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alexmolas

5,606 karma · joined June 28, 2022

I’m a husband, father, physicist, and data scientist. In that order.

www.alexmolas.com

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alexmolas··on Jev Can't Be Calibrated
Yes, good point. I meant that the Jev can't be calibrated for everyone out of the box. I find it important because this is one of their main claims. They literally say

> Outcomes assigned a probability of 0.2 should occur about 20% of the time.

and this is not true

alexmolas··on Jev Can't Be Calibrated
"Not especially good at classifying" does sound like a serious drawback for a classifier
alexmolas··on Jev Can't Be Calibrated
If you want calibrated probabilities you'll be forced to fine-tune it
alexmolas··on Jev Can't Be Calibrated
I don't know if it's reasonable. What it isn't is calibrated.
alexmolas··on Jev Can't Be Calibrated
But "problems about actual probabilities whose answers can't be known at all" are exactly the problems where calibration is important. Since calibration is one of the big claims about Jev I'd expect it to perform well in these problems.
alexmolas··on [dead]
Read the first paragraph of the Wikipedia page [1] for a lot of sources claiming the opposite.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_genocide

alexmolas··on Wildthing – A model trained on role-reversed ChatGPT conversations
Very interesting idea, but the result is a bit disappointing. It doesn't matter what I answer, the questions are always repeating
alexmolas··on Mapping latitude and longitude to country, state, or city
I used to work on a logistics company and we had to map latitude and longitude to specific directions. One of the first things I learnt was to avoid storing 6 decimal precision coordinates. Also, this XKCD was shared a lot https://xkcd.com/2170/
alexmolas··on In the Network of the Conclav: How we "guessed" the Pope using network science
This is textbook survivorship bias. Out of 133 electable cardinals, someone was bound to guess Robert Prevost. If they were wrong, no one would remember. You could probably find 132 others who guessed wrong.
alexmolas··on Ty: A fast Python type checker and language server
how does it compare against mypy? is it much faster?
alexmolas··on Vatican Observatory
> Religion needs science to keep it away from superstition and keep it close to reality, to protect it from creationism, which at the end of the day is a kind of paganism – it's turning God into a nature god

I love this quote!

alexmolas··on Chain of Recursive Thoughts: Make AI think harder by making it argue with itself
There are two examples in the repo, one with CoRT and another one without. And the one without it it's much better than the one that uses it. Weird choice of examples...
alexmolas··on Pyrefly - A faster Python type checker written in Rust
The astral team (behind uv and ruff) is already working on a type checker in Rust, and given the quality of their existing tools, I'm inclined to wait and see what they release. Pyrefly looks interesting, but from the repo it seems pretty early-stage and not intended for external use yet.
alexmolas··on Show HN: Unsure Calculator – back-of-a-napkin probabilistic calculator
is this the same as error propagation? I used to do a lot of that during my physics degree
alexmolas··on Why I find diffusion models interesting?
I guess the biggest limitation of this approach is that the max output length is fixed before generation starts. Unlike autoregressive LLM, which can keep generating forever.
alexmolas··on Run Python in the Browser Effortlessly
how did they solved the problems with pypi in China?
alexmolas··on Crystal Ball Trading Game
Exactly! They're evaluating the model using the training data
alexmolas··on Ask HN: What AI tools are you using to boost developer productivity?
Cursor and Continue.dev
alexmolas··on Chemistry Nobel: Computational protein design and protein structure prediction
And the literature Nobel will go for ChatGPT
alexmolas··on Mira Murati leaves OpenAI
They can't spend more than 6 months without a drama...
alexmolas··on [dead]
Looks very nice! But I'm missing a "how to run it" section in the README.
alexmolas··on What are great international locations to work at?
Barcelona. It has good weather all the year. A great start-up environment. Great WLF. Great people. And a lot of things to do after work. Geographically it's placed in one of the best spots in the world. In winter you can go to ski in the Pyrenees, and in summer you can go to the beach yo Costa Brava or Mallorca/Menorca
alexmolas··on Solving the out-of-context chunk problem for RAG
But with FTS you don't solve the "out-of-context chunk problem". You'll still miss relevant chunks with FTS. You still can apply the approach proposed in the post to FTS, but instead of using similarity you could use BM25.
alexmolas··on Win your fantasy league using operations research
I was using data from the group stages. And I agree that just using the last 5 games had a lot of variance, but unfortunately, I didn't have data from before the Euro.
alexmolas··on Win your fantasy league using operations research
But the expected value of past games may not be the same as the expected value of future games.
alexmolas··on Win your fantasy league using operations research
I don't have the numbers to back this opinion, but I believe that consistently ranking in the top 5% in all the games will greatly increase your chances of winning the league. It's not necessary to win every stage, but just having high scores consistently will likely make you win the league.
alexmolas··on Ask HN: Best feature phone to combat internet addiction?
If you're addicted to your phone and you want to quit it maybe it's a good idea to use a dumbphone with a shitty UX. Otherwise you're going to get addicted to your dumbphone.
alexmolas··on The number of CS grads who don't even know basic Git commands is astounding
This is why it's called Computer Science, and not Software Engineering.
alexmolas··on Postgres is all you need, even for vectors
And sometimes numpy is all you need, especially for POCs when the embeddings fit in memory.
alexmolas··on Good code is rarely read
my bad, you're right. Thanks for pointing it out :)
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