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NeutralCrane

3,503 karma · joined July 18, 2019

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NeutralCrane··on Jev Can't Be Calibrated
One of the entire value props for Jev is that is exactly how it is supposed to work. That is one of the big claimed advantages over regular LLMs.
NeutralCrane··on EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'
It’s not shifting accountability. After WWII, France demanded that its colonial holdings, including French Indochina, be returned to it as a requirement for it joining NATO. The Vietnamese were not interested in returning to French colonial rule. This kicked off a decade-long war between the two that the French lost. The US had advisors to the southern Vietnamese during that time, and rather than fully pulling out, increased their presence as they tried to manage the void left by the French. This spiraled into the Vietnam War.

The US is on the hook for its decisions. But Europe doesn’t get off the hook for its own.

NeutralCrane··on OpenAI is well positioned to fast-follow Jev
I think the point of Jev is to thread the needle of the gap between non-LLM classifiers and LLMs.

Classifiers like classical NNs require:

- annotated data, potentially a lot of it - training - inference

#2 and #3 aren’t a big deal if you have an ML engineer, but #1 will always be a potential headache no matter who you are. The tradeoff is that they could be quite fast, cheap, and you can get probabilities, not just classes.

With LLMs you get:

- zero shot classification (no dataset or training required) - potentially can use third party model providers like OpenAI off the shelf. Don’t even need to host your own model.

The downside to LLMs is that they are comparatively slow and expensive to traditional classifiers. Historically they also were prone to hallucination or malformed responses, though not as much these days. You also can technically get log-probs back, but these aren’t equivalent to the classifier probabilities.

Jev gets you the zero-shot, zero-infra benefits of LLMs, while being closer to the speed and cost of traditional ML classifiers, as well as both classification and probability responses.

NeutralCrane··on 9 Ads per Minute: FIFA Cup 26 – "the price of the beautiful game"
Absolutely not.

Early in my career I worked for a pharmaceutical giant as a statistician. One of the things we would work on was trying to determine how much the various advertising efforts the company did actually moved the needle. Every year was the same miserable experience. The company would spend millions and millions of dollars in various advertising channels. We would attempt to determine how effective it was, but the wayin which they advertised and the way we collected data made it very difficult to generate any kind of insight at all. We would make recommendations as to how to adjust execution moving forward to ensure we could reliably determine how much value we were getting out of these campaigns, all of which would be ignored. They would massage our findings to tell whatever story they needed and would do the same thing the next year.

The marketing division is its own organization, with their own incentives that don’t necessarily align with the broader company’s incentives. They also were heavily addicted to relying on external analytical consultants who could pump out all the slide decks and pie charts they wanted, which would inevitably show that the marketing was not only effective, but should be invested in more the following year.

NeutralCrane··on Japan's book scene is moving from bookstores to libraries
The most interesting thing in the article to me is that there was a dual library/bookstore, and that it’s privately owned. I don’t think I’ve encountered a library that wasn’t publicly owned in the US.
NeutralCrane··on EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'
Since the wars in Iraq, sure. Vietnam was the US inheriting Europe’s mess.
NeutralCrane··on EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'
I think this is speaking from the perspective of nations/governments rather than individual citizens.

For what it’s worth, as an American, I agree with them. The USA is proving to be unreliable, if not outright malicious, to our long term allies.

NeutralCrane··on Mark Zuckerberg: "Cambridge Analytica" (2017)
An equally cynical but opposite take is that data is what you turn to when you want to dispel with the mythology, hand-waving, and general bullshit that self-described “creatives” wrap themselves in in order to avoid admitting that they may not actually understand why something works or doesn’t work (and by extension, that their success may be dumb luck rather than talent).

I don’t think truth aligns with either extreme. Both are approaches that have their place. But if it was an “uncreative” with no ideas that simply took the time to look and discovered that the three point shot was absurdly more efficient than basically any other shot in basketball, what does that say about all the “creative” coaching geniuses who failed to discover it in half a century? And if basketball is now “less creative” because of it, that’s an indictment of the fact that the league refuses to address the underlying issue.

I think it’s telling that no one bemoans the fact that we design our medicine using data driven methods. I’m sure it would spice up our lives if the pharma companies dropped the boring data analysis and statistical methods and just slapped some compounds together through free-flowing creative passion!

