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meroes

1,319 karma · joined November 21, 2018

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meroes··on Why your local LLM feels dumber than it is
It is specialization at scale.

It’s paying hundreds of thousands of RLHF’ers from every subject and through some dystopian income stream.

It’s decent money don’t get me wrong, but you aren’t paid at if a task isn’t completed in time for example.

meroes··on AI Isn't Outthinking Mathematicians. It's Out-Remembering Them
Takes the rogue having access to the $$$$ models though.
meroes··on Intelligence Is Not the Main Bottleneck
The perfectly rational actor myth in economics will have Mary doing all sorts of things she doesn’t actually do. Mary just really likes peaches and the whole construct of rational actors is a fictional superstructure. Same with this idea of intelligence levering all our behavior.

Maybe Mary keeps intelligently finding new ways to find scarce peaches, but her ultimate benefit is eating the peach. It’s that human desire if anything.

meroes··on Intelligence Is Not the Main Bottleneck
It’s the same rehashed idea of the perfectly rational actor in economics.
meroes··on Taylor Farms has rewritten its cyclospora statement four times in sixteen days
All I know is the Taylor Farms Creamy Ranch from Costco gave me the worst stomach aches for 4 days and horrible gas
meroes··on Exercise intensity influences body composition in healthy older adults (2025)
Are you sure you’re talking about fat and not total calories? The whole premise about Zone 2 running vs Zones 3/4 is you really do burn more grams of fat at the lower Zone per minute.

https://cannonbol.com/blog/articles/Achten_%282004%29.pdf?ut...

meroes··on Exercise intensity influences body composition in healthy older adults (2025)
Longer slower running burns more fat because your body isn’t forced to use as much glycogen as faster paced running.

I guess the answer for optimizing time is to get a home treadmill if removing the commute to a trail/track will make the timing work.

meroes··on Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?
My house and street and surrounding streets still aren’t on Google Maps after a month post closing (new development). It’s on Apple Maps and Uber; Amazon and FedEx deliver.

Google Maps feels like I’m constantly in an A B test for how bad it can be and I’m always getting the bad side. It repeatedly doesn’t update in CarPlay, showing the same miles to destination as I progress.

It doesn’t label streets well either. I try to manually find routes in SF and I have to switch to Apple Maps because not enough streets are labeled no matter how much or little I zoom.

meroes··on Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
Ya and this leads to the point that if the simulation is so complex, which I take to mean is so like the real thing, then the near-perfect simulation and the actual thing must be highly similar physically.

And digital circuits are not physically similar to biological brains yet. So we shouldn’t conclude they have the similar consciousness property.

meroes··on Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
That’s like saying simulating a supernova and a supernova are both extremely hot.
meroes··on Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
Well if you go that route, a computer simulating digestion has almost no physical features in common with actual digestion of a stomach. The same holds for consciousness and brains and computers. Them saying it’s just instructions is shorthand for pointing out the physical differences of brains and computers.

It’s all just particles, but the higher level differences are vast, and only brains are implicated for first person perspectives via science.

meroes··on Hormuz crisis side effect: a sharp rise in container shipping rates
Anyone tried to buy paint recently?

$611 for 2x 5 gallon buckets just to do my garage.

meroes··on A case against Boolean logic
“The law of non contradiction exists”. Even Aristotle couldn’t “prove it” exists yet logic uses it all the time. I hardly think logic is about what exists but rather a tool, born out of interlocution.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-noncontradictio...

meroes··on Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent
Yes state schools are. That’s why it’s so competitive as well. $4-$6k at the state school vs $50K+ at private.

There’s one state school for my program within 100 miles of me (physical therapy assistant)

And a four year program is still 2 extra years of tuition even at the subsidized amount, and most would work fewer hours if at all because they need high GPAs.

meroes··on Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent
Rad tech is like $130k+ per year in the Bay Area. And if you specialize even more. I know one in a hospital in Marin making $150k+.

That much pay for a 2 year program is very hard to beat.

meroes··on Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent
One reason is rad tech and similar are all over Tik Tok.

