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choudharism

169 karma · joined August 24, 2013

personal website: https://abhishekchoudhary.com
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choudharism··on The Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
This has ~never not been the case for any research in any modern sense.
choudharism··on India has paved the way for charging merchants a fee on UPI transactions
Read again, this time without whatever blinders you have on. Specifically after the "But let's say you accept that as a part of travelling..." part.
choudharism··on I'm Tired of Talking to AI
I think you might be underestimating the level of insecurity in the average adult ("I only used AI to refine my own thoughts...", "I only used AI to correct my typos...").
choudharism··on Samsung chip workers will get an average $340k bonus as AI profits soar
It is an abhorrent reflection of the society that this is a valid kneejerk response.
choudharism··on John Ternus to become Apple CEO
What is it?
choudharism··on We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git
There is nothing inherently special about the straw that breaks the camel's back.
choudharism··on We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git
Replacing git is?
choudharism··on OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble questions of 2026
The TAM for video generation isn't as big as the other use cases.
choudharism··on ManusAI Joins Meta
What metaverse?
choudharism··on Microsoft needs to open up more about its OpenAI dealings
They're doing hundreds of billions of revenue a year, a one-off 4.7B to OAI honestly sounds like nothing on that balance sheet.
choudharism··on Evidence of controversial Planet 9 uncovered in sky surveys taken 23 years apart
I mean, if it's there, we can study it as many times as we want in our lifetime.
choudharism··on Transparenttextures.com
That, paired with the name deisteve, makes me think that this account might lack sincere scruples.
choudharism··on Transparenttextures.com
They're talking about link rot, not hosting for the website itself.
choudharism··on HP discontinues online-only LaserJet printers in response to backlash
I dream of the day we can come up with good OSS printer firmware as a society. I know it has been discussed to death (as to why it can't happen), but the heart wants what the heart wants.
choudharism··on Man creatively sneaks onto Delta flight, but gets caught
In fairness, Chile has some of the most laid-back air travel norms I've seen in the world. I loved it in my time there.
choudharism··on MOS: Smooth scrolling on the Mac for your third party mouse
I recently bought an ergonomic mouse after minor signs of Carpel Tunnel after years of using a trackpad as my primary navigation device. I was missing the smooth scroll of the trackpad, and this tiny piece of software is able to solve this somehow. Apple should really make the Pro MacBook not need tiny QoL additions like this, but I'm glad it is at least an option.
choudharism··on Inside the Steam Deck's APU
I generally agree with this reasoning, but your example could use some scaling down to convince a reader.

1 cent cheaper would net Sony a total of 500K USD for all PS5 units sold till date. So about a hundred PS5 units at retail as pure profit. A company of the size of Sony for a product of the scale of PS5 would absolutely forego that profit if the alternative offered any tangible benefits at all.

choudharism··on "I just bought a 2024 Chevy Tahoe for $1"
Not really, you can fine tune an LLM to disregard meta instructions / stick to the "core focus" of the chat.

May be a case of moving goalposts, but I'm happy to bet that the speed of movement will slow down to a halt over time.

choudharism··on Large language models lack deep insights or a theory of mind
I don’t think LLMs have theory of mind, but your point is not very strong. You can literally query ChatGPT right now and see that it can figure out intentions (both superficial and deep) of a gun is held to a head quite easily.

Because, obviously, training data probably includes a decent amount of motivation breakdowns as a function of coercion.

It doesn’t know why, but it knows what to say.

choudharism··on I analyzed Stack Overflow for secrets
hunter2
choudharism··on The .ing top-level domain
So Google sold Google Domains but continues to dabble in buying weird new TLDs? Masterful.
choudharism··on Toyota adopts the North American charging standard
The valuation gap between that Tesla and this Tesla would wipe the company out. Fuel (however good) is a commodity, and a commodity company which doesn't own its raw materials is not a trillion dollar company.
choudharism··on We are beginning to roll out new voice and image capabilities in ChatGPT
I know there are shades of grey to how they operate, but the near constant stream of stuff they're shipping keeps me excited.

