864 karma · joined October 21, 2020
This is why governments exist.
Indeed I would be, but I don't, so I'm not.
What I'm saying is that nobody understands either creativity or intelligence, and people keep listing behavior that they think can only be displayed by something that has those qualities. Yet, whenever we build a system that displays this behavior, all of a sudden, those qualities are NOT attributed because we now understand how to achieve this, the curtain has fallen, the magic is gone, and we do not assign the qualities we believe are human to something that is not magic, lest we reduce ourselves to the machines in front of us, losing the things that make us unique.
That is the shifting of goalposts, its not me who's doing it. There's a wiki page for it, its called "the AI effect": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
From (highly upvoted) parent:
> LLMs are text-prediction engines. They are not Artificial Intelligence, and shouldn’t not be treated in any form or fashion as if they possess intelligence > LLM-based “AI” ....
Hardly neutral statements, hardly accurate statements, yet highly upvoted. LLMs are AI, there is nothing to gain by pretending it isn't because of some secondary motive or opinion someone has.
> LLM has solved enough problems that almost nobody has the view you ridicule here
I think I have just shown you the parent literally claims LLMs are not AI, and do not possess intelligence.
> but there are still many who think LLM are thinking just like humans and that you can trust them just like humans.
I don't think many people think that, especially on HN, for two reasons:
1. Most high profile AI tools have immediately visible disclaimers saying, more or less, "AI makes mistakes". 2. People don't trust humans either, if anything people trust the AI more because it is not human.
People may be incorrectly worshipping LLMs, but they are doing it precisely because it is not human. If you put chatgpt behind a believable chatbox so people would actually think it was human, they would be much more skeptical.
Of the vast uncertainties and philosophical exercises that we must face to bridge the chasm between where we are now, and where we will be when we understand intelligence, I can take comfort in claiming, with 100% accuracy, that our biology is not based on technology invented by Google in 2017.
If ever there was a human quality.
Also, your explanation of "dumb" is really favoring the anti-llm side, and its a very generous interpretation. I suspect what is much more likely meant, is that token predictors cannot be smart, not now nor in the future after improvements, because they are token predictors and predicting tokens is not how intelligence works.
All of this is of course unfounded, and hidden behind the word "dumb".
Solves what? Chess? No thats not AI, its just a chess bot. Turing test? No, thats not AI, its just a dumb token predictor.
Why would the goalposts stop moving at AGI? I am 100% convinced it will somehow still lack the "gusto" or the "taste" or the "timbre" of real intelligence. You can see it in coding right now, AI has bad "taste" in coding, because really, we can't do a better job critiquing that which is obviously (on occasion) just plain good.
The very second they add this part, it will "just be a dumb token predictor with introspection", mark my words.
The issue is of course with using the word "dumb": they are next token predictors, no doubt about it, but whether LLms as a class of system are smart or dumb is entirely unknown and entirely variable in time.
To interact with them effectively you must know how they behave, just like you have to know how humans behave to interact with them effectively. If you disagree, find someone with autism and have a conversation with them.
I hate AI slop as much as the next guy but the amount of tribalism over AI is taking near-religious forms.
Nobody knows what intelligence is, therefore we don't know what does or does not possess it, therefore we don't know whether LLMs currently, or in the future, possess it.
Yes, LLMs can be stupid, guess what: so can I. That doesn't really change the argument at all.
I feel like I'm on a deja-vu from when DALL-E was released and everybody was fighting over whether AI can be creative yes or no. Same story, different words.
Intelligence, creativity: we have no idea what these words mean, and AI is helping us understand them better. That alone is an achievement of epic proportions. I am not joking here. Any computer scientist before 2015 would be absolutely blown away by what you can now do for 10 cents and an API call, yet somehow because of the tech-bro-iness of it all we get a tribal war over what is plainly visible in front of us:
LLMs are uncomfortably close to what we thought intelligent machines would look like
Aha ok, so your judgement of an entire governmental apparatus, trying to influence and predict millions of people in hundreds of thousands of companies and across hundreds of industries, from the most sensitive to the most frivolous of activities, can be summarized in a one liner.
Don't you think these people got advice from people like you? Do you think you are smarter than whatever panel of experts was involved? Do you think maybe the panel of experts was confronted with some information that you do not have? Do you think maybe something you value was in conflict with something somebody else values?
I really cannot express how unlikely it is that you are right.
* firing people * making services worse * sacrificing their own future
Whether it actually does involve those things is effectively arbitrary, because the consideration of the "bad sign" is also arbitrary. If there is no objective value judgement of their operation there is no objective value judgement in their streamlining either, so all bets are off.
no percentage no good
"complex consideration"
It's quite serious that you see "being good" as something inferior to "the core of capitalism".
