (temperature, etc.) is for me an oxymoron. But I am not a mathematician. In the context of automated theorem proving, proof search and proof checking could not be more different.
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by nrfulton 2y ago
"There is a leisure class at both ends of the economic spectrum." But even setting that aside, the article goes on to mention Albania (low CoL) and access to healthcare. The latter, in particular, checks out. I have great insuranc
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by nrfulton 2y ago
This is an essay that lauds Cambridge, MA as a panoply of virtuous places with "limiting virtues" while at the same time decrying an "elitist" fascination with "anything goes". Lots of Cathedral energy in its a
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by nrfulton 3y ago
> This is just coming up with excuses for the MTurk workers No. The authors are not trying to study MTurk market dynamics. They are trying to compare humans and LLMs. Both questions are interesting and useful. This study is only asking
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by nrfulton 3y ago
> Unfortunately, it seems the authors threw out the only data that didn't support their hypothesis as GPT-4 did, in fact, outperform the median Mechanical Turk worker, particularly in terms of instruction following. MTurk, to firs
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by nrfulton 3y ago
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy This is a common counter-argument, and sounds reasonable on face, and is even true in the limit. But we're not anywhere close to the limit. Reminding the dear r
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by nrfulton 3y ago
No. The "effectively and efficiently" is important. It's not like you can't get the point across. It's just hard to do without lots of communication effort. (In particular: self-driving car companies are already hig
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by nrfulton 3y ago
For Hackers, the money quote, IMO, is the one about competing technical cultures within Software^1: > Koopman, who has a long career working on AV safety, faulted the data-driven culture of machine learning that leads tech companies to
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by nrfulton 3y ago
All of the hackerspaces I've been to in the past 15 years are still around: St. Louis: https://archreactor.org/ Pittsburgh: https://hackpgh.org/ Boston (albeit bummed they left their Somverville locati
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by nrfulton 3y ago
Oh no, nothing like that. One team said verification and validation techniques would prevent AI systems from failing catastrophically (must've done homework on their judge...) and then there was some back-and-forth that included one of
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by nrfulton 3y ago
> It's mind numbing and comes off as sophistry. It is mind numbing. IMO it's also a fair bit of sophistry, but it's at least sophistry that involves some amount of concept compression. Ie, you can't quite unpack tho
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by nrfulton 3y ago
I think your experience is atypical. In most circuits, the typical judge is a parent with no particular knowledge about debate and certainly not a tabroom.com paradigm.
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by nrfulton 3y ago
No, all of that is still true at most tournaments. The author's piece is a description of the national circuit, and perhaps of a very few regional circuits that heavily overlap with the national circuit. All of her statistics are for a
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by nrfulton 3y ago
This piece is not about the vast majority of high school debate and is probably going to create some real headaches for people just trying to run an after-school activity. All of the statistics in this piece are about the "Tournament o
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by nrfulton 3y ago
> But why are the organizers choosing judges who refuse to judge? Debate tournaments happen after school or on weekends. So you need about one adult volunteer for every two to four students. The adult needs to be willing to show up to
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by nrfulton 3y ago
In retrospect, I found the actual debate part of debate to be mostly a chore. But the research and learning parts were a lot of fun. Some things I learned about in high school because of debate: 1. A lot of stuff about the actual topics tha
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by nrfulton 3y ago
> It seems like there should be a place for both: one where diverse literature and meta-debate is both accepted and maybe even the point (e.g. make the premise actual critical to the Ks), and another where you are expected to argue for