taylorius

I'd say so for sure. I've lived in London most of my adult life, and in my experience the air is a lot better than it used to be.

I wasn't using the word popular as a metric - "popular music" is a fairly standard term, and is used as a category designator, to refer to music created by modern songwriters and/or bands, as opposed to say, classical music.

I must say I find it slightly hard to believe that this isn't obvious - but I hope this explanation clarifies things.

I daresay I'm in a minority of one, but I cannot abide Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. In my opinion one of the most overrated songs in all of popular music.

Just adding context, elaborating a little on the deterministic / statistical aspects of an LLM. I don't disagree with what you said, I'm afraid - so not much prospect for a back and forth :-)

The issue with comprehending LLM's internal workings is just that they're so big. The operation of the network itself is deterministic - but it's output is a set of probabilities over the value of the next token in the stream. At that point you have to choose one, based on that probability distribution, and then start the process again. That choice is where the randomness comes in.

It was a close run thing between that and retina scans for the top secret lab's security.

I'm from the UK and I took it as a compliment.

One of my hobbies is trying to predict foreign exchange prices (usually EURUSD tbh, but others as well).

I enjoy finding out the actual best-case performance of various technical analysis indicators, and popular "systems", by optimising the indicator's parameters to find the best long term performance. I also design my own indicators and systems in the same way.

To this end I have a C++ ImGUI desktop app with charting capabilities, and optimisation using differential evolution. The app has its operation driven by a c++ class that controls all aspects of its running, by means of various callbacks.

This enables me to test lots of strategies quickly, exploring the parameter space with the optimisation functions.

I've considered open sourcing the app, though I'm not sure there would be any interest. The codebase would need cleaning up first anyway! :-)

Thank you for this article. It was genuinely fascinating reading. I am in a similar situation to you, though at the very beginning, so it's fascinating to read about your experience.

In the mid 90s, I had been working on an SGI Indigo for a couple of years (3d post facility in London). We were in line for a hardware upgrade, and my junior colleague wanted us to switch to a Windows PC setup. From price / performance, it was hard to argue against it. I loved SGI hardware though, it was sad it fell by the wayside somewhat.

They absolutely do define gradients via functions - but the point it, the screen only has a finite number of pixels. As I understood it, pixels is what this technique uses as it's dicing primitive. Pixel sized rectangles cut out of the polygon.

Pixar's Renderman used to use a (slightly) related technique. This was along time ago, and I have no idea if they still do things this way - but they would subdivide patches until each primitive was smaller than a pixel.

Anything is constant colour if you dice it up into small enough pieces! :-)

Firstly, I'm coming at this from the pint of view of standard feed forward NNs, rather than spiking neural networks, so apologies in advance if I am way off-base.

By global activation limit, I assume you mean the total sum of neuron activation during one forward pass? So halving it would strongly encourage sparsity? How do you enforce the reduced limit? Just put it in the loss function? Or does the spiking nature allow you to "sparsify" the spiking by raising a threshold?

Very very interesting stuff. I'm working with differential evolution, and incorporate correlation measures between candidates to (try to) allow for multiple divergent solutions, and it also feels fairly off the beaten track, compared to mainstream AI. But who cares, let's enjoy the dark forest! :-)

"Of course the drug ads are marketed to you, so you go and get a prescription from your doctor."

The main purpose of Big Pharma's saturation advertising spend on TV networks is the buying of influence with those networks - not marketing, secondary or otherwise.

I suppose its a question of balance, but to me, the article is saying that the act of "getting to know" someone, necessarily involves sharing things that are a bit more "real" than the typical glossy surface conversation people tend to have. I think it's just worth taking a bit of time with these things, doing one's best to make sure such openness is reciprocated, and that the other person's heart is in the right place.

Indeed. I could be wrong, but I interpreted the article in the same way.

"they can easily laugh at some particularity of your face and that would be very hurtful. "

Forgive me, I'm not saying such insults aren't hurtful, but if that's the worst they have to throw at you, then believe it or not, you're getting off relatively lightly.

