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MarkusQ commented on The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday   campedersen.com/singulari... · Posted by u/ecto
bheadmaster · a day ago
> It works in precisely the same way that you can walk from "here" to "there" by taking a step towards "there", and then repeating.

It's funny how, in order to explain one complex phenomenon, you took an even more complex phenomenon as if it somehow simplifies it.

MarkusQ · 18 hours ago
Sorry, can't tell if that's sarcasm or not.

I wasn't referring to the biomechanical process of walking, I was referring to the process of gradient descent, which is well understood and yes, quite simple.

MarkusQ commented on The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday   campedersen.com/singulari... · Posted by u/ecto
bheadmaster · a day ago
> here’s how LLMs actually work

But how is that useful in any way?

For all we know, LLMs are black boxes. We really have no idea how did ability to have a conversation emerge from predicting the next token.

MarkusQ · a day ago
> We really have no idea how did ability to have a conversation emerge from predicting the next token.

Uh yes, we do. It works in precisely the same way that you can walk from "here" to "there" by taking a step towards "there", and then repeating. The cognitive dissonance comes when we conflate this way of "having a conversation" (two people converse) and assume that the fact that they produce similar outputs means that they must be "doing the same thing" and it's hard to see how LLMs could be doing this.

Sometimes things seems unbelievable simply because they aren't true.

MarkusQ commented on The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday   campedersen.com/singulari... · Posted by u/ecto
MarkusQ · a day ago
Prior work with the same vibe: https://xkcd.com/1007/
MarkusQ commented on From watchdogs to mouthpieces: Washington Post and the wreckage of legacy media   thejournal.ie/readme/bezo... · Posted by u/DyslexicAtheist
amiga386 · 2 days ago
Truth or not, newspapers fund themselves by flattering their readers' opinions.

Paper 1, which prints only truthful and legally fact-checked stories about how X is fucking over Y and X is clearly evil, gets a lot of paid subscriptions from people who support Y.

Meanwhile, paper 2 prints only truthful and legally fact-checked stories about how Y is fucking over X and Y is clearly evil, getting a lot of paid subscriptions from people who support X.

The real truth is that X and Y both do good things and bad things, and always take the opportunity to fuck each other over, leaving plenty of factually correct material for the partisan journals, who just don't bother reporting all the skullduggery their "own side" gets up to.

MarkusQ · 2 days ago
Sadly, this is true.

Journalists presenting the whole story would be wonderful, but I don't think we're likely to see it soon.

MarkusQ commented on From watchdogs to mouthpieces: Washington Post and the wreckage of legacy media   thejournal.ie/readme/bezo... · Posted by u/DyslexicAtheist
jauntywundrkind · 2 days ago
Wrong. Journalists have an obligation to favor the truth.

If a party is not being honest or truthful, they should disfavor that party very strongly. That party is acting against the spirit of what journalism ought to be about, and is making itself a traitor to democracy, the people, and journalists.

The WaPo lost significant double digit percent of subscribers because it spiked a Kamala endorsement. That was a clear and obvious and correct position to take, and that favoring was objectively clear a choice. Sitting on the fence pretending like both parties are equal is a great misdeed sometimes. Your obligation as journalists does include assessing & grasping a situation; it's more than being a steganographer for both sides, it does mean actually considering and helping shape opinion to steer people away from lies and misportrayals, it involves reminding people of whatever downsides they are at length.

MarkusQ · 2 days ago
> Wrong. Journalists have an obligation to favor the truth.

I'm not sure why you think we're disagreeing on this part. I'm explicitly asserting that they need to seek truth rather than pushing an agenda.

> If a party is not being honest or truthful, they should disfavor that party very strongly.

Here though, we do disagree. I think they should call out the lies and provide explicit, verifiable evidence that they are in fact lies. The should counter lies with truth.

But they should be blind to "parties" and not favor or disfavor anyone. From that point on you're drifting into "and they should agree with me, and say so" thinking. They should not be helping "shape opinion" and "steer people" even in a direction you happen to like today.

If the facts don't do the job, they shouldn't put their thumbs on the scale.

MarkusQ commented on From watchdogs to mouthpieces: Washington Post and the wreckage of legacy media   thejournal.ie/readme/bezo... · Posted by u/DyslexicAtheist
MarkusQ · 2 days ago
The problem isn't that news outlets favor the wrong side (as TFA seems to assert) but that they favor any side at all. Once they abandon the attempt to report the facts and start trying to shape public opinion, they're going to get caught in a tug-of-war and eventually torn to shreds.
MarkusQ commented on Do Markets Believe in Transformative AI?   marginalrevolution.com/ma... · Posted by u/surprisetalk
MarkusQ · 3 days ago
The markets and I agree then.

I'm a firm believer in technological progress, but not so fond of group-think hype trains. The LLM/diffusion breakthrough(s) are huge, but they aren't what their rabid fans/neurotic critics are thinking.

MarkusQ commented on Vouch   github.com/mitchellh/vouc... · Posted by u/chwtutha
HiPhish · 3 days ago
I think merged PRs should be automatically upvoted (if it was bad, why did you merge it?) and closed unmerged PRs should not be able to get upvoted (if it was good, why did you not merge it?).
MarkusQ · 3 days ago
Intrinsically good, but in conflict with some larger, out of band concern that the contributor could have no way to know about? Upvote to take the sting out of rejection, along with a note along the lines of "Well done, and we would merge is it weren't for our commitment to support xxx systems which are not compatible with yyy. Perhaps refactor as a plugin?"

Also, upvotes and merge decisions may well come from different people, who happen to disagree. This is in fact healthy sometimes.

MarkusQ commented on Five disciplines discovered the same math independently   freethemath.org... · Posted by u/energyscholar
zozbot234 · 3 days ago
OP's comments in this thread are also pure clanker speak, which is disappointing and shows a lack of awareness of what HN is for.[0] It would be nice if an established scholar in this area of mathematics (complex systems) could comment re: this proposed correspondence and whether it has been noticed before. To be sure, similarly duplicative developments, gratuitous differences in terminology, etc. are discovered all the time, this isn't huge news. Statistics and ML is a well-known example.

[0] I haven't actually tried this, but I'm pretty sure that even just telling the robot "please write tersely, follow the typical style for HN comments" would make the output less annoying.

MarkusQ · 3 days ago
It has been noticed before. It's called Catastrohe Theory.
MarkusQ commented on Five disciplines discovered the same math independently   freethemath.org... · Posted by u/energyscholar
MarkusQ · 3 days ago
And they don't even seem to have noticed Catastrophe Theory, which was based on the study of exactly this.

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

u/MarkusQ

KarmaCake day1119October 24, 2013View Original