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qsort

9,124 karma · joined September 22, 2020

qsort is human and can make mistakes. Please double-check responses.

spunky.greener-0n@icloud.com

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qsort··on Show HN: Gemini 4 Argon plays StarCraft
It's beyond insane that Astra achieves above 50%. Are models allowed to "play against" the specific bot they're up against? What explains the fact that it drops to single-digits against strong bots?
qsort··on With most information hidden, the game Stratego had stumped AI until now
Sure, but you can do Monte Carlo with a double-dummy solver.

The point is that, especially for games perceived as being lower-status like MTG and other board games, I'm more inclined to believe the answer is closer to "nobody is willing to pour in the resources to seriously try" as opposed to "we definitively cannot with current science and technology."

qsort··on With most information hidden, the game Stratego had stumped AI until now
There are very few missing pieces for a game like MTG. The main reasons we don't have a Stockfish for MTG is that it's a PITA to implement the rules and that nobody cares (or at least not enough to make it happen.)

There is nothing that, in principle, makes MTG different from poker or bridge, and we have superhuman engines for both.

qsort··on Walking Men
I suspect tech has little to do with it: we all mostly miss being 20 years younger and not having gray hair.
qsort··on Walking Men
No Ampelmann???

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampelmännchen

qsort··on CEO of Mistral: AI is software. It can be controlled
Literally the "AI is just computer" argument
qsort··on Claude Opus 5.5 Intelligence, Performance and Price Analysis (Max)
Yes, but crucially, in ways that are increasingly decoupled from any practical pattern of usage, considering that I wouldn't see how you can argue that Astra is worse than Opus 5.

One man's modus ponens is another's modus tollens I guess.

qsort··on Claude Opus 5.5 Intelligence, Performance and Price Analysis (Max)
I am begging you on my knees to please stop posting this cringe.

The model is just out. It could be good, great even, I don't know. But I do know that this index has Opus 5, one of the worst releases of 26, ahead of Astra. What information are we supposed to deduce from number having gone up?

qsort··on Chess Atlas
It's endlessly fascinating how culture, religion and even language influence stylistic choices, even though Chess is a purely abstract game.

The obvious ones: in Western sets the king has a cross on top, and Islamic traditions only use abstract shapes. But I wonder if the "usual" designs aren't at least somewhat influenced by the English language specifically. Bishops have a stylized miter and Rooks are a tower with crenellations, but e.g. in Russian Bishop is "elephant" and Rook is "boat". Even in many other Western European languages "Bishop" as in the piece is not the same as bishop as in the religious office, e.g. "fou" in French, "alfil" in Spanish, "Laufer" in German.

qsort··on How big are factorials?
> (This approximation should be familiar to many from an algorithmics class.)

You need both sides though :)

What makes it interesting for estimating algorithmic complexity is that \log{n!} \in \Theta(n \log n). One side is obvious as you note, the other less so, but there's a famous trick to do both at once:

\log{n!} = \log{\prod_{h=0}^{n} h} = \sum_{h=0}^{n} \log{h}

Therefore,

\int_0^n \log{x} dx \le \log{n!} \le \int_0^n \log{x+1} dx

with both integrals trivial by parts.

qsort··on A warning about 'model welfare'
is claude not a man and a brother
qsort··on There are only twelve 4x4 sudokus (and a cool trick for finding minimal subsets)
Can't you just describe the group that defines those transformations and use Burnside?
qsort··on Romania soccer introduces black card to 'combat abusive behaviour' from parents
Quoting from the official website:

>>>>>>

The new procedure targets inappropriate behavior by parents and spectators directed at children, coaching staff members, referees, match officials, or other parents and spectators. This includes, but is not limited to:

Verbal abuse (insults or profanity), as well as physical assault or shoving of one’s own children;

Verbal abuse, physical assault, or shoving of staff members of one’s own team;

Verbal abuse, physical assault, or shoving of players or staff members of the opposing team;

Continuous challenging, verbal abuse, physical assault, or shoving of referees and match officials;

Verbal or physical altercations with other parents or spectators.