NeutralCrane··on Record-High 89% in U.S. Say Government Corruption Widespread
Corruption does not mean bad policy. It’s government officials breaking the law to empower and enrich themselves. To the extent the items on your list even exist outside of the addled minds of conspiracy theorists, they aren’t corruption.
NeutralCrane··on How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
Ed Zitron is also making money off of his claims. It may be orders of magnitude less than Altman, but it’s still his income source
NeutralCrane··on A Rant About “Technology” (2005)
I could be misremembering but the Walking Dead season 1 and Game of Thrones season 1 came out around the same time, but didn’t really kill of any major characters until after the first season.

Both are based on pre-existing material but GoT source material predates the Walking Dead by 7 years.

NeutralCrane··on Ruff v0.16.0 – Significant new updates – 413 default rules up from 59
I agree with you, but that is literally what ruff is meant to do, and what this person is arguing against.
NeutralCrane··on Ruff v0.16.0 – Significant new updates – 413 default rules up from 59
This seems like a strange hill to die on. Linters don’t consume energy, that’s the entire point. They get everyone on the same standard so that no energy is wasted by anyone on having to discuss, debate, and implement these standards. And yes, there are instances where someone’s non-standard coding style is not a problem. But there are instances where it absolutely can be, and these tools help there.

I’m also not sure I understand the “ My place used pylint, flake8, black, ruff -- with hundreds of commits on every change”. These tools don’t add extra commits. You run them prior to your PR, get them aligned with the linting, and then commit the change you were already going to make. Thats 0 extra commits.

For someone ultimately arguing that there is too much effort spent on people’s coding styles, you are spending a lot of effort arguing about people’s coding styles. These tools are some of the most set it and forget it things around.

NeutralCrane··on OverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future
I work for one of these. Never had a real job, and it shows. They sure can present a slide deck. Organizing a company around a coherent strategy is very clearly beyond them.
NeutralCrane··on My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite
I think the point is that if you only voice your criticism the moment they are no longer funding you, it’s not upholding standards and principles, it’s sour grapes
NeutralCrane··on The kids with phones are alright
Well they didn’t say 16 years olds should not having access to compute so your point is irrelevant.
NeutralCrane··on Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)
Distribution is a subset of use
NeutralCrane··on Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)
> If we're doing capitalism people have to be paid somehow, and when people say "free" they don't mean "absolutely".

Therein lies the entire issue. Intellectual property is a paradox and a farce, but our current systems require IP as a concept to exist. 99% of human history existed without the concept of IP law, and yet people still innovated, learned, and shared knowledge. But now we are at a point where human beings can only survive if they have something they can productize and sell to others, and so for knowledge to be produced, it has to turned into something that is artificially scarce, so that those producing it can be compensated for their labor. Maybe this is unavoidable for this point of our evolution. I doubt it, as 99% of human history managed without the concept of IP, and we still produced and shared knowledge.

But even if it is necessary for this stage, it is still a dystopian model. And I imagine we aren’t far off from a point where we can provide for everyone’s basic needs, and therefore we don’t need to introduce artificial scarcity to make knowledge work economically viable.

NeutralCrane··on Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)
Has absolutely nothing to do with the paradox of intolerance. If you have a more substantive criticism, feel free to elaborate.
NeutralCrane··on Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)
There’s plenty of licenses that dictate that code can’t be used in commercial applications, or what kind of license derivatives can use.
NeutralCrane··on Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)
If they lock it up, they lock it up. They don’t need to be forced to open it up. But they also shouldn’t be able to prevent others for making use of any knowledge gleaned from it.

In the case of AI, I don’t think LLM providers are required to make their models completely open source just because they were trained on the data freely available on the internet. Those model weights aren’t the original data anyways, so they aren’t even selling access to that original data. However, there is should be nothing preventing others from creating and selling something produced from those LLMs. Distillation, for example, is free game.

In short, you should be required to make your knowledge freely available. But once someone has access to that knowledge, you can’t stop them from using it however they wish, including if they wish to sell it themselves.

NeutralCrane··on Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)
First of all, I’d recommend you not accuse others of being intellectually dishonest simply because they have a stance you disagree with.

