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HarHarVeryFunny

8,220 karma · joined July 29, 2017

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HarHarVeryFunny··on Uranium cubes reveal why the German nuclear project failed
The Uranium cubes don't tell you anything - they just didn't have enough, or enough heavy water, to achieve criticality for a nuclear reactor.

The real goal was to build a nuclear bomb, not a reactor, and the main reason the Germans failed at that is different - Heisenberg incorrectly calculated the critical mass of U-235, thinking that tons would be necessary, which would be impossible to produce (unlike a heavy water reactor which doesn't need refined U-235).

Of course even if Heisenberg had calculated correctly, it's not clear that Germany had the resources or mindset for a Manhatten project scale effort to actually pursue it.

One interesting stat on the Manhatten project is that is was using 10-15% of all electricity generated in the US - just to refine the 64kg of U-325 needed for the Hiroshima bomb.

HarHarVeryFunny··on Tesla winds down Cybertruck production after years of poor sales in few markets
Not sure what you mean by that - I'm sure Tesla was happy to have the reservations (great publicity - maybe that was the point), but there is no indication they took the numbers seriously.
HarHarVeryFunny··on Tesla winds down Cybertruck production after years of poor sales in few markets
It was a refundable deposit (and small), so I wonder how many people were even that serious - no real commitment.

2019 USA annual car/pickup sales were ~17M. I find it very hard to believe that 10% (2M cybertruck pre-orders) of those purchasers were seriously interested in a cybertruck - it really is not a design made for mainstream tastes.

HarHarVeryFunny··on Tesla to wind down Cybertruck production
I wonder how many people liked the design vs tolerated it? If Ford offered a cybertruck trim on the F-150 without changing the price would people buy it?

No doubt there is some demand for an "out there" design, but I'd have to guess that the projected $40K price was itself a large part of the attraction.

HarHarVeryFunny··on Tesla winds down Cybertruck production after years of poor sales in few markets
> it was the first car with steerable rear wheels

Not even close - there are probably at least a dozen 4 wheel steering cars going back to the mid 80's starting with things like Nissan Skyline, Honda Prelude, etc.

HarHarVeryFunny··on Tesla to wind down Cybertruck production
A ford Transit van fits that requirement much better - much more useful as a utility vehicle, much more space for advertising, much cheaper...
HarHarVeryFunny··on Tesla winds down Cybertruck production after years of poor sales in few markets
Even if it was half the cost, say $40K rather than $80K, I think most people in the market for a vehicle would choose something else!
HarHarVeryFunny··on Tesla to wind down Cybertruck production
I don't think the poor sales is primarily due to the cost - it's just a design with limited appeal.
HarHarVeryFunny··on Geoffrey Hinton: it might turn out we were better off without AI
Sort of, although didn't Von Neumann package it slightly differently - less personal (someone else) and more about the evolution of science and separation of roles of scientist and politician... basically science is going to happen, and it's not for people like us (scientists) to be worry about what happens as a result.

Still seems a moral cop-out, and while true, the timeline would certainly have changed, if not the inevitability, if key figures such as himself had opted out.

HarHarVeryFunny··on 'It's just vape, nail, charity shops': Can anything save UK high street?
What was your impression of London ?
HarHarVeryFunny··on Geoffrey Hinton: it might turn out we were better off without AI
Yes, the cat is out of the bag as to how to create this type of AI.

But that doesn't mean that everyone has to use it.

We're only starting to see the beginning of the negative impact of AI to the job market and society. If if turns out that allowing most jobs to be replaced by AI is bad for society and the economy (super high unemployment - nobody buying more then necessities), then wouldn't it be smarter to not do that?

If that's the case, then each country can decide for themselves.

Dario's "Machines of loving grace" UBI/foodstamp "utopia" sure doesn't sound like a recipe for success.

HarHarVeryFunny··on The 'Astra can read and write weights to improve Qwen' post is misleading
Any idea why Alibaba might ship a model while aware that it has this defect when it is so easy to fix?

Is this looping tough to fix by changing the training?

HarHarVeryFunny··on Anthropic's IPO Filing Warns It May Be 'Imminently' Close to RSI
No - that will not be possible. They need your money first.

Dario will send you a postcard from Fiji if they achieve RSI, AGI, any mass extinction events, or any other milestones.

