enriquepablo

LLMs tell you one thing and not its negation, this choice is semantic. "just language in absence of any context or reference" is a set that includes every valid text. The usefulness of LLMs is their ability to mostly respect whatever semantics you establish in the prompt in their choice of output.

The Chomsky hierarchy is a classification of grammars. So it's about Syntax.

GPT is purely about semantics, about truth. To the extent that I think it can be said to be fundamentally informal in its dedication to truth, since it can easily be prompted to produce syntactically incorrect output - wrt the syntax of whatever language whose semantics determine the truth GPT is asked to reflect.

So I think this is a categorically incorrect question.

I mean, what is the fundamental syntax of the output of an LLM? It would have to be that any sequence of utf8 chars is valid.

The article shows one, the kind of double torus - though I do not understand how neighbourhoods that intersect the line of contact between the 2 "tubes" can be mapped to R².

Thanks for reading :)

"There is a true SENTENCE". Sentence, not sentience.

Designing a conscious machine

The idea here is not to understand why some combinatorial problems are hard and others easy, but rather to just be able to distinguish between them. So, instead of understanding why the measure functions structure the solution spaces the way they do, treating them as black boxes and examining the structure they provide to the solution space.

An attempt at understanding the difference that makes the sorting problem (the problem solved by sorting algorithms), but not the travelling salesman problem, efficiently solvable, looking at the topologies of their solution spaces.

But the cosmic microwave background refers to one single event, that has echoes everywhere, right? If I understand correctly, you don't need to synchronize anything to have echoes everywhere.

As far as I understand (I'm not a physicist), to be able to say that the universe is isotropic across space, you need a point of view that just doesn't exist. You cannot speak about an absolute synchronicity among events happening in locations scattered among an arbitrary subset of the set of all visible galaxies, and without that, you cannot abstract time out of the picture, which you'd need to do to speak about isotropicity across space.

I don't think that, in this regard, you can say much more than "the universe is not isotropic across space-time".

How does Yode compare with tree-sitter?

> Nuanced and rigorous history requires careful and objective study to truly understand.

Have you read https://acoup.blog/?

Another reader above (@iainctduncan) said:

> Years ago he was a springboard for me to read further on various topics, each time leading me to conclude he doesn't give a shit about presenting the truth if it gets in the way of his story. :(

If everyone were like her or him, it would be fine to write sloppyly and engagingly about science and history posing as if you were a real authority. But that doesnt seem to be the case (this is HN).

With uindex, you provide a Parsing Expression Grammar (PEG) [1], and you obtain a database that can hold, as data, unicode strings structured according to the top production of the provided PEG. You can then query the db for tokens corresponding to any of the (sub-) productions in the grammar.

This is a work in progress; for example, at the moment, dbs exist only in memory. In my opinion it shows promise, since as I show in the linked README, it performs in the league of in-memory SQLite.

Do you think it is worth investing more effort on this?

1.- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsing_expression_grammar

I would say that you are mixing up "parsing" and "calendaring (or something of the sort)". As far as I understand parsing is syntactic analysis, i.e. going from a linear structure to a more complex structure (usually a tree); it should not add to the tree anything that was not in the linear structure. It shouldn't consider a semantic context (such as the current date) to produce an ast.

At the beginning of "multiverse.html" you say "In the beginning of the 19th century..."

I think you mean 20th.

I think that there is a distinction that is interesting to make here: human made systems vs natural systems. Human made systems have a source of systemic debt that natural systems cannot have, due to human errors. In the natural systems, "function" comes after "form" (we don't believe in natural teleology) whereas in human technology "function" comes before "form", and thus the "form" may be faulty.

I have always understood technical debt as the systemic debt derived from human error, but it is nice to see how it is indistinguishable from the systemic debt "naturally" acquired when the environment changes (and I think of civilizations as natural rather than human made systems).

> then the burden of proof is on you to show that lying is in effect

Don't say on "me", I was just offering a plausible side. But I agree it is a difficult question. There is the point you make, but there is also the point made by asking "cui bono".

> As a result, it's worth cautioning people that just because a fact of foreign policy efforts was true 100 years ago does not mean that it is true today.

Perhaps we might say something contrarian to this: if it was something true 100 years ago, the burden of proof is on the side of proving it is no longer so. And I think you will have a hard time at it.