<<<<<<

If that's the situation in, and it can't be stressed enough, a children soccer game, then yes, abandoning the match is probably the right choice. I assume they are only defining a formal procedure for practices that already exist.

qsort··on OpenAI considers slowing advanced AI development, Sam Altman tells employees
A lot of people have explained how that would happen, in excruciating detail. The reason why this wasn't a major part of the discourse is that most people (including myself) did not believe jumps in capabilities like those we have seen in the last few years were likely.

For a superintelligent AI trained with methods anywhere close to what we are doing now, killing all humans is the default outcome. I actually think researchers are downplaying the risks to make their arguments more normie-friendly.

qsort··on OpenAI considers slowing advanced AI development, Sam Altman tells employees
Humans not dying would be an excellent feature for the future to have. Not a hard requirement though, we'll see if there are some story points left in the sprint.
qsort··on IBM Bob
To be fair Codex and Claude Code don't have a lot of secret sauce either. This is not to say that the harness doesn't matter at all or that you can't do any better, but whenever they benchmark it always turns out that you don't lose that much with even a very minimal agent. If a different harness makes better sense for your workflow I don't see why you wouldn't switch (or make your own if you have the resources to do so).

I'm also sticking to first-party agents, but that's more because I feel no compelling reason to switch and CLI agents fit well with my spartan technology choices. YMMV.

qsort··on IBM Bob
markdown as a service is crazy
qsort··on GPT-6 Astra
> The ARC-AGI-3 scorecard is extremely misleading (...)

True.

> Regardless, the result is still valid (...)

If you think the game is rigged, the virtuous thing to do is to point that out and refuse to partecipate; making up your own rules is something I just don't understand, especially since the rule-abiding result would still have been SOTA.

> in the sense of passing the most famous benchmark designed specifically to measure AGI progress

The benchmark does not measure AGI progress or progress towards superhuman intelligence, as explicitly stated by the creators.

On the AGI question: surely you realize this depends on how we define the term? For example, one of the definitions OpenAI originally gave is "capable of doing most economically valuable work", which almost certainly Astra, as impressive as it is, would fall short of. I'm not saying it's a good definition, but as far as I'm concerned it's as good as any. More importantly, I don't think that it would change much if we said yes or no. I'm only bothering to take a position if it amounts to something.

This can feel as "moving the goalposts", and to some extent it is, but if done honestly "moving the goalposts" is how you make progress. Had you asked me 10 years ago I would have said that anything that could hold a conversation like GPT-4 could would probably have been wildly superhuman at almost everything. It shouldn't be hard to find ways GPT-4 was lacking, though. We see new things, we reassess and try again: that's how it's supposed to work.

qsort··on OpenAI restores 5-hour Codex and Work limits for ChatGPT Plus users
They now give out resets you can choose when to use, but with a "best before" date. With Anthropic you don't even know what model you'll have access to next week. A few months ago I wanted to try a subscription to Gemini but I couldn't figure out how to give them money. The other one thinks he's Mecha Hitler.

To an extent I get it, this is not like a normal SaaS where you just buy seats, but their commercial offerings, especially B2C ones, feel like complete amateur hour. If they were selling literally anything else I'd have ran for the hills a long time ago.

qsort··on Anger, Anxiety and Agency
I agree with you contra GP that "barely speak English" wildly misrepresents LLM capabilities, but I think they don't write very well, and your characterization is also an overstatement. They often use stylistic elements that don't make sense in context: pointless metaphors, abuse of bullet points and tables when a simple paragraph would do, excessive parataxis, misplaced emphasis, dense technical prose even when unnecessary, occasionally weird word choices.

Those problems are much worse in languages other than English, by the way. I'm not a native speaker but I always interact with LLMs in English because their prose in Italian is terrible, it often reads as though the text had been written in English and then translated.

Obviously there's nothing wrong with each of those stylistic elements in abstract, exactly like there's nothing wrong with em-dashes or the word "absolutely", but I would argue that writing well means choosing styles that match the content; what LLMs appear to be doing instead is forcing the message into a default pattern, which we percieve as forced and therefore tend to dislike.

