ulber

>I think we need something that at least captures the general mechanism by which LLMs predict the next token.

This bit varies a lot since the capabilities involved in prediction depend on the data. If the text is a math book and the prompt is "... three plus five apples is a total of " the crucial capability is arithmetic (plus of course NL capabilities). On the other hand, if you're completing a post from /r/relationship_advice the capabilities involved will be (vaguely) maintaining literary tone, theory of mind, psychology, etc. Within a text the capabilities needed will also vary a lot, where you might need theory of mind at some crucial inflection points, but most of the time its already clear what is going to be said and the model just has to get the wording right.

So, my take would be to really think hard about the data to understand how predictions might be made.

I bet they forgot to include that it can generate that 770MWh every hour.

Maybe we don't, but we should let market forces sort it out by doing our best to tax the externalities of power generation too.

The argument the article makes is indeed a bit blunt.

The idea here is that tipping enables better price discrimination, which in turn allows a higher "quantity" of coffee to be produced. With coffee shops that "quantity" will translate to things like 1) higher density or 2) more attractive placement of coffee shops, both of which increase coffee consumption by making it easier to pick one up, or 3) higher quality (think small batch) coffee being produced, which increases the quantity of labor being sold in a cup.

I still don't enjoy this tipping culture, but the argument being made makes sense when you fill in the details.

As an aside, Universal Paperclips is the best clicker game I've played and has zero monetization.

https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/

As a crude point of comparison, you'd be buying this service at about 917 euros/hour. With a pretty lax 1600 hours/year you'd have to make almost 1.5M per year to match the rate.

This was a great read. I kept expecting it to reference the "Curse of Dimensionality" [1] as an explanation for why we see no close-to-average samples in high-dimensional spaces. I'm guessing the book this is an excerpt from might. In any case, I enjoyed this as a relatable instance of the concept!

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_dimensionality

I get the point but also fully disagree. At the point where computer cognition is good enough for humans to truly fall in love, build friendships or come to hate as an enemy, I personally think not recognizing it as AI will become a fringe belief.

I feel this description overstates the freedom. Academia is full of rather hard deadlines, as the conference you're targeting a paper for might be the only fitting one for many months. Missing these deadlines can delay the whole "pipeline" of research, as you'd like to build on your existing work and properly cite it, but publishing subsequent work might make the original result harder to publish. Grant application deadlines are similarly hard.

In contrast, deadlines in engineering are often even not expected to be hit.

The "freedom" to travel for conferences is an integral part of your job as a researcher: either you network and sell your ideas, or you stay in obscurity. Of course travelling on someone else's dime can be fun, but the same is true of all business travel. It stops being fun the moment it becomes a chore and you'd rather be home putting time into your hobbies or family. Then it's just more work.

If writing grant applications is your hobby and you're married to your research, academia can be great, but the freedom doesn't include a balance with all the other parts of life. I know I'm not fully contradicting you, there is indeed a lot of freedom to choose what you work on. I just think it's important that people considering academia understand what the job actually consists of.

You could also train for this kind of interconnectedness by designing tasks that are explicitly multi-modal. For example, you could:

- Stack boxes collaboratively by controlling your own arm and communicating with another agent helping you.

- First produce a plan in text that another agent has to use to predict how you're going to control the arm. You'd get rewarded for both stacking correctly and being predictable based on the stated plan.

They definitely need a brushing after smoothies, but apart from that I'm not the most worried about bacterial growth inside them. They're not used for cooking, so as long as there isn't significant biomass inside there it doesn't feel too dangerous - bacteria multiplying in food and manufacturing toxins is the thing I'm really careful about. I imagine people routinely get similar exposure to bacteria from many other sources they don't even think about.

Here's his response: https://cheapeth.org/whalegate.html It casts the situation in a rather different light - you should read it.

If you're advocating for a single tax, let it at least be LVT [1].

But seriously, the point of this Finnish tax is to internalize externalities of vehicles that contribute excessively to global warming. Even if there's some loopholes it's still shaping consumer behavior by making you jump through them... and if the jump is too easy, they can just continue making the loopholes smaller.

Thinking this tax is for meeting the government's budget is missing the point. It would serve its purpose just as well if you were required to burn the money instead of giving it to the government.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax

I don't think SSAO is really ever selected over more realistic methods for artistic preference. High budget animated films tend to go for ray traced methods even when they have a non-photorealistic style.

SSAO is just cheap.

I think you misunderstood the approach. MuZero is being used to optimize the choices made in the VP9 compression. In modern video encodings there's many ways to encode the same content. As a very simple example, you can vary how often you provide a full encoding of a frame and how often you encode differences between frames. Once this off-line optimization is done, the result is still a valid VP9 encoding, just a smaller one. MuZero is not needed for decompression at all.

>single player Lovecraftian text editor

I hope that was not a typo and would love to see what a Lovecraftian text editor looks like.