HarHarVeryFunny··on Anthropic's IPO Filing Warns It May Be 'Imminently' Close to RSI
The reality of "RSI" is just attempting to automate the jobs of people working on building/training LLMs - it's not about creating "smarter data". Much post-training nowadays doesn't even use data - it uses thousands of custom training environments for agents to attempt to do better in.
HarHarVeryFunny··on WTF Ubuntu?
This is a valid concern.

AI is now capable of, and being applied to, find so many bugs recently that infrastructure providers need to up their game and respond quickly.

Hopefully this is a passing phase as bugs are quickly patched, and we'll get past it without too many incidents.

HarHarVeryFunny··on Anthropic may not secure investment-grade rating after IPO, Blackstone says
Yeah - maybe we get a free token on IPO day.

In contrast, back when RedHat went public they reached out to everyone on the open source mailing lists, and gave everyone a few shares as thanks for the work they were benefiting from. I got some shares even though all I had done was post some free video format converters.

HarHarVeryFunny··on Serbia just elected the world's brainiest parliament
The ancient Roman republic (i.e. pre-Caesar) did just fine run by the senate without any emperor (they were vehemently opposed to the idea of putting so much power in the hands of one individual).

One of the ways they made this work was by assigning temporary powers to elected/appointed individuals appropriate and sufficient to get their job done, whether that was provincial governor, tribunus plebis, consul or whatever. A notable title was that of "dictator" (where the modern word derives from) which gave sweeping temporary powers to a general sufficient to execute a war.

Julius Caesar famously abused this system, effectively becoming the first emperor (despite no such position existing) by assuming the title of "dictator perpetuo" (perpetual dictator), although that did not end well for him. His successor, Augustus (whose adopted name later became the name of the office of emperor) initiated a more acceptable version of this by simultaneously holding multiple "elected" positions thereby having the power of them all.

HarHarVeryFunny··on Democrats' Secret Effort to Stack Alaska's Ballot
Honestly seems fair game to me - he did qualify to get on the ballot by going through the primary system and ranking #3 (with 2.5% of the vote). Top 4 get on the ballot.
HarHarVeryFunny··on Anthropic may not secure investment-grade rating after IPO, Blackstone says
According to this analysis of Anthropic's S-1, the founders own about 10% of the company, which at $2T valuation would mean they each make about $28B. The employees collectively own about 15% which results in some staggering math - thousands of employees making ~$100M each, even those hired as recently as last year.

These are averages, but still!

https://x.com/AndrewBenson/status/2115458726396310008

HarHarVeryFunny··on I didn't know I was lacking in Vitamin D until I collapsed at work
I've got to wonder about correlation vs causation.

Normally, as well as food sources, your body naturally produces Vitamin D as a reaction to sunlight (being outdoors), and not having sufficient time outdoors, especially in a pleasant/nature environment, may be contributing to depression.

HarHarVeryFunny··on LLM Voice
I'm not sure how you are imagining an LLM "self evaluating". They are feed-forward auto-regressive predictors. The only source for the next word they spit out is what came before and the patterns that contains.

If you ask an LLM to "win like Magnus" it can't because, as above, it is a feed-forward auto-regressive predictor. Do you realize how much different this is to how something like Stockfish (that can play at, and far beyond, Magnus' level) works?

A big LLM is still an LLM - the architecture and operation doesn't change. It just has more capacity to learn, both to learn deep predictive patterns and to memorize factual knowledge.

Does it not occur to you that your beliefs of what LLMs are capable of (generating amazing prose) is totally at odds with what we see them doing? Where is all the amazing prose?

HarHarVeryFunny··on Gilgamesh by Simon Armitage review – an ancient epic is brilliantly translated
The Roman's hadn't invented soap, so oil worked as a cleaning agent since it mixed with oily secretions, then being scraped off with a special purpose "strigil" scraping instrument - usually done at the public baths.
HarHarVeryFunny··on Cisco gives engineer unlimited AI tokens to rewrite legacy code
Yeah - code rewrites are generally a thing to be avoided since the requirements of older production code is typically not fully documented, even if it originally had been. Production code accumulates bug fixes, performance tweaks, special cases, additional requirements, etc, with documentation and test suites not always being updated in sync.