To be clear: their writing is fine. The primary goal of writing is to convey meaning, and LLMs have been perfectly adequate at that pretty much from day one. I can get over their quirks.

qsort··on Python Polars Cheatsheet (based on our O'Reilly book)
If your work is more focused on statistics or pure modeling, then I agree R wins hands down. The issue is that most projects have "unclean" parts where you have to gather data from multiple sources, use connectors for services, S3 buckets and whatnot; dealing with that mess is where Python really shines.

AI probably changes the equation to some extent, but I still believe I'd rather maintain a complicated data pipeline like that in Python rather than R.

qsort··on Linear algebra done right
> His polemic against determinants is poorly motivated, misguided, and distracting.

What polemic? Defining the determinant as the unique multilinear alternating form satisfying certain properties is very normal (and in fact the only way that really makes sense for both finite- and infinite-dimensional vector spaces). There are zero unusual things with this book imo.

qsort··on Linear algebra done right
You zoomers are making a list of linear algebra books and not citing Lang? Get off my lawn ;)
qsort··on Ancient Library – 1,060 Greek/Latin texts, click any word to parse it
That's actually ok. In virtually all Latin dictionaries verbs are listed in the first singular person of the present indicative (e.g. you would find "sum" and not "esse"). It's just showing you the dictionary entry.
qsort··on Why Erdős Problems Are Falling to AI
> When OpenAI posted about their 10 breakthroughs, I saw lots of career research mathematicians say things mostly along the lines of “I don’t understand any of this it’s way over my head”.

Huh?

Mathematics is an extremely wide subject, it's perfectly normal even for two professional mathematicians not to understand each other's work. Have you considered that maybe they just don't work in that area?

Are you implying OpenAI's paper (which was, by the way, edited by humans and provided Lean certificates for most of the proofs) is actually gibberish? That's flat-earth levels of conspiracy.

qsort··on Why Erdős Problems Are Falling to AI
> I wonder if national, institutional, or otherwise "eccentric" sponsorships (encouraging a similar migrant-madman approach to academic cultivation) of some of the folks on HN wouldn't lead to meaningful discoveries in CS.

The problem is that Paul Erdos was eccentric but he was also Paul Erdos. I'm not saying you're implying that, but I feel it's a similar line of thinking to how popular culture often romanticizes autism and Asperger's because some very smart people are (allegedly) affected. The same group includes people who need 24/7 care.

Computer science at the frontier is as specialized and hard as mathematics, you need years of study to truly understand a field well enough to make meaningful contributions. You can try sponsoring me if you really want, but I don't think you'd be spending your money wisely in expectation.

qsort··on The AI Productivity Gap
I've had similar conversations with a client recently while discussing estimates for a large project. Senior leadership has a mental model where AI makes everything X% faster, but that's very wrong. Some things get sped up by an insane amount and basically go to zero, some others not so much. Entirely new tasks emerge, such as directing agents to provide them the context they need, setting loops, etc.

It's a very O-ring problem.

qsort··on I don't recommend Tailwind CSS
Counterpoint: the problem is actually HTML and most of webtech is increasingly elaborate cope mechanisms to deal with the original sin.
qsort··on I don't recommend Tailwind CSS
I'm not a frontend guy so take this with a pinch of salt, but for a few personal projects I've done my approach is now "ai pls generate css". I thought it would be inconsistent and broken, but if you tell it to care about accessibility and you're willing to clean up a bit it's not that bad and you end up with very compact transfers after minification.

I tend to like simpler/textual interfaces though, admittedly this won't be everyone's cup of tea.

qsort··on Google fixed more Chrome bugs in June than over the past two years, thanks to AI
> guidance or missing context issue

I mean yeah, that's mostly what I'm saying?

The only parts where I would disagree are that capabilities are spiky, and also the fact that they're a bit prone to losing the forest for the trees without guidance (the macro/micro distinction). But yeah, by default I don't write code by hand.

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