tripletao

7 ms·

31.
by tripletao 9mo ago
> in the context of a civil law dispute The squatters are very frequently committing criminal fraud, by showing a fake lease to the police to portray themselves as legitimate tenants. Leases aren't recorded like deeds, and landlords
32.
by tripletao 9mo ago
Yeah. I think the additional trick is that squatters often have a fraudulent lease. That makes it owner vs. tenant, and the police have orders to err on the side of not facilitating an illegal eviction. The owner could attempt to owner-occu
33.
by tripletao 9mo ago
I spent some time looking for sources for the various "railroad investment as % of GDP" numbers floating around, and I don't think they're very good. The modern concept of GDP didn't even exist back then, so the den
34.
by tripletao 9mo ago
> Sure, Chomsky's work doesn't have practical applications. Most scientific work doesn't. > Has geology accomplished something considered difficult outside of geology? Ask an oilfield services company? A structural engi
35.
by tripletao 9mo ago
> So, essentially, you have decided not to engage with Chomsky’s work. That is a perfectly legitimate thing to do, but it does mean that you cannot make informed criticisms of it. Any criticism that I'd make of homeopathy would be u
36.
by tripletao 9mo ago
> It's very unlikely that Everett's key claims about Pirahã are true Everett achieved something unequivocally difficult--after twenty years of failed attempts by other missionaries, he was the first Westerner to learn Pirahã, l
37.
by tripletao 9mo ago
> Andrew Wiles has not produced any result evaluable by me or by almost anyone else. Fermat wrote the theorem in the margin long before Wiles was born. There is no question that many people tried and failed to prove it. There is no quest
38.
by tripletao 9mo ago
> LLMs make no prediction at all as to whether or not natural languages should have wh-islands: they’ll happily learn languages with or without such constraints. The human-designed architecture of an LLM makes no such prediction; but aft
39.
by tripletao 9mo ago
"What should or shouldn’t be a wh-island" is literally a statement of "what words might come after some other words"! An LLM encodes billions of such statements, just unfortunately in a quantity and form that makes them
40.
by tripletao 9mo ago
I could iterate with an LLM and Lean, and generate an unlimited amount of logic (or any other kind of math). This math would be correct, but it would almost surely be useless. For this reason, neither computer programs nor grad students are
41.
by tripletao 9mo ago
The generation of natural language is an aspect of human cognition, and I'm not aware of any better model for that than current statistical LLMs. The papers mapping between EEG/fMRI/etc. and LLM activations have been generall
42.
by tripletao 9mo ago
Unless and until neurologists find evidence of a universal grammar unit (or a biological Transformer, or whatever else) in the human connectome, I don't see how any of these models can be argued to be "causal" in the sense th
43.
by tripletao 9mo ago
I agree that his contributions to proto-computer-science were real and significant, though I think they're also overstated. Note the link to the Wikipedia page for BNF elsewhere in these comments. There's no evidence that Backus o
44.
by tripletao 9mo ago
Norvig's textbook surely appears on the bookshelf of researchers including those building current top LLMs. So it's odd to say that such an approach "may not even provide a good predictive model". As of today, it is unqu
45.
by tripletao 9mo ago
Shannon first proposed Markov processes to generate natural language in 1948. That's inadequate for the reasons discussed extensively in this essay, but it seems like a pretty significant hint that methods beyond simply counting n-gram
46.
by tripletao 9mo ago
I'm not sure what you mean? As the length of a sequence increases (from word to n-gram to sentence to paragraph to ...), the probability that it actually ever appeared (in any corpus, whether that's a training set on disk, or ever
47.
by tripletao 9mo ago
If Chomsky were known only as a mathematician and computer scientist, then my view of him would be favorable for the reasons you note. His formal grammars are good models for languages that machines can easily use, and that many humans can
48.
by tripletao 9mo ago
This essay frequently uses the word "insight", and its primary topic is whether an empirically fitted statistical model can provide that (with Norvig arguing for yes, in my opinion convincingly). How does that differ from your con
49.
by tripletao 9mo ago
Here's Chomsky quoted in the article, from 1969: > But it must be recognized that the notion of "probability of a sentence" is an entirely useless one, under any known interpretation of this term. He was impressively early
50.
by tripletao 9mo ago
The acute pain paper they cited (linked in other comment) said "low-quality evidence [...] for a small but significant reduction", which seems clear and correct to me. If these authors think that's too favorable, then the pap
51.
by tripletao 10mo ago
In this context, "does not support" means "the evidence is of low quality", not "the evidence says it probably doesn't work". Per the quotations in my other comment here, the paper and its references concl
52.
by tripletao 10mo ago
That's true, but I believe the authors' complaint here is efficacy rather than safety. (I also think they're using terms of art from evidence-based medicine to make a statement the general public is likely to misinterpret, pe
53.
by tripletao 10mo ago
Acute pain isn't discussed in detail in this paper, but here's a paper they cited: > Conclusions: There is low-quality evidence indicating that cannabinoids may be a safe alternative for a small but significant reduction in sub
54.
by tripletao 10mo ago
I'm not sure what the rest of the paragraph adds here? Nothing in that qualifies or contradicts the absolute that I quoted. Are you just saying that the statement was so generally inarticulate that any reasonable person should have ign
55.
by tripletao 10mo ago
Here's Biden in 2021: > You’re not going to — you’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations. https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/speeches-... Perhaps any statement in that context
56.
by tripletao 10mo ago
It's obviously almost all confounders, since COVID mortality is low now and choosing to obtain the vaccine correlates strongly with other medical and non-medical factors affecting all-cause mortality. The point is that no adverse effec
57.
by tripletao 10mo ago
This isn't an RCT and COVID mortality is no longer high, so the effect on all-cause mortality is almost entirely confounders. So that result just means people 18-29 who chose to get the COVID vaccine have other characteristics that res
58.
by tripletao 10mo ago
After yet more investigation, I think I found the questionnaire. Question 7 asks: > Between MMM DD – MMM DD, did this business use Artificial Intelligence (AI) in producing goods or services? (Examples of AI: machine learning, natural la
59.
by tripletao 10mo ago
After more investigation, I'm not sure what question was asked. I quoted that exact language from Apollo, and the Census Bureau uses very similar language in the spreadsheet with the aggregated responses, at https://www.cens
60.
by tripletao 10mo ago
The Census Bureau asks if firms are using AI "to help produce goods or services". I guess that's intended to exclude not-yet-productive investigations, and maybe also indirect uses--does LLM-powered OCR for the expense report

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