How about undermining your memories of your not-long-dead parents, based on things you've told them about your childhood? Doing their level best (and they are VERY persuasive, and persistent) to convince you that you were never loved by your mother, extrapolating from stories you have told them, to construct an alternative history that paints your parents (and particularly your mother) as an uncaring, sexually profligate monster.

I have many other examples - but it's Friday evening, and I don't want to put either of us in a low mood. :-) So I'll just wish that no-one who reads this ever runs into someone like that, and wish you the very best of luck!

Cheers

You don't know the person you're speaking with very well. How can you know how they might choose to use such personal, intimate information?

Some people will absolutely use such personal stuff as ammunition, perhaps at some point in the future when they're angry with you, or feeling vengeful, or stressed. And yes, I've had it happen to me - and to an extent that would boggle people's minds. And it came from a self professed "kind" person, who "only wished good things". Until they got riled up that is, and then anything and everything was verbal fair game.

I don't think the extent to which people feel comfortable socialising stays constant. I'm naturally introverted, and with a few exceptions I find being in other people's company exhausting - however I'm not a complete loner, and do enjoy it in smallish doses. It's as if I have a "level of fitness" socially. In my head, I consider that "forcing" myself to go to social events maintains this fitness.

Now think of the pandemic lockdown. It could have caused introverts to have lost their social fitness entirely.

I agree - however I suspect it's all for naught, and the rebuttal will boil down to "haha GPU go BRRR".

But artists create for a reason. You can take away the financial component, but the artist will still hope to get something out of it for themselves.

Consider a band releasing a new album they've spent 9 months writing and recording. In our post-financial brave new world, they give it away for free. But they'll read the reviews, and get excited if their music is well received. In short, they are hoping to be "paid" in public acclaim.

Now imagine that the minute they release it, some AI system digests all their new tracks, and a thousand randoms start making songs that are similar to the style and aesthetic they have spent time creating. In short order, the number of synthetic AI tracks will dwarf the originals, and the recognition will go to whoever markets their synthetic tracks the best, rather than the original creator.

The only hope I see for artistic creativity is in training custom, boutique AI systems that accurately encompass the Artist's style. But that's not really creativity to be honest, it's more akin to licensing.

That's interesting. I first read your comment, and I thought you were referring to the personalities of those studying an animal gradually changing as they unconsciously model their own behavior after that animal. This seems highly plausible to me.

But then I re-read it, and the second time it seemed to mean that the members of a group studying a certain animal would self select to favour those who are fascinated by and admire that animal. This also seems highly plausible to me.

Either way, it seems fitting that the world of shark study is full of "apex predator" researchers.

This is true - but such artists can't create a new one every few seconds. A change in scale is a change in kind. Such "democratization" is, in my view, rather demeaning to an artist, who doubtless worked hard to develop a new style, only to have their work digested by the machines and a million imitators pop up almost immediately.

"The fact that what it does is so opaque remains the main flaw of it."

That, and the fact that it takes rather a lot of numerical calculations to do it.

Indeed - UK the same. The government makes so much hay out of persuading the electorate that businesses are somehow entirely separate from them.

The future - megawatts of electricity being used, 24/7 as armies of LLMs email and debate each other, and try to sell each other programs at a great discount.

As for the humans, we went fishing instead.

Or nestled in a flowery hat work by someone on a trans-atlantic flight? SO many holes in this story... :-)

For sure - but at least we have the illusion of being able to vote these people out.

Fair enough - that's true, for sure!

I could say the same thing to you. You don't get to define "we" any more than I do. In fact my use of the collective "we" was directed primarily towards the claim of xenophobia - which definitely WAS an accusation thrown at people who supported Brexit. The thrust of my point was to single out the political ruling class in the EU for their refusal to listen to the opinion of their subjects. (I can't call them constituents, as that would imply some sort of representative democracy was taking place).

"So no, the UK didn’t vote leave because they “hate the unelected, undemocratic, wannabe-communist institutions”,"

Yes they very definitely did. The economic arguments were never the main drivers of Brexit. It was about national sovereignty, and electoral accountability - and this new Orwellian EU law, (enacted "for the children", of course) only serves to reinfoce that view.