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CephalopodMD

455 karma · joined July 15, 2014

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CephalopodMD··on What Is Gridifcation
> Not taste. Not quality. Presence.

Ugh. Ironic that this blog post lambasting the use of machines to achieve inhuman levels of perfection is so clearly ai slop brained. This is far from the only LLM idiom I saw in here.

CephalopodMD··on The Elizabeth Holmes documentary “You Can See Everything” is deceiving
^ this person definitely did not see the movie and clearly does not know what they are talking about
CephalopodMD··on What California is learning from solar panels built over irrigation canals
Isn't this missing a major seeking point of the scheme? I'm pretty sure I've read about this, and putting the panels over water makes them run colder, which makes them marginally more efficient than if they were in a field. Good for the water AND the panels.
CephalopodMD··on Claude is just Mr. Meeseeks
When my sessions get long - in any AI context, not just vibe coding - I do find it starts "getting weird, man!" This is a good philosophy to have.
CephalopodMD··on I Fired Google
i really like Gemini Google home. The old software felt lobotomized by comparison.
CephalopodMD··on What even is food authenticity? Why we guard carbonara, and flatten chicken rice
Carbonara was invented at least 3 decades after the American hamburger. When your cuisine is no more traditional or ancient than a burger, you should probably rethink your snobbery.

Granted, when I (out of pure curiosity) ordered and bit into a rubbery charred puck of a hamburger at a restaurant in Rome, I felt similarly violated. The "American sauce" it was served with provided a good laugh. But I shudder to imagine that this is what the Italians think we eat like. Perhaps their indignation is similar.

CephalopodMD··on Expanding Project Glasswing
This is either a chuffed up PR move or an extremely generous alpha fold "publish all the proteins" moment
CephalopodMD··on Ti-84 Evo
Wasting time making games on my TI84 in the back of middle school geometry taught me how to program.
CephalopodMD··on A compelling title that is cryptic enough to get you to take action on it
A link to the HN discussion from when this was already posted here 6 months ago, possibly to be helpful, but also possibly as an attempt to admonish others for not knowing this is a repost.
CephalopodMD··on I Won't Download Your App. The Web Version Is A-OK
I'm okay with downloading your app provided it's actually good and does something substantially better than a website could do. I'm talking seamless mobile UI, use of mobile features like gps or nfc, or easier/better security and authentication.

However, I don't want your bloated or minimum effort dog-shit app just to watch a movie on a plane, browse a site like Reddit, order a pizza, read a news article/blog, or shop at your specific online store. I will begrudgingly download it if I must, but I'll hate you for it.

CephalopodMD··on From Braun T3 to Apple's iPod
This whole post looks like slop. Misspelled label in the 1st image. "4rd"?
CephalopodMD··on iPhone 17e
They'll pry mine from my cold dead hands!

(Until they release a new human hand sized phone at least)

CephalopodMD··on Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)
I remember a scene in this show which felt like many real meetings I've had in my life. The big hot shot CEO guy pulls everyone into a meeting to share his big idea. The idea? Let's sell a computer that's "twice the speed, half the price!"

...The engineer then rolls his eyes like "yeah no duh". If we could just magically do stuff like that, we would have done it already. Classic management thinking they have an original idea with no understanding of the engineering beneath it all. I thought they would just tell him off and that would be it. I really felt seen in that moment.

The frustrating thing is, they then take pointy haired boss's idea seriously. The rest of the season is spent actually pursuing that dumb, dumb idea... This felt disrespectful, and I stopped watching.

CephalopodMD··on Neurons outside the brain
> In several cases, memories of the old heart’s host seem to become accessible to the recipient ^2.

That does not seem at all to be what citation 2 is saying.

CephalopodMD··on Letting Claude play text adventures
Could you maybe have your harness limit the memory of Claude and then occasionally, when Claude specifically asks for it ("i need to remember something"), you can give Claude the full game history? Most turns, I'll bet it's okay to have a short context and maybe some notes. And then maybe once in a while it's nice to see the full chat history. Wdyt?
CephalopodMD··on Apple picks Gemini to power Siri
Not exactly the same, but kinda: my gen 1 Google Home just got Gemini and it finally delivers on the promise of like 10 years ago! Brought new life to the thing beyond playing music, setting timers, and occasionally asking really basic questions
CephalopodMD··on The Q, K, V Matrices
I think of it more from an information retrieval (i.e. search) perspective.

Imagine the input text as though it were the whole internet and each page is just 1 token. Your job is to build a neural-network Google results page for that mini internet of tokens.

In traditional search, we are given a search query, and we want to find web pages via an intermediate search results page with 10 blue links. Basically, when we're Googling something, we want to know "What web pages are relevant to this given search query?", and then given those links we ask "what do those web pages actually say?" and click on the links to answer our question. In this case, the "Query" is obviously the user search query, the "Key" is one of the ten blue links (usually the title of the page), and the "Value" is the content of the web page that link goes to.