Your rewritten codebase will presumably look much cleaner and more maintainable that what it's aiming to replace, but it's easy to miss the purpose/necessity of all of the old "cruft" which need not be just poor coding but rather later enhancements not anticipated by the original design whose implementation was therefore crufty.

Does anyone here work at Cisco, and have any insight as to why a rewrite is considered necessary and might be expected to succeed?

HarHarVeryFunny··on Gilgamesh by Simon Armitage review – an ancient epic is brilliantly translated
I'm not sure what culture(s) you're referring to as "in antiquity", but in the Roman world at least olive oil was mostly for consumption - a way to add some flavor, moisture and calories to bread that was the core staple keeping the population alive. Olive oil was such a necessary part of the diet that emperor Septimius Severus instituted the "Oleum Publicum" making olive oil part of the Annona - free distribution of food primarily within the city of Rome.
HarHarVeryFunny··on LLM Voice
Yes, with the "scenario expectations" just being the necessary setup to deliberately create false expectations and make the punchline that much more unexpected/funny.

I think both music and humor are both exploiting the same evolutionary essentials of human nature - to find comfort/safety in predictability, and excitement/danger in unpredictability. Laughter would seem to be a social thing - perhaps it helps develop a theory of mind in signalling that you get the joke - that the punchline is indeed unexpected to you as well ? And/or perhaps it helps draw others attention to an unexpected situation with learning potential.

HarHarVeryFunny··on LLM Voice
The goal (literal, not figurative) of an LLM is to reduce training/inference errors - to predict the training material.

The "quality/goodness" (likability) of output is only selected for to extent that it also reflects RLHF preferences originating from low paid contractors who are scoring based on "looks good to me", not based on Pulitzer prize prose potential.

To explore a false hypothetical, suppose an LLM was only trained on the output of a single popular author, then you'd certainly expect it to reproduce that author's style, but it would not be "upredictably interesting" but rather predictably quirky, reproducing the same "surprises" over and over so that they no longer are surprising and therefore interesting.

To continue the hypothetical, if you trained an LLM exclusively on the output of multiple good authors, then rather than get the best of each you'd get a statistical blend (this is how training works) that emphasized what they had in common rather than the individual quirks that made them interesting.

There is a fairly common misperception that "AI" (LLMs) is always trying to do it's best, where "best" has been anthropomorphized to have the human sense rather than the LLM sense of "the most statistically accurate continuation prediction" it can make. For example, if you give an LLM the moves of a partial chess game and ask it to predict next moves for one of the players, it will NOT play to win, but will rather play to predict how the game would have continued, which means continuing at the level (ELO rating) and style of the player who had made those moves.

Of course you can ask an LLM to play to win, just as you can ask it to write in a style that is, say, "unpredictable and interesting", but it can't escape itself - you will necessarily get predictable unpredictability.

HarHarVeryFunny··on LLM Voice
> All human communication is based on internally simulating the presumed mind that was/will-be at the other end

Which requires a bunch of things an LLM lacks, such as theory of mind, knowing who it is talking to, and willingness/ability to engage in short turn conversation to assess and steer the conversation according to the feedback it is getting from the person it is talking to.

HarHarVeryFunny··on LLM Voice
A model trained to minimize statistical prediction errors is going to sound ... predictable (aka boring). A (good) human author tries to keep their writing interesting, while an LLM strives for predictable instead.

It's not just predicting content but also the form/shape of the response, highly shaped by RLHF preferences, which seems to encourage longer form responses which need padding with filler to generate the "preferred" amount of verbiage.

It seems most of these models have been trained to interpret questions as wanting a long-form authoritative/comprehensive-sounding response (even when midwit filler is all it has to offer), rather than initiating a short-turn conversation which would better allow you to steer the conversation. Apparently Muse is much better in this regard, but so far I've resisted signing up for any Meta/FaceBook service, and not inclined to break this winning streak!

HarHarVeryFunny··on Gemini 4 Carbon is the new #1 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5
Interesting idea .. "Google Prime" including access to all their best stuff.
HarHarVeryFunny··on Gemini 4 Carbon is the new #1 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5
What's the betting we see another "dramatic" Anthropic release either shortly before the IPO, or at same time they release their Q3 results which were conveniently omitted from their S-1 filing.
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