17,382 karma · joined May 17, 2016
Speaking of which I was wondering, a spider building a web is probably making some interesting noises (the web vibrations), I wonder if it's possible to record that.
I realized, what am I actually afraid of. Well, overspend. So I just set then all to disable auto-reloading. Now if it blows up, I'm down $5.
Same story with containers. Just give it root on a VPS, and if it blows up, I'm down $3.
a. Holes are ontologically parasitic: they are always in something and cannot exist in isolation. (‘There is no such thing as a hole by itself’, Tucholsky 1931: 100; ‘Take away the thing, and the hole goes too’, Heath 1967: 524). This is why there cannot exist a world consisting only of holes (Coggins 2010: 71).
b. Holes are fillable. You don’t necessarily destroy a hole by filling it up (except perhaps when the filling is homogeneous with the hole-lining); you don’t create a new hole by removing the filling.
c. Holes are locationally gracious. When you fill or put something in a hole, the hole does not squeeze to the side; it shares its location with its guest (and if the guest has a hole, you get two co-located entities of the same kind).
https://aleph-alpha.com/en/blog/bounding-hallucinations-merl...
It's like a snake worm thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caecilian
And apparently they produce something like milk to feed their young. Wild!
My two favorite graphs are AA's A Index vs Time Per Task and AA Index vs Cost Per Task.
https://artificialanalysis.ai/#intelligence-comparison-tabs
https://artificialanalysis.ai/?intelligence-comparison=intel...
The argument is that people aren't equipped to do that, but that's a muscle they've never exercised, because... they aren't equipped to do that, because that's a muscle they've never exercised, etc. It's self-sealing.
They don't work like humans, obviously, but there's a nonzero amount of anthropos in there already. (See also the tendency to lie, cheat, etc.)
I think non-RLHF'd LLMs (i.e. pretrained text completion models) sound natural enough to pass the Turing test, but I don't know if anyone has tested them for that. (Also I'm not sure how to come by base models without post-training crap, even the "base" models of recent releases start spamming assistant-type text constantly, i.e. they're clearly putting it in the pretraining data.)
If I'm right on that then we hit that benchmark like five years ago.
The egg thing, probably 2030-ish.
Well, there's at least one getting ready to send them back.
https://www.restorebritain.org.uk/pp_mass_deportations_legit...
Revealed preferences? What's being asked here? Preferred noise level? Preferred number of children?
The article said some people called it dystopian. I don't think so.
But we can lean into that! If the government buys your data from data brokers (like some governments are already doing), the matching algorithm suddenly has a lot more data points to work with.
Related: I've been wondering since 2008 why there isn't a "recommender engine" for friends.
Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden (December 2025)
More precisely, I had figured out how to parse an Excel formula (keeping track of braces and commas, I recall!). For the actual math symbols, all I had to do was rewrite them as Excel formulas!
3+6*2 -> 3+MUL(6,2) -> ADD(3,MUL(6,2))
In order of precedence. And then just evaluate the resulting formulas inside-out:
ADD(3,MUL(6,2)) -> ADD(3,12) -> 15
It somehow ended up being a thousand lines of code. Another guy doing the same assignment told me he did it in 50 with regular expressions.
In retrospect, what I did reminds me of hammering in a nail with a screwdriver.
I ended up revisiting the idea later (just the math parser, no ADD() syntax) and it was much nicer, like 30 lines of JS (no regex either!). (Well, you can do it in one line with eval, but yea :)
I only have one though. What do you have the separate employees for?
For free time, do you send it mail with cron?
Why does it take longer?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tf%E2%80%93idf
Take it from me, this'll be all the rage next year.
"Save token spend by optimizing your agents' grepping spree!"
I'm a bit of an outsider here (I don't understand computer) but a few weeks ago I was wrestling with the question of deploying an application on many boxen. After looking into Docker (and unikernels, lol) I arrived at the conclusion that "the operating system is part of my application."
A very bloated "part", which I did not write, don't understand very well, and which spontaneously self-modifies. An OS is a big bag of global mutable state! Ew!
This made me very sad. (At which point I was informed that I had basically reinvented NixOS from first principles?)
Also something about "we don't break userspace -- that's libc's job!"
Bravo indeed!
(Also, based on the CSS, the author appears to be GPT.)
The most notable is probably cracking the admin password because I wanted to change the volume or something. (Seemed perfectly reasonable to me at the time!)
The computers had all kinds of weird restrictions, including the panning being forcibly set way to the left to compensate for the school's crappy headphones -- a crime against humanity, you would surely agree, if you experienced it.
It took 30 seconds to crack, it was a short dictionary word and I remember being very disappointed with the sysadmin. But obviously I couldn't tell anyone about it...
Let me see what else... our school accounts had 200MB network storage, but this was too small for all the Portable Apps[0] I wanted to use. So I created some kind of "startup program" that downloaded and extracted them from my web server. I think it also changed the background and the Windows Theme...
https://portableapps.com/apps - still online, I see!
I think these days kids just have their own laptops though. That's no fun at all :)
That reminds me of how in zoos they put the food inside hard to open boxes so the animals don't go insane from boredom.
This one time my neighbor rang my doorbell. I answered on the intercom.
We talked for a minute and were then both puzzled. "Why did you ring the bell?"
"I didn't ring the bell. You did!"
Turns out we were both in our apartments, and an unknown third party downstairs had rung both our bells at the same time.
This was how I discovered the doorbell intercom also functions as "bus" where all apartments can talk to each other. (It also blares your conversation onto the street downstrairs, though.)