maaaaattttt (u/maaaaattttt)

maaaaattttt commented on Persona vectors: Monitoring and controlling character traits in language models anthropic.com/research/pe... · Posted by u/itchyjunk

tdtr · 24 days ago

I'm pretty sure that the canonical choice is either choosing vectors to be anchor - either by a knn distance with other vectors, or by "hand", or even stuff like cross entropy - but then that is already in the loss function. another method would be to create some kind of adversarial setup where the output is "stretched" intentionally and then criticized by another llm. afaik the problem is with scale, as manually going through a bunch of vectors to just ground the latent isnt exactly economical. also people are quite conservative, esp in the big model runs - stuff like muon isnt exactly popularized till the new qwen or kimi. obviously this is all speculation for open models and folks with more experience can chime in.

maaaaattttt · 24 days ago

Maybe do something close to what I like to believe the brain does and have a meta model wrap a "base" model. The meta model gets the output data from the base model (edit: plus the original input) as input plus some meta parameters (for example the probability each token had when it was chosen and/or better which "neurons" were activated during the whole output sequence which would include the Persona they mention). It's then the meta model that generates new output data based on this input and this is the output that is shown to the user.

maaaaattttt commented on François Chollet: The Arc Prize and How We Get to AGI [video] youtube.com/watch?v=5QcCe... · Posted by u/sandslash

Lerc · 2 months ago

And if someone makes a machine that does all that and another person says

"That's not really AGI because xyz"

What then? The difficulty in coming up with a test for AGI is coming up with something that people will accept a passing grade as AGI.

In many respects I feel like all of the claims that models don't really understand or have internal representation or whatever tend to lean on nebulous or circular definitions of the properties in question. Trying to pin the arguments down usually end up with dualism and/or religion.

Doing what Chollet has done is infinitely better, if a person can easily do something and a model cannot then there is clearly something significant missing

It doesn't matter what the property is or what it is called. Such tests might even help us see what those properties are.

Anyone who wants to claim the fundamental inability of these models should be able to provide a task that it is clearly possible to tell when it has been succeeded, and to show that humans can do it (if that's the bar we are claiming can't be met). If they are right, then no future model should be able to solve that class of problems.

maaaaattttt · 2 months ago

Given your premise (which I agree with) I think the issue in general comes from the lack of a good, broadly accepted definition of what AGI is. My initial comment originates from the fact that in my internal definition, an AGI would have a de facto understanding of the physics of "our world". Or better, could infer them by trial and error. But, indeed, it doesn't have to be the case. (The other advantage of the Zelda games is that they introduce new abilities that don't exist in our world, and for which most children -I've seen- understand the mechanisms and how they could be applied to solve a problem quite naturaly even they've never had that ability before).

maaaaattttt commented on François Chollet: The Arc Prize and How We Get to AGI [video] youtube.com/watch?v=5QcCe... · Posted by u/sandslash

qoez · 2 months ago

I feel like I'm the only one who isn't convinced getting a high score on the ARC eval test means we have AGI. It's mostly about pattern matching (and some of it ambiguous even for humans what the actual true response aught to be). It's like how in humans there's lots of different 'types' of intelligence, and just overfitting on IQ tests doesn't in my mind convince me a person is actually that smart.

maaaaattttt · 2 months ago

I've said this somewhere else, but we have the perfect test for AGI in the form of any open world game. Give the instructions to the AGI that it should finish the game and how to control it. Give the frames as input and wait. When I think of the latest Zelda games and especially how the Shrine chanllenges are desgined they especially feel like the perfect environement for an AGI test.

maaaaattttt commented on How would a passing gravitational wave look or feel? (2017) physics.stackexchange.com... · Posted by u/ynoxinul

spauldo · 2 months ago

Matter isn't pinned to the space it's in (source: try walking around). As space expands, the other forces which are orders of magnitude stronger than the expansion of space slide matter along so that distances don't change. You can only detect the expansion of space by measuring the distance between things that are so spread apart that the other forces between them are essentially zero.

maaaaattttt · 2 months ago

That's what I understood from the explanation on stackexchange. But given what you said, if we take the plank length as the shortest length unit, and we consider two theoretical "objects" placed at one plank length away from each other. Does the universe expanding for these two objects mean: 1. the plank length is becomming bigger, 2. more plank lengths are added in between the two objects, 3. Something else and I'm completely off

maaaaattttt commented on How would a passing gravitational wave look or feel? (2017) physics.stackexchange.com... · Posted by u/ynoxinul

maaaaattttt · 2 months ago

On a somewhat related note I'm wondering what the expansion of the universe means for our bodies and matter in general? I think, like the accepted answer suggests, the forces on the atomic level make it so that larger structures get back to a certain equilibrium even if constantly streched equaly in all directions. But I have a hard time imagining what the universe expanding really means on a human/solar system scale. I know of the inflatable balloon analogy, but to me, matter is not on the ballon, rather it is the rubber the ballon is made of.

I have never seen this really explained in details to the general public which I belong to. Maybe that's a sign I'm completely misunderstanding the subject though.

maaaaattttt commented on Dinesh’s Mid-Summer Death Valley Walk (1998) dineshdesai.info/dv/photo... · Posted by u/wonger_

bigdict · 2 months ago

Pairs great with the tale of the Death Valley Germans: https://www.otherhand.org/home-page/search-and-rescue/the-hu....

maaaaattttt · 2 months ago

This was a great read, thank you for sharing it!

maaaaattttt commented on Research suggests Big Bang may have taken place inside a black hole port.ac.uk/news-events-an... · Posted by u/zaik

Valgrim · 2 months ago

A few years ago a popular idea was that our universe existed as an hologram on the surface of a black hole.

Recently I saw also a theory that black hole might not, in fact, exist as we thought, and may be instead something called 'gravastars', where large stars do not collapse in an infinite point but instead the mass reaches a maximum density and hardness and become sorts of empty bubbles.

Now this. It's not exactly a new idea, I remember reading about black hole cosmology 10 years ago.

Sooo... My uneducated, pop-sci fueled imagination now sees the universe as a mathematical function of a fractal looking like a shell with patterns on it, and those patterns interact or 'fold' in a way where the patterns themselves can be thought of as shells with patterns on them, and each shell creates something that, from the inside, looks like a new dimension of space or time, and what we think of as black holes are the next fold. