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jsrozner

667 karma · joined January 14, 2014

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jsrozner··on How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
The issue is simply that the posted article begins with a review of recent earnings/ revenues, but fails to discuss that a substantial part of those revenues are investment markups.

Whether it matters we don’t know yet, but it’s a fact worth noting. A better article might have tried to argue why it doesn’t matter

jsrozner··on How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
Though the bubble has not popped, I don't see the following discussed in the post: Zitron would probably point out (as have others) that many of the hyperscalers are booking valuation increases in Anthropic, OpenAI as "Other Income", which is substantially increasing their reported revenue and earnings. It's roughly:

- Hyperscalers like Goog, Meta, Msft invest cash in Anthropic, OpenAI, in exchange for equity

- The ongoing investment actually boosts the valuations in the Anthr/OpenAI (new raises are done at higher valuations), so the valuation of the Hyperscaler's existing investments in Anthr/OpenAI increases, which gets recorded as Other Income in quarterly earnings

- Much of that invested cash will itself come back (circularly) to the hyperscalers as revenue since Anthropic and OpenAI spend a lot of money via datacenters etc.

On Other Income phenomenon, see for example, https://www.ft.com/content/be97df0a-76b1-4cb0-9ba4-d1117d8d1...

Also, there's apparently lots of off-balance sheet debt. For example https://www.ft.com/content/a0a07cce-6d19-4b1e-a73b-9855a06ba...

jsrozner··on MIT's Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training
What human writes, "This is not a moment for patches and duct tape."

Is that AI or just horribly clichéd writing?

jsrozner··on Show HN: My Claude quota ran out in 10 minutes, so I made a tool to find out why
Hi Claude, please build a tool for analyzing Claude token usage and then deploy it to github.

If you're going to fully vibe code a repo, maybe we should get the build artifacts (i.e., the claude session).

jsrozner··on Thomson Reuters Launches Its Own Frontier Model
I don't see why you couldn't see improvements in self-hosted or hosting-as-a-service model throughput? Basically API-style support for a company's internal LLM system. Why not? Or secure infra offered by AWS to self-host your own models that get served to the company just like any other company internal service can be hosted on AWS or similar?

It won't match Anthropic or OpenAI, but it could be economic?

jsrozner··on It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use
In times of substantial technological change, laws tend to lag substantially behind what is actually needed.

And in times of substantial inequality, they lag yet further.

jsrozner··on Being ambitious and being a dad
First definition of ambition in merriam webster is "an ardent desire for rank, fame, or power." Ambition is basically definitionally antisocial.

A desire to accumulate power is tantamount to a desire to accumulate wealth. Most ways to wealth these days involve finding ways to consume more of the world's resources or siphon resources to yourself.

Consider refining word choice. (Though if your notion of ambition corresponds to building a sillycon valley startup, then 'ambition' is probably the right word.) I don't mean that nothing good ever comes of technology; I mean that VC-funded startup tech is mostly done in the pursuit of money, damn any social consequences.

jsrozner··on Meta Files Patent for Facial Recognition, Automatic Recording of People
This is the inevitable result of wealth concentration. The wealthy will spend their money buying up whatever resources they want. Today, most things are for sale, and they're all fungible. Solving this problem in any durable fashion requires not having billionaires.

There will almost always exist loopholes in any scheme. Having wealth effectively buys you new loopholes. It's a (non)virtuous cycle. We need to tie tax to wealth level and be done with it.

jsrozner··on Meta Files Patent for Facial Recognition, Automatic Recording of People
Is the misspelling of "reel" -> "real" in the first sentence a sign that this was written by a human or a trick to make me think it was written by a human? I think it is the former.
jsrozner··on Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit
Most laws are designed to accomplish specific objectives. For example, there might be laws about whether you can collect certain kinds of data, for the sake of privacy or protecting some attribute. As technology improves, however, it may become possible to collect different kinds of data (that are not regulated to not be collected) and still recover the original attribute.

