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hfbff

136 karma · joined August 31, 2022

ML / AI. Particularly interested in causality

cd_1901 is my username

proton.me is the server

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hfbff··on Google Python Style Guide
`pyarrow`'s `read_csv` function[0] has just four default arguments (defaulted to None): 3 option objets and one Memory Pool option.

``` pyarrow.csv.read_csv(input_file, read_options=None, parse_options=None, convert_options=None, MemoryPool memory_pool=None) ```

You can then pass a `ReadOptions`[1] object if needed.

For example:

``` read_options = csv.ReadOptions( column_names=["animals", "n_legs", "entry"], skip_rows=1) csv.read_csv(io.BytesIO(s.encode()), read_options=read_options) ```

You can see how ReadOptions is written on this link [2]. It's interesting they use a `cdef class` from `Cython` for this.

This doesn't solve all issues (the ReadOptions object and the others will inevitably have a bunch of default arguments) but I do think it's safer and it's easier to have a mental map of the things you need to decide and what's decided for you.

[0] https://arrow.apache.org/docs/python/generated/pyarrow.csv.r... [1] https://arrow.apache.org/docs/python/generated/pyarrow.csv.R... [2] https://github.com/apache/arrow/blob/master/python/pyarrow/_...

hfbff··on QGIS is the mapping software you didn't know you needed
>A note for my European friends - some of these links might not work from outside the US, as some .gov links tend not to.

Is the author assuming you're either from the US or European if you're reading the blog?

hfbff··on Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office?
This has been my experience too. The transactional vs familiar thing is a tradeoff IMHO and people will have different preferences.

Also: I'd like to ask you a few questions on Latam remote work. My email is in my About if you have the time!

hfbff··on Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office?
I've talked about this topic with many people and it seldom matches the opinions of many people here in hacker news. I wonder if hacker news is biased towards a specific type of people that is less social / more family oriented / etc? (Of course, the people I meet in real life could be the more biased sample)
hfbff··on U.S. military shoots down suspected Chinese surveillance balloon
Are you saying that the US does believe in a rules-based international system? Let's count the number of countries the USA has invaded vs China...and the government topples with the help of the USA vs China
hfbff··on U.S. military shoots down suspected Chinese surveillance balloon
From your point of view, I can see how China is bad and the USA is good. But ask someone whose country got invaded by the USA or whose bloody dictator got supported by the USA. Over here in Latinamerica we still remember the horrible things that the USA did. It seems to me (but I could have a false perception) that China is a horrible bully in their corner of the world (nine dash line and, of course their will to invade Taiwan), but their foreign policy is order of magnitude less intrusive (i.e. they don't invade or topple countries on the other side of the world).
hfbff··on New AI classifier for indicating AI-written text
You're right, that's the core mechanims of GANs. The current state of the art models aren't using a GAN structure, but it's plausible that they achieve state of the art numbers in the future
hfbff··on New AI classifier for indicating AI-written text
>People who are great at writing prompts for ChatGPT aren't going to be that, either.

I don't see why this would be true. If you have evidence of some strong argument on why this would be true, I'd like to hear them.

As an anecdote, I work with young people (x<25) that don't seem to be worse at recalling facts than the older generation. The bright/geeky ones grew up reading up wikipedia and, in fact, have a wider grasp of facts/stories than the older generation (in my experience)

hfbff··on New AI classifier for indicating AI-written text
Text generating models are so much more than spell checkers, but allow me to make a comparison .

Before spell checkers, having good spelling was relatively difficult and it allowed employers/teachers/etc to separate the "good" people from the "bad". After spell checkers became ubiquitous (unless you have to handwrite!), having good spelling became the norm and the floor becomes much higher. A document with bad spelling means the person doesn't know of spell checkers (a sign that the person isn't computer savvy enough?) Or doesn't care enough.

Did spell checkers reduce the language capacity of students? Maybe they did start putting less attention into spelling, but I would argue it's ok because now we have more assistance. If you really want to test their spelling, you can always do a handwritten, in class quiz.

ChatGPT and the like may be different because they are written the whole thing, right? Well, kind of. You still need to give the prompt to express what you want to say. You still need to correct stuff and exercise judgment to see if the style in this paragraph is ok, if the facts stated over in that other paragraphs are ok. Besides, you still need to learn how to write because of the in class quiz next week.

hfbff··on Cuba and the geopolitics of submarine cables
I think keeping an embargo and hurting a country for 60 years is enough to send a signal. In any case, the US government isn't doing it motivated by some intertemporal consistency (and thinking of the next 200 years of foreign policy), they do it for the cuban swing voters
hfbff··on Playing games with AIs: The limits of GPT-3 and similar large language models
It's funny that you mention poetry. With poetry I do like to feel the sound of words.

I very much like Emily Dickinson, why? (What's your favorite piece of poetry?)

hfbff··on Tell HN: We Need Robots.txt but for AI
This is your opinion. Many experts (the majority right now?) do see the beginning of general intelligence and I would urge you to at least entertain the possibility that those experts are right.

(Also, general intelligence is not usually synonymous with self awareness in the literature. You might want to argue that, but it's, I think, a minority opinion)

hfbff··on Franz Kafka, Party Animal
Why is Sartre de waiter? I don't get it
hfbff··on Why Fortran is a scientific powerhouse
My experience with academics is that most don't know / don't understand the benefits of coding things in a better way, so they don't even consider hiring someone to help.

