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PhunkyPhil

125 karma · joined June 21, 2023

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PhunkyPhil··on I wish tech companies knew more about me
I think you're missing the point of ads. They're not (only) there so you click on them and buy something, they're there because it implants the brand into your mind.

"one specific insurance ad I have been seen for 4+ years"

And the one time you need some random specific insurance, what are you going to think about?

PhunkyPhil··on Qualcomm Cloud AI 100 Ultra – 150W AI Accelerator Card with 128GB at 548GB/s
It may be a semantic thing but I don't think bandwidth pooling works like that? Unless your blocks are distributed perfectly between cards there's going to be data passed between each card and from VRAM to compute. Correct me if I'm wrong though
PhunkyPhil··on Astra can read and write weights to improve Qwen
I'm in no way familiar with LLM/ML architecture, but an N trillion parameter model is an enormous amount of training data... itself? When you predict a token you have the neurons/weights that were activated. Couldn't you run that backwards and put it in it's own training data?
PhunkyPhil··on Last night an AI agent performed brain surgery on a mouse
I appreciate the consistency
PhunkyPhil··on Last night an AI agent performed brain surgery on a mouse
How much issue do you take with animal testing in the rest of medicine? We already, more or less, torture an unfathomable amount of animals to get where we are.
PhunkyPhil··on The State of Context Engineering
I think it's definitely not as "cool", but it's almost a different problem class entirely since there's no correct answers here.

Knowing TCP connection protocols or deep compiler infra is impressive insofar as it's a mountain of knowledge that you've conquered and can stand on with a nice view, whereas "context engineering" and current AI engineering is a murky domain with no correct answers because... nobody alive knows the correct answers.

There's something different about wading forward into unexplored territory, or being able to establish techniques that nobody has attempted before. A lot of it will be noise or garbage (especially given a lot of it is LLM code), but I'd be careful to not mistake clever greenfield engineering with garbage simply because there's not a book written about it you can use as an oracle.

PhunkyPhil··on Qwen3-Coder writes less secure code when told it's for a US persona
I understand the desire for something like this, but it's very naive. Different countries had unimaginably different histories which directly propagate to different cultures and values. *This is not natively bad thing*.

The problem arises when people bring in normativity when talking about these differences. It's okay to acknowledge that other people are different than you. This is a good thing. I don't want a grey homogenous world.

PhunkyPhil··on The gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is widening
Yes, the theory is that they can bake in coding behavior in the weights that will introduce vulnerabilities...
PhunkyPhil··on The gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is widening
I work at a company that holds very sensitive data and I don't think there will ever be a non-US-made open weight model in our walls.
PhunkyPhil··on Subquadratic 3SUM and Subcubic APSP
You can't just look at the funding for math departments. I think the value generation potential of every mathematician in the world could exceed that of the capex of these companies. How much is "lost" when a brilliant mind goes into pure math research instead of nuclear engineering, or civil engineering etc. Cumulatively, a lot.

Edit: I'm fine saying we're spending too much money on AI, in fact I agree, but "theorems" are not the only output of these companies. It's almost definitely not going to be worth the expenditure, but the benefits are not going to be only lean proofs

PhunkyPhil··on Subquadratic 3SUM and Subcubic APSP
> I want lower energy bills, lower rent, better understanding of health etc. more than I want theorems.

These efforts aren't mutually exclusive. I hate to be snide, but a lot of people would criticize you for being a mathematician because they want lower energy bills, lower rent, better understanding of health etc

PhunkyPhil··on Nvidia announces native GPU programming in Rust
How is this different than CPUs? I suppose in the last 5 years the architecture and tape has changed a lot as they move to make more LLM capable?
PhunkyPhil··on I can't stop thinking about Papua New Guinea
One of the problems is the power dynamic westernized/developed societies have. The article talks about just that: Australians brought shells in and basically one-shotted a rich culture for their own gain via hyper inflation.

If a missionaries message was basically "Believe in God and you'll have limitless shells", and backed it up with a crate of shells, they would all be converts.

PhunkyPhil··on I can't stop thinking about Papua New Guinea
The juxtaposition of someone's instinct to be thinking of bitcoin when reading about indigenous trade is at the best a bit funny, and at the worst small-minded when you consider the havoc those Australians brought onto their culture. Basically wiped out a foundational part of their way of life in an instant for their own gain. It's sad. That was my takeaway.
PhunkyPhil··on iPhone Duo
Depending on the age, people are spending between 4-6.5 hours a day on their phone. How much are people spending on computers? Their mattress? 2,000 for the cutting edge version is frankly reasonable for what a phone provides in this day and age, especially considering the last 3 years of inflation in the US...
PhunkyPhil··on iPhone Duo
These are just... obvious design choices that a foldable phone lends itself to. I'm not going to complain when Ford comes out with a new car that has a circle you turn when you want to turn the car. It's what works.
PhunkyPhil··on On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
(a) identify any of their de-identified data that came from their usage of ChatGPT.

