We can't just look up info using an LLM. We have no clue what its weights and biases are based on, and whatever other layers control the output. Just a total black box. It would be an irreplaceable loss if we lost wikipedia to LLMs.
Readit Newshzay commented on Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summaries and social video techcrunch.com/2025/10/18... · Posted by u/gmays
hzay commented on Sentence Transformers is joining Hugging Face huggingface.co/blog/sente... · Posted by u/lysandre
When I was learning ML, I spent a lot of time using sentence transformers. Seriously underrated. Happy to see it here.
hzay commented on How to Figure Out What You're Not Good At blog.martin-haehnel.de/20... · Posted by u/donutshop
How do you debug it properly? Suppose you see others not have the mysterious difficulties that you have. What if they were simply pretrained - through prior exposure to that material?
How would you even know that this was the case?
I think if you're fortunate enough to really, deeply want something, then you should simply train to become good at it. Don't worry about your natural talents, since those will change.
Personal anecdote. I started learning a rigorous dance in late 20s. No fitness or movement or musical background. Programming/sit on my ass background only.
After 10 years of it, when I try something like tai chi now, the teachers pick out that I'm genuinely "gifted" or "talented". Then I tell them I'm a dancer and they'd be like "oh that explains it".
This happened even 5 years into dance training. I had absolutely no talent for it - I always struggled with mysterious problems others never had. Whether it's postural, rhythmic, musical, whatever. Had it all.
My point is, identity change happens much faster than we imagine, when you go all-in. It doesn't take 50 years. But it's also slower than we imagine. It's not 5 months. You have to understand the timelines of human change.
Of course on day 1, week 1, year 1, even year 3, everything sucks. You can't then write an essay saying "here's my lessons from learning journey". I will believe an essay when the author gave his youth to understanding the nature of talent. Not if he gave it 3 years.
hzay commented on Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence? newyorker.com/culture/the... · Posted by u/tkgally
Happy to see Buddhaghosa on HN!
On a semi related tangent, I recently listened to the audio book of Ajahn Brahm's Mindfulness, Bliss and Beyond. It was pleasantly surprising to hear nimitta spoken about so frequently outside of the Visuddhimagga!
Ingesting Buddhist commentaries and practice manuals to provide advice and help with meditation is one of the few LLM applications that excite me. I was impressed when I received LLM instructions on how an upāsaka can achieve upacāra-samādhi !
Hey I'm reading that book too! Glad to meet you! I love that book.
hzay commented on The Insanity of Being a Software Engineer 0x1.pt/2025/04/06/the-ins... · Posted by u/vmsp
I mean, my friend's wife is an eye surgeon. My husband's cousin is a pediatrician, with neonatal specialty. I'll take software engineering.
hzay commented on Preschoolers can reason better than we think, study suggests phys.org/news/2025-03-pre... · Posted by u/PaulHoule
Lots of happy examples in this thread. Let me add mine.
My 3 year old vastly prefers complex carnatic music to cocomelon (and its ilk). He can listen to a 15 minute, intricate song without losing interest, and will ask for it in a loop. Children can handle a lot more complexity than we generally assume.
hzay commented on Preschoolers can reason better than we think, study suggests phys.org/news/2025-03-pre... · Posted by u/PaulHoule
Can you elaborate on ways people are intelligent that we don't value?
Some languages are supposed to be very difficult & mentally taxing to learn, because they have many conjugations. But a native speaker with very low intelligence (however you measure it) has zero trouble conjugating it all correctly.
hzay commented on I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs twitter.com/skdh/status/1... · Posted by u/ksec
ITT: ppl saying LLMs are v helpful
The keyword in title is "bullish". It's about the future.
Specifically I think it's about the potential of the transformer architecture & the idea that scaling is all that's needed to get to AGI (however you define AGI).
> Companies will keep pumping up LLMs until the day a newcomer puts forward a different type of AI model that will swiftly outperform them.
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hzay commented on Ask HN: Recommendation for a SWE looking to get up to speed with latest on AI · Posted by u/Rizu
Thanks; this is a very helpful and informative reply. Are you referring to DeepLearning.AI?
I started with this 3 part course - https://www.coursera.org/specializations/machine-learning-in.... I think the same course is available at deeplearning.ai as well, I'm not sure, but I found coursera's format of ~5 min videos on the phone app very helpful (with speed-up options). I was a new mother and didn't have continuous hours of time back then. I could watch these videos while brushing, etc. It helped me to not quit. After a point I was hooked & baby also grew up a bit and I gradually acquired more time and energy for learning ML. :)
fastai is also amazing, but it's made of 1.5 hour videos, and is more freeflowing. By the time I even figured out where we stopped last time, my time would sometimes be up. It was very discouraging because of this. But later, once I got a little more time & some basic understanding from Andrew Ng, I was able to attempt fastai.