Another reason is these people know how to grind, but can’t afford a 4 year program.

meroes··on Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent
Egalitarian?

Let me explain healthcare right now.

To get into a radiation tech program, there are 260 applicants, almost all with all As, for 20 slots at my local community college.

Maybe in the very first instant you’d think it’s merit based. But, EVERYONE is playing the game. Getting homework and tests from friends who already took the class, taking classes at several different schools to get the easier teachers, paying multiple times the tuition cost on tutors and other study aides (eg $2k+ for all the anatomy models), every demographic is using paid ChatGPT. We all know which teachers to take. We spend much of class strategizing like this.

Every single student. It’s just another game to play or you lose.

meroes··on For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day
Interesting that boring is the salient factor.
meroes··on Spotify adds 'Verified' badges to distinguish human artists from AI
Which generations? Even the most low tech older Millenials are using AI more and more.
meroes··on Microsoft and OpenAI end their exclusive and revenue-sharing deal
There’s 3 main facets behind AGI pushers

1) True believers 2) Hype 3) A way to wash blatant copyright infringement

True believers are scary and can be taken advantage of. I played DOTA from 2005 on and beating pros is not enough for AGI belief. I get that the learning is more indirect than a deterministic decision tree, but the scaling limitations and gaps in types of knowledge that are ingestible makes AGI a pipe dream for my lifetime.

meroes··on Can you stop beans from making you gassy?
I don't know if you can have it all, bacteria wise.
meroes··on I Cancelled Claude: Token Issues, Declining Quality, and Poor Support
This is how I feel with AI math proofs. I’m not sure where they’re at now, but a year ago it took so much more time to check if an LLM proof was technically correct even if hard to understand, compared to a well structured human proof.

Maybe it was Timothy Gowers who commented on this.

Lots of human proofs have the unfortunate “creative leap” that isn’t fully explained but with some detectable subtlety. LLMs end up making large leaps too, but too often the subtle ways mathematicians think and communicate is lost, and so the proof becomes so much more laborious to check.

Like you don’t always see how a mathematician came up with some move or object to “try”, and to an LLM it appears random large creative leaps are the way to write proofs.

meroes··on College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work
No projects, no labs, no teamwork, no papers?

What a narrow set of skills to send into your economy.

meroes··on Landmark ancient-genome study shows surprise acceleration of human evolution
Dogs?
meroes··on The AI revolution in math has arrived
I guess I just don’t have the experience or optimism that a harness around an LLM, which can’t make the first, bare deduction on its own, is a good use of compute.

I got out of RLHF, including games and puzzles, before agents took off and maybe I have outdated info. But we estimated RLHF’ing a single hard full sized sudoku was ~25 hours worth of work.

meroes··on The AI revolution in math has arrived
Grammar seems like you’re talking about LLMs specifically. Well, isn’t Sudoku just math? LLMs suck at Sudoku last I checked. When told not to code a solver, its very first deduction was wrong.
meroes··on LinkedIn Is Illegally Searching Your Computer
It’s worse than that. My mom wants to see ads. I thought I was doing her a favor adding her to my pihole but she really likes ads, especially Facebook ads.
meroes··on Inside Nepal's Fake Rescue Racket
Ya that was a very serious situation for you. I knew when my dad was barely able to stand but insisted we hike the 1000ft back up to then get back down it was also serious. But when we got home I read how deadly altitude sickness is.
meroes··on DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
Ya I mean gfx card was pretty bad during Covid.

Discord groups that had real-time line counts and pictures of the line at most best buys across the country (US).

The only way I got one was overpaying and a lottery system that bundled it with other hardware because they knew everyone would still buy it. It was impossible to buy online normally as you needed some kind of automated way to buy it before stock zeroed the minute it was posted.

You could pay a scalper for a gfx card, but stores had none. Now, stores have RAM at least.

meroes··on In math, rigor is vital, but are digitized proofs taking it too far?
Because if rigor is all we cared about I’d think we’d spend more time on non-classical math.
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