roadside_picnic

9 ms·

61.
by roadside_picnic 9mo ago
I've lived through multiple incredibly rapid changes in tech throughout my career, and the lesson always learned was there is a lot of wasted energy keeping up. Two big examples: - Period from early mvc JavaScript frontends (backbone
62.
by roadside_picnic 9mo ago
I feel similar, I'm not against the idea that maybe LLMs have gotten so much better... but I've been told this probably 10 times in the last few years working with AI daily. The funny part about rapidly changing industries is th
63.
by roadside_picnic 9mo ago
> I presume that making yourself valuable pays dividends, including promotions! This has not been my experience at all. I've had multiple positions where I took on multiple challenges and responsibilities outside my role, reshaped
64.
by roadside_picnic 9mo ago
To be fair, as someone who used to manage an X account for a very small startup as part of my role (glad that's no longer the case), for a long time (probably still the case) posting direct links would penalize your reach. So making a
65.
by roadside_picnic 9mo ago
> AI video isn't "enabling people to be more creative," it is quite literally removing creativity from the process all together. This is very much not the case with the Stable Diffusion/Wan/general open diffusi
66.
by roadside_picnic 10mo ago
You're thinking only about the final step where we're just doing a bunch of matrix computation. The real work Python does in the ML world is automatic differentiation . Python has multiple excellent options for this: JAX, Pytor
67.
by roadside_picnic 10mo ago
> If an LLM is typing that code - and it can maintain a test suite that shows everything works correctly - maybe we don't need that abstraction after all. I've had plenty of junior devs justify massive code bases of random scri
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by roadside_picnic 10mo ago
WSJ has been writing increasingly about "AI Psychosis" (here's their most recent piece [0]). I'm increasingly seeing that this is the real threat of AI. I've personally known people who have started to strain rela
69.
by roadside_picnic 10mo ago
I'm still confused by what you meant by "actual reasoning", which you didn't answer. I also fail to understand how building what you described would not help your understanding of multiplication, I think it would mean
70.
by roadside_picnic 10mo ago
What "actual reasoning" are you referring to? I believe you're making my point for me. Speculative decoding requires the implementer to understand: - How the initial prompt is processed by the LLM - How to retrieve all the pr
71.
by roadside_picnic 10mo ago
The most valuable tutorial will be translating from the paper itself. The more hand holding you have in the process, the less you'll be learning conceptually. The pure manipulation of matrices is rather boring and uninformative without
72.
by roadside_picnic 10mo ago
I personally don't think implementation is as enlightening as far as really understanding what the model is doing as this statement implies. I had done that many times, but it wasn't until reading about the relationship to kerne
73.
by roadside_picnic 10mo ago
It's just a re-invention of kernel smoothing. Cosma Shalizi has an excellent write up on this [0]. Once you recognize this it's a wonderful re-framing of what a transformer is doing under the hood: you're effectively learni
74.
by roadside_picnic 10mo ago
In my experience this is a substantial difference in the ability to really get performance in LLM related engineering work from people who really understand how LLMs work vs people who think it's a magic box. If your mental model of an
75.
by roadside_picnic 10mo ago
Most cynically? I sincerely believe there's more value he can extract from American workers if he can keep the ride going on just a bit longer. For example: it's better to keep the stock market a float a volatile so he can transfe
76.
by roadside_picnic 10mo ago
> I don't think the current US administration has any strategy I 100% believe the strategy is to enlarge the Trump family's wealth, and it's been a wildly successful strategy (in the past year he's been able to crea
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by roadside_picnic 10mo ago
AI's real super power is telling you what you want to hear (doubly true since RLHF became the standard). You can really see the limitations of LLMs when you look at how poorly they do at summarization. They most often just extract a fe
78.
by roadside_picnic 10mo ago
I very much agree, and believe using languages with powerful types systems could be a big step in this direction. Most people's first experience with Haskell is "wow this is hard to write a program in, but when I do get it to comp
79.
by roadside_picnic 10mo ago
> slight detours. If you're up in Neah Bay, WA (and I have been out there in the past so this isn't a fantasy scenario) and suddenly realize you need to charge, you need to drive over an hour and ten minutes to Forks, WA. But
80.
by roadside_picnic 10mo ago
Being within range of a charging station doesn't mean you can charge, it means you can get there. So yes, in a crisis, it means you could charge without risk of being stranded. But looking at most of the places I've been on that m
81.
by roadside_picnic 10mo ago
This is a great project btw! I've long been fascinated by the 易经 especially the different probability distributions associated with the different methods of generating the lines. It's been a while but I used to have an actual set
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by roadside_picnic 10mo ago
> One is that pickups are a weirdly-politicized lifestyle choice in the US Based on my personal experience traveling, there's a more practical reason for the political divide. I spend a good portion of my life in rural parts of the
83.
by roadside_picnic 10mo ago
The hexagrams can be modeled with only 6-bits, but this does not contains enough information for a proper reading of I Ching which also need to account for line changes. So there are really 4 lines: young yin, old yin, young yang, old yang.
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by roadside_picnic 10mo ago
In addition to all this, I also feel we have been getting so much progress so fast down the NN path that we haven't really had time to take a breath and understand what's going on. When you work closely with transformers for whi
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by roadside_picnic 10mo ago
Even before LLMs became big I started hording solid technical books, as there was so much mis information on Google/SO that any non-trivial technical question could not be answer without a high probability that the answer was fundamen
86.
by roadside_picnic 10mo ago
As an avid reader (and sometimes writer) of technical books, it's sad to see the, perhaps inevitable, decline of the space. I still remember in the early 2000s Barnes and Noble would still have massive shelf space devoted to every te
87.
by roadside_picnic 10mo ago
> Unfortunately, I cannot read technical books fast and definitely not fast enough to make the subscription be worth $500 per year. For me I find the $500 to be a pretty clear win as far as value goes. My shelves are already overflowin
88.
by roadside_picnic 10mo ago
> who are actually working with it only become more bullish I have a feeling the word "actually" is doing a lot of work with this. I shipped AI facing user products a few years ago, then worked in more research focused AI work
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by roadside_picnic 10mo ago
It's national defense! Imagine if China had more slop than us!
90.
by roadside_picnic 10mo ago
I know this is mostly paranoid thinking on my behalf, but it almost feels like this is a conscious effort to attempt to destroy "personal" computing. I've been a huge advocate for local, open, generative AI as the best resist

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