iandanforth

I was recently reading the Greek Myths series by Stephen Fry and he makes a point of how there are so many stories we know of but have been lost from ancient texts. Stories and authors that were famous enough to be mentioned by multiple other authors but which themselves have been lost. This collection of scrolls could contain some of those lost stories and the possibility of that is terribly exciting.

Tried it today. The weight is a real problem. I'd gladly have a larger side pack to lose weight off the headset. If they ditched the useless eye screen, and moved the m2 to a pack they could probably drop 100g from the headset.

Frankly I want to watch an animation of all the combinations as they are discovered/created over time from their backend. Seeing a growing 'tech tree' from the exploration and imaginations of users would be delightful.

I'll second this. Jumping straight into a conversation is also pretty stressful. You ask, "Have you practiced conversations before" but answering "Yes" doesn't mean I'm any good at them. I'd like to start with lessons not free form conversation.

Also, please for the love of god remove the 'streak' mechanic. There is nothing more demotivating than breaking a long streak and it's why I don't use Duolingo.

It's a sketch comedy YouTube group. In this sketch a group of scientists are accosted by two people representing the rich and politically powerful who are yelling that people are dying outside because of poison falling from the sky. The scientists take this in stride saying it was a bit earlier than they predicted. The politicians try to get the scientists to do something, but they refuse angrily throwing their papers in the politicians faces that predicted this outcome. The scientists then don additional PPE as the politicians die (there wasn't enough funding to make PPE for them) and the scientists walk out the door to go see a movie, noting that they won't have any competition for the theatre since everyone else is probably dead.

The new video is however a spot on commentary on people who didn't worry about climate change but now do. Very sharp swap, IMO.

"when social and behavioral risk factors were controlled"

So physically and ignoring tons of other factors relevant in the real world.

There are a couple traps to be aware of with this article.

1. "Bioelectricity"

This is a generic term which doesn't capture the nuance of charge gradients and chemical gradients in cells. While you can directly apply charges to interact with gradient based biological systems, this is a brute force method. Cells have chemically selective walls. So while applying an external electrical voltage can act in a similar manner as causing a neuron to fire, it is far less precise than the calcium and sodium channel mediated depolarization which implements normal firing. Said another way 'bioelectricity' is not simple.

2. Replacement

This one is a bit more subtle. If you find that you can affect a system by one means that is not the same thing as saying the means is the cause. Take the example of using RNA to transfer memory from one Aplysia to another. Immediately after transfer the recipient does not have the memory. It takes time for the introduced RNA to affect sensory cells so that they become more sensitive to stimulation. This is in contrast to a trained animal that has already undergone synaptic remodeling. If you have the appropriate synapses but were somehow able to remove all the relevant RNA in an instant, the animal would continue to 'remember' its training. Synapses are sufficient.

In reality there are multiple systems that work together over multiple timescales to produce the behaviors we observe. Some of those systems can have their contributions mimicked by other interventions. Because of this complexity you can never say 'it's really about X', the best you can say is 'X plays a major role' or 'X contributes Y percent to this observed phenomenon'.

Poor sheep.

Nope, still a joke. Like many MS products individual pieces of tech may be incredible but the overall experience is severely lacking. So while you might say "this one aspect of the display technology is incredible!" everyone who's actually used it will reply, "yeah and if it didn't feel like looking through a postage stamp then it would have been great!"

Potatos work as batteries with very little lithium. New Scientist apparently doesn't care about those properties that make batteries useful, so maybe they'll write up potatoes next.

I've never once used a duvet cover. There are plenty of comforters that look great all by themselves. Sometimes the best solution is to remove the problem entirely.

Predibase has a writeup that fine-tunes llama-70b to get 99.9% valid JSON out

https://predibase.com/blog/how-to-fine-tune-llama-70b-for-st...

Is the Post Office a private company? Why are they using phrases like 'protect our brand?'

> "You don’t have to worry about the legal sphere anthropomorphising software."

This is a lawyer writing about a lawsuit on a law office blog. That's what's worrisome.

I take issue with describing hallucinations as lies. They're most certainly not. There is no culpable agent with the ability to determine whether or not they are telling the truth. There is no intent, positive or negative, behind the generations.

The generated statements may be inaccurate but they cannot be called lies. To do would be a dangerous level of anthropomorphization in the legal sphere.

So what do you do now? Also have you connected with others with Asperger's?

Muscles are pretty amazing. They have a higher strength to weight ratio than pretty much any small actuators we have. That strength is essential for smooth dynamic movement (the forces you encounter trying to pick up a gallon of milk, open a jar, get yourself out of bed are surprisingly large). In addition we don't just have muscles that go forward and back, or up and down, like many actuators. We have dozens of muscles engaged during pretty much any task that allow for flexible 3D force application. This is then coupled with reflexes and the brain's ability to accurately predict the body's motion, and that of things you interact with. Robot actuators are almost all reactive making their processing speed a limitation for control.* Humans all use long range predictive control to apply forces preemptively to smooth out motions. Finally we're highly optimized for an effort minimization, we don't just choose motions that work, we choose motions that are efficient. That objective and ability goes all the way back to evolutionary influences.

So yeah, smooth motion feels easy, but is a gd miracle of biology :)

* Robots can make up for a lack of prediction through really really fast control. This is how Boston Dynamics robots operate at a basic level.

Apparently the author has it out for import statements.

"No import dumpster at the top of each file. Forget imports even existed. Just access whatever you want, wherever you want. TypeScript knows where to find it."

This is a bizarre preference. Is there some reason the JS community has turned against explicitly listing what libraries are used by a module?

FYI your mailing list subscription requests get blocked by Firefox tracking protection.

This is a lawsuit, not a call for regulatory action. They are claiming there are guilty parties under existing law. Culpability is the point.

Arguing whether it can is not a useful discussion. You can absolutely train a net to memorize and recite text. As these models get more powerful they will memorize more text. The critical thing is how hard is it to make them recite copyrighted works. Critically the question is, did the developers put reasonable guardrails in place to prevent it?

If a person with a very good memory reads an article, they only violate copyright if they write it out and share it, or perform the work publicly. If they have a reasonable understanding of the law they won't do so. However a malicious person could absolutely trick or force them to produce the copyrighted work. The blame in that case however is not on the person who read and recited the article but on the person who tricked them.

That distinction is one we're going to have to codify all over again for AI.

You may be interested in https://unlearning-challenge.github.io/

(2020)

Can we correct the title to the correct short form: "U.S. workers say weed killer banned in 50 countries is giving them Parkinson's"?

Didn't seem to have any conversation history, or just failed at recalling the 'first question I asked.'

After watching the studying video I'm surprised there is no direct GPT-4 integration with his tool. There's a clear opportunity for dynamic question generation such that you have notes/cards which can't be memorized but instead ask novel questions around the same point.

TLDR; It doesn't work very well except on summarizing specific documents.

It is, yes. If you browse zillow you'll find many homes have 3D views attached. These are often image-sphere captures that you can painfully move through by clicking. While I agree that full res photos can be more appealing, the user experience with SMERF is so much better it might leave end users with a more positive feeling about a property and thus increase the chances of a sale.

Nice work. They still use a mid-level controller to translate the output of the policy into kinematics which is an all-too-frequently accepted part of robotics. Ideally control is learned end-to-end, which is how you get more natural robot motion.