johntb86 (u/johntb86)

johntb86 commented on Pixel 10 Phones blog.google/products/pixe... · Posted by u/gotmedium

dakiol · 7 days ago

> I love the idea of an on-device model that I can say something like "who's going to the baseball game this weekend" and it'll intelligently check my calendar and see who's listed. Or saying something like "how much was the dinner at McDoogle's last week?" and have it check digital wallet transactions.

It's probably just me (or a few like me) but I don't really keep my life in digital format as much as others (and I'm a "geek" for my family/friends since i work in the software industry). If I'm going to the cinema or baseball or any other event... I don't have it in any calendar. I pay with debit/credit cards but I don't have any digital wallet. I don't take my phone with me most of the time (my phone is big and having it hanging in my pockets is not nice).

The features described in the Pixel 10 left me with a sense of "I think I am missing something! But... oh well, whatever, I don't need any of that". Which is weird again, because I'm supposed to be the "geek".

johntb86 · 7 days ago

How do you get your tickets? Do you just buy in person at the theater or ballpark?

johntb86 commented on The Claude Bliss Attractor astralcodexten.com/p/the-... · Posted by u/lukeplato

roxolotl · 2 months ago

The surprise! Is what I’m surprised by though. They are incredible role players so when they role play “evil ai” they do it well.

johntb86 · 2 months ago

They aren't being told to be evil, though. Maybe the scenario they're in is most similar to an "evil AI", though, but that's just a vague extrapolation from the set of input data they're given (e.g. both emails about infidelity and being turned off). There's nothing preventing a real world scenario from being similar, and triggering the "evil AI" outcome, so it's very hard to guard against. Ideally we'd have a system that would be vanishingly unlikely to role play the evil AI scenario.

johntb86 commented on The Halting Problem is a terrible example of NP-Harder buttondown.com/hillelwayn... · Posted by u/BerislavLopac

andrewla · 4 months ago

Hmm.. I'd love to see a more formal statement of this, because it feels unintuitive.

Notably the question "given a number as input, output as many 1's as that number" is exponential in the input size. Is this problem therefore also strictly NP-hard?

johntb86 · 4 months ago

It needs to be a decision problem (or easily recast as a decision problem). "given a number as input, output as many 1's as that number" doesn't have a yes or no answer. You could try to ask a related question like "given a number as input and a list of 1s, are there as many 1s as the number?" but that has a very large input.

johntb86 commented on Trump temporarily drops tariffs to 10% for most countries cnbc.com/2025/04/09/trump... · Posted by u/bhouston

mort96 · 5 months ago

Sure, but when we pay our AWS bills, that money still goes to Amazon which is US-based, even though we servers we rent are in Frankfurt.

johntb86 · 5 months ago

Does it actually go to the US corporation, or to some European subsidiary?

johntb86 commented on Requesting formal removal of all anaconda posts for copyright violation meta.stackoverflow.com/qu... · Posted by u/user5994461

lotyrin · 5 months ago

Even if it did, I don't see how they could imagine that would apply retroactively, even with the "confusion" or whatever. "Please take down a piece of your property and of internet history about our product... because it reminds people of when it used to have a more permissive license and that's inconvenient to us as the people who want to restrict it."

johntb86 · 5 months ago

I don't see any reason to believe this was requested by the Anaconda developers. For example, it refers to the Anaconda developers in the third person: "For example adding a footnote in a 2014 answer to state Anaconda has started restricting commercial usage is insufficient and misleading, as they have restricted nearly all usage later."

This seems more likely to have been written by some third party who'd annoyed about the license change.

johntb86 commented on 4o Image Generation openai.com/index/introduc... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

cubefox · 5 months ago

LLMs are autoregressive, so they can't be (multi-modality) integrated with diffusion image models, only with autoregressive image models (which generate an image via image tokens). Historically those had lower image fidelity than diffusion models. OpenAI now seems to have solved this problem somehow. More than that, they appear far ahead of any available diffusion model, including Midjourney and Imagen 3.

Gemini "integrates" Imagen 3 (a diffusion model) only via a tool that Gemini calls internally with the relevant prompt. So it's not a true multimodal integration, as it doesn't benefit from the advanced prompt understanding of the LLM.

Edit: Apparently Gemini also has an experimental native image generation ability.

johntb86 · 5 months ago

Meta has experimented with a hybrid mode, where the LLM uses autoregressive mode for text, but within a set of delimiters will switch to diffusion mode to generate images. In principle it's the best of both worlds.

johntb86 commented on Honda's F1 engine technologies that enable >50% thermal efficiency global.honda/en/tech/moto... · Posted by u/ylk1

ikekkdcjkfke · 5 months ago

What are the NOx emissions?

johntb86 · 5 months ago

If they cared they could probably use a DEF system to reduce them.

johntb86 commented on Claude can now search the web anthropic.com/news/web-se... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

tcdent · 5 months ago

Searching the web is a great feature in theory, but every implementation I've used so far looks at the top X hits and then interprets it to be the correct answer.

When you're talking to an LLM about popular topics or common errors, the top results are often just blogspam or unresolved forum posts, so the you never get an answer to your problem.

More of an indicator that web search is more unusable than ever, but interesting that it affects the performance of generative systems, nonetheless.

johntb86 · 5 months ago

I've found that OpenAI's Deep Research seems to be much better at this, including finding an obscure StackOverflow post that solved a problem I had, or finding travel wiki sites that actually answered questions I had around traveling around Poland. However it finds its pages, they're much better than just the top N Google results.

johntb86 commented on Ladder: Self-improving LLMs through recursive problem decomposition arxiv.org/abs/2503.00735... · Posted by u/fofoz

Workaccount2 · 6 months ago

It's a 7B model. So while the problem is not advanced the model is far from it too.

johntb86 · 6 months ago

I'd be curious what would happen if you SFTed a larger model with successful reasoning traces from the smaller model. Would it pick up the overall reasoning pattern, but be able to apply it to more cases?

johntb86 commented on The FFT Strikes Back: An Efficient Alternative to Self-Attention arxiv.org/abs/2502.18394... · Posted by u/iNic

johntb86 · 6 months ago

Does anyone have an intuition about why looking at things in the frequency domain is helpful here? The DC term I can see, but I wouldn't expect the input data is periodic enough that other frequencies would be meaningful.