rhelz

Have you ever asked it to?

It is almost a cliche' that New Yorker's hate their Mayors. I was there for the 3 which were previous to Mamdani, and everybody hated them.

I thought that Mamdani would set back the cause of Democratic Socialism by 100 years, because surely, after 2 weeks, everybody would just start hating him and the mainstream of both parties could point to him as an obvious warning.

But he's the most popular politician in the country. That doesn't happen by good P.R. It happens when that pothole which has been there for 3 mayors suddenly gets fixed.

There is only a finite number of times you can see:

1. A pothole get fixed Mamdani has repaired over 200,000 of them.

2. Your landlord finally repairs that leaky roof. Mamdani has had landlords do $34 million worth of repairs and upkeep they were legally obliged to do.

3. Or Door Dash finally paid you for those hours you worked....

...yeah, that only happens a finite number of times before you ask yourself? Why didn't any of the other mayors do that? What were the other mayers doing with that 8.5% income tax I pay to live in this city?

And from there it's just a short step to asking "why has government taken all my money in taxes and given me nothing in return?"

It's not P.R. man. It is an existential threat to the mainstream politicians.

That's because we don't really have a left, not since Ronald Reagan. Clinton was more conservative than Nixon, and Obama was more conservative than Clinton.

Don't cry---run for office and do as great a job as Mamdani is doing, or find a Georgist who can and support them. Its pretty clear that people are open to giving alternatives a chance to show they can do better.

Turing would be so proud.

Not saying that it isn't useful. It's just not science.

Thanks. Nobody ever admits when they are wrong on the internet, so I'm trying to be the change I want to see.

W.R.T. the grand historical tradition, etc, note that the great majority of people who practiced that were, like Plato, independently wealthy and otherwise idle. Those who didn't need any money.

That's why we give Judges, teachers, and Professors tenure, a guaranteed job for life. People are more likely to be fair judges of other people's performance when they don't need the money.

So I guess if you want a non-conservative fix, it would be universal guaranteed minimum income. Something we already have, BTW, but you have to be over 62 to get it.

We've tried to open it up to more than just the 1%, but we didn't really go all the way. It is really unreasonable to expect somebody who isn't independently wealthy to do free work. It is a lot of work to properly review a paper, and reproducing the results is something you simply can't do at all if you are supposed to already be working 70 hours a week generating your own research.

Of course a researcher paying reviewers would be a disastrous idea. But if the grant-awarding body would hire 3rd parties to validate that their money was actually well spent, I think it would be a win/win.

Thanks for the references on where paying reviewers has already been tried. I'd like to see others reproduce their success :-)

Agreed. There are multiple senses for "simple" and on of those senses is "small". It is actually a very useful sense too, as Solomonov/Levin/Kolmogorov/Chaitin-style inductive reasoning has shown.

And it is important not to just make snappy quips by equivocating.

If somebody finds patterns in them, that means they can be improved by reducing the patterns. Patterns and symmetry are forms of redundancy.

The less memory the weights take to meet a level of competency, the more random, and therefore patternless and inscrutable they will be.

Thanks for this reply, your points are well taken and it really got me to think about this stuff.

I suppose you could view arxiv as being a way to let more people do a peer review on the papers, i.e. as one component of a more open and transparent peer review process. As such, it is certainly a welcome alternative to what the snootier journal reviews do, which is to put off reading your paper for a year, and then spend about 50 seconds looking for a reason to say "no".

But I had a narrow point to make when I said that arxiv is a vanity press: just because something is on there doesn't guarantee that it is correct, or even useful. It is a vanity press in the sense that it will publish pretty much anything--modulo obscenity and porn laws, and apparently also some sanity checking by arxiv moderators--but so does a vanity press for print books.

To your point of predatory journals, power-broker reviewers and such, yes, I have done my fair share of suffering from them. It slows down good research and passes through bad research. The system is badly in need of reform, and arxiv gives a much needed alternative.

But really, the problem is (as one of my profs said) that science is totally run on volunteer, unpaid labor. Peer reviewers are very busy, get paid nothing, it is mostly a distraction. This leads them to look for other ways of being compensated--e.g. the can try to be a power broker, a feared authority, etc.

The real solution would be to actually pay peer reviewers and fund them so they can actually reproduce the results. Here's how it could work: when a researcher submits a grant proposal, they budget for enough money to fund the research and enough money to peer review and reproduce it. If the research isn't good enough to warrant an attempt to validate it, then it isn't worth doing in the first place.