In the attention mechanism, we are given a token and we want to find its meaning when contextualized with other tokens. Basically, we are first trying to answer the question "which other tokens are relevant to this token?", and then given the answer to that we ask "what is the meaning of the original token given these other relevant tokens?" The "Query" is a given token in the input text, the "Key" is another token in the input text, and the "Value" is the final meaning of the original token with that other token in context (in the form of an embedding). For a given token, you can imagine it is as though the attention mechanism "clicked the 10 blue links" of the other most relevant tokens in the input and combined them in some way to figure out the meaning of the original query token (and also you might imagine we ran such a query in parallel for every token in the input text at the same time).

So the self attention mechanism is basically google search but instead of a user query, it's a token in the input, instead of a blue link, it's another token, and instead of a web page, it's meaning.

CephalopodMD··on Python is not a great language for data science
Python is the 2nd best language for almost everything
CephalopodMD··on DoGE "cut muscle, not fat"; 26K experts rehired after brutal cuts
Doge cut muscle sure. They cut the bones too. They sold one of our kidneys on the black market. And then jabbed us in the eyes 3 Stooges style for good measure so we couldn't even see how bad it really was.

We went in for liposuction and buccal fat removal surgery and came out the other side severely disfigured with Maralago face and a hunchback.

CephalopodMD··on Gemini 3
What I'm getting from this thread is that people have their own private benchmarks. It's almost a cottage industry. Maybe someone should crowd source those benchmarks, keep them completely secret, and create a new public benchmark of people's private AGI tests. All they should release for a given model is the final average score.
CephalopodMD··on iPhone Air
Also still rocking a 13 mini. There are dozens of us! Dozens!

(Also to those who say not enough people wanted a mini phone to be worth producing: I submit the case of Prego chunky pasta sauce. Not many people want a chunky pasta sauce, but you sell a whole lot more pasta sauce in total if you sell both regular and chunky pasta sauce. Malcolm Gladwell has a TED talk about this.)

CephalopodMD··on Persona vectors: Monitoring and controlling character traits in language models
The added sauce here is they're using it to bias the model during training, not just using steering vectors at inference time (though they do mention that). This is apparently effective at making the intended change in behavior without the lobotomizing side effects that steering vectors can have.
CephalopodMD··on White House Prepares Executive Order Targeting 'Woke AI'
AI labs already do everything they can to have politically neutral responses. It turns out that when you pre-train on all the content ever produced by humanity and post-train on real people's preferences, the result is extremely liberal. That's been my experience at least. It's a little counterintuitive, and there are definitely corner cases where misaligned AI becomes more conservative, hateful, or authoritarian, but that's the trend overall. I can all but guarantee that every single major AI product out there would be even more liberal with trust and safety interventions turned off.
CephalopodMD··on I want an iPhone Mini-sized Android phone (2022)
you can pry my 13 mini from my cold dead hands
CephalopodMD··on Gemini 2.5 Flash
As a googler working in LLM space, this feels like revisionist history to me haha! I remember a completely different environment only a few months ago when Anthropic was the darling child, and before that it was OpenAI (and for like 4 weeks somewhere in there, it was Deepseek). For literally years at this point, every time Bard or Gemini would make a major release, it would be largely ignored or put down in favor of the next "big thing" OpenAI was doing or Claude saturating coding benchmarks, never mind that Google was often just behind with the exact same tech ready to go, in some cases only missing their demo release by literally 1 day (remember live voice?). And every time this happened, folks would be posting things to the effect of "LOL I can't believe Google is losing the AI race - didn't they invent this?", "this is like Microsoft dropping the ball on mobile", "Google is getting their lunch eaten by scrappy upstarts," etc. I can't lie, it stings a bit when that's what you work on all day.

2.5 was quite good. Not stupidly good like the jump from GPT 2 to 3 or 3.5 to 4, but really good. It was a big jump in ELO and benchmarks. People like it, and I think it's just psychologically satisfying that the player everybody would have expected to win the AI race is currently in the lead. Gemini finally gets a day in the sun.

I'm sure this will change with whenever somebody comes up with the next big idea though. It probably won't take much to beat Gemini in the long run. There is literally zero moat.

CephalopodMD··on The Real Book (2021)
iReal pro is the new real book
CephalopodMD··on The belay test and the modern American climbing gym
Ohhhhhh. It just clicked for me that indoor climbing is from silicon valley and that's why the Venn diagram of tech bros and crag dirtbags overlays so much. I always assumed there was just something about the type of people who work in tech that they're weirdly more into climbing than average. But it's not a psychological quirk, it's a historical quirk!
CephalopodMD··on Grok3 Launch [video]
Gemini has been topping benchmarks and leaderboards for weeks if not months at this point. Nobody cares.
CephalopodMD··on GenAI Art Is the Least Imaginative Use of AI Imaginable
I feel the same way about using nfts to sell jpegs on the internet
CephalopodMD··on Trump wins presidency for second time
These are real and trivial quotes to find. Google is free my friend.
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