Chathamization (u/Chathamization)

Chathamization commented on Coffee for people who don't like coffee ostwilkens.se/blog/coffee... · Posted by u/ostwilkens

pton_xd · 9 months ago

> Eat a coffee bean by itself. If it tastes bad on its own, it’ll probably taste bad in the brew too. I enjoy munching a few beans while I make my coffee.

This just doesn't make sense to me. There are a great number of beans and vegetables that taste bitter or unpleasant "raw" but are very delicious with a bit of heat and time.

Chathamization · 9 months ago

Right, most people are would hate eating a 100% pure cacao bar, but that doesn't mean they won't enjoy chocolate. There's so much variability in these things, and in the end, it mostly comes down to "try different stuff and see what you like." I almost always drink coffee without any cream or sugar (exception listed below), but I wouldn't say I enjoy coffee more than someone who drenches theirs in both. It's just different tastes.

Even the oft-maligned Nescafe is pleasant for me if I make it correctly. Not the original formula, but the 100% coffee one without the extra ingredients. I thought it tasted horrible when I first tried it, but if I drowned it in a lot of soy milk it actually made for a fairly pleasant drink.

In general, people are going to be happier if they stop trying to cultivate aristocratic aversions to common food, and instead start cultivating curiosity and an interest in finding ways to enjoy things they didn't expect themselves to enjoy.

Chathamization commented on Arc-AGI-2 and ARC Prize 2025 arcprize.org/blog/announc... · Posted by u/gkamradt

jononor · a year ago

The task you mention require intelligence but also a robot body with a lot of physical dexterity suited to a designed-for-humanoids world. That seems like an additional requirement on top of intelligence? Maybe we do not want an AGI definition to include that?

There are humans who cannot perform these tasks, at least without assistive/adapted systems such as a wheelchair and accessible bus.

Chathamization · a year ago

> at least without assistive/adapted systems such as a wheelchair and accessible bus.

Which is precisely what the robotic body I mentioned would be.

You're talking about humans who have the mental capacity to do these things, but who don't control a body capable of doing them. That's the exact opposite of an AI that controls a body capable of doing these things, but lacks the mental capacity to do them.

Chathamization commented on Arc-AGI-2 and ARC Prize 2025 arcprize.org/blog/announc... · Posted by u/gkamradt

pillefitz · a year ago

They are useful to reach Arc-N+1

Chathamization · a year ago

How are any of these a useful path to asking an AI to cook dinner?

We already know many tasks that most humans can do relatively easily, yet most people don’t expect AI to be able to do them for years to come (for instance, L5 self-driving). ARC-AGI appears to be going in the opposite direction - can these models pass tests that are difficult for the average person to pass.

These benchmarks are interesting in that they show increasing capabilities of the models. But they seem to be far less useful at determining AGI than the simple benchmarks we’ve had all along (can these models do everyday tasks that a human can do?).

Chathamization commented on Arc-AGI-2 and ARC Prize 2025 arcprize.org/blog/announc... · Posted by u/gkamradt

Palmik · a year ago

In your example you already indicated two tasks that you think might be hard for AI but easy for humans.

Who said that cooking dinner couldn't be part of ARC-AGI-<N>?

Chathamization · a year ago

That’s precisely what I meant in my comment by “these types of tests.” People are eventually going to have some sort of standard for what they consider AGI. But that doesn’t mean the current benchmarks are useful for this task at all, and saying that the benchmarks could be completely different in the future only underscores this.

Chathamization commented on Arc-AGI-2 and ARC Prize 2025 arcprize.org/blog/announc... · Posted by u/gkamradt

gkamradt · a year ago

Hey HN, Greg from ARC Prize Foundation here.

Alongside Mike Knoop and François Francois Chollet, we’re launching ARC-AGI-2, a frontier AI benchmark that measures a model’s ability to generalize on tasks it hasn’t seen before, and the ARC Prize 2025 competition to beat it.

In Dec ‘24, ARC-AGI-1 (2019) pinpointed the moment AI moved beyond pure memorization as seen by OpenAI's o3.

ARC-AGI-2 targets test-time reasoning.

