singingfish

7 ms·

31.
by singingfish 2y ago
I've been following the whole thing low key since the 2nd wave of neural networks in the mid 90s - and made a very very minor contribution to the field which has applications these days back then too. My observation is that every wave
32.
by singingfish 2y ago
The extra boilerplate noise with excessive repetition doesn't help one little bit.
33.
by singingfish 2y ago
Aligning the computer's and the humans' thinking processes. Cognitive load is exceptionally important - one of the few uncontravenable facts in human psychology is that healthy human short term memory has a capacity of 5 items pl
34.
by singingfish 2y ago
I've had some C# code inflicted on me recently that follows the pile of garbage design pattern. Just some offshore guys fulfilling the poorly expressed spec with as little brain work as possible. The amount of almost-duplicate boiler
35.
by singingfish 2y ago
I thought it was more that python was basically perl with the fun bits removed. Or to put it another way: python helps you think more like the computer does. Perl helps the computer think more like you do.
36.
by singingfish 2y ago
I believe it was NSA not NASA - in his hubristic style larry wall described perl as being born from "a secret project in a secret laboratory". I'd say the biggest influence on my programming work is recognising how to use tha
37.
by singingfish 2y ago
I think the lack of discussion of perl is in part because from a bird's eye view, python and perl do exactly the same stuff in exactly the same way, but python has the mindshare. Because of perl's depth and flexibility, for the a
38.
by singingfish 2y ago
nah, it was created for their day job in order to provide reliable quick to write code under difficult conditions
39.
by singingfish 2y ago
Today's job is finishing up and testing some rather gnarly haproxy configuration. There's already a fairly high chance I'm going to stuff something up with it. There is no chance that I'm giving some other entity that c
40.
by singingfish 2y ago
I' a fully paid up member of the cult of Honk! festivals :D There's a few local bands. Most notably to my mind, we have a periodic jam band that appears with varying configurations at one of the beachside changing rooms around he
41.
by singingfish 2y ago
I have no aspirations to ever get paid gigs as a musician. To the point where if anyone ever does try to pay me, I'm not sure how I'd deal with it. But I play lots of gigs on the streets and similar. My favourite is the rehearsa
42.
by singingfish 2y ago
Speaking as a 50-something year old man whose mother finished her career in medicine and the very pointy end of politics, when I first heard this joke in the 1980s it stumped me and made me feel really stupid. But my 1970s kindergarten cla
43.
by singingfish 2y ago
> LLMs do none of that, they will take whatever you ask and give a reasonable-sounding output that might be anything between brilliant and nonsense. This is exactly why I’ve been objecting so much to the use of the term “hallucination” a
44.
by singingfish 2y ago
Characters from the hitch hikers guide to the galaxy. Currently I have arthur, eddie, zarquon, trillian, alice, hotblack and marvin This lab I was in used to use Scottish mountains. Some of which were visible from the lab window, sometime
45.
by singingfish 2y ago
Not that long ago I moved a 250kline codebase from oracle to postgres. Yes, SQL embedded in strings and so on. Towards the end of that process, chat GPT helped me with that, and it was pretty valuable for some kinds of problem. Still had
46.
by singingfish 2y ago
bottom of the article has a section "Does Notation Even Matter?"
47.
by singingfish 2y ago
And no mention of notched box plots which make a lot of the troublesome aspects go away?
48.
by singingfish 2y ago
+1 - recommend crunchy. I ran a substantial oracle to postgres project recently and crunchy were great.
49.
by singingfish 2y ago
The only advice on hearing aids is if you need them, get it diagnosed and intervened early. That way you get the cheapest and most reliable hearing aid that's going to work well for you. Otherwise the stuff you described in your commen
50.
by singingfish 2y ago
Too cold to hang washing out? Below freezing wet laundry starts to sublimate which when you hang it out.
51.
by singingfish 2y ago
I've been working on this as a way of better exposing organisational knowledge recently. A few things I've observed: * The prompt engineering side is a black art. * Generation is pretty amazing but less useful than it first seems
52.
by singingfish 2y ago
I'm going to put this here - The Crooked Fiddle Band - a Sydney folk band with major inspiration from Big Black and others had two albums produced by Albini - I couldn't think of a better match: https://crookedfiddleban
53.
by singingfish 2y ago
I'm not sure that's correct. Hallucination definitely implies some sort of connection to reality, confabulation does not, it implies some kind of hard to detect error in stitching memories together coherently
54.
by singingfish 2y ago
Fabrication implies making things up for the sake of it. Confabulation is similar but is defined by making things up due to some limitation in capacity.
55.
by singingfish 2y ago
would lead to hafabulation. Still not acceptable in my view - confabulation is clearly the correct term
56.
by singingfish 2y ago
That making things up based on memories of past things is entirely what confabulation is. Bullshitting in the large as it were. I've met quite a few clinical confabulators (people with Korsakov syndrome and the like) and I find the p
57.
by singingfish 2y ago
My view is that hallucination is something related to the interpretation of reality. It's not really directly mapping to memory at all. The mechanisms of confabulation entirely surround the gluing together of memories, and what are t
58.
by singingfish 2y ago
Please can you give an example of what might not be a memory error. Not that I think "memory error" is the right phrase either.
59.
by singingfish 2y ago
I'm really cross that the word "hallucination" has taken off to describe this as it's clearly in incorrect word. The correct word to describe it is "confabulation", which is clinically more accurate and a much
60.
by singingfish 3y ago
Interesting, thanks! On a similar but unrelated note, I think instead of MERGE INTOs, self-updating CTEs are a better bet for similar reasons.

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