interstice (u/interstice)

interstice commented on AGI is an engineering problem, not a model training problem vincirufus.com/posts/agi-... · Posted by u/vincirufus

andy99 · a day ago

If you believe the bitter lesson, all the handwavy "engineering" is better done with more data. Someone likely would have written the same thing as this 8 years ago about what it would take to get current LLM performance.

So I don't buy the engineering angle, I also don't think LLMs will scale up to AGI as imagined by Asimov or any of the usual sci-fi tropes. There is something more fundamental missing, as in missing science, not missing engineering.

interstice · 8 hours ago

Sometimes I think the fundamental thing could be as ‘simple’ as something like introducing l an attention/event loo, flush to memory, emotion driven motivation. There are quite a few fairly obvious things that llms don’t have that might be best not to add just in case.

interstice commented on AGI is an engineering problem, not a model training problem vincirufus.com/posts/agi-... · Posted by u/vincirufus

fao_ · 13 hours ago

> It doesn't seem clear that there is necessarily any connection between consciousness and intelligence. If anything, LLMs are evidence of the opposite.

This implies that LLMs are intelligent, and yet even the most advanced models are unable to solve very simple riddles that take humans only a few seconds, and are completely unable to reason around basic concepts that 3 year olds are able to. Many of them regurgitate whole passages of text that humans have already produced. I suspect that LLMs have more akin with Markov models than many would like to assume.

interstice · 8 hours ago

There is an awful lot of research into just how much is regurgitated vs the limits of their creativity, and as far as I’m aware this was not the conclusion that research came to. That isn’t to say any reasoning that does happen is not fragile or prone to breaking in odd ways, but I’ve had similar experience dealing with other humans more often than I’d like too.

interstice commented on Vibe coding creates a bus factor of zero mindflash.org/coding/ai/a... · Posted by u/AntwaneB

interstice · 4 days ago

> The only thing you can rely on is on your ability to decipher what a highly imperfect system generated, and maybe ask explanations to that same imperfect system about your code its code (oh, and it has forgotten everything about the initial writing process by then).

This just sounds like every other story I hear about working on ossified code bases as it is. At least AI can ingest large amounts of code quickly, even if as of today it can't be trusted to actually decipher it all.

interstice commented on Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel? lock.cmpxchg8b.com/anubis... · Posted by u/taviso

johnklos · 4 days ago

This is a usually technical crowd, so I can't help but wonder if many people genuinely don't get it, or if they are just feigning a lack of understanding to be dismissive of Anubis.

Sure, the people who make the AI scraper bots are going to figure out how to actually do the work. The point is that they hadn't, and this worked for quite a while.

As the botmakers circumvent, new methods of proof-of-notbot will be made available.

It's really as simple as that. If a new method comes out and your site is safe for a month or two, great! That's better than dealing with fifty requests a second, wondering if you can block whole netblocks, and if so, which.

This is like those simple things on submission forms that ask you what 7 + 2 is. Of course everyone knows that a crawler can calculate that! But it takes a human some time and work to tell the crawler HOW.

interstice · 4 days ago

The cost benefit calculus for workarounds changes based on popularity. Your custom lock might be easy to break by a professional, but the handful of people who might ever care to pick it are unlikely to be trying that hard. A lock which lets you into 5% of houses however might be worth learning to break.

interstice commented on Ask HN: Do you use personal AI Agents? · Posted by u/kandros

interstice · 11 days ago

My approach is looking for things that need a level of fuzzy logic. It can be as basic as do any of the subject lines in an inbox have some variation of ‘looks important’. I’m less sold on them doing much of anything reliably at the moment though.

interstice commented on So You Bought a Fancy Vintage Car. Now Who's Going to Restore It? bloomberg.com/news/featur... · Posted by u/toomuchtodo

aspenmayer · 12 days ago

Have you documented the rebuild process? It would be cool to see if you have a write up when it’s done. You might post it here. I think restoration and repair projects by HN users are great to see here when we get them.

interstice · 11 days ago

Thanks for the encouraging words! I've got a large folder of photos and videos I've been meaning to do something with, this could be the catalyst that needed.

interstice commented on LLMs aren't world models yosefk.com/blog/llms-aren... · Posted by u/ingve

jononor · 12 days ago

"LLM" as well, because coding agents are already more than just an LLM. There is very useful context management around it, and tool calling, and ability to run tests/programs, etc. Though they are LLM-based systems, they are not LLMs.

interstice · 12 days ago

This rapidly gets philosophical. If I use tools am I not handling the codebase? Are we classing LLM as tool or user in this scenario?

interstice commented on So You Bought a Fancy Vintage Car. Now Who's Going to Restore It? bloomberg.com/news/featur... · Posted by u/toomuchtodo

interstice · 12 days ago

I've just about got my 1981 Mini I bought in highschool for $600 NZD back in one piece. Wasn't going to touch the engine originally but thought why not, so almost 20 years later with almost everything aside from the shell refurbed or replaced here we are. It's been expensive and slow and I'd have been better off now having put the money into a house deposit instead. But now I know a fair amount about rebuilding a 45 year old car and I have about 10k in specialty tools I will probably barely use again, so I guess there's that.

interstice commented on Is the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS alien technology? [pdf] lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loe... · Posted by u/jackbravo

King-Aaron · 20 days ago

It makes me sad that so many people are seemingly so aggressive against Loeb and his takes on this stuff. Whether things might be aliens or not, people get so upset whenever it's even mentioned as a thought experiment. We should be able to have a bit of fun here and there.

interstice · 20 days ago

I agree, I mean something like this only has to happen once in our lifetime for everything we know to change overnight. I’m not saying believe anything and everything at face value, but at least question whether immediate knee jerk dismissal of any idea you think you’ve seen before is actually considering the nuance of the specific thing in question or just a learned response.

interstice commented on If You're So Smart, Why Are You So Poor? terminaldrift.substack.co... · Posted by u/paulpauper

interstice · 22 days ago

I've seen people I work with become rich, and what I noticed about some of them is that they don't care about being 'nice', they are happy to treat everyone like they owe them something. Being nasty in business works, better and for far longer than it should. I always felt that if I was to succeed or fail, It will be on my own terms and my own thoughts about how to operate ethically, so I became my own boss. 15 years or so later I'm not rich by SV standards, but I did manage to buy a house as a 35yo millenial near the peak of the market off the back of doing what I thought was right. And I'm proud of that. I don't know if I'd call myself smart, but I would suggest that intelligent people are aware of what being ruthless in the pursuit of money will do to those around them, and many will choose not to abuse their intelligence knowing that it would hurt others. Or at least I'd like to think so.