My view is that good AI benchmarks don't just measure progress, they inspire it. Our mission is to guide research towards general systems.

Base LLMs (no reasoning) are currently scoring 0% on ARC-AGI-2. Specialized AI reasoning systems (like R1 or o3-mini) are <4%.

Every (100%) of ARC-AGI-2 tasks, however, have been solved by at least two humans, quickly and easily. We know this because we tested 400 people live.

Our belief is that once we can no longer come up with quantifiable problems that are "feasible for humans and hard for AI" then we effectively have AGI. ARC-AGI-2 proves that we do not have AGI.

Change log from ARC-AGI-2 to ARC-AGI-2: * The two main evaluation sets (semi-private, private eval) have increased to 120 tasks * Solving tasks requires more reasoning vs pure intuition * Each task has been confirmed to have been solved by at least 2 people (many more) out of an average of 7 test taskers in 2 attempts or less * Non-training task sets are now difficulty-calibrated

The 2025 Prize ($1M, open-source required) is designed to drive progress on this specific gap. Last year's competition (also launched on HN) had 1.5K teams participate and had 40+ research papers published.

The Kaggle competition goes live later this week and you can sign up here: https://arcprize.org/competition

We're in an idea-constrained environment. The next AGI breakthrough might come from you, not a giant lab.

Happy to answer questions.

Chathamization · a year ago

> Our belief is that once we can no longer come up with quantifiable problems that are "feasible for humans and hard for AI" then we effectively have AGI.

I don’t think that follows. Just because people fail to create ARC-AGI problems that are difficult for an AI to solve, doesn’t mean that said AI can just be plugged into a humanoid robot and it will now reliably cook dinner, order a pizza and drive to pick it up, take a bus to downtown to busk on the street and take the money back home, etc.

ARC-AGI is an interesting benchmark, but it’s extremely presumptive to think that these types of tests are going to demonstrate AGI.

Chathamization commented on Forget Twitter threads and write a blog post instead (2021) kevquirk.com/blog/forget-... · Posted by u/theshrike79

ryandrake · a year ago

Maybe I'm just not a Real Artist, but I don't understand this focus on "engagement" and "visibility" for casual writers and other online publishers. Assuming they are not doing it for revenue, where their income depends on huge readership, why are they so concerned with how many readers they are getting? When I share some source code on GitHub, I don't care in the slightest whether anybody or nobody uses it. It doesn't really affect me. Same for comments on HN. I get no benefit if 10,000 people read a comment vs. 100.

Whenever you talk about blogging vs. more popular platforms, someone always chimes in with this "but I get so many more eyeballs on Twitter!" and I legitimately don't understand why that matters.

Sure, if you are doing it for a living and your income scales with the number of readers, then yea, of course, it's obvious why you want "engagement."

Chathamization · a year ago

One of the things is wanting to be part of the discourse. For instance, this has happened to me several times - big players are talking about a particular topic. I dig through the primary sources, and see that many of the assumptions people are making about it are wrong. I try to bring it up, but - where? Blog/Tweet about it, and with no audience you're yelling into the void. Sometimes I try contacting the big players, but like I said, it's a pretty cliquish environment, and if you're a nobody you get ignored. Another option is to spit out a lot of garbage dopamine hits to build up a big enough audience to the point where someone might pay attention to your good points.

In the end I just gave up, because I realized the state of discourse in these spaces is terrible. It's a shame, though, because there are a lot of small, overlooked voices that do similar things, diving through primary source material and data and uncovering very important stuff that's gotten ignored. Occasionally, I've seen these people break stories that eventually get the attention of the national media - but it's hard, and this usually only happens for the really huge stories.

Meanwhile, the big players in these spaces are usually intellectually incurious and busy churning out vapid engagement bait.

Chathamization commented on Forget Twitter threads and write a blog post instead (2021) kevquirk.com/blog/forget-... · Posted by u/theshrike79

panorama · a year ago

As much as I enjoy writing and teaching, it feels like a fruitless endeavor when your content doesn't get any visibility. I've written on Twitter, Bluesky, and self-hosted my own blogs (I've even been front-paged on HN before), and each time I give up eventually because it's so hard to build a consistent readerbase.

