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tshadley

204 karma · joined November 28, 2016

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tshadley··on Game prototype using AI assisted graphics
Dreamfusion -- text-to-3d seems like it might be useful here eventually: https://dreamfusion3d.github.io/ (once successfully opensourced, see https://github.com/ashawkey/stable-dreamfusion)

Rigging also looks like it could have a decent AI/DNN solution: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.00559.pdf

tshadley··on Iranian attack drone found to contain parts from more than a dozen US companies
The context missed by the article is that Iranian drones are crude, low-tech, and cheap by most military standards, hence, made with only the cheapest and most widely available parts.

The article below estimates the Shahed-136 at $20,000. The Mohajer-6 probably isn't that much more.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-iranian-made-killer-drones...

But that's the economic-warfare genius of cheap drones: it [might] cost as much $500,000 to shoot down a $20,000 drone.

https://www.businessinsider.com/suicide-drones-much-cheaper-...

tshadley··on The internet wants to be fragmented
If twitter dies, where do I find a site where I can follow at least one expert/leader in every major discipline/social/political-movement to get a sort of snapshot of what's happening in the world?

I don't need to agree with every expert/leader, I just want to know what they think.

tshadley··on A swarm of robots built this tunnel [video]
So the robots are building the shell of the tunnel before the material within the tunnel (spoil) is removed.

The robots do not seem specifically involved with removing spoil or even carving it into smaller pieces (at least pieces smaller than the tunnel diameter).

Does this mean building tunnel shells is the hardest part of tunnel building, not breaking up and removing spoil?

Or does this approach somehow make it easier to fragment and remove the spoil since it's now in tunnel-sized chunks?

(Edit: Yes, stabilising the tunnel is the hard part, see excellent and thorough answer by rmccue)

tshadley··on New and Improved Embedding Model for OpenAI
https://help.openai.com/en/articles/6787051-does-chatgpt-rem...

> While ChatGPT is able to remember what the user has said earlier in the conversation, there is a limit to how much information it can retain. The model is able to reference up to approximately 3000 words (or 4000 tokens) from the current conversation - any information beyond that is not stored.

This implies ChatGPT has a 4000 token maximum prompt and prior prompts in a given web session are inserted into the current prompt, most recent to oldest (probably with some sort of time context like "previously, user asked:"), up to 4000 tokens.

tshadley··on Keep Your Identity Small (2009)
> The difference is that religion addresses matters that ARE central to people's identity. It addresses choices that EVERYONE must make

In the essay, identity is associated with a particular religious/political/social perspective on the human condition, not the human condition itself. Keeping identity small is basically converging on "being human"-- the choices everyone must make as you note -- without the false certainty that comes with loyalty to a religious/political/social identity.

tshadley··on Caterpillar offers phone with built-in FLIR camera
Says "FLIR Lepton 3.5 professional-grade sensor" which lists at 160x120 from

https://www.flir.com/news-center/camera-cores--components/fl...

tshadley··on AI Homework
The model is trained to, essentially, fabulate an excuse in response to correction; which also gets to a major limitation: it is not learning truth from falsehood but rather learning what human evaluators like or dislike.

"ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers. Fixing this issue is challenging, as: (1) during RL training, there’s currently no source of truth; (2) training the model to be more cautious causes it to decline questions that it can answer correctly; and (3) supervised training misleads the model because the ideal answer depends on what the model knows, rather than what the human demonstrator knows."

https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/

tshadley··on I created a site to make AI generated photos of your pet
Best of luck, you've got a great look!
tshadley··on I created a site to make AI generated photos of your pet
Wow, and Ruiz et al published the work only around 4 months ago. Who did the first open source, was it https://github.com/XavierXiao/Dreambooth-Stable-Diffusion?
tshadley··on I created a site to make AI generated photos of your pet
The first of many dreambooth startups?
tshadley··on FTX to file for U.S. bankruptcy, CEO resigns
https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/1591091209157898241
tshadley··on Political Chips
Very good points. Here's the link.

https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/fzgps/date/2022-07-31/segme...

LIU: Nobody can control TSMC by force. If you take a military force or invasion you will render TSMC's factory non-operable because this is such a sophisticated manufacturing facility. It depends on the real time [correlation] with the outside world, with Europe, with Japan, with the U.S., from materials to chemicals to spare parts to engineering software diagnosis. And it's everybody's effort to maybe this factory operable. So if you take it over by force you can no longer make it operable.

tshadley··on Covid-19 Antibody Seroprevalence in Santa Clara County, California
It looks like there's an argument to be made it could overcount or undercount depending on importance of each potential bias.

"This study had several limitations. First, our sampling strategy selected for members of Santa Clara County with access to Facebook and a car to attend drive-through testing sites. This resulted in an overrepresentation of white women between the ages of 19 and 64, and an under-representation of Hispanic and Asian populations, relative to our community. Those imbalances were partly addressed by weighting our sample population by zip code, race, and sex to match the county. We did not account for age imbalance in our sample, and could not ascertain representativeness of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in homeless populations. Other biases, such as bias favoring individuals in good health capable of attending our testing sites, or bias favoring those with prior COVID-like illnesses seeking antibody confirmation are also possible. The overall effect of such biases is hard to ascertain."

tshadley··on Covid-19 Antibody Seroprevalence in Santa Clara County, California
Why would this matter as long as they got a good geographical sampling?

"We used Facebook to quickly reach a large number of county residents and because it allows for granular targeting by zip code and sociodemographic characteristics. We used a combination of two targeting strategies: ads aimed at a representative population of the county by zip code, and specially targeted ads to balance our sample for under-represented zip codes. In addition, we capped registrations from overrepresented areas."