The other issue is that the incentives aren't necessarily aligned. They don't get payed to share their code or to make their code reusable. The code is used to publish one or a couple of paper and then thrown away. Maybe someone else will reuse it in the future but the original author doesn't necessarily gain much from that

hfbff··on Tell HN: We Need Robots.txt but for AI
I don't think you're being charitable enough. GP point is actually thought-provoking (at least to me): doing it for humans doesn't make sense. Does it make sense to do it for AI? The more advanced the AI, the less sense it makes.

I think it's related with the "substantive elaboration" test with regards to copyright (sorry I can't remember the proper term). If I just copy a scene from your movie, you can probably sue me. If I take some elements from it, but do my own thing so that it read more like a parody/comment / meta-comment, then it's ok.

Is AI just parroting back stuff or is it creating new things? A few years ago, I would have said it's just parroting. With the current models I think we are midway (it will depend on the propmt too!). In a couple of years my bet is that we'll be clearly on the "creating new thinfs territory".

hfbff··on Playing games with AIs: The limits of GPT-3 and similar large language models
I read without hearing the words. If I'm tired, however, sometimes I need to start reading out loud to keep concentrated.

Also, non phonetic writing systems will push you towards not hearing while reading. For example, when I read chinese there are plenty of characters (hanzi) whose pronunciation I don't know (was it hai? Pai?), but I remember the meaning just fine.

Even with English (I'm not a native speaker) sometimes I won't remember how to pronounce a certain word, but I'll read it just fine.

hfbff··on Lula Becomes Brazil’s President, Bolsonaro Flees to Florida
But Lula got arrested by the judiciary, right? How do you reconcile that with what you're saying?
hfbff··on A map of every country in the world using a MM/DD/YYYY date format
The map is a just a joke...the whole point is that there are so few countries that have this format that it looks silly to represent this information with a map. Adding the ~2 other countries (Liberia + 0.5 Canada + 0.5 Philippines) would be more complete of course, but also the joke wouldn't be as clear
hfbff··on Elon Musk’s $44B education on free speech
Please reflect on whether you're being unreasonable and too emotional on this response (i.e. you're not considering the evidence that is given and you're not giving evidence of your own).

This is why you're getting downvoted. You can come up with a reason why we're downvoting you, but maybe it's because you need to reflect a bit more on what you're saying and be more open with different opinions/facts?

The poster above you gave you a quote of an estimate. This can be challenged if you quote another estimate or you find some deep methodological flaws on the estimate. Your argument, as it stands, is nonsensical

hfbff··on The War on General Purpose Computing (2015) [video]
Agreed. I don't want either (in general, there might be exception s). I obviously want to hold people (the people that actually have the kiddie porn, that are actually posting the hate speech) accountably for kiddie porn, inciting terrorism and even hate speech, but I don't generally want vendors to be accountable.
hfbff··on Stable Diffusion 2.0
I don't think you're using the principle of charity here ("make the best interpretation of a post"). The person isn't complain, he/she is just saying that people will probably return to v1 unless v2 has something impressive to compensate.
hfbff··on Japanese have been producing wood for 700 years without cutting down trees
I don't know about your corner in Canada, but that "there was nothing here 150 years ago" is a dangerous lie told by people in many parts of the USA and Canada that minimized the indigenous people and occupied their land.

Your part of Canada might truly be somewhere with no indigenous presence

hfbff··on BBC ignores World Cup opening ceremony in favour of Qatar criticism
I've been complaining about FIFA for at least a decade, I don't see it as a new thing
hfbff··on BBC ignores World Cup opening ceremony in favour of Qatar criticism
So the tens of thousand of migrant workers didn't die?
hfbff··on BBC ignores World Cup opening ceremony in favour of Qatar criticism
Is this a play on words? At least how I understand the word, "whitewash" doesn't have a racial reference.

The countries that need a whitewash are the ones that have really bad human rights abuse (or, in this case, a country that let tens of thousands of people die building the very same stadiums that are being used). That's not related to being white in any systematic way

hfbff··on BBC ignores World Cup opening ceremony in favour of Qatar criticism
Good. This is by far the world cup I've been less excited about, both because it counts as whitewash for the Qatar government and for how corrupt FIFA is.
hfbff··on If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
Football fans are a sizable group in pretty much in every social network
hfbff··on The sinister attempts to ‘decolonise’ mathematics
Unfortunately the selection of criticisms is not great. I agree with some, but then it mixes it with things like

>The UK Office for National Statistics has already succumbed to such ideas, proposing that respondents should be allowed to self-identify their sex in the 2021 census.

This is something we've been doing in my country for decades and I don't see a problem with it (the alternative is to ask the person that does the census to take a guess on the gender of the person...sometimes it's easy, sometimes not so much)

hfbff··on AI models that predict disease are not as accurate as reports might suggest
Thanks for sharing. My belief is that we need to figure out a way to make humans interact with prediction models in a virtuous way. Prediction models suck at "connecting the dots" or considering multiple sources of information (for example: multiple models predicting different outcomes). Until we get true general artificial intelligence, I think the way to go forward is to try to quantify those unknowns through confidence intervals (conformal prediction seems to be quite nice for many models) plus some multiple hypothesis testing to handle the multiple outcomes / multiple models.

This needs to be then implemented on a real flow where humans and prediction models interact (for example: approve these things automatically, send these other test for humans to revise)

hfbff··on Illegal host, electric shocks, slugs, leaks and no support – How Airbnb failed
And I prefer Airbnb because sometimes I can't afford hotels. It means you're richer than me. I'm glad there are offerings for both of us.
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