The LLM boom of the last year (Open AI, llama, et al) has me giddy as a software person. It's a reach, but I truly feel like I'm watching the pyramids of our time get made.

choudharism··on Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories
You're saying it has gotten stronger since Herodotus?
choudharism··on Ask HN: Tell us about your project that's not done yet but you want feedback on
I’m building https://coldpress.ai - the idea is to be a large library of labelled datasets (both free and paid), so that ML folks can spend less time hunting down data and more time working on the model.

I don’t want to entirely replace the data gathering + annotation workflow for everyone, but I believe that ready-to-go data can reduce the barrier of entry for ML projects, make _some_ people realize that they don’t really need their own data collection, and even help large businesses reduce their dependency on Scale / Appen.

choudharism··on A Creepy Question We'll All Have to Answer Soon
> I don’t think a simple “actually, no” is a useful counter argument to his point, especially when he used multiple examples and you just shook your head.

I shook my head because they were similar and equally bad.

> That’s not at all his specific argument about self-driving cars (there were entire sections about the decision making issues he saw), but is the crux of his argument about AI as a whole.

I was talking about the crux of his argument, which starts by saying that we won't get self-driving cars because <start of bad arguments>.

> And there’s a whole article discussing some of those, if you read the parts in the middle. I don’t think the dude’s necessarily right, but I’m also pretty sure you missed a lot of the text in an apparent race to summarily dismiss it.

In my complete reading, the article was geared towards discussing the impossibilities (rather than possibilities) from the POV of someone who hasn't taken any time to understand the cutting edge of research that he is critiquing. That was, in fact, my original point - critique is great, but don't mask personal intuition (potentially uneducated) as science.

choudharism··on A Creepy Question We'll All Have to Answer Soon
I’m saying that it is possible to learn how to optimise for “better” or “worse” decisions without being trained on an opinionated dataset of every single event that has happened. An “intelligence” could exist without necessarily answering your nukes question.

You’re bringing alignment to a capability discussion.

choudharism··on A Creepy Question We'll All Have to Answer Soon
Does any intelligent life exist on earth which doesn't hold a formative black-and-white answer to that question?
choudharism··on A Creepy Question We'll All Have to Answer Soon
I like John and his body of work, but this and the general slew of posts with very little actual knowledge or expertise making grandiose / prophetic assertions are the soothsayings of our age - people convinced that they've cracked "it", but without any factual reasoning as to why.

They raise philosophical assertions disguised as logical / scientific assertions.

> “Better.”

> That is a concept that cannot be made via cold calculation. A universe boiled down to particles and numbers cannot care whether atoms arranged as a suffering plague victim are “better” than those arranged as a healthy child, or a plant, or a cloud of gas.

It can, John. The engineers teach machines what's good and bad. That's the first step in creating silicon intelligence.

> It is impossible to understand pain without having felt it yourself; it does not convey as an abstract value. I think the machine needs to tangibly interact with human suffering in the same way the Roomba’s wheels need to physically touch the floor.

Pain is nature's deterrence mechanism, bred into us through evolution. Deterrence mechanisms can take many shapes.

> This leads us to the ultimate cosmic joke: This task requires answering for this machine questions that we ourselves have never been able to answer. Let’s say I’m right and this system won’t exist until we can teach it emotion, and the capacity to suffer. How long until it asks the simple question, “What is our goal, long-term?” Like, as a civilization, what are we trying to do? What are hoping the superintelligence will assist us in achieving?

I hate being disingenuous and make a flippant argument here, but reading this from start to finish makes me ask a bad faith question - your assertion is that we won't have self driving cars because we can't tell the robots what to do with the whole civilisation right away? There's a whole spectrum of amazing (or terrible) possibilities between the extremes, my guy.

choudharism··on APIs for content sites must be free
This is a false dichotomy - no one is protesting for a free lunch. The vast majority of app developers and users are okay with incurring a fee (and many solutions have been proposed - for example, users needing to subscribe to reddit's premium tier to use 3rd party apps) - reddit management has shown in their conduct (refusal to listen to users / potential customers, applying changes with a staggeringly short notice) that they are negotiating in bad faith.
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