Update: Okay, "Other biases, such as bias favoring individuals in good health capable of attending our testing sites, or bias favoring those with prior COVID-like illnesses seeking antibody confirmation are also possible."

tshadley··on Covid-19 Antibody Seroprevalence in Santa Clara County, California
Note coauthor name "John Ioannidis". That gives the paper a healthy boost in my view.
tshadley··on Covid-19 Antibody Seroprevalence in Santa Clara County, California
At 3-4%? Herd immunity needs 70% in US. COVID-19 can not have spread freely if only 3% people are infected.

https://www.journalofinfection.com/article/S0163-4453(20)301...

tshadley··on Not everyone has an internal monologue
Translating thoughts to language does seem like a major bottleneck. But if your goal is to implement thoughts in socially communicable concepts (spoken word or text), or in mathematical or programmable concepts (algorithms, software), an internal monologue is a rough draft of the implementation that is continually refined during the reflective process.

Further, the internal monologue is just one representation in mind, it does not replace the full (non-verbalized) thought. Both are present and complement each other.

tshadley··on Banning facial recognition is missing the point
> The goal of the law is to prevent the development of a technical reality

Facial recognition in the brain is just specialized object recognition, therefore any research on powerful general-purpose object recognition via deep-neural-networks is improving facial recognition technology whether it means to or not. Only a law banning all artificial neural network research seems to have a chance at stopping the technical reality here.

tshadley··on Self-driving truck delivers butter from California to Pennsylvania in three days
Interesting points.
tshadley··on Self-driving truck delivers butter from California to Pennsylvania in three days
Handling that 10% is going to be tricky, though. Can an unpiloted truck be trusted to know its limitations perfectly, shutdown and park when it hits borderline road conditions?

Edit: Okay, remote driver access might solve this.

tshadley··on Alternate Day Fasting Improves Physiological and Molecular Markers of Aging [pdf]
The caloric reduction makes the difference, as the paper notes:

> Of all the anti-aging and longevity-promoting interventions tested so far, calorie restriction (CR) seems to be the most conserved among species and robust. However, humans struggle to constantly achieve a certain level of CR. Here, we show in a clinical trial that a related intervention, alternate day fasting (ADF), also leads to striking reduction in overall calorie intake over the course of the study but is more easily tolerated than continuous CR and provokes similar beneficial changes on the cardiovascular system and on body composition while being safe for a period of >6 months.

tshadley··on Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna
"Unfeeling Malice" is ironic reference to the reviewed book's discovery that Hans Asperger sentenced children to death while using the same phrase himself as a diagnosis of their condition.
tshadley··on Top lawyers beaten by legal AI
Statement from Professor Yonatan Aumann, advisor to Tel Aviv-based LawGeex, on LawGeex AI:

“The technology has been developed through a combination of supervised and unsupervised learning techniques. Unsupervised learning was used for teaching the AI engine the core legalese language. Thereafter, supervised learning, using deep learning multi-layer LSTM and convolution technology, was used to train the system for the fine-tuned issue-spotting. Supervision was performed based on human-annotated documents, using legal experts. A unique augmentation algorithm was applied to boost learning from these examples. The overall result is the most advanced technology for the automatic analysis of legal documents. The p-value for the statement that accuracy of AI is above that of these lawyers is 0.0068 (using MannWhitney’s U test).

https://images.law.com/contrib/content/uploads/documents/397...

tshadley··on Why Do Americans Stay When Their Town Has No Future?
They moved, most likely: http://www.bbpmag.com/Features/1114/1114_map-population.jpg
tshadley··on Why Do Americans Stay When Their Town Has No Future?
> According to a new Brookings Institution report, the largest metro areas—those of 1 million or more people—have experienced 16.7 percent employment growth since 2010, and areas with 250,000 to 1 million have seen growth of 11.6 percent, while areas with fewer than 250,000 residents have lagged far, far behind, with only 0.4 percent growth.

So, clearly most Americans don't stay behind when their town has no future. The article should add the qualifier "Some" Americans to avoid a misleading impression.

tshadley··on Today’s dominant approach to A.I. has not worked out
> <Something> suggesting the next step to language and reason is the right path and easy is the rhyming history of AI for sixty years.

If evolution can be taken as a successful search through the space of what is possible, language and reason are on the path from curve fitting. But calling this "easy" is far from my point. If evolution is any sort of guide, deep neural network architectures are where the real work is needed before language understanding is possible (contra Pearl, Marcus).

tshadley··on Today’s dominant approach to A.I. has not worked out
700,000,000 years ago to 300,000 years ago: all of nervous system life gets by on "pattern detection" and "curve fitting" (Judea Pearl's term for deep learning).

Homo neanderthalesis or thereabouts to modern day: language, reason, cause and effect.

> Today’s dominant approach to A.I. has not worked out.

But "curve fitting" biological neural networks needed 2500 times more architectural exploration and enhancement to get to rudimentary language capacity than rudimentary language architectures needed to achieve all of human knowledge. That suggests we're doing the right thing in growing and enhancing deep neural network architectures now. Evolution suggests the next step to language and reason on the right architecture is comparatively easy.

tshadley··on AI and Compute
> In those examples, however, the meaning is, in current usage, 'calculation' or 'computation', not as a measure of computational work.

So is the OP:

"We’re releasing an analysis showing that since 2012, the amount of compute [amount of calculation, amount of computation] used in the largest AI training runs has been increasing exponentially with a 3.5 month-doubling time "

Without loss of meaning, title could be AI and Calculation, or AI and Computation

tshadley··on AI and Compute
Archived 2012 discussion invokes Oxford English Dictionary to trace the original use back several 100 years. http://www.techwr-l.com/archives/1206/techwhirl-1206-00295.h...
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