> For regular people in China, does the addition of Google with some censorship make their life better? ... I think the answer is obvious.

I think the answer is obvious, but in the opposite sense you imply. Google acts as a window into the universe. Not the only one, of course. But if you have a window into the universe that lies to you about the universe (and of course, assuring you that I will tell you everything that is important, and then omitting certain important things, is lying), it is best for you to be without it, and rely on whatever windows you have left.

DNA is an anti-secret in the same way that digital rights management schemes are an anti-secret. DRM schemes only work through legal support; and in my opinion, legally protecting the secrecy of DNA is much more sensible (from a human pow, rather than from an economic growth pow) than legally protecting the secrets behind DRMs. People can be actively harmed, can be discriminated laboraly for example, if their DNA is public, as opposed to being devoid of some imaginary profits.

> Anonymity is weakened if we tie authentication to biometrics.

I think you mean pseudonimity. There should be no authentication in anonimity.

> Something you know (as in password) is always theoretically more secure than something you are (your physical characteristics).

If you authenticate, you can use methods that are more or less secure. If you use a password method, and use a secret as password, it will be more secure than if you use a biometric as password.

But the security of the authentication method will bear no weight on the "pseudonimization" - meaning on the difficulty of linking the authenticated identity with your real, legal identity.

> The password ... is a way of identifying that you are you.

That is not correct. The "system" identifies you by your ID (username - biometrics - whatever). And for the system to ensure that whatever actions you perform on it, are really coming from you, you have to add proof of your identity to the orders for those actions. You use a secret to create that proof of identity. The secret is yours, the identity is the system's (what it uses to identify you).

If you use something you don't treat as a secret (such as your fingerprint) as your proof of identity, you'll be loosing it left and right - you'll be inviting everyone around to impersonate you. Drinking a can of coke and throwing it to the bin would be the same as printing your password in cards and passing them around.

Requests is or has been the most downloaded egg from pypi. If you have used it, you'll know why: it makes dealing with http requests a pure pleasure. Dead easy to remember how to use it, and dead easy to read it. So discouraging this kind of library seems misguided.

I think that you should discriminate between "violence" in Physics and "violence" in Ethics.

>> The anger that motivated the writing of the Cookbook blinded me to the illogical notion that violence can be used to prevent violence.

> The leaders of almost every major revolution eventually reached precisely the opposite conclusion.

> I don't think that has anything to do with something that is inherently illogical.

(I think my editing has preserved the spirit of the letter.) I would say it is deeply illogical. You would have a hard time convincing me that any of those leaders have managed to prevent any amount of violence through the use of violence. I don't see any progress in the erradication of illegal violence, and legal violence is more violent than ever.

The notion is definitelly illogical. What your reasoning shows is that the leaders of almost every major revolution had pride. Pride is inherently illogical.

> To properly mimic this property with yes/no questions, you will have to come up with questions that divide the whole Earth's population equally AT EVERY NEW QUESTION.

Not only that: The first question must divide the population in 2; the second question must divide each of the 2 subsets produced by the first question in 2; and the third has to perfectly divide the 4 subsets produced by the second... And this independently of the order in which you make the questions.

"shantytowns solve the habitation problem of many people more adequately than if the same people had to wait under the bridge for the market to provide beautifully architected villas at affordable prices."

This must be one of the most braindead sentences I have read in a long time. I dare you to count all the fallacies involved.

Brilliant. But this is dangerous stuff in the wrong hands. If the NSA gets hold of it, BANG!, everything is metadata. Even you are coded in many codes many times along any expansion of pi... You can now be considered metadata.

> But the issue with cheap gadgets goes both ways. Chinese factories allow people in India and other 3rd world countries to have a cheap (read: affordable) mobile phone.

And why people in 3rd world countries cannot afford expensive mobile phones? Because corporations have robbed them the value of their labour, or the environment where they live... You just seem to be confortable with the status quo, and making excuses.

> (see: homelessness, hospital costs, correlation with violent crimes, impaired drivers hurting others, etc)

Those are consecuences of being outlawed, not of consuming substances. Blame the prohibition and not the substances. The proof of this is simple: just compare. Compare people drinking coffee today and in 19th century Russia (where it was prohibited). Compare people drinking alcohol today and in early 20th century USA. Compare people using opiates today and in the roman empire...