sdenton4

5 ms·

31.
by sdenton4 2mo ago
Five (maybe six?) of the results are improvements on bounds. These kinds of problems tend to have some initial advances, and then stall out as the complexity of the bound skyrockets... until some grad student is bored enough to push the bou
32.
by sdenton4 2mo ago
Some of them... The two places were seeing lots of movement are: * Updates to lower/upper bounds. In many cases, these kinds of problems are the deep-math equivalent of calculating more digits of pi. Yes, if you throw time at it you&#x
33.
by sdenton4 2mo ago
I got an obviously-AI voice agent spam call yesterday. Had a bit of fun getting it to answer trivia questions (when was the treaty of westphalia ratified? answer in a rhyming couplet) as a precondition to handing over the keys to my bank ac
34.
by sdenton4 2mo ago
I did some of the napkin math on algae a couple years ago... The fun realization is that the physical carbon has to go somewhere. So if we're trying to sequester the average american's 14 tons a year of carbon or whatever it is th
35.
by sdenton4 3mo ago
I doubt yoda speak is actually strict enough, but I do enjoy the idea that Yoda comes from a reverse Polish civilization.
36.
by sdenton4 3mo ago
... But are those CEOs ready to admit that those skills are needed?
37.
by sdenton4 3mo ago
"succeeding despite Elon musk" is, however, a skill set applicable at only a (strike)small number of companies (/strike) single company.
38.
by sdenton4 3mo ago
I dunno, ever used a thing you learned from a textbook in your job? Did you have to continue paying for the copy of that knowledge speed on your brain? No, because that's not what copyright is about. Learning from and building on previ
39.
by sdenton4 3mo ago
but.... the LLMs are actually all trained on approximately the same stuff, and tend to have similar quirks. In the human world, writers develop recognizable voices, which are detectable and classifiable (as in the article we have all suppos
40.
by sdenton4 3mo ago
The way the US military works, throwing rolls of toilet paper at the drone from the deck of the shop is likely more expensive than the drone said toilet paper is hurling towards.
41.
by sdenton4 3mo ago
Why is that? Companies still need employees, and ai makes it more obvious than ever that workers need to organize together for their rights.
42.
by sdenton4 3mo ago
Education research is hard hard hard. Getting clean studies, especially at large sample sizes, is extremely difficult, leading to a lot of ambiguity in results.
43.
by sdenton4 3mo ago
That sort of abstraction has always existed, it's just been a matter of hiring experts or labor from other humans. Reality still has a surprising amount of detail. You deal with it by engaging directly, delegating to someone else to en
44.
by sdenton4 4mo ago
Well, you said people can't use things they don't understand. But I'll take your expanded statement, to include riding a horse, something even older than the engine. We don't understand fully how a horse works -- biology
45.
by sdenton4 4mo ago
How many people drive cars without knowing how an engine works? Or make a phone call without knowing how voice compression for a cellular network does it's thing? Or eats food without knowing how it came together from the supply chain?
46.
by sdenton4 4mo ago
Yah - it's simultaneously the hardest and most vital part of machine learning work, and completely non-monetizable.
47.
by sdenton4 4mo ago
In discussions of super intelligence and ai takeoff and such, I find it helpful to ask why the smartest humans usually aren't heads of state...
48.
by sdenton4 4mo ago
kwargs exists, and is rather more pythonic. Just pass the kwargs dict to a standard formatting function, et voila.
49.
by sdenton4 4mo ago
I got a very different message from this, actually much closer to the problem of incumbent advantage. The known-good thing has been heavily optimized for performance, making it much harder for new technologies to prove that they are better.
50.
by sdenton4 4mo ago
Here's a recent nytimes article in a quote positive experience using ai in place of a realtor: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/28/technology/sell-house-wit...
51.
by sdenton4 4mo ago
It's the standard problem of devolving responsibility to individual action: the effect is so diffuse as to be negligible in all but the most extreme cases. In most cases, one wouldn't even be able to correlate change in sales with
52.
by sdenton4 4mo ago
Boycotts are the weakest form of protest.
53.
by sdenton4 4mo ago
Of course, you can use Option B to write the program, and then run it on your own machine...
54.
by sdenton4 4mo ago
LLMAO, surely.
55.
by sdenton4 4mo ago
And yet, there was no html5 newgrounds. The magic of flash was that it gave a space where a music person, an art person, and a programmer could bang something out. The barrier to entry was comically low, which allowed an absolute explosion
56.
by sdenton4 4mo ago
"Stakeholder" literally means someone with a stake in the outcome, which is to say, those who will be affected by the decision. That can include a whole range of people+entities, including citizens (as a group) and the companies t
57.
by sdenton4 4mo ago
Any binary classifier can have a FPR under 0.5% if you don't have any restriction on FNR...
58.
by sdenton4 4mo ago
Yeah, it's nice to overlay this with Graeber's Debt - there's cyclic chunks of history where no one has little bags of coins to buy the 10ft poles needed to explore the dungeon. (par example.) Sometimes because the monetary s
59.
by sdenton4 4mo ago
The thing is... Interactive updates happen, just in a different way than it does for animal brains. The system is updated with new training data more-or-less constantly. Suppose OpenAI (or whoever) collects a week's worth of conversati
60.
by sdenton4 4mo ago
Yeah, it's kind of mind boggling that Ted Chiang (of all people!) can't imagine intelligence without a body. and the whole thing just begs a lot of questions. Is a car a body? Does an AI situated in a car therefore get to have des

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