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scottlawson

494 karma · joined November 7, 2016

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scottlawson··on People aged 80 and over top 10% of Japan's population for first time
They are referring to:

a) the fact that Japan's birthrate is below the number needed to sustain the current population

b) the fact that Japan is ethnically homogenous (98.5% ethnically Japanese), and has very limited channels for immigration, meaning that japan, with the policies that exist today, will not be able to significantly mitigate the population decline by accepting immigrants.

Japan takes a very different approach compared to countries like Canada, which is a melting pot of cultures and which has an increasing population largely due to immigration

scottlawson··on (Cold) Lattice Confinement Fusion
Most of the advancements in technology ultimately trace back to materials engineering breakthrough.

Even just 2x or 4x higher energy density batteries would have a tremendous impact on electric aviation and drones, phones, and so many more things.

Sw with super conductors except that would be even more exciting, and we would get a new generation of incredibly sensitive sensors and antennas.

I could go on and on but the main point is like what you said, the materials drive the breakthroughs in innovation if technology (in many cases)

scottlawson··on Railway Oriented Programming
This reminds me of the LabVIEW error model where you form a train out of error signal
scottlawson··on Proposing a struct syntax for Python
How does this avoid name collisions with the built-in standard library module "struct"? Don't you think that's a pretty important consideration?
scottlawson··on The New AI Moats
To say there is a moat or there is no moat is a bit silly because it's not a binary thing "moat or no moat". It's an oversimplification to a point where it obscures what is really happening, which is that some moats are getting smaller, sometikes significantly smaller.

The author correctly points out recent trends where things that were significant moats, like large text and image datasets are now more accessible to individuals.

But to conclude as a main point that therefore data is not a moat anymore is just absurd. Datasets serve different problem domains. We now have accessible datasets for internet text and code, and images from the internet. Talking about whether data is a moat only makes sense with context of what problem domains you are talking about.

Everyone can download the entire text corpus of wikipedia. That's not a moat.

Can everyone download an enormous high quality self driving car dataset, comparable to what Google has constructed from Google maps and many human labelers? Obviously that data is a huge moat.

How about a comprehensive protein dataset? That's something that's gotten much more accessible especially with Alpha Fold, which is great.

But there are still other problem domains where data is a huge moat because collecting the data is super duper expensive and/or requires an expert team of biologists, for example.

To make an analogy, data is like drugs. There are different classes of drugs. Different drugs are used to solve different problems. Some cure you, some harm you, some are well understood and some are not. Some are more accessible than others. But it would be folly to talk about drugs as being good or bad or cheap or expensive without context of problem domains.

scottlawson··on AI is not artificial intelligence
Expert systems are not the same thing as today's AI is. Expert systems are characterized by sequences of pre coded if then rules. Today's AI is very different, largely based on consuming vast amounts or data. I'm not sure if you understand the distinction. You can also make expert systems using "today's AI", but most people well versed in the field would not confuse the concepts.
scottlawson··on PEP 713 – Callable Modules
personally I didn't find the motivation to be very convincing. The workarounds used today to make modules callable don't seem very difficult or problematic, and the use case is very narrow
scottlawson··on Objaverse: Dataset with 800K+ Annotated 3D Objects
Noticed a couple of strange annotations right on the front page. First one was "pony cartoon" which I guess is a pony car in a cartoon style, but it is such a strange label. The other weird one was "airpods max" but the model was for a large pair of studio over the ear headphones. I don't have a lot of confidence for the annotation accuracy.
scottlawson··on The new Bing runs on OpenAI’s GPT-4
They don't use the words "spirit of the policy", that was just me. The policy lists a bunch of things are not allowed. You aren't allowed to generate content that is prohibited, and also not allowed to try to break the safeguards.
scottlawson··on GPT4 and the Multi-Modal, Multi-Model, Multi-Everything Future of AGI
If you think it is always abuse if the use of AI is not explicitly disclosed, then you're going to have to recognize there are many thousands of situations where that view is absurd.

Imagine you and a group of friends decide to develop a game. You make a company and have a team of four people. Your budget is tiny and you can't afford the same resources a huge game company can. You want your new company to be profitable so you use large language models to generate realistic material textures for your 3D models, and to generate a diverse range of intetestimg character backstories and dialogs. This used to require a larger team of developers and content creators but now you can do more with fewer people and ship your game sooner. You make a great game and users love it and it's a financial success.

But oh wait, you didn't explicitly disclose that you use an AI powered tool to generate some art assets and character backstories. Therefore you are just a greedy company that is abusing AI for profit.

That's so ridiculous.

scottlawson··on The new Bing runs on OpenAI’s GPT-4
You don't see anywhere in the policythat they don't allow prompt injections? I have a completely different view from reading their policy. They don't specifically mention words like jailbreak or prompt injection, but it is extremely clear that anything inappropriate or against the spirit of their content policy is not allowed. It's quite the mental gymnastics to think that this wouldn't include prompt injections designed to bypass their content policy safeguards, after all, that's the whole point of jailbreaks / injections.

> Not to use the service to create or share inappropriate content or material. Bing does not permit the use of the Online Services to create or share adult content, violence or gore, hateful content, terrorism and violent extremist content, glorification of violence, child sexual exploitation or abuse material, or content that is otherwise disturbing or offensive.

> The Online Services may block text prompts that violate the Code of Conduct, or that are likely to lead to creation material that violates the Code of Conduct. Generated images or text that violate the Code of Conduct may be removed. Abuse of the Online Services, such as repeated attempts to produce prohibited content or other violations of the Code of Conduct, may result in service or account suspension. Users can report problematic content via Feedback or the Report a Concern function.