Of course, I’m self-aware enough to recognize that it might be because my writing is terrible or because I’m covering topics no one cares about. But the point is, I don’t blame people for posting on Twitter instead of going through the effort of setting up a blog. The vast majority of written content gets little to no reach, so choosing the platform with the lowest barrier to entry makes the most sense.

Chathamization · a year ago

> Of course, I’m self-aware enough to recognize that it might be because my writing is terrible or because I’m covering topics no one cares about.

I've hard similar issues with you, and actually think the opposite to be the case. When I was trying to build an audience, I actually found that it was the low effort nonsense that would get the most traction. At a certain point I was attempting to try to get followers by making a lot of those, and then trying to mix some quality posts in, and had some success. But I started asking myself, to what end? What kind of community am I building that's only interested in low quality junk?

And one thing I noticed about Blogging and Twitter is that they're extremely cliquish. From what I've seen, most people would rather interact with popular Bloggers/Twitter users that they hate or say are idiots than they would with users who have a low follow count/seldom read blog. Sure, there are ways you can juice your follower count so that you're large enough that the big guys will think you're worth enough to pay attention to. But again - what's the point? When you see the complete vapidity of many of these supposed thought leaders, is it really worth it? So what, you can get into the daily Twitter slap fights that they seem to love so much?

I mostly wish their were more places were thoughtful people to find and chat with each other, without having to get involved with petty blog/Twitter vanity games.

Chathamization commented on Character amnesia in China globalchinapulse.net/char... · Posted by u/nabla9

DiogenesKynikos · a year ago

It's very clear what you meant, and I don't know why you're going in circles like this.

You very clearly wrote that Chinese would become an incomprehensible mess if written in Pinyin.

You first stated that there would be a severe loss in fidelity in switching to Pinyin. Then you gave an analogy showing how removing various non-phonetic elements of written English would make it an incomprehensible mess. Immediately after that, you said that the same applies for Chinese.

I'm objecting to your argument that Chinese would be an incomprehensible mess if written alphabetically.

Chathamization · a year ago

No, I'm genuinely confused by your claim that in order for Chinese to be similar to English in this manner, it would be "somehow unique among all human languages." These are contradictory ideas. That's why I was asking for clarity.

> I'm objecting to your argument that Chinese would be an incomprehensible mess if written alphabetically.

That's fine, but it runs directly counter to your initial comment. If a phonetic transcription would make Chinese just as easy to understand as it is written now, it would be quite different from English, and almost every other written language, all of which include non-phonetic elements in order to facilitate reading.

Chathamization commented on Character amnesia in China globalchinapulse.net/char... · Posted by u/nabla9

garou · a year ago

If you consider that a lot of people using the Latin alphabet does use the cellphone autocomplete to check how to write a word used infrequently...

So I would say this text is biased by the "western" view of the writer, something that could be categorized as "Orientalism". A study about this phenomenon is valid, is important. But this post is not a good study.

Chathamization · a year ago

That's very much the impression I get. I've never seen pinyin used in Chinese writing, and the Chinese friends I've met have said they've never seen it either (they said they'd probably just look up the character or write a homonym instead, but even then it's pretty rare that it comes to that).

That's not to say it's never done, but it feels like an outlier. As if a friend found a word too hard to understand and drew a picture instead, and then the author wrote an article about how spelling is so difficult that it leads English speakers to draw words instead of writing them.

But the thing that struck me the most was just how confused people were when I asked them about it. It just didn't seem to be anything that was an actual issue for them.

Chathamization commented on Character amnesia in China globalchinapulse.net/char... · Posted by u/nabla9

bobbylarrybobby · a year ago

Pinyin should be approximately as ambiguous as the spoken language, i.e. not very (especially if whitespace is used to denote word boundaries)

Chathamization · a year ago

Removing the added information would make it much more difficult to parse, though. Paragraphs don't exist in oral English - or spaces between words, quotation marks, capitalization, etc. - but we still find it much more easy to read properly formatted text than improperly formatted text.

Just because people are able to understand strict phonetic transcriptions, doesn't mean it's a good way to convey information (which is why almost no language relies on just strict phonetic transcriptions).