vannevar

22 ms·

331.
by vannevar 3y ago
Essentially the author is saying that most people are honest most of the time. Maybe so, but truthfulness is only relevant in cases where there are stakes, and in those cases, there is much, much more dishonesty. Put another way, I'd s
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by vannevar 3y ago
I remember sketching out the idea for something like this when digital cameras came out in the 90s. I'm surprised it's taken this long for someone to do it, seems like it would've made more sense back when everyone had film c
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by vannevar 3y ago
More accurate to say "some" being critical, sure. But we're talking about it, so I think the juxtaposition is fair.
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by vannevar 3y ago
Right---it's like comparing ten-year-old Hemingway's writing to 40-year-old Hemingway's writing.
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by vannevar 3y ago
Not really. The point of the LLM exercise is to measure creativity. Upscaling is not a creative process, it's basically the opposite of creativity. The only reason to keep the prompt in the same vein as the original story is for the ju
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by vannevar 3y ago
Yes, it's a testament to how powerful these models have become in a such a short time that we've gone from being impressed that they can write a coherent paragraph to being critical that they can't win a professional writing
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by vannevar 3y ago
> ...I'm amazed by how healthy and prosperous the average European looks. Are you sure you're seeing the "average European?" Europe is a pretty big, diverse place. If you're spending most of your time in the weal
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by vannevar 3y ago
I don't think the point was that you should use logistic regression on MNIST. In lesser-known problems, say a custom in-house model, if you don't try the simpler approach first, you'll never know that your more complex soluti
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by vannevar 3y ago
Schwalbe looks good for puncture-resistant pneumatic tires, but if you want true puncture-proof bicycle tires, I've been super happy with my Tannus airless tires. They're slightly heavier than pneumatic, but even on my road bike I
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by vannevar 3y ago
The paper notes that further research is needed on whether there is any causative link, or merely correlation: "Further studies are warranted to determine whether these findings represent an actual effect of menopausal hormone therapy
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by vannevar 3y ago
IANL, but in some jurisdictions and circumstances I understand that threatening someone with criminal prosecution can itself constitute the crime of extortion or abuse of process.
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by vannevar 3y ago
>Model training, though, is an up-front cost, not dissimilar to the cost needed to buy those Sun servers and Cisco routers in the dot-com era... This is only partially true even now, and I expect it will be less true in the future as con
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by vannevar 3y ago
I don't think "jaded" is the right word---it's like saying homelessness is increasing because people are jaded with habitation. The problem with college is the same as the problem with housing: the cost has climbed much
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by vannevar 3y ago
Exactly. Glorification can be pretty significant. Humans are glorified apes.
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by vannevar 3y ago
Flown twice is still pre-existing---the vehicle had been in development years before the award. If your point is that the Falcon was pre-existing and it still took a long time to get to crewed flight, that's true. But note that the a
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by vannevar 3y ago
Far from being a counterexample, Falcon 9 is a great example of the adage's truth. It flew for 10 years before being used for human missions.
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by vannevar 3y ago
It's only "dollar-backed" if PayPal guarantees to convert the coin to dollars on demand. Anything short of that is marketing.
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by vannevar 3y ago
>The last one is the worst crime. Property Taxes are designed to keep poor people poor... Most places have a homestead exemption for this very reason. But you're right, it would make more sense to have a progressive property tax rat
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by vannevar 3y ago
Are those materials linked anywhere? The opinion pieces linked in the letter are not persuasive, it would be better to see the actual source materials before deciding to sign such a strong accusation.
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by vannevar 3y ago
I imagine the same reason most tech companies are started by people in their 40s-60s: because it takes that long to accumulate the experience, contact network, and wealth to start a company.
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by vannevar 3y ago
"For the nation as a whole, the labor force participation rate for women was 56.8 percent in 2022." From the US Bureau of Labor statistics ( https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2023/labor-force-participation
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by vannevar 3y ago
Yes, my first thought on reading the headlines was ,"Great---it's actually working!" It's worth noting that as of 2020, only 32.5% of full professors were women ( https://www.aaup.org/news/data-snapsh
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by vannevar 3y ago
Literally everything I've seen in the first two categories is complete garbage. You are assuming that you are aware of the origin of everything you read. I suppose that's possible, but unlikely. At this point the use of generati
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by vannevar 3y ago
>That's why LLMs aren't able to "solve" problems that don't have existing writeups somewhere (beyond certain problems more or less equivalent to combinatorial search). Neither can humans. We create by analogy; &q
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by vannevar 3y ago
Even if the statement were true, the data that these models are trained on is, collectively, smarter than the smartest person who ever lived. An individual person simply cannot absorb, in an 80-year-or-so lifetime, even a tiny fraction of
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by vannevar 3y ago
Yes, this is the point I was making about developers not getting much of a share of the increased profits from the productivity boost. That's been the story for workers (at least in the US) since the 70s.
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by vannevar 3y ago
>I propose a simple lens to settle this debate: look around you and count how many products or services you use regularly that you wish are better digitized or “software-ized.” Unless and until that number is 0, there will be more develo
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by vannevar 3y ago
Agreed, this is basically a case of someone getting fired and escorted from the building, something that happens all the time. If he has a case against the university, he'll get his day in court. He wasn't arrested, he wasn't
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by vannevar 3y ago
Sure, if you want to lease a car, lease a car. But the idea that I can buy a car but have to pay a subscription for heated seats is ridiculous. Not everything in our lives needs to be a subscription.
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by vannevar 3y ago
I'm asking for something that never existed---an EV that has the UX simplicity of ICE vehicles of the past.

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