HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

dlkf

1,223 karma · joined November 20, 2016

submissionscomments
dlkf··on Annual 'winners' for most egregious US healthcare profiteering announced
What country are you referring to? The American middle class is objectively very wealthy: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/no-the-us-is-not-a-poor-societ...
dlkf··on Does current AI represent a dead end?
I mean, the matrices obviously change during training. I take it your point is that LLMs are trained once and then frozen, whereas humans continuously learn and adapt to their environment. I agree that this is a critical distinction. But it has nothing to do with “meaningful internal structure.”
dlkf··on Does current AI represent a dead end?
> Previous generations of neural nets were kind of useless. Spotify ended up replacing their machine learning recommender with a simple system that would just recommend tracks that power listeners had already discovered.

“Previous generations of cars were useless because one guy rode a bike to work.” Pre-transformer neural nets were obviously useful. CNNs and RNNs were SOTA in most vision and audio processing tasks.

dlkf··on Does current AI represent a dead end?
> Current AI systems have no internal structure that relates meaningfully to their functionality

In what sense is the relationship between neurons and human function more “meaningful” than the relationship between matrices and LLM function?

You’re correct that LLMs are probably a dead end with respect to AGI, but this is completely the wrong reason.

dlkf··on More men are addicted to the 'crack cocaine' of the stock market
Now do drug-development.
dlkf··on OpenAI O3 breakthrough high score on ARC-AGI-PUB
If you take a vote of 10 random people, then as long as their errors are not perfectly correlated, you’ll do better than asking one person.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ensemble_learning

dlkf··on Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals
If we did this fifty years ago, we’d be having this discussion by snail mail.
dlkf··on In Praise of Print: Reading Is Essential in an Era of Epistemological Collapse
There is no epistemological collapse. Access to accurate information has never been so fast nor so easy. To be sure, lies are spread on the internet - but people believed all sorts of bullshit before the internet. Those who want to claim there is a crisis don’t have a principled argument as to how things are worse.
dlkf··on In Praise of Print: Reading Is Essential in an Era of Epistemological Collapse
I implore everyone reading this to google the Sokal hoax before decide whether these guys are worthwhile.
dlkf··on What were the best books you read this year?
Concrete Island by JG Ballard

Libra by Don Delilo

Deep Water by Patricia Highsmith

dlkf··on America's new millionaire class: Plumbers and HVAC entrepreneurs
Assuming you value 10 days at the cost of 1-2 AC units.
dlkf··on California bans legacy admissions at private universities
The main difference is that the media report will be read.
dlkf··on What Does It Mean to Learn?
Would new developments (or old developments that had gone underappreciated) in an adjacent stem field count as ”added cultural context” ?
dlkf··on The most cited authors in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
A neat list, but there is a bias toward authors who published one controversial (and not necessarily good) argument that got a ton of rebuttals. Williamson is the worst offender.
dlkf··on The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to “The Office” (2009)
The article is rife with references to a mediocre tv show, but it doesn’t contain a single example of the principle as applied to a firm. The author is an expert in something, but it isn’t business.
dlkf··on Artificial consciousness: a perspective from the free energy principle
It’s interesting to consider whether a simulated rainstorm is in fact possible. Not a crude numerical simulation like those used for forecasting, but one fine-grained enough to accurately predict the trajectory of every drop.
dlkf··on So you want to rent an NVIDIA H100 cluster? 2024 Consumer Guide
In the regions where it works (PNW, Quebec, etc) we could easily build more. The hurdles are regulatory. The regulation isn’t baseless - a dam will affect the local ecosystem adversely. But that’s a tradeoff we choose rather than a fundamental limitation.
dlkf··on So you want to rent an NVIDIA H100 cluster? 2024 Consumer Guide
Why is green in scare-quotes?
dlkf··on Why YC went to DC
> It means that google doesn't have to aquire-hire your team, they can just poach all of them wholesale.

Imagine a skilled worker taking a new job that pays better. What a nightmare scenario.

dlkf··on Arthur Whitney releases an open-source subset of K with MIT license
Does the page 404 for anyone else? Is this a Europe thing?
dlkf··on Georg Cantor and His Heritage
> Literally any definition of something infinite can always be reduced to a procedure that recursively transforms or observes some prior state.

You can’t generate R this way. This is a consequence of Cantor’s proof.

dlkf··on Georg Cantor and His Heritage
Your critique of the use of ”bigger” in your strawman applies equally to your own use of ”longer” - neither loop will ever terminate. So in what sense is either one longer?

The diagonal proof is arguing that there is no bijection from N to {0, 1}∞ , despite the fact that both are infinite. The sense in which the latter is ”bigger” is that there are always elements left over that are covered by N.

dlkf··on Dana-Farberications at Harvard University
I’m not sure that you can. What I’ve read is that in a lot of fields, the community is small enough that you have a reasonable idea whose work you are reviewing even if the author’s name is redacted.
dlkf··on Coding Self-Attention, Multi-Head Attention, Cross-Attention, Causal-Attention
It’s debatable to what degree ”attention” in LLMs relates to ”attention” in psychology. See Cosma Shalizi’s note on this http://bactra.org/notebooks/nn-attention-and-transformers.ht...
dlkf··on Gilles Deleuze – What is Philosophy? [audio]
I’m not accusing Whitehead of the fallacy, I’m talking about the parent post.

Parent is suggesting that if we don’t take Deleuze seriously, we should also not take Whitehead seriously. (Despite Whitehead being a fav of the analytic crowd.)

But the Deleuze comparison, to the extent that it makes any sense, only applies to the later Whitehead. We don’t have to reject the Pricipia. The obvious position is that Deleuze is not-even-wrong, process philosophy is not-even-wrong, and the principia is merely wrong (which is amazing in philosophy.)

dlkf··on Gilles Deleuze – What is Philosophy? [audio]
Motte (principia) and bailey (process philosophy).
dlkf··on Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%
Can we please stop stating things that are obviously false? One can easily make a good case that software engineers are not oppressed without lying.
dlkf··on Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%
I think this is actually pretty well-established, eg https://news.crunchbase.com/layoffs/analysis-big-tech-pandem...
dlkf··on Nothing Personal: How ideas made Derek Parfit
Hume wrote morality is better felt than reasoned. There is a large tradition in virtue ethics following Hume (eg Bernard Williams) who defend our moral intuitions, our prioritization of family, etc.
dlkf··on We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO
> I know it's easy to ridicule the sheer stupidity the board acted with (and justifiably so), but take a moment to think of the other side. If you truly believed that Superhuman AI was near, and it could act with malice, won't you try to slow things down a bit?

The real ”sheer stupidity” is this very belief.

Page 1 of 12Next →