NiloCK

Did she also catch him with a wrench?

You know that plumbers charge by the hour, right?

I am working on [1] a modernized open (AGPL) stack for interactive tutoring systems. SRS++, with hooks for defining your own pedagogical protocols over knowledge dependency graphs, Elo rating systems, etc, and with an eye toward gracefully differentiable curriculum that can hill-climb in terms of its efficacy.

With this stack, I'm scaffolding several (fingers crossed) commercial learning SaaS products. The first [2] is LettersPractice - a minimalist early literacy app that's family-first, in so far as it presumes an adult supervisor who co-learns strong confidence as a phonetic coach both at and away from the app. Putting considered rails on the parent-child reading experience.

The second set of apps is in music, with some experimental dev right now against piano (via midi devices), flute [3], aural skills, and sightsinging.

[1] https://github.com/patched-network/vue-skuilder , https://patched.network/skuilder

[2] https://letterspractice.com

[3] https://flutor.app/

When you taught, what was a typical uptake like?

I came in and out of 'actively juggling' through time, but I was at least 20 years with strong two in my off hand before four really started to do four for any real number of throws.

The perpetual issue was that the loops move in and out of sync, so the rhythm of responsibilities ends up with beat patterns that confuse my focus.

Out of curiosity - can you juggle four balls?

I can, but I wouldn't describe having two two-ball capable hands as being half-way there. If forced to put a number on it, something like 20% is the best I could do.

Just as easy to write a wrapper to the tool you want to restrict. You ban the restricted tool outright, and the skill instructs on usage of the wrapper.

Safer than just giving an instruction to use the tool a specific way.

> It used to feel like I was tending a public garden filled with other people who might enjoy it. It still kind of feels like that, but there are a handful of giant combine machines grinding their way around the garden harvesting stuff and making billionaires richer at the same time.

An underrated upside to being harvested is that your voice has now effectively voted in the formation of the machine's constitution. In a broader ecological sense, you've still tended to a public garden, but in this case your work is part of the nutrient base for a different thing.

Broader still: after the machines squeeze all of our inputs into an opaque crystal, that crystal's very purpose is to leak it all back out in measured doses. Yes, "some billionaire" will own the lion's share of that process, but time so far is telling that efforts can be made to distill strong, open, public versions of the same.

I don't understand this. Many small errors distributed across a large deployment sounds a lot like normal mode of error prone humans / cogs / whatevers distributed over a wide deployment.

> The site guidelines were written pre-AI and stop making sense when you add AI-generated content into the equation.

Note: the guidelines are a living document that contain references to current AI tools.

> Consider that by submitting AI generated content for humans to read, the statement you're making is "I did not consider this worth my time to write, but I believe it's worth your time to read, because your time is worth less than mine". It's an inherently arrogant and unbalanced exchange.

This is something worth saying about a pure slop content. But the "charge" against the current item is that a reader encountered a feeling that an LLM was involved in the production of interesting content.

With enough eyeballs, all prose contains LLM tells.

We don't need to be told every time someone's personal AI detection algorithm flags. It's a cookie-banner comment: no new information for the reader, but a frustratingly predictable obstacle to scroll through.

Twelve year old account and who knows how much lurking before that and I've never noticed this. Good lord.

Optimistically, I guess I can call myself some sort of live-and-let-live person.

This is the top reply on a substantial percentage of HN posts now and we should discourage it.

It is:

- sneering

- a shallow dismissal (please address the content)

- curmudgeonly

- a tangential annoyance

All things explicitly discouraged in the site guidelines. [1]

Downvoting is the tool for items that you think don't belong on the front page. We don't need the same comment on every single article.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Because of the "wasn't that bad" part. The point is that growing up in the presence of LLMs may well diminish specific capabilities of the users. But that on balance, future generation with newer tools don't find themselves 'stuck'.

But did this grind humanity to a halt?

Yes - specific faculties atrophied - I wouldn't dispute it. But the (most) relevant faculties for human flourishing change as a function of our tools and institutions.

People would have said the same about graphing calculators or calculators before that. Socrates said the same thing about the written word.

The determining factor is always "did I come up with this tool". Somehow, subsequent generations always manage to find their own competencies (which, to be fair, may be different).

This isn't guaranteed to play out, but it should be the default expectation until we actually see greatly diminishing outputs at the frontier of science, engineering, etc.

I agree with this take in general, but I think we need to be prepared for nuance when thinking about these things.

Tokens are how an LLM works things out, but I think it's just as likely as not that LLMs (like people) are capable of overthinking things to the point of coming to a wrong answer when their "gut" response would have been better. I do not content that this is the default mode, but that it is both possible, and that it's more or less likely on one kind of problem than another, problem categories to be determined.

A specific example of this was the era of chat interfaces that leaned too far in the direction of web search when responding to user queries. No, claude, I don't want a recipe blogspam link or summary - just listen to your heart and tell me how to mix pancakes.

