emtel

As far as I can tell, neither of the frontier US labs have referred to distillation as "stealing", but someone please provide a link if I'm wrong.

They do claim that it violates their ToS, which we can assume is simply correct, since they get to put whatever they want in their ToS.

Given all that, I don't know what the fuss is. Are they supposed to not use the advances that were openly published by Chinese labs? The entire industry is built on a discovery made at Google, which was published openly. Should Chinese labs therefore not use transformers? Should US labs not try to prevent distillation of their models?

You’re technically correct, but the vast majority of software has never been built to the kinds of standards you are describing. LLMs are not displacing that kind of work!

There is no limited supply of batteries. Production is growing and prices are declining rapidly.

Do you think people should continue developing AI up until the point that there is evidence that AI is facilitating biological weapons development?

I think we should stop before then. But that necessarily means that there will not be evidence at the time that we stop.

I have dabbled with Verus in rust. I found that if you leave the agent to its own devices it will produce a spec that just restates the existing implementation. It took a lot of work to arrive at specs that were plausibly accurate and complete statements of what the code was supposed to do.

But once you got there, Claude had no trouble proving the code satisfied the spec, and I uncovered a few interesting bugs this way.

I would say that it is not even wrong. You say it’s a next token predictor. I say it isn’t. What observable behavior of the system can settle our dispute?

I fail to see how any possible output could cause either of us to change our mind.

Can anyone explain why on earth you would counter bore a pipe at all, let alone after installation? I read the article but couldn’t understand the explanation. It seems like a totally ludicrous way to make a pipe.

> The model did exactly what it was told, albeit in an unintended, emergent strategy

Yes, that is the problem!

“Rare books” usually refers to rare editions of books. Any books out there where there are only a few extent copies of the text itself, are probably not of very much interest or social value, since almost no one is able to read them, by definition.

If you think there is priceless knowledge locked up in books so rare that it is on the verge of being lost forever, then AI labs are not really the problem!

In my experience fable can absolutely find very subtle bugs just by reading code and thinking. Last example I saw was a very subtle race condition that neither I not the author noticed. It wasn’t a security issue, but it could have been.

> Compiler performance is dominated by algorithms

But you can always use the best algorithm no matter what your implementation language is, so it still makes sense to prefer a language that makes it easy to write fast code.

> should I walk or drive to the car wash

there is an entire genre of riddles based on this kind of misdirection that works on humans, such as "A plane crashed on the border or US and Canada. Where do they bury the survivors?"

As with humans, comprehension is not a binary property of the agent - it is a quality that can be present in some situations and absent in others. LLMs may emit correct outputs sometimes because they do comprehend the input, and emit incorrect outputs in other cases when they do not comprehend the input.

In order to show that LLMs can't comprehend, we'd have to show that there are no (or at least very few) situations in which they exhibit comprehension, not show that there are some situations in which they don't.

Even if pre-training was the only training step, it still wouldn't necessarily follow that the only thing the model is doing is stitching words together probabilistically, unless you expand the definition of "probabilistically" to the point that it becomes meaningless. This kind of thinking assumes that design of the training process and the "design" of the artifact that training produces must be similar.

I’m guessing you don’t have kids. My membership pays for itself just for the savings on string cheese alone. Same for eggs.

audiophiles (https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/turntables-with-pace....) also claim that turntables can be rated on "timing, rhythm, and pace" in which supposedly the timing of the music can be affected by the turntable's mass and other properties.

How this would occur without also producing grossly audible pitch distortion never seems to be discussed.

What a strange paragraph! Why on earth should we assume that a body is a prerequisite for having emotions?

How is drugging an animal's food a "brute force tactic"? What would qualify as a non-brute-force tactic in your mind?

The "Einstein can't get a cat into a carrier even though he is smarter" is just a hilariously bad argument. All cat owners can get their cats into a carrier! And most cats don't want to get in, because they hate the vet! And it's almost entirely because the humans are smarter!

You can even get a literal tiger into a carrier, even though it can kill you easily. You just drug its food and wait till it passes out. This is because you are smarter than it, and know that tranquilizers exist and how to obtain them, which is a strategy that cats of any size are not even able to conceive of, and probably can't understand what happened after it's been done to them.

A lot of posts urging people to get colonoscopies. But general anesthesia also carries risks. How should one weigh the risk vs benefit?

> The goal is not to force individuals to not replace their phones, but rather to provide that as an option at all, for those who want it.

But my point is that you need to recognize that in so doing, you are taking away the option of having other things, such as waterproofing, larger batteries, smaller/lighter phones, etc. There is no free lunch.

That's an odd reply since by that argument they also flocked to a phone with no replaceable battery, which was pretty standard in the 2000s.

But you could be right. I guess this will be an experiment to watch: If EU consumers show a strong preference for replaceable batteries once they become more widely available, we can expect manufacturers to start offering it in other markets as well.

One of the most frustrating things about HN is that people seem so unaware of how idiosyncratic their preferences are. If you stood on the street corner and asked every passerby what they would change about their phone, I think you would be there all day before someone said "I wish I could replace the battery".

It's okay to have idiosyncratic preferences (I certainly do), but people should recognize that this law will make phones _worse_ for most people, because this law will force phone manufacturers to compromise the things that most people want in order to provide something that most people don't want.

I suppose someone will say that this law is necessary for environmental reasons, regardless of people's preferences. But that's nonsense, because the law doesn't actually require people to replace batteries rather than replacing their phone, and by the time batteries wear out, most people are going to want a new a phone. At the very least we'd need to see some data that shows that most people replace batteries when it is possible to do so.

I bought a north face backpack for college in 1998. It cost $60. It was an extravagant expense for me at the time and I felt horrible about it for weeks.

That backpack is currently at college with my son, who used it all through high school as well. It is by far the oldest and most durable daily-use object I’ve ever owned.

Communist regimes, especially the USSR, had nearly unlimited power to impose exactly the policies that supposedly would help.

Open societies, in contrast, must balance many competing interests and voting factions, meaning that free market supporters have limited power to enact their preferred policies, meaning they rarely can be implemented in a “pure” form.

It has never been the case that publishing a work entitles you to a share of all profits that are downstream of your work. Copyright law protects your ability to receive profits that result from the distribution of the work itself, but that's quite limited.

If you publish a cookbook, you should get a portion of the sales of the cookbook itself, and no one should be allowed to distribute copies of it for free to undermine your sales.

What you don't get is a portion of the revenues of restaurants that use your recipes!

This comment defies common usage and accounting practices.

When people say “selling at a loss” they mean negative unit economics. No one ever means this much more expansive definition you’ve invented.

They don’t allow unlimited “extraction” of wealth. It is inherently limited by the need for people to take the other side of a trade.

Importantly, people who either thought they had better information (and were sadly wrong) or people who were simply gambling. It’s not like prediction markets are taking money from orphanages.

I’m simply refuting the claim that when nasa launches a mission, they “know it will work”. They certainly do not.

NASA has killed 19 astronauts. SpaceX: 0

But McDonalds can't pay people $1 an hour because no one is willing to work for that little, regardless of how they classify them.