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Comment by andai | Hacker News Reader

>I used Qwen2.5-Coder-0.5B as the starting point. I needed a small model to get close to realtime performance. Being a coding model, it had also already seen plenty of CLI usage.

Interesting. I wanted to ask, how that model compares with the fine-tuned version, but I just saw the author provided benchmarks. Interesting that fine-tuning improved the memory so significantly, wouldn't have expected that.

Though, on second thought, I had an experience where I was able to, as a human, fine-tune my memory beyond what I previously thought was possible!

Reminds me of one of my favorite jokes.

Excuse me, can you tell me how to get to Carnegie Hall?

—Practice, man... Practice...

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I haven’t run extensive tests yet, but larger models also get better at memory.

> … I had an experience where I was able to, as a human, fine-tune my memory beyond what I previously thought was possible!

Please elaborate.

Yes please. I'm curious

I'm not the person you're replying to, but there are techniques like memory palaces that can let many people pull off impressive memory tricks like memorizing a deck of cards.

Joshua Foer did some articles where he was looking into how people do the memorization tricks, ultimately concluded that most anyone can do it, and he actually went on to win the US memory competition after a year of practice. He wrote several articles and a book about it I think, so I'm not sure which one I originally read about it.

Oh, so I was smoking weed with a friend and went "what were we just talking about?"

The guy tells me to rewind. You can just rewind the conversation. Put in a little effort and run it backwards.

That's a skill and apparently I'd never practiced it before.

After a few weeks, I was being complimented for my "excellent memory", while I was high (as someone who naturally had a poor memory even while sober).

Also worth mentioning, I met a guy once who was much like me, he'd go on like 5 different tangents... but then he did something spectacular, he'd tie them all together into one glorious point.

I assumed that was because he was some kind of genius, but now I'm wondering if that's learnable as well.

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