DPI is deep packet inspection in this context. HyperScan did some groundbreaking work for DPI, where you (1) have to match a huge number of regexes at the same time, (2) need high and consistent performance, and (3) don't need the starting points of matches.

I tried to with a Quest 2. Immersed VR was the only option I found for getting multiple virtual monitors with my non-VR-ready work laptop (it has to encode and stream the virtual monitors to the headset), but performance was not good enough for more than two screens at a reasonable resolution.

I did see the promise of it though. Input was not a problem as I'm able to touch type without looking at the keyboard. Being able to position additional screens all around your main screen was amazing -- with physical monitors I only have space for two.

Using a VR-ready machine to directly run the headset and some headless monitor emulator adapters might result in a better experience right now. With this kind of setup you can use other VR desktop software, e.g. Virtual Desktop.

More likely ease of implementation. The use case shown here is an interactive UI element, so performance isn't really a concern.

>His thesis is that the US is a world power on the decline and China will soon rise to take its place.

Something I've found interesting about these kinds of theses (although I'm sure there's more to his) is that just believing that a company/country/whatever is going to be successful doesn't make it a good investment. It's all about the pricing of the asset and ultimately, for assets priced by a market mechanism, about what other people think. So a thesis for investing more in China could be "US is in decline and China will take its place faster/more fully than the market thinks."

Of course even if you don't have any special knowledge about China's future, the default position should still be to invest a part of your portfolio according to it's market weight, which in the FTSE All-World Index [1] is 3.9% currently.

[1]: https://research.ftserussell.com/Analytics/Factsheets/Home/D...

I found your pitch really interesting, I'd love to try it. I, however, refuse to install an extension and change my default search engine just to be allowed to type in a search query.

I'm sure you have some "growth hacking" reason for this that is compelling to you. Maybe you hope that the slight annoyance of switching back will outweigh the inevitable annoyances with a new product like this.

It does come off as user hostile though - you're trying to badger me to switch rather than selling me on the merits of you.com.

For people reading the article, do read the top comment by Scott Alexander. It provides what seems to me like a grounded summary and opinion on the events.

It's not an app (although those apps may help implement it, idk). It's a method from a researcher B.J. Fogg, who wrote a book called "Tiny Habits" [1]. I haven't read that one, but I listened to a similar approach in "Atomic Habits" [2].

[1]: https://tinyhabits.com/ [2]: https://jamesclear.com/atomic-habits

The "reverse a binary tree" problem gets often brought up as one of these tricky algorithm problems that you just have to know. However, the "algorithm" is to just swap all of the left pointers with the right pointers in each node.

The biggest difficulty for most seems to be that they don't know what "reverse a binary tree" actually means. It sounds kind of mathy and opaque, so I get it, but candidates should be able to have a dialog to figure out what the requirements mean. And on the flipside interviewers should be ready to have that dialog and not count not knowing the term by heart against the candidate.

This problem to me feels qualitatively different than the "rabbit and hare" algorithm for finding a loop in a linked list mentioned by another poster. That one needs a non-trivial algorithmic insight that just might not come to you during an interview. The solution to "reverse a binary tree" flows out of the structure of the problem statement as long as you have the fundamental skills for walking and manipulating data structures and the conversational skills to understand the problem, both of which seem fair to test for.

Yeah, the internet is bigger now - all of the weird fringe stuff from enthusiasts is still there and there's even more of it. One thing that has happened is that the mainstream is there too now, so if you don't venture outside that its easier to not see the more interesting stuff. In the old days, when just having a "homepage" placed you a bit outside the norm, stumbling on something non-mainstream was more of a given.

Driving is qualitatively different from coding: an AI that's pretty good but messes up sometimes is vastly more useful for coding than for driving. In neither case can you let the AI "drive", but that's ok in coding as software engineering is already set up for that. Testing, pair programming and code reviews are popular ways to productively collaborate with junior developers.

You're not replacing the engineer, but you're giving every engineer a tireless companion typing suggestions faster than you ever could, to be filled in when you feel it's going to add value. My experience with the alpha was eye opening: this was the first time I've interacted with an AI and felt like its not just a toy, but actually contributing.

I wasn't aware of Lean not being sound and a quick search didn't come up with anything related to that. Could you link a source?

It still manages to be poor UX: when reading the book it has already trained me to navigate by flipping forward, so if I actually want to go to the previous page I’ll just flip backwards. When I want to exit the book to the previous page I was on I’ll try the back button, but of course that doesn’t work. Personally this went against my expectations —- I think it’s because I associate the back button as the counter to navigation through links, which the page flip gesture doesn’t feel like. Flipping the page rather feels like changing the state of an object presented on a single page.

Why would anyone take that wager? I see no reason to believe that's possible with either Prolog or NNs when you're restricted to 80s hardware.

I'd wager hedonistic adaptation is the big culprit. You don't end up saving that much unless you actually plan for achieving financial independence.