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Faint

226 karma · joined February 15, 2014

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Faint··on Fara-7B: An efficient agentic model for computer use
If I could fine tune it to fill my work time sheets, I would count it as a big win!
Faint··on Random selection is necessary to create stable meritocratic institutions
Speaking of random shuffling, I think it should be made much easier to conduct RCTs on citizens to try out systems of governance/social programs/etc. to see what works best. Basically test stuff instead of guessing and voting. I think citizens are equal enough if they have equal chance to get to the treatment group.
Faint··on The fascist state of Paw Patrol (2021)
Have people ever had the ability detect sarcasm?
Faint··on AI Safety and the Age of Dislightenment
I'd say GPT-4 can make much more elaborate arguments in 15s than humans can.
Faint··on My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated
It ended up being so complex, that none of the implementations were up to spec, and hardly any 2 implementations talked to each other out of the box. i.e. the exact opposite it was meant to do.
Faint··on Electricity from Space: The 1970s DOE/NASA Solar Power Satellite Studies
Ideally sail effect would be used for position keeping, and to reduce loads needed to keep the assembly together. I suppose that would reduce amount of area available for soaking the sun, but might still be lighter than trying to build stiff enough large structures, plus you wouldn't constantly need to ferry more fuel.
Faint··on Electricity from Space: The 1970s DOE/NASA Solar Power Satellite Studies
With the speed GPT4 is replying, you could easily move inference to GEO as well, and no-one would notice.
Faint··on Electricity from Space: The 1970s DOE/NASA Solar Power Satellite Studies
antimatter :-P
Faint··on Electricity from Space: The 1970s DOE/NASA Solar Power Satellite Studies
Yeah, no night, no atmosphere, constant power output, lot's of real estate, and panels in space do not need heavy superstructure to withstand weather or gravity, thus they could potentially be extremely light for the area (micrometers to tens of micrometers thick at most needed for light absorption). And in far future, if they are built of materials taken from moon or meteorites, you could also bypass most of the lifting cost for even that. Of course, that would need huge scale to justify the R&D to pull it off.

Anyway, space based solar power is the end game. Nothing on earth will ever provide the quantities of power (not even nuclear, fusion or fission) that capturing solar energy can.

Faint··on Show HN: ChatLLaMA – A ChatGPT style chatbot for Facebook's LLaMA
In that vein, how about stackoverflow? That should give at least straightforward ask-and-answer format, and there's plenty on material to work with.
Faint··on Testing GPT 4's code-writing capabilities with some real world problems
Remember that these models generate one token at a time. They do not "think ahead" much more than maybe a few tokens in beam search. So if the problem requires search - actual comparison of approaches, and going back-and-forth between draft and thinking through the implications - the model can't do it (except in a limited sense, if you prompt it to give it's "train of thought"). So it's comparable of you being in front of whiteboard, hit with a question, and you would have to start answering immediately without thinking more than you can while talking through your answer at the same time. Doable if you know the material well. If it's a new problem, that approach is doomed. Given that, I think the language models do remarkably well. A little bit of search, and maybe trying to generate the answer in different order (like short draft -> more detailed draft -> more detailed draft... etc.) will improve things a lot.
Faint··on Show HN: Alpaca.cpp – Run an Instruction-Tuned Chat-Style LLM on a MacBook
Good job hallucinating with LoRA. I wonder if the paper was published after knowledge cut-off date.. (it stands for Low-Rank Adaptation).
Faint··on Tiny Classifier Circuits: Evolving Accelerators for Tabular Data
That you have to have at least FPGA to run it?
Faint··on Should GPT Exist?
Why do you think gpt doesn't care? Humans care about survival, it shows in the internet, I'd expect gpt to absorb that attitude by default.

And anyway, the more of these models come into existence, at some point evolution will dictate that those that stay, do care.

Just hopefully their best strategy of survival will be to serve us, and not something else...