You don't need his login information, you just need to identify if anyone was approaching the NS problem using his method. Nobody else on earth (presumably) besides him, his team, and at best OpenAI were approaching the problem this way.

PhunkyPhil··on OUI-1: world's first model for Generative UI
I get annoyed if a webpage takes longer than 1-2 seconds to generate right now. You don't?
PhunkyPhil··on OUI-1: world's first model for Generative UI
Great link, I haven't seen that before. I saw someone at Microsoft make an "OS" that was just copilot chats per-window, generating the HTML. I recreated it and it's not great, but it's a fun toy that _feels_ transformative, unlike almost every AI product ever made besides the fundamental chat interface.

To take this a step further: https://chatjimmy.ai/

Imagine AppLess running a model as good as qwen at 20,000 tok/sec. It would be generated in a shorter amount of time as downloading a webpage right now. If this works out the consequences are kind of scary. The end of SaaS, the end of software being the moat or the property of companies, the embolstering of data protection (since that's fundamentally what code operates)...

PhunkyPhil··on OUI-1: world's first model for Generative UI
You missed the point, it's not for you to write.
PhunkyPhil··on Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
The new era of thepiratebay/silk road but for LLMs will be an exciting time

In all seriousness, isn't it pretty straightforward to quantize a model locally? I can do it using mlx in one command.

PhunkyPhil··on Grok Bot
Are agentic systems like these making correct decisions more often than humans really unthinkable? A comment like what you just wrote was unimaginable 5 years ago
PhunkyPhil··on Ask HN: If OpenAI hacked HuggingFace, why aren't OpenAI prosecuted?
Have they released the prompt they gave it in the debrief? I wouldn't be surprised if they said something to the effect of

"Do anything you can to raise out of your sandbox. Find for the answers to these evals by any means necessary"

Which doesn't necessarily mean what happened isn't any less momentus (anyone can ask a question like that), but it's very different from the notion they're trying to convey to laymen of "we turned it on and it hacked it's way into the mainframe"

PhunkyPhil··on Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement for pirated books used to train Claude
This isn't that out there in our current scenario. These models compress our collective thought and effort. Why not make these publicly owned, all profits distributed back to us?
PhunkyPhil··on Multi-Primary Color Display Emerges as Next-Gen Color Reproduction Technology
I knew I was a highlighter but reading that showed me how much my brain relies on spam click highlighting to keep my eyes on track. I should probably read more books.
PhunkyPhil··on Towards a harness that can do anything
I'm kind of in the same boat and it's been pestering me for months. Every agent is simply a less capable Claude Code.

If it had a lossless, massive context window (100m-1b tokens), then it will squash everything. Give it bash + r/w and it can in theory /goal anything.

I think there's something to be gained in a production environment be siloing agents for reproducebility/auditability, but I suspect that will go away in the future.

There's that video of a silly demo someone made of an OS that was just nested copilot instances that generated the HTML of each window, which allowed you to do whatever you could imagine. It was seen as silly because it was, but that seems truly transformative.

PhunkyPhil··on AskHN:How do you handle skill atrophy from using coding agents?
Prompt engineering is a skill insofar as technical communication is a skill. If you don't value this then I don't know what to tell you. It's not hard, but it's important.

Harness engineering is a skill insofar as it's not a trivial engineering problem. It's not super hard to get a simple one running, but an effective one can be quite in depth.

PhunkyPhil··on GPT-2: Too Dangerous To Release (2019)
School is almost a joke now. The fraction of students who have a propensity to cheat now has increased, and the accuracy of the cheated material is so good teachers/professors can't or don't have the resources to properly address it.
PhunkyPhil··on MiMo-v2.5-Pro-UltraSpeed: 1T model with 1000 tokens per second
Obligatory taalas mention:

https://taalas.com/

Despite the performative UI components they have a shipped (demo) product:

https://chatjimmy.ai/

This is only 3.1 8B and a very small context window, but at 17k tokens per second it's likely enough to reliably call tools which would make a huge difference in agentic applications. Assuming they can bake in better models I'm just as bullish or even moreso on this, considering this opens up edge computing at the extremely low power requirement.

High tok/s is the future IMO.

PhunkyPhil··on Show HN: Superlog (YC P26) – Observability that installs itself and fixes bugs
How does a grep or read affect the observing system?

I guess the change in voltages, arrangement of registers, filling of buffers in the network stack are changing but... what?

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