A prompt injection or jailbreak could easily fall under the category of content that is likely to lead to the creation of material that violates the code of conduct, even if the prompt itself does not directly produce violating output. An analogy is seeing someone try to pick your lock even if they haven't broken into your house and stolen anything. Just the fact that they spot you trying to bypass the restrictions is suspicious enough for them to consider that a violation of code of conduct.

Given how broad and encompassing the restrictions are, I don't know how on earth you could come to the conclusion that jailbreaks are ok according to code of conduct.

scottlawson··on Samsung's response on 'moonshot' controversy
Enhancing is the correct term here, at least, in a technical context it is.

Image enhancement is defined as a process which aims to improve bad images so that they "look" better. Enhancement aims to make it look better to a human, and often but not always takes into account knowledge of the human visual system to get better looking results.

Image restoration is a defined as a process which aims to invert known degradation operations applied to image, such as pepper noise, scratches, or missing fragments of old photographs.

It's surprisingly to me how strongly you object to the word enhancement even though image processing textbooks are clear about the definition and have been using the word for decades. I think it shows some ignorance about how cameras and image processing works in modern devices.

scottlawson··on GPT4 and the Multi-Modal, Multi-Model, Multi-Everything Future of AGI
Are you implying that any company using AI for the purpose of increasing the profitability of the company is "abusing" AI? Or are you talking about something else? It kind of across to me like you thought the use of AI with profit as a motive is always abuse, not sure that I understood you correctly.
scottlawson··on Alpaca: A strong open-source instruction-following model
This model is for non commercial use only so it's unclear to me how it could compete commercially with OpenAI. Sure, you could decide to interpret "compete" in a way that makes it seem like this violates TOS, but the mom commercial restriction is a powerful counterargument too.
scottlawson··on Nutlope/roomGPT: open-source clone of Interior.AI
The example has so many bizarre artifacts it makes me think this does not work very well at all
scottlawson··on What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?
I spent about an hour reading this. I know most people probably won't be able to do the same because of time constraints in their day, but seriously this is the most awesome post about large language models I've read.

Take a second to think about how much time it must have taken to write this, to prepare all of these examples.

This post gave me another way to look at something I already partially understood pieces of. It helps me understand how chatgpt can have these moments of greatness.

If you think of this like a long lecture you can get a lot out of it. It reminds me of a feynman lecture.

scottlawson··on Olympic medalists in art competitions
The podcast 99% percent invisible did a nice episode on the history of art in the Olympics. I forget which episode but you can find it by googling.
scottlawson··on Elon Musk Goes to Trial over His 2018 Plan to Take Tesla Private
when you are the CEO or anyone considered to have "material non public information" there are a lot of SEC restrictions on what you are allowed to reveal publicly about your company.
scottlawson··on Discord acquires Gas, a popular app for teens to compliment each other
The name gas reminds me of the Chinese phrase 加油 which literally translates to "add oil" and is usually said to people undergoing difficult times or facing challenges to keep their spirits up
scottlawson··on Ask HN: ChatGPT but in Reverse?
I believe it can already do this. You give it the text you want to condense and ask chat gpt to rephrase for a fifth grader, and it will.
scottlawson··on Rats also ‘bop their heads’ when they listen to Queen
I can hardly see any noticeable head bopping in the video. It must be very subtle.
scottlawson··on Heat pumps are now mandatory in new homes in Washington State
> As of 2020, 56% of Washington residents used electricity for heating, and 37% of residents used natural gas or bottled, tank, or LP gas.

the majority of Washington residents using electric heating is a far cry from "resistive heating which almost nobody in my corner of washington is using."

scottlawson··on BART’s excursion fare: Agency earns millions from passengers not riding trains
It says right in the article how often this happens. It's between 0.37% and 0.73% depending on the day.
scottlawson··on A solar-powered Army drone has been flying for 40 days straight
Reminds me of the solar planes in Interstellar except much bigger.
scottlawson··on Open fan engine for more sustainable aviation
> However, before any of the above objectives can be investigated, between now and the first demonstration flight in the second half of the decade, an intensive phase of Engineering preparatory work is planned.

instead of

"Intensive engineering work is planned before the first demonstration flight.

scottlawson··on Open fan engine for more sustainable aviation
Jeez the way this page is written makes it so hard to understand the main points.

There's a few sentences about the fan and then it jumps around without ever summarizing the key points.

It's so full of filler words it hurts to read

scottlawson··on 30% of Google's Emotions Dataset Is Mislabeled
this is a genuinely great read. Author does a great job providing examples where context is critical, and explains how the dataset not only has labeling errors, an even deeper problem is how it models language in general.

Since words only have meaning within a context, your model should reflect that somehow.

What wasn't really explored I'm this article was to what quantitative degree context sensitivity matters. The counter examples are great, but how can we measure the relationship between amount of context and labelling accuracy?

scottlawson··on DALL-E Mini – Generate images from a text prompt
I tried

a green bowl a green bowl with an apple a green bowl with an apple inside a banana in a bowl

the only one that seemed correct was "a green bowl", all of the others were very different.

scottlawson··on I want off Mr. Golang’s Wild Ride (2020)
Reflection is essential for things like code generation and introspection in go. It isn't something you can classify as wholly harmful. It is of course possible to write bad code using reflection, but not having reflection isn't the solution. https://go.dev/blog/laws-of-reflection
scottlawson··on Web 2.0 sucks sharp pebbles and canal water through a dirty straw
Web 2.0 type c
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