Also, the core of capitalism is making money for private individuals, nothing more, nothing less. Whether that's done with or without "failing things", is really beside the point.
(Not the person you replied to)
I'm not sure where all of this is coming from, the law is actually extremely obvious and useful: you want to track people, they have to be informed, and have to consent. The law says nothing about how, and the way it was implemented was entirely up to the corporations discretion, which of course opted for the most malicious terrible way to do it, but they did it.
The purpose of the law was that people should be informed about cookies being installed and consent to that happening.
Do you feel like people are now aware that cookies are being installed, more so than before the banner? Do people understand that they are consenting to this?
That is the law at work.
Everything above and beyond that is nice to have, and I'm sure the world would be better for it, but without the EU, people probably wouldn't even know what cookies were, let alone understand (or have control over) how they are being tracked.
If that's not a net positive in a world where net-negatives happen every week, I don't know.
Sure it would, you can attach a multi-table sqlite database in duckdb
> that does not mean just because it came first
I agree with most of your points, I am not stating my opinion but my observations. I am the target audience here, I want to use this, but I don't really care too much about the file format itself, at least not as much as I care about the data inside.
That means access, which means compatibility with my tooling.
Compatibility is hard to beat.
This is the concorde of file formats.
Seems to be a columnar storage format that addresses some shortcomings in parquet. Thing is, though, that of all these formats the real winning feature is compatibility, which is (obviously) very hard to improve on, as anything new immediately loses.
Parquet is unfortunately very good just by virtue of being first, and so widely supported. The most widely used parquet version is the oldest version from 2013 (as per the paper itself), so parquet itself couldn't even supplant parquet. If you want to improve on it, you need to bring some serious results, which I don't think f3 does.
Also, my main gripe with parquet (single table per file) is not even addressed, so, also the name is a bit hyped up.
Also also, it seems to go out of its own way to include a compiled wasm binary for decoding, yet requires flatbuffers to parse that blob? Kind of defeats the purpose.
Its main result seems to be improved random access which, although certainly welcome, is not the point of columnar storage, as columnar storage was invented to exchange random access for something else: fast analytics. F3 seems to sacrifice fast analytics for the wasm decoder. I don't get it.
Maybe I'm being too cynical. Can someone help me out here?
I don't think its fair to attribute it to lack of skills or bad intent, unless there's some proof to any of it.
If you would ask someone to write a piece of code, and a part of the problem is this conversion, then you would be right to expect they reach for a library, but even if they don't you would be giving them the opportunity to explain themselves, and judge the explanation, not the answer. Also, if your test is "does this person reach for a library at the right time", you could do a lot less esoteric and confusing by just asking them to add 10 days to a date. If you just ask this one specific problem, it is likely they assume you are looking for them to demonstrate the skills involved in actually solving the problem, i.e. leetcode.
This is also why some people give you the blabla answer, because it is indeed very unlikely that someone needs to do this legitimately. This is because its a toy problem. Someone's professional reaction to the problem in isolation should indeed be: this is weird, I've never been asked something like this, what's up?
Finally, even though the question is terrible, I would still rate the "whatsup?" response higher than the "leapyear" response. I would want a developer to triple check that this problem needs solving, before they would solve it themselves.
Finally finally, if there's one answer to one question that, when answered trivially in a way literally taught in most basic programming courses (use the standard library / a third party library), makes them a "guaranteed hire", I also have significant doubts about the level of talent you are bringing in, as any experienced interviewer will tell you that qualified people will get important questions wrong, and unqualified people will get important questions right.
I understand that this reaction might be quite harsh, and I know better than anyone that its hard and time consuming to do good interviews, but please consider that you are rejecting people who may be very confused and sad by this way of rejection.
Removing from an array is not the same as resizing, which is what I commented on. Resizing is a very deliberate, bad, choice.
If you need to support deletes, you can do this without resizing an array. Either by tracking object lifetimes and inserting tombstones, or by swapping to fill in deleted objects. Both of them retain good performance characteristics. Both of them are easy.
This is not "simple vs complex" this is "I misunderstand vs understand SoA"
Consciousness can be not-emergent but also not metaphysical, think sci-fi-type undiscovered physics or matter.
Knowledge loss is precisely my point: there is very little a-priori knowledge needed to solve this, the guy who found the bug proves that.
I've done this kind of stuff many times, and something like a json array taking minutes to parse would likely be very very obvious when looking at a trace.
Guess what, all Chinese EVs are made by communists, maybe there's something to it after all!