For example, 20 years ago, few people would have imagined that you could build a fingerprint of a person from all their behaviors on the internet. You didn't need to regulate away certain kinds of data collection to prevent such fingerprinting because it wasn't possible. With ML and AI, it has become possible.

My point is that as technology improves, "de-identification" takes on new meaning. Whatever de-identification was 20 years ago is not what de-identification is today. And whatever de-identification was used here is probably insufficient to guarantee that customers can't be identified.

We need new regulations and we need them yesterday.

jsrozner··on Universal Health Coverage Could Save $1T and 114k Lives a Year, Yale Study
For the most part, any time one person in the economy saves money, another person loses money. So, what about all the insurance company, private equity, and hospital system profits that would be eroded by a system that better serves individual humans?

/sarc

jsrozner··on Planes With Same Call Sign at PHX – one departing, one arriving
Sure the same flight number can sometimes be used on distinct flights (especially when one plane completes multiple segments successively), but the flights should generally not be operating simultaneously, and definitely not in the same local airspace. Some nice comments here: https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1voj922/2_planes_...

Buses each have individual identifiers, even if they are tied to the same route.

jsrozner··on Planes With Same Call Sign at PHX – one departing, one arriving
This seems decidedly like something AA's flight database should catch and prevent. Has AA been vibe coding or is this just an edge case that had never been tested before?
jsrozner··on Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?
The funny thing about imprecision (e.g., in poetry) is that it allows for varying downstream interpretations. I wonder if there's some pressure to use "poetic" language so that the model does not overly commit itself to something.

Sales and corporate speak are like this: sycophantic language that seems plausible, ostensibly sounds good, but commits you to nothing.

jsrozner··on Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?
You can imagine that as people get used to working with Claude, they defer to its judgement. So the people choosing which RL path is better may say "yes, Claude, that was a good refactor!" because it did something hard that it may have been able to superficially justify. Actually the change was unnecessary and complicating.

The Claude trainers, as they themselves adapt to Claude's output, are collapsing in their own distribution, so even "new" from-human data is already contaminated.

jsrozner··on Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?
I agree, and yet it is reasonable to ask if these notions of "context" (sorry!) - namely feelings, external world, body, senses, etc - are somehow distinct from an LLM's notions of context. Today they certainly capture different things, but given the right representations, why couldn't these human notions also be captured as "context"?

The idea of memory does not seem to resolve this: if you allow the machine to "compact" its context, then you've given it a system which is analogous to our own evolving state. (Though this is undoubtedly still less expressive and meaningful than the one we have evolved as humans.)

One idea I've wondered about is our human capacity to induce subsequent mental states: I can effectively decide how I want to feel and take actions to create that feeling. It's not clear whether models exhibit any degree of privileged introspection into their own states. Is this important? I don't know. (Non)determinism also does not seem to resolve it; it's my understanding that there are plenty of philosophers and researchers who think that human behavior is deterministic, or that the question of determinism does not matter.

jsrozner··on I requested a copy of my data from McDonald’s loyalty program
"She says a more beneficial approach for consumers would be highly detailed disclosures during the sign-up process that lay out what’s going to be stored in your 'permanent record' and how that data will be used to make specific inferences about you."

No. You should never have to try to figure out what companies are collecting or how they are using it. They should not ever be allowed to aggregate data at the individual level. And if aggregate data ever becomes fine-grained enough to fingerprint individuals, then regulation should force coarser graining. (This would mean that better machine learning systems would result in companies being able to collect less data.) We should have forced audits of every consumer company.

jsrozner··on Flock wanted to tap dashcams in rideshare vechicles to add to surveillance data
Highly anti social people (flock executives, mark zuckerberg, other surveillance capitalists, etc.) should simply be expelled from society to a separate island to fight each other for scarce resources.
jsrozner··on Honey, I shrunk the embeddings: Matryoshka vs. PCA
Yeah...so I'm having difficulty conceptualizing your result. If you were publishing this I feel like it would be an important distinction to make.

