dontlikeyoueith

AWS Textract works pretty well for this and is much cheaper than running LLMs.

In improving the lives of their people?

Yes, absolutely.

It's particularly bad in the anglosphere because we have common law legal systems that are built around resolving personal disputes in court.

This has upsides -- it was a good solution to the problem in the 1200s of people solving disputes by fighting it out -- but in a modern context the downsides are pretty high thanks to rent-seeking lawyers.

The problem is that people already have piss-poor reading comprehension. Relying LLMs to help them is going to make it worse than it already is.

> all the darkest holes of history are in situations that attempt to tell people how to live

I sure hear a lot of faux-market fascists telling me how to live these days.

Sounds like an empty dodge.

> it's better for the cured, and not any worse for all others.

Won't anyone think of the business owners who lost their steady stream of income from treatable but incurable illnesses?

> United could provide you an API key to do so via an API, but in practice they won't, only some enterprisey travel software company can get that kind of access, for a steep fee. You could build a tool which automatically puts together an itinerary based on rules and books it, through a tool like this. Perhaps a slightly contrived example but I believe things like this definitely happen.

And you think that's NOT sketchy?

I'm almost afraid to ask where you think the bar is...

> I'm someone

Asserting facts not in evidence, as they say.

> On the other hand this thing got 83% on a test I got 47% on

Easy to do when it can memorize the answers in its training data and didn't get drunk while reviewing the textbook (that last part might just be me).

I still don't have a Mr. Fusion in my house, FYI.

We always overestimate the future.

That is not what anyone means when they talk about moats.

That's a bit like saying there's no European civilization, just a bunch of different European civilizations sharing a broadly similar culture.

Or maybe ancient Greece, with its city-state structure is the better comparison.

More like drunk or hungover tourists.

That's about the only time I can stomach Taco Bell.

> Everything written is reasonable and logical

So was Ptolemy's model of the solar system.

That doesn't make it right or valuable.

It's not even well thought-out speculation. It's basically "old man rants at clouds."

I'm pretty negative about the LLM hype, but this is just a low-effort, low-value "back in my day" rant.

> We train them for the ability to predict thr next word, which is a task that can only be performed satisfactorily by working at the level of concepts and their relationships, not at the level of words.

This is just obviously, trivially false.

This is just admitting you don't care about knowledge or truth.

> In the limit of training on a diverse dataset (ie as val loss continues to go down), it will converge on the process (whatever that means) or a process sufficiently robust.

This is just moving the goal posts from "learning the actual process" to "any process sufficiently robust"

> I think it's fair to call one process that can imitate a more complex one a representation of that process

I think it's sloppy.

> whether that looks like how humans do it or not.

So you agree with me that there is no guarantee it learns any representation of the actual process that produced the training data.

> But it turns out that to ‘just learn’ the statistical correlations in text, to compress them really well, what the neural network learns is some representation of the process that produced the text

This is pretty sloppy thinking.

The neural network learns some representation of a process that COULD HAVE produced the text. (this isn't some bold assertion, it's just the literal definition of a statistical model).

There is no guarantee it is the same as the actual process. A lot of the "bow down before machine God" crowd is guity of this same sloppy confusion.

That's because you don't understand what you're reading.

Yes, bow down before your god.

You people are so weird.

> Small businesses and business with low profit margins will be forced out of business.

Bad businesses that don't create enough value to justify their existence will be forced out of business.

That's a good thing.

> Just post the big bombshell thing and not express your opinion about stuff?

Yes.

> Often it's the expressing opinion part that's more important than the actual nits.

Your opinions are not that valuable. Focus on the most valuable feedback you can give first.

> If they had taken all the radios and computers out of the system and just showed a random number as the minutes to arrival that would have been every bit as good as NextBus.

Bold of you to assume they hadn't already done that.

Remember, lowest bidder wins the contract.

Oh no, the rich will have the same experience as the poor!

That's a cute tactic.

Claim that $BAD_SIDE_EFFECT would be bad, even if it's better than the status quo.

Nice way to prevent change.

> Our legal system would grind to a halt.

Because it isn't a system so much as a kafka-esque nightmare.