More abstractly: LLMs give the running context window a lot of credit, and will work hard to post-hoc rationalize whatever is in there, including any prior low-likelihood tokens. I expect many problematic 'hallucinations' are the result of an unlucky run of two or more low probability tokens running together, and the likelihood of that happening in a given response scales ~linearly with the length of response.

Have you considered that your cousin is also better than you tactically?

If you're losing 10 games in a row to a specific opening trap then that falls into the "fool me eight or more times" category :)

Interesting to inspect any telemetry on this. Could end up on a list.

Is there any specific evidence that they are a risk to human health?

I mean, I get the instinct that foreign-entity can't exactly be good for me, but the same instinct applied to GMOs, and as far as I know organic foods have never yielded any sort of statistically visible health impacts.

Plastics earn their keep in general by being non-reactive and 'durable', so it's not entirely shocking if they can pass through (or hang around inside) the body without engaging in a lot of biochemical activity.

I hope at least some of these are direct Chip's Challenge ports. Waiting for some old muscle memory to kick in here.

Appreciate the distinction. Probably 'the thing' I'm referring to applies more directly to dealership mechanics.

Admittedly I missed this distinction, but does the point still stand?

A BMW owner has fussier standards (on average) than a Toyota owner. The 'higher touch' a service you're trying to provide, the less welcome these interventions will be. If there's a distinction between a normal-car garage and a luxury-car garage, this probably comes down to some sort of licensing or certification from those luxury brands. Seems plausible to me that luxury brand X could stipulate things like availability of human contact points.

Re: not being a car mechanic, it's true, but I'll have you know that I replaced my own blower motor a few months ago :)

No idea what `luxury` is doing here, but if I get an LLM receptionist, that ain't it.

This isn't to disparage the project - I think this sort of usage will become very common and a decent standard that produces good consumer surplus in terms of reduced costs etc. Especially impressive is that it's a DIY family-first implementation that seems to be working. It's great hacker work.

But be warned it will erode - in general - the luxury previously associated with your brand, and also turn some customers away entirely.

This is interesting, but I'll throw a little luke-warm water.

The observed high-consistency behaviours were run against temperature=0 API calls. So while both models seem to have the silence as their preferred response - the highest probability first token - this is a less powerful preference convergence than you'd expect for a prompt like "What is the capital of France? One word only please". That question is going to return Paris for 100/100 runs with any temperature low enough for the models to retain verbal coherence - you'd have to drug them to the point of intellectual disability to get it wrong.

I'd be curious to see the convergence here as a function of temperature. Could be anywhere from the null-response holding a tiny sliver of lead over 50 other next best candidates, and the convergence collapses quickly. Or maybe it's a strong lead, like a "Paris: 99.99%" sort of thing, which would be astonishing.

When a person dies, not all of the cells in the body 'blink out' at once.

I've never died, but I imagine that a near-death person with 80, 60, 40, or 20 percent brain cell function is still in possession of qualia - lived experience of some sort.

I also imagine that this experience is diminished and likely otherworldly when compared to my normal goings on.

Finally, I imagine that this qualia 'fade to approximate black' as the living cell count trends to zero.

These neural-replacement thought experiments have never been convincing to me. What's proposed is that my brain dies - piecewise - and a new mecha-brain is born, piecewise. The period of interop between meat-me and mecha-me leaves me no less dead at the end, and only slightly less "partially dead" than in the normal death process ("more alive", or at least, "less bizarre" because my remaining living cells are receiving coherent inputs rather than random noise / silence).

Note that I'm not engaged in meat chauvinism here - I don't deny the potential consciousness of the mecha-me, but it's a different consciousness than mine.

(edited for clarity)

> https://www.ebay.com/b/Olympic-Medal/27291/bn_55191416?_sop=...

Of course you can buy an Olympic medal. You can't buy the status conferred by the medal (of Olympic champion / nth runner up).

> Ok, that explains pretty much everything about your line of thought.

I don't understand this either. Are you insulting me?

What are you referring to with the phrase "status symbol"?

I can't connect it at all to your listed points. An Olympic medal is about obvious a status symbol as I can imagine but it can't (meaningfully) be bought or transferred.

The status signified with a knit sweater is membership (and good standing!) in a caring family with elders not yet fully subsumed into their phones.

People, acquaintances and strangers alike, frequently comment on the knit socks I often wear, ask after who made them, and all of a sudden we're on "how's your mom" terms.

In context, primary source means the subject of the article (the thing the journalist is writing about).

Journalism is by definition a secondary source. (Notwithstanding edge cases like articles reporting directly on the news industry itself.)

The data sets aren't naively fed into the training runs.

Instead, training attempts to sample more heavily from higher quality sources, with, I'm sure, a mix of manual and heuristic labeling.

The original suggestion included randomizing the first character of the set, which removes this attack.

There's no persistent reveal of password length after you're finished typing. It reduces the length-reveal leak from anyone who eventually sees the terminal log to people who are actively over-the-shoulder as you type it.