What is your definition of a vanity press? Mine is that it will publish anything from anybody.

Sure, there's lots of good stuff on there. But there's lots which is not good. Publishing there is not doing science. Science requires peer review.

Its a wonderful resource, but when overworked journalists (or worse, AI) just picks up a paper from there and writes a breathless article on how cool this new idea is, it is misleading to the general public.

Worse, it can get the general public (and from the comments here, even people working in the field) to forget what science is and why arXiv is not a scientific journal.

If the weights arn't compressed, then a smaller set of weights would perform as well. Sure, you can always induce as much symmetry and patterns as you want by bloating the data set, but that hardly gives us insight into how a set of weights which is "as full as it can be" of information.

I'm not claiming any arbitrary set of weights is a minimal representation. But typically, if people could achieve the same quality of results with a smaller set of weights, or weights which have been quantized to lower bit representations, etc, they would have published the smaller one instead.

// why limit your article's impact //

Because...science? It's not science until it passes peer review.

I'm not advocating that everybody stops posting to arXiv, and I'm not saying you can't find good stuff there. I'm just saying, it's a vanity press, there is absolutely no guarantee of the paper's quality.

And being published by a famous professor from a prestigious university is also no guarantee. If we've learned anything from the non-reproducibility crisis, it is that a paper's origin story is no guarantee.

You are not wrong. But this has by no means proven its up to the standard of being publishable in a machine learning journal. Its on arXiv.org, which, lets face it, at the end of the day is a vanity press.

Cyberphrenology. In any two random graphs, you'll find an isomorphic graph which is can be up to log of the size of the graphs.

And if the LLM has been trained up to the limit of what data it can hold, it is going to be random. Proof below if it isn't obvious.

The entire effort of all people who are trying to understand how LLMs work, how they represent their data, its all bound to fail.

Proof: a LLM is a very good approximation of the Solomonov/Levin/Kolmogorov universal probability function on tokens. As such, it will be random--pure white noise--because if you found any patterns in there, you could exploit the regularity and come up with a smaller set of weights for the same LLM.

There are no patterns there to be found. They have all been factored out by training the neural net until it couldn't learn any more.

For those of you who are under the age of 25, "Nirvana" refers not to an enlightened state, but a popular rock band who had their heyday almost 40 years ago.

What am I missing here? Seems like an AI detection program would be as useful as a program which could tell whether John Henry used a sledge hammer or a steam hammer to lay a section of track.

Or whether your CPA did your taxes using Excell or just a big piece of graph paper and counting on his fingers.

What we should be doing is making tools which can tell when an AI is hallucinating, or the output doesn't really solve the problem the user wants to solve.

They most certainly are too stupid. This is a true story. In 1995, a guy named McArther Wheeler was flabbergasted when police picked him up for robbing a bank. He said "But I put the lemon juice on my face!!" He figured that since Lemon juice was used for invisible ink, putting it on his face would make him invisible.

So far, just a story about a dumb guy--but here the story take an epistemologically terrifying turn: He actually did an experiment to prove that it would work. He put Lemon juice on his face, went to the bathroom, and took a selfie. (Since this was 1995, he took a selfie with a polaroid camera.) When he looked at the picture, it just showed a blank mirror.

He was too dumb to know that he had not pointed the camera at the right place.

This is how the anti-vaxers, the anti-covid-ppe crowd are. It's not like they want to ignore the latest results of cutting edge science. It's not even like they don't want to do "research" on the internet. It's that they simply do not know how to tell what is and what is not genuine experimental results. They don't know when they are "hallucinating."

This is not the world that the movie "Idiocracy" presents us with. In idiocracy, everybody is even worse than old McArther Wheeler was. They don't even bother to do any research. Anything they believe is just self-evidently true to them.

(If you really want to freak yourself out, ask yourself how you would be able to tell whether or not you were fooling yourself just as McArther Wheeler did. If you are anti vax or anti Covid PPE, you really should ask yourself that question.)

Not just Claude. For me, anyways, google ai and chatgpt swing from vapid to genius on a daily basis. These companies are obviously searching for some kind of sustainable business model, and trying to get us to upgrade to higher paid tiers.

Honestly, I don't know why they bother charging. Surely they are gathering more information about what people want to do and want to buy than search engines ever possibly could.

Do you want to open a "hello kitty" theme park in wyoming? People are voluntarily telling AIs every day whether that would be a valid business for not. Selling that kind of aggregated information -- heck, giving venture capital to startups they know will succeed--is surely far more profitable than nickel and diming us.

