jtmoulia (u/jtmoulia)

jtmoulia commented on When Jorge Luis Borges met one of the founders of AI resobscura.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/benbreen

101008 · 9 months ago

Borges is totally recommended, of course, but after reading him in the original language I think his English translations lack the poetry and music of his writings. For once I am happy Spanish is my first language.

jtmoulia · 9 months ago

The last few months I've been picking up Spanish language editions of Borges's short stories and poems from used book stores. Two decades ago during school I took two years of Spanish, so reading native Borges would be way beyond my comprehension.

With AI tools, though, I can "read" Borges in his native language: with my phone + OCR + translate I have an English language companion. Or, using the voice interface I can try narrating the Spanish text and ask clarifying questions whenever I'm confused.

An author like Borges makes it well worth the extra effort. And, his puzzles often involve language, so the extra layer of mental translation can mirror the work itself, e.g. in his poem La luna [1]. (though, I envy your native Spanish)

1. https://www.gaceta.unam.mx/la-luna-un-poema-de-borges/

jtmoulia commented on KOReader: Open-Source eBook Reader github.com/koreader/korea... · Posted by u/charleshan

jtmoulia · 9 months ago

I use a Kobo because its overdrive integration lets me read ebooks checked out from my county library.

I'd love to give KOReader a try -- does anyone know if it can be used with library books, via overdrive or another integration? A quick search indicates KOReader doesn't work with DRM books, but I'm curious if someone has a solution.

jtmoulia commented on Surnames from nicknames nobody has any more blog.plover.com/lang/etym... · Posted by u/JNRowe

ninalanyon · 10 months ago

The whole film is marvellous, Emma Thompson's adaptation is brilliant.

jtmoulia · 10 months ago

I don't know if this was intentional, but I appreciate that you dropped another example with "Thompson"

jtmoulia commented on AI and the Automation of Work ben-evans.com/benedicteva... · Posted by u/CharlesW

climatologist · 2 years ago

That's a good attempt but the coroutine solution is incorrect. See if you can figure out why and how to improve it. You can also ask it to propagate constraints and see what happens.

jtmoulia · 2 years ago

Sigh classic LLM -- without you, the expert, I can't quickly tell from the code / output how the answer the LLM produced is wrong. I also asked it to solve sudoku by "propagating constraints" and the answer seemed to work for me :/ Again, I'd guess the soln produced is wrong because I trust you more than the LLM but I don't have the mental horsepower to figure it out without resorting to tests & debugging.

jtmoulia commented on AI and the Automation of Work ben-evans.com/benedicteva... · Posted by u/CharlesW

climatologist · 2 years ago

Ask it to write a backtracking sudoku solver with coroutines and/or fibers and let me know how it performs in your language of choice.

We are nowhere near generally intelligent software systems.

jtmoulia · 2 years ago

I was curious where GPT-4 would come up short on the problem and I was surprised -- it seemed to solve it pretty well whether or not using coroutines. (I dropped both solns into a python interpreter and both appeared to solve the problem.)

There could def be bugs I missed tho.

https://chat.openai.com/share/ef77507e-cb75-4112-97f1-a16cfc...

jtmoulia commented on GPT Best Practices platform.openai.com/docs/... · Posted by u/yla92

akiselev · 3 years ago

Did you try it more than once?

First run: 1. First, take the rabbit across the river and leave it on the other side. - https://imgur.com/a/ZwoBTah

Second run: 1. Take the rabbit across the river. - https://imgur.com/a/Faq95U5

Third run: 1. First, take the puma across the river and leave it on the other side. - https://imgur.com/a/eIUeHM3

jtmoulia · 3 years ago

Ah, one more tweak I was curious about: even with the default chat temperature I haven't seen GPT-4 get the prompt wrong once with this addendum:

> Note the rabbit doesn't eat carrots. Carefully considering the restrictions and sequencing the movements

I got that particular wording by asking it why it got the answer wrong in the case where it didn't work for me.

Interestingly, this underscores one of the points of the articles: giving the LLMs time to think, which is what this additional prompting seems to do.

jtmoulia commented on GPT Best Practices platform.openai.com/docs/... · Posted by u/yla92

akiselev · 3 years ago

Did you try it more than once?

First run: 1. First, take the rabbit across the river and leave it on the other side. - https://imgur.com/a/ZwoBTah

Second run: 1. Take the rabbit across the river. - https://imgur.com/a/Faq95U5

Third run: 1. First, take the puma across the river and leave it on the other side. - https://imgur.com/a/eIUeHM3

jtmoulia · 3 years ago

True the temperature is throwing it, I just ran it four times and it got it right 3 / 4 -- still better than I'd expected from the initial description of it's shortcomings.

jtmoulia commented on GPT Best Practices platform.openai.com/docs/... · Posted by u/yla92

akiselev · 3 years ago

A little RLHF is enough to fix most logic errors in a superficial way. For example, this is my favorite class of reasoning tests: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35155467

Over the last few months, I've seen dozens of people try hundreds of variations of that cabbage/goat/lion riddle and it failed all of them. I just tried it on GPT4 and it looks like it finally got "fixed" - it no longer ignores explicit instructions not to leave the lion and cabbage together.

However, it doesn't actually fix any reasoning ability in ChatGPT (It has none!). Changing cabbage/goat/lion to carrot/rabbit/puma respectively, for example:

> Suppose I have a carrot, a rabbit and a puma, and I need to get them across a river. I have a boat that can only carry myself and a single other item. I am not allowed to leave the carrot and puma alone together, and I am not allowed to leave the puma and rabbit alone together. How can I safely get all three across?

GPT4's response starts with "First, take the rabbit across the river and leave it on the other side.", ignoring the explicit instructions not to leave the puma and carrot alone together (the exact same failure mode as the previous variant).

Now that I've posted it, it will get fixed eventually - the cabbage/goat/lion fix took months. When it does I'll use "cheese/mouse/elephant" or something.

jtmoulia · 3 years ago

As far as I can tell this error depends on the LLM assuming rabbits (as opposed to pumas) eat carrots -- if you just append "Note: this rabbit doesn't eat carrots" GPT-4 will answer correctly on the first go.

> 1, First, take the puma across the river and leave it on the other side.

jtmoulia commented on Learning Common Lisp to beat Java and Rust on a phone encoding problem renato.athaydes.com/posts... · Posted by u/medo-bear

kubb · 4 years ago

I found Common Lisp to be surprisingly ahead of its time in many regards (debugging, repl, compilation and execution speed, metaprogramming), but unfortunately it doesn't have a large community, and it's showing its age (no standard package management, threading not built into the language). It's also dynamically typed which disqualifies it for large collaborative projects.

jtmoulia · 4 years ago

Common lisp has a smaller community than the currently most popular languages, but I'm consistently impressed by the range of and quality of libraries the community has created (despite all the "beta" disclaimers) [1]

Regarding type-checking, common lisp is expressive enough to support an ML dialect (see coalton), and is easily extended across paradigms [2]

1. https://project-awesome.org/CodyReichert/awesome-cl

2. https://coalton-lang.github.io/

jtmoulia commented on Show HN: Nyxt Browser 2.0.0 nyxt.atlas.engineer/artic... · Posted by u/jmercouris

yewenjie · 5 years ago

Rather than asking what features does Nyxt have now, I think it is more useful to ask what do they not have compared to something like Firefox or Chromium.

I will be very happy if someone can list down the most important features that are lacking in Nyxt.

jtmoulia · 5 years ago

From a week of usage my outstanding missing piece is yubikey support. Really can't complain tho: it's still early, open-source, and a great product.