Second of all, “knowledge is free” doesn’t mean it is free to generate. It means that it literally cannot be owned. Property implies scarcity. If I use a thing, it makes it so you can’t use that thing. This does not apply to something like knowledge. The fact that I use your idea doesn’t mean you can no longer make use of that idea. Your analogy is flawed, because drinking a beer means that is a beer that cannot be used by someone else. Intellectual property is an oxymoron. There is nothing actually stopping someone from making use of someone else’s knowledge, and therefore we must artificially construct barriers in order to maximize the ability to profit off of it. In the most charitable sense, this in theory provides financial incentive for people to generate knowledge. In a less charitable sense, it is literal though policing for the sole purpose of extracting money.

I get that making use of knowledge without compensating the person who produced it is “theft” under our system. The problem is not with the act. It is with the system in which knowledge work can only support an individual if these dystopian measures are enforced. Frankly, most knowledge work is built on mountains of previous knowledge work that never is compensated for it anyways, so the model of the world isn’t even internally consistent.

NeutralCrane··on Resetting Xbox
I’m guessing 90% of them are mobile gamers exclusively, so no, that is not realistic
NeutralCrane··on What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"
What exactly are the facts about AI water usage? I have trouble separating hysteria from reality but most of what I see still claims water usage is enormous
NeutralCrane··on Returning to Zig
The never-ending discussion of LLM-generated code in binary terms is tiring. It’s either all completely useless slop (which is the author’s stance), or it’s infallible and should be maximized at all costs. Yes there is slop, but there is also good or even great code produced by those making use of LLMs. I understand why a maintainer of a large project like Zig may outright reject LLMs for sheer practicality matters, just to stay on top of the wave of slop generated contributions. But it makes very little sense when a consumer of code, such as the author, takes a black and white stance on if LLM generated code is accepted by the language. If anything, it feels like an intellectual crutch. No need to understand technical nuances when you can fallback on dogmatic zeal.
NeutralCrane··on Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)
There’s a lot of crops that are very intensively bred to create new, specific cultivars. Take a look at all the new Apple varieties popping up. There’s nothing natural about their creation: https://applerankings.com
NeutralCrane··on Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)
If knowledge is to be free, that means there should be no restrictions on how it is used. Even an open source license misses the point, because the implication is still that one person can dictate how another person can make use of knowledge. It’s still premised on the same dystopian view that a person can own an idea.
NeutralCrane··on Parse, Don't Validate – In a Language That Doesn't Want You To
That’s my point. The AI writing either affects the content or it doesn’t. If you require a disclaimer to tell the difference, then it isn’t affecting the content.

Requiring a disclaimer is essentially admitting the content isn’t meaningfully different than human generated content. At that point, who cares? Just engage with the premise on its own merits, rather than on how it was written.

NeutralCrane··on Parse, Don't Validate – In a Language That Doesn't Want You To
I think the need to jump through hoops to disclose anything and anything that might offend someone’s particular sensibilities is a losing battle. What if I want a disclosure on if the content is being hosted via AWS vs some non-magacorp that agrees with my sensibilities more? Or that the power being used by the data center is renewable? Or a disclosure for the author’s every political position so I know if I agree with them and if I should amplify their message and/or generate ad revenue through their site?

At the end of the day, the ideas within the content are what matters. An idea has or does not have merit regardless of if it was produced entirely by a person, or by a person using AI as an editor, or 100% generated by AI. If you need a disclosure on if an idea was produced by AI, you are saying that you have no interest on debating the content on the grounds of the arguments it is making, while simultaneously ceding you can’t tell the difference between someone using AI and someone who isn’t (which undermines one of the primary arguments against AI, that it makes for inferior outputs).

NeutralCrane··on Why narcissistic leaders resist remote work
> who wants to work for a leader who is neither powerful nor high-status within their own company?

Me. In my limited experience, the more leaders are involved, the less likely the project is to be successful. The ideal situation is having leadership that is able to set a decent strategy, and then get out of the way of their subordinates and let them execute. Bad leadership micromanages and inserts themselves in the way of execution.

The status and “power” involved in setting strategy isn’t nearly as significant as the amount involved in micromanagement.

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