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jtr1 commented on Classical statues were not painted horribly   worksinprogress.co/issue/... · Posted by u/bensouthwood
arrrg · 13 days ago
Did he talk to people who make those reconstructions?

Why speculate from that outside perspective when you could talk to people who worked on them and the decisions they made. I think that would be very interesting. As is that‘s completely missing and it feels a bit like aimless speculation and stuff that could be answered by just talking to the people making those reconstructions. My experience is that people doing scientific work love talking about it and all the difficult nuances and trade offs there are.

jtr1 · 13 days ago
The ending of the article left me feeling he had more of an axe to grind here. The mostly unspoken ideological background is that classical art is often appropriated by proponents of Western chauvinism to demonstrate their supposed innate cultural superiority. Poorly painted reconstructions undermine that image, but it does not mean this was done intentionally. I agree that a more neutral observer would have been interested in learning the thought process of those researchers.
jtr1 commented on The "confident idiot" problem: Why AI needs hard rules, not vibe checks   steerlabs.substack.com/p/... · Posted by u/steer_dev
jodrellblank · 23 days ago
> LMs don't do this. Instead, every question is immediately responded with extreme confidence with a paragraph or more of text.

Having just read a load of Quora answers like this, which did not cover the thing I was looking for, that is how humans on the internet behave and how people have to write books, blog posts, articles, documentation. Without the "dance" to choose a path through a topic on the fly, the author has to take the burden of providing all relevant context, choosing a path, explaining why, and guessing at any objections and questions and including those as well.

It's why "this could have been an email" is a bad shout. The summary could have been an email, but the bit which decided on that being the summary would be pages of guessing all the things which what might have been in the call and which ones to include or exclude.

jtr1 · 23 days ago
Interesting. Like many people here, I've thought a great deal about what it means for LLMs to be trained on the whole available corpus of written text, but real world conversation is a kind of dark matter of language as far as LLMs are concerned, isn't it? I imagine there is plenty of transcription in training data, but the total amount of language use in real conversational surely far exceeds any available written output and is qualitatively different in character.

This also makes me curious to what degree this phenomenon manifests when interacting with LLMs in languages other than English? Which languages have less tendency toward sycophantic confidence? More? Or does it exist at a layer abstracted from the particular language?

jtr1 commented on Why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're disabled?   reason.com/2025/12/04/why... · Posted by u/delichon
qazxcvbnmlp · a month ago
The difference is how you relate to the job providing accommodations. If you know certain employers are more willing and able to provide accommodations then you can consciously weigh that piece of information when considering a job/career field.

By consciously accepting who you are and how you work with the world, it lets you navigate better in it. For some people that is just feeling it out and ending up in a career that fits them. For some people, it might be getting a diagnosis. The end result might be the same.

jtr1 · a month ago
What is your personal experience here?
jtr1 commented on AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering   tomwphillips.co.uk/2025/1... · Posted by u/tomwphillips
BeFlatXIII · 2 months ago
> the environmental attack on AI is more a hangover from crypto than a thoughtful attempt to evaluate the costs and benefits of this new technology

Especially since so many anti-crypto people immediately pivoted to anti-AI. That sudden shift in priorities makes it hard to take them seriously.

jtr1 · 2 months ago
On the flip side, the crypto hype machine pretty seamlessly flipped to the AI hype machine, so it makes sense the same anti crowd shifted pretty seamlessly. Given the practical applications of crypto were minimal and the externalities were mostly crime and pollution, I’m not at all surprised that many people expect the same for AI.
jtr1 commented on AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering   tomwphillips.co.uk/2025/1... · Posted by u/tomwphillips
emp17344 · 2 months ago
The anti-crypto people were correct, though. Why should we not push back when we’re seeing the same type of baseless hype that surrounded crypto being cultivated around the AI space?
jtr1 · 2 months ago
They were and we should push back and yes, there is a mountain of baseless hype. But if you train your fire on the wrong thing, you risk not addressing the actual problem.
jtr1 commented on AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering   tomwphillips.co.uk/2025/1... · Posted by u/tomwphillips
paulryanrogers · 2 months ago
Just because there are worse abuses elsewhere doesn't mean datacenters should get a pass.

Golf and datacenters should have to pay for their externalities. And if that means both are uneconomical in arid parts of the country then that's better than bankrupting the public and the environment.

jtr1 · 2 months ago
I think the point here is that objecting to AI data center water use and not to say, alfalfa farming in Arizona, reads as reactive rather than principled. But more importantly, there are vast, imminent social harms from AI that get crowded out by water use discourse. IMO, the environmental attack on AI is more a hangover from crypto than a thoughtful attempt to evaluate the costs and benefits of this new technology.
jtr1 commented on American solar farms   tech.marksblogg.com/ameri... · Posted by u/marklit
FrustratedMonky · 3 months ago
What is the argument against it? I've never heard any logical reasons beyond hating the Left.

It's like hating bikers, why? The same people that have pickup trucks and swerve to intimidate bikers, seem to hate solar energy. But why?

jtr1 · 3 months ago
I think you'll have a difficult time comprehending the phenomenon if you look for reasoned arguments. A much more productive framework, IMO, is to see it in terms of a feedback loop between funding sources and the aggregate valence of speech on a particular topic.

The energy industry is one of the largest in the world, with trillions of revenue on the line. The FF component of that industry has every incentive to turn sentiment against upstart competitors, but you do that at scale less by reasoned arguments and more by gut level appeals: "the people who want renewable energy hate your culture and way of life", "renewal installations are ugly and a blight on the landscape of your home", etc.

u/jtr1

KarmaCake day986January 7, 2015View Original