Comment by gcr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gcr | Hacker News Reader

a cursory sniff test of the abstract reveals greater-than-trace presence of bullshit

I would trust this paper far more if it didn’t trip my “crank” radar so aggressively

Red flags from me:

- “Biologically-inspired,” claiming that this method works just like the brain and therefore should inherit the brain’s capabilities

- Calling their method “B. Dragon Hatchling” without explaining why, or what the B stands for, and not mentioning this again past page 2

- Saying all activations are “sparse and positive”? I get why being sparse could be desirable, but why is all positive desirable?

These are stylistic critiques and not substantive. All of these things could be “stressed grad student under intense pressure to get a tech report out the door” syndrome. But a simpler explanation is that this paper just lacks insight

One of the authors here. I am genuinely thrilled to know someone would like to know what "B" stands for, knowing/expecting that "DH" stands for "Dragon Hatchling"!

A clarification is thus due. As indicated in the github repo: "BDH" stands for "Baby Dragon: Hatchling". Technically, "Hatchling" would perhaps be the version number.

For readers who find this discussion point interesting, I recommend considering for context: 1. The hardware naming patterns in the Hopper/Gracehopper architecture. 2. The attitude to acronyms taken in the CS Theory vs. Applied CS/AI community.

What about the fact that it has 45 pages with exactly one comparison with transformer architecture (Figure 7)? This is just a fluff piece for a company trying to raise funding.

> claiming that this method works just like the brain and therefore should inherit the brain’s capabilities

Your words, not the author's. They did not make this claim.

I suppose all positive saves you a bit per weight, sort of, and potentially some circuitry to deal with negative numbers.

Your quotes (“ and ”) and apastrophes (’) make me think this was written by AI as no sane human wouldn't use " or '

could just be non-english autocorrect or keyboard layout

pardon, i use those for literals/proper nouns. it's a "typing quirk," LLMs wouldn't output with that style

Some people draft stuff in different places, different devices, or whatever and then copy paste, just a heads up.

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