There is one difference, and it is a very telling difference. In Idiocracy, people openly scorned smart people. They made no pretense of using any kind of logic or scientific method.

What we have now is different. People stopped vaccinating their kids because they actually believed the scientific evidence proved vaccines were dangerous. They can point to endless documents which have the overt form of being an actual research paper, written by people who are actually Ph.D.s from good universities.

You can go online and find endless meta-analysis, written by and endless number of untenured professors, that, say, Masking and social distancing didn't help stop the spread of Covid. Because these endless number of untenured professors need to land research grants and write papers. Sure, a face mask is useless against an airborne disease. Go ahead and sneeze on the salad bar.

If this were really like idiocracy, nobody would be funding fake research papers, bribing professors, etc. They would just make fun of anybody who was smarter than they were, because they sounded "effeminate."

I don't know which style of stupid is worse, but it is a pretty big difference.

What's the error rate for humans?

// America simply is no longer a democracy or representative democracy. //

Well, that's the kicker. We actually did vote him in. TWICE. It would be great if we could blame some cabal or coup or something. It would get us off the hook.

But the sad fact is that Trump--after sending cop-killing goons to the capital to try to steel the last election--we voted him in by a margin of 53%.

We have no one to blame but ourselves.

Gold is a useful element, for sure, but there's no where's near enough of it to serve as a reserve currency. E.G. the U.S. reserves are worth about $1.2 trillion (changes each day, of course). Compare that to a national economy which has a GDP of over $30 trillion.

All these old gold bugs just can't wrap their heads around what exponential growth really looks like. But we can grow our productive capacity far, far faster than we can grow the supply of gold.

I'm old enough to remember when people said that the debt Ronald Reagan racked up would never be repaid. Which means I also am old enough to remember Clinton turning record deficits into record surpluses.

I remember when the U.S. Treasury stopped issuing 30 year bonds---no deficit, no need to borrow!! Boy did that scare the bejezuz out of the financial industry though. I read an op-ed in the Wall Street journal about how are we ever going to offer 30 year mortgages if the banks can't buy 30 year treasury bonds?

Then the supreme court handed the 2000 election to George Bush, and the financial industry was happy again, because record surpluses turned into record deficits again. The banks still lent money to homebuyers--in fact, so many people took out mortgages that.....

The answer is so simple, everybody know it: spend less than you earn, borrow only for things which will pay you back. We can start doing that this afternoon, if we wanted to.

The federal government is actually quite efficient in what it does. For example, the overhead for Social Security is between 0.5% and 1%. I.E, less than the mutual funds in my 401k charge per yeah for "administrative fees."

When people talk about government waste, what they really are talking about is things the government does which they don't approve of. E.g. ICE--is that wasteful spending? Depends upon whether you like ICE or not. Aide to Israel? Same stuff.

That's why DOGE got nowhere. There is no mythical mammoth waste, fraud, and abuse in the government.

How embarrassing is it to welcome foreign dignitaries to a building which has been partially torn down? I man, if he actually had replaced it with a ballroom, that would be different.

But that's not what we get from Trump. He can't even maintain a reflecting pool--we're not going to get a ballroom.

No, he's going to leave the White house much worse than he found it. Which is his style.

By the time Trump leaves office, the whole federal government will be completely trashed, up to and including the East Wing of the White House being torn down to a hole in the ground.

I've never felt so alienated from the leaders of my industry, from my politicians, and from my fellow citizens. Ya'll should have known better. It is the information age, all ignorance is willful ignorance.

AI skeptics hate him. Here's how he doubled his productivity using AI with one simple trick.

You have to stop thinking like an employee or a worker bee, and start thinking like a boss.

Guess what, the work you give your boss isn't 100% gold either. And sometimes you are preoccupied, or tired, so what you deliver isn't the best of all possible deliverables. Sometimes you hallucinate, i.e. you are dead wrong when you think you are dead right.

This is the job of a boss: take fallible employees and turn what they produce into something actually valuable. The boss lets the grunts do the grunt work, and then they combine the output together, and do the due diligence, etc etc.

It's an entirely new skillset. But learning the new skillset isn't the real blocker--the real blocker is that you've got to stop thinking like a grunt and start thinking like an executive.

WHAT is it that you really want to do? Frame that question as clearly and as concretely as you can. Then farm out thee work to human or AI grunts, and be prepared to do your due diligence on the result.

The general entshitification this article mentions is very real. However, if AI isn't making you 2-3x more productive than you were, you are doing it wrong.