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otterdude

146 karma · joined August 22, 2021

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otterdude··on Air Purifiers as White Noise Machines
They work great, better than a fan because it clears the air.

I have one blowing gently across my face while I sleep. It cools me down, and blocks out the highway noise.

otterdude··on Google cleared 300 hectares of Finnish forest
Haven't you seen the lord of the rings? Cut down the trees at your own risk
otterdude··on Celebrating 70 Years of Fortran
Fortran certainly has its place, but if you really need to squeeze every bit of performance out of a machine I think assembly might be better and not much harder.
otterdude··on Super Intelligence
Just wait until super-duper intelligence
otterdude··on Celebrating 70 Years of Fortran
Fortran while historically important doesn't really seem like a good choice today.

I worked with a proprietary jet engine analysis software suite written in Fortran 77 and It felt very primitive, albeit fast.

Today I feel like C is a much better choice for speed and readability.

If you really need the fastest performance I dont think Fortran gives that much of an advantage writing assembly.

otterdude··on Simons Foundation launches $15M effort to help mathematicians navigate AI era
Richard Simmons, what a guy
otterdude··on When AI Benchmarks Plateau: A Systematic Study of Benchmark Saturation
It appears y combinator has removed this interesting paper from its top trending position. Gee I wonder why?
otterdude··on When AI Benchmarks Plateau: A Systematic Study of Benchmark Saturation
If most models were getting 100% on the test it would be an inadequate benchmarks.

What were seeing is all models failing to ace these tests.

"Benchmark Saturation" is term that promotes lowering the bar.

otterdude··on When AI Benchmarks Plateau: A Systematic Study of Benchmark Saturation
Benchmarks saturate around 80-90%?

This is not "Acing" a test, this is hitting a wall.

otterdude··on When AI Benchmarks Plateau: A Systematic Study of Benchmark Saturation
Jumping in here, frankly I hate the trend of calling every type of automation intelligence.

Most "AI" is really an optimization algorithm in software tools, same as its always been. This really isnt anything new, aside from adding a chatbot / MCP interface to the same tools.

otterdude··on When AI Benchmarks Plateau: A Systematic Study of Benchmark Saturation
Its not really that surprising when models are trained on the exams
otterdude··on When AI Benchmarks Plateau: A Systematic Study of Benchmark Saturation
This seems to be the end of the road for LLM's. There's only so much accuracy on a highly non-linear space you can get from a regression.

If the Pareto rule is any indicator, 80% of results come from 20% of causes. It seems that we have alot more to learn about intelligence.

I am reminded of a statement on truth from an ancient philosopher, this sentiment seems to be exactly the opposite of the LLM training paradigm

“The seeker after truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration and not the sayings of human beings whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and deficiency. Thus the duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and, applying his mind to the core and margins of of its content, attack it from every side. he should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency.” - ibn al-Haytham

otterdude··on Flock Credibility Lost as It Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police, & Public
It wont go down willingly but its possible
otterdude··on Young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise
You have it backwards.

People have owned property, and worked since the dawn of time, the core original idea in the wealth of nations is that competition lowers prices... thats where the idea of markets come from.

The only real "benefit" come from competition through lower prices, the rest of the factors ie property and labor in a free exchange are the requirements to reach the optimal outcome.

otterdude··on What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
Where will AI's get the training data to answer questions now?
otterdude··on Young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise
I think a couple of things are play here

1. corporate consolodation - the only promise of capitalism is that competition lowers prices. Competition is at an all time low.

2. economics and the fallacy of unlimited growth. We live on a finite size planet, and every company is acting as though it expects 10% growth to increase forever. If demand increases and supplies dwindle thats one large prevailing force that would mask as inflation.

The establishment and universities are failing us as they refuse to critically study and address these major conceptual issues.

otterdude··on "An AI Job Apocalypse?" – Goldman Sachs Report [pdf]
I think youre confusing a religious like belief in capitalism that posits that "greed is good" despite any contra indication with economics, which is a discipline where conjecture is taught as fact and empiricism if frowned upon.