Are the goals different, or should the original paper have done something more similar to your benchmark? Or something else?

jsrozner··on Honey, I shrunk the embeddings: Matryoshka vs. PCA
The original MRL paper (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2205.13147) reported an SVD baseline, which showed comparable performance (Table 1, top-1 accuracy) at d>=256, but much degraded performance at lower dims (d \in {8,32,64}). (Though Table 2, nearest-neighbor accuracy, doesn't show degradation until d <= 16.)

In your conclusion, you report that PCA won on most dimensions. Did you investigate why you found that PCA outperforms MRL when the original paper found that their SVD baseline did not?

jsrozner··on Denmark Requires Oral Defenses for Students' Written Work to Counter AI Cheating
As a thought experiment: In-person testing or oral defense approaches work until we get implants. If people have implants, what then? Demand that the implant be turned off? Demand that the implant's data connection be turned off? In the latter case, the person with more storage or a better local model wins.

In the long run, in the AGI world, if everyone has implants, then everyone is roughly equal because computer-aided computation will be better than what any individual can do. Those without implants are screwed.

(I don't want an implant; nor do I want others to have implants.)

jsrozner··on I flagged two research papers for fake authors and both were accepted as orals
I'm sympathetic to the idea: we should have an open, publicly queryable citation graph. Google scholar could very easily offer this at marginal cost near zero, but they won't.
jsrozner··on I flagged two research papers for fake authors and both were accepted as orals
Idk if we're automating humans out of the publishing loop as much as rapidly automating the production of crap. I had a very similar experience reviewing for EMNLP recently.

We are nowhere near AI being able to judge the quality of research (in fact, one might reasonably state that even most humans can't really judge the quality of research). Most things in society are not like math: we can't automate (via verification) our way out of noise overwhelming the signal.

Folks are willing to entirely abuse the public resource that is faithful, honest reviewing. (This is unsurprising; the abuse of the commons / public resources has been rising for a long time). There isn't a good solution other than something akin to draconian social scoring to limit access to the reviewing system.

jsrozner··on A.I. companies are recruiting electricians and carpenters by the thousands
Things come to be only when the people with MONEY demand them. If you have no money your demand doesn't exist. A society this unequal serves only the rich (whether that's people or companies).
jsrozner··on A.I. companies are recruiting electricians and carpenters by the thousands
i don't understand why this was downvoted
jsrozner··on Kill The Cookie Banner
Hypocrisy is the name of the game in SillyCon valley. Push YouTube autoplay slop on kids globally, but no ipads for children of the tech elite. Computer-based instruction for public schools, but 2:1 teacher:student ratios in the local private grade schools that cost as much as an Ivy League University. Etcetera.
jsrozner··on Kill The Cookie Banner
Does this still work on new chrome versions?
jsrozner··on Kill The Cookie Banner
"I like being manipulated by people who want to extract maximal value from me"
jsrozner··on Kill The Cookie Banner
Cookie banners are just a kind of ad. If you're at the site, the demand you have for the content on the site is probably close to inelastic (especially on services websites). The site exploits its effective monopoly on the content to raise prices to the user (in this case your time, attention, and experience).

There is ZERO cost to abusing the user over, and over, and over again by asking for permission to track them.

We shouldn't have the cookie banners at all because NO company should be able to do anything with tracking data. Just ban the use of user data by companies and most of SillyCon Valley's garbage behaviors are fixed.

Similarly, I should never get "terms of service updates" from digital companies because there should be no changes that they can make. You can provide the obvious service that you're providing; you can't aggregate my data for any purpose other than directly serving me; you can't aggregate my data with that of other users; if you retain my data for any other purpose, the government should take percentages of your revenue. I shouldn't have to wade through the BS that the mercenary corporate lawyers cook up to extract value from me.

jsrozner··on Firefox Containers Preview
This. No cookies should be cross-site visible, ever, unless I explicitly choose for them to be.
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