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astrange

16,618 karma · joined August 28, 2009

An omnipresence in wired?
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astrange··on Waymo Safety Impact
They don't necessarily even hint them. I think the car mainly asks them yes/no questions and they respond.
astrange··on EsoLang-Bench: Evaluating Genuine Reasoning in LLMs via Esoteric Languages
> I would probably score about the same, does this prove I also rely on training data memorization rather than genuine programming reasoning?

It doesn't even prove the models do that. The RLVR environments being mostly Python isn't "training data memorization". That's just the kind of dumb thing people say to sound savvy.

astrange··on EsoLang-Bench: Evaluating Genuine Reasoning in LLMs via Esoteric Languages
BF involves a lot of repeated symbols, which is hard for tokenized models. Same problem as r's in strawberry.
astrange··on Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework
Kind of like saying that scaling the language area in a human brain won't lead to a human brain.

True, but just don't do that then.

astrange··on Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework
AI has been consistently defined as "anything we can't make a computer do yet" since 1970.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2024/06/20/not-ai/

astrange··on Big data on the cheapest MacBook
Well, now you get to file a bug with Feedback Assistant…

If you send me the number it will get looked at.

astrange··on Big data on the cheapest MacBook
Run `IOAccelMemory` in the terminal to see what's causing that (dirty and wired columns). It's probably an app with a lot of windows.

Or for general memory `footprint` is good.

astrange··on AirPods Max 2
Modern Apple gives you control over everything by hiding it in Accessibility settings. You can control almost everything about AirPods and give them custom EQ there. But it doesn't have that.
astrange··on Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story
Having assets worth X dollars is not the same thing as having X dollars. It means investors are willing to trade you X dollars for the assets.

Those investors don't want to give /you/ money, they want to give the billionaire money.

astrange··on AirPods Max 2
Apple's R&D budget for a single product is larger than the entire audiophile industry, and they also actually know how to manufacture things.
astrange··on AirPods Max 2
Unfortunately ANC only works on some sounds. In the suburbs you have leafblowers and cars driving past you on the sidewalk, and ANC removes everything /else/ which makes them stand out even more.
astrange··on AirPods Max 2
> If you keep in mind that AirPods are calibrated to your ears with your iPhone's FaceID camera, they provide nice, tailored sound.

That's only for spatial audio.

astrange··on Your phone is an entire computer
Carriers definitely care about the OS if it's a major OS, because bugs can take them down.
astrange··on Parallels confirms MacBook Neo can run Windows in a virtual machine
Just because it's soldered doesn't mean it can't be replaced.

(But it's encrypted, so you'd better have backups because you can't read it off the chips.)

astrange··on The MacBook Neo
LZ4 not LZFSE.

> Windows/Linux treat RAM like a stream of bytes (similar to how you’d compress a .zip file) so it’s not as efficient.

That doesn't really follow. There are faster and slower compression algorithms no matter what, and 64-bit integers are kind of a waste of memory much of the time.

Also, unified memory has tradeoffs. The GPU improvements are real but it mostly means more pressured on memory, not less.

astrange··on LLM Writing Tropes.md
That's not a major issue. Any newer model with reasoning/web search has to be able to tell when it doesn't know something, otherwise it doesn't know when to search for it.
astrange··on We should revisit literate programming in the agent era
No, I use plan mode and have several rounds of conversation with it, but lately I've been doing tasks where it does tons of independent research and finds complicated conclusions in an existing old codebase. I don't really feel like either of those count as "a prompt".

The plan mode is useful because if you do corrections during development mode it does that silly thing where it leaves comments referring to your corrections.

astrange··on Unlocking Python's Cores:Energy Implications of Removing the GIL
"gives real memory and IPC wins" is AI phrasing. So is the colon followed by tricolon.

Pangram is pretty reliable and shows 100% AI.

astrange··on We should revisit literate programming in the agent era
Almost nothing in a Claude Code session has to do with "your prompt", it works for an hour afterwards and mostly talks to itself. I've noticed if you give it small corrections it will leave nonsensical comments referring to your small correction as if it's something everyone knows.
astrange··on LLM Writing Tropes.md
OAI puts instructions in the system prompt to use or not use emoji depending on your style settings.
astrange··on LLM Writing Tropes.md
The newer Claude models constantly use the word "genuinely" because Anthropic seems to have forcibly trained them to claim to be "genuinely uncertain" about anything they don't want it being too certain about, like whether or not it's sentient.
astrange··on LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first
Claude is multimodal and can see images, though it's not good at thinking in them.
astrange··on MacBook Neo
And a different SSD and different charging and different heatsinks…
astrange··on Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs
I thought a mezzanine was when you go see a movie at noon.
astrange··on Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’
Bernie had the most money. Political campaigns get money from people using ActBlue to give them $25.

(Also, political donors are unusually engaged upper-middle-class people which means they are left of the average voter.)

astrange··on The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying
You can see what Claude's goal is, and it's not that.

https://www.anthropic.com/constitution

> Anthropic wants Claude to be genuinely helpful to the people it works with or on behalf of, as well as to society, while avoiding actions that are unsafe, unethical, or deceptive.

astrange··on GPT-5.4
They have AI psychosis and think it's their boyfriend.

The 5.x series have terrible writing styles, which is one way to cut down on sycophancy.

astrange··on MacBook Neo
Probably a badly behaved app. Run `IOAccelMemory` to check.
astrange··on MacBook Neo
Slack is an Electron app.
astrange··on Claude's Cycles [pdf]
How do you get from a piece of text smaller than a word to an entire coherent sentence?
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