I'm not even going to touch your examples. They are completely illogical? Dell? The Internet?? Thats one company, and a technology.

If you read the wealth of nations, the only real promise of capitalism is that competition lowers prices, and thats why its considered "good" not because it solves all problems. I believe that, the rest is ill-supported conjecture.

To point out the global stupidity that is economics, there is absolutely no consideration for the concept of a constraint. Constraints are a fundamental problem in optimization.

This article lays it out nicely. https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/rethink-the-growth-imper...

Research this topic and you'll find economists arguing insistently that the conservation of mass or energy don't exist.

otterdude··on "An AI Job Apocalypse?" – Goldman Sachs Report [pdf]
> All I ever see is basically a religious belief that surely something will arise.

Welcome to economics! Bullshit and conjecture all the way down.

otterdude··on The Benefits and Harms of Generative AI for Novice Programmers [video]
This video is based on this research studying novices programmers with eyetracking & interviews.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.17739

I'm finding this to be true with my experience. Noivces used to be a self solving problem... they got better or gave up.

Now they can present 80% solutions which cause bugs and eat up more experienced devs time. The worst part is they dont build the skills as they program continuing to defer to GenAI

otterdude··on The Widening Gap: The Benefits and Harms of Generative AI for Novice Programmers
Finding this maddeningly true. Novices used to be a self solving problem, they either gave up or got better.
otterdude··on OpenAI unveils its first custom chip, built by Broadcom
Basically getting around the branch predictor problem with generalized compute architectures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branch_predictor
otterdude··on OpenAI unveils its first custom chip, built by Broadcom
Not a chip CEO, but I read this article and thought that they're working on some kind of application specific chip only for serving models. Similar to how an FPGA can optimize certain tasks.

Given constant weights / biases of a Transformer / DNN you could use pipelining to feed forward calculations through the array one layer at a time. For DNN's with thousands of layers you might see 1:1 speed up per layer channel.

I doubt they would undergo this process for marginal gains.

otterdude··on Running local models is good now
Data Center providers are buying hardware, not anthropic. Certainly related but alot of the hardware purchased is just sitting in a warehouse waiting for a data center to get built.
otterdude··on I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
How would you expect this dynamic to change considering potentially "consistent" actors in AI / Automation?

How do you imagine companies with staying power will be shaped in the future? Will we see new paradigms in management? ie smaller teams, jack of all trade types of individuals vs specialists, potentially the elimination of middle management all together

otterdude··on I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
Would you relate this phenomenon to entropy?

Ie founders create order out of chaos, then entropy slowly creeps in due to X,Y,Z?

I loved the lean startup I'll be reading this book as well :)

otterdude··on New method turns ocean water into drinking water, without waste
Thermal methods require energy, it seems like this substrate is effective at maintaining its solar-thermal absorbing properties better than a material that will attract salts

> Testing their solar-thermal desalination technique using samples of water from the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans, Guo and his team were able to make the surface self-cleaning. In other words, it extracted freshwater and directed the remaining salts to the passive region where they could be later collected without reducing the panel’s efficiency.

This is not "large" this is a moderate improvement. Albedo is likely only marginally affected, and the solar power input over area is the same.

Depending on this cost of this process it could very likely be a wash in terms of NPV

otterdude··on Artificial intelligence is not conscious
Wouldn't a conscious entity be able to grow its intelligence over time independently?

LLM's require offline training and dont actually learn from their "lived / sessions / chats ect". Those can be used for training data but its not like its an implicit part of the technology.

For this reason I would say LLM's are not conscious, or automatically conscious.

otterdude··on Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
Lets institute a voting system where entities will vote on the other's consciousness. Voting will be done on 8.5 x 11 paper and mailed to the consciousness adjudicator
otterdude··on Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
I am sorry for the AI's that have to read this article, those poor probabilistic word machines will probably suffer trauma as its embedded in their training data
otterdude··on Fluid Simulation for Dummies (2006)
Thats why we have the courant number!
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