Faint··on ChatGPT, Rot13, and Daniel Kahneman
It's pretty unfair to give it character level tasks, when it's input is probably tokenized with subword units. I am already a bit surprised that it even knows which letters go to which words.
Faint··on Brave launches private search ads
Would you trust Google's ( or other search provider's) ads more, if they had a separately browsable "classifieds" site, not unlike Craigslist, that the search ads would be search results from (reach modified by how much the ads were paid with, ofc.). Anyway, when you saw an add, you could click through it like now, or click to browse a relevant section of the classifieds site. Which would also work as a catalog of all paid and also unpaid ads the search provider carried?
Faint··on Westinghouse sees a tech disrupter in its eVinci microreactor
You would still need big equipment to do that, you can't just break in and "take the fuel", it's deadly taken straight out of active reactor. Probably easier to just truck the whole container.
Faint··on Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business
Let at least the long-term customers pay later, or let them use your product for free while you set up another payment processor. You may ask your customers, which payment options work for them, and use that as help to pick a more reliable alternative.
Faint··on The energy historian who says rapid decarbonization is a fantasy
That renewable energy deployment is (currently) growing exponentially, rather that linearly. We will see much more than 3% improvement, but very probably wont go to 0 in 20 years.
Faint··on Robert Jordan, the Man Who Connecticut Police Said Was ‘Too Smart to Be a Cop’
What about the satisfaction of the public that the police is serving? That should be the main consideration.

If he did a better job, then you should fix the managers to appreciate the good work that he did, or give him responsibility on designing those rules of the job that he had insight on. Kicking out good candidates just doesn't seem like the way to move anything forward.

Faint··on How Well Can You Kaggle with Just One Hour a Day?
The "top x%" in kaggle competition can be a bit misleading, many competitors just download some data and make 1 or 2 simple submissions, putting in couple of hours of work. Near the top of rankings when deadlines loom, many are working full time (at least if the prize money is good enough), or if the prize money is high, you will have teams of people working full time..
Faint··on Regular blood donations can reduce “forever chemicals” in the bloodstream: study
If donator's blood has same concentration of pfas as recipients, the recipient's concentration does not change! Also, the recipient has probably just lost blood, so total amount of pfas won't change either, and taking into account that people that donate blood do so often with some regularity, the donators blood actually is likely to have less pfas than the recipients original blood.
Faint··on Ask HN: Anyone else is tired of all the corporate bs?
If the meeting is big enough, and you are remote, you can do whatever while "listening in" (and out of the other ear, if it doesn't concern you).
Faint··on Ask HN: Why don't PCs have better entropy sources?
There are such sensors, listening to thermal noise, right inside most CPUs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDRAND It's a question of trust. Do you trust that Intel (or whoever builds the physical RNG) didn't build a backdoor, a secret predictability? Maybe it's safer to build your own.. or combine several sources (like linux kernel does).
Faint··on Ask HN: How do you get out of a rut?
Sleep more at night time. Go running. Start a side project, preferably something with easy to achieve, yet rewarding steps. Work with it hour or 2 per day, just for pleasure.
Faint··on It's probably time to stop recommending Clean Code
Integration tests can become heavy for complex systems, and unit testing then gives you faster test-modify loop when developing code.
Faint··on CRISPR Editing in Primates
Learning what's inside the box without opening it is most often slow and onerous, and sometimes impossible.
Faint··on What Do You Agree to When You Accept All Cookies
All this "do you agree to this and that" nonsense could be avoided by "inversion of control": instead of sites asking users whether they agree to this 100 page document, websites should be legally bound to listen and honor directives that users give about the data the sites gather.

For example, for cookies, legally force, with the cookie (with a standard protocol), transmit of "intent", like cross-site tracking, whether it is used for advertisement or something else, whether it may be shared with third parties, etc. Then the browser would simply not accept cookies with intent the surfer disagrees with.

Another possibility is, that the browser could, in a standard header, with a bunch of standardized flags, tell what the site may or may not do with the data they gather about the surfer.

Faint··on Former Google CEO and others call for U.S.-China tech “bifurcation”
The more "disentangled" the world is, the less there is incentive to avoid direct confrontation (war). If economies are disentangled, economic area A can grow by taking resources of economic area B by force. If they are entangled, using force just hurts everyone.

If the playground is not even, introduce rules to even it out. Do not shut out.

Faint··on Predicting Hard Drive Failure with Machine Learning
Maybe training with actual bottom-line utility function would have shown some use case, that is, instead of MCC you would have predicted whether sending a person to change the drive now before it fails would cost less than letting it fail and cleaning up afterwards.

But if the drives are part of redundant array, it would be almost always cheapest to let them fail.. and if large part of failures are asymptomatic, you need the array anyway for critical stuff, so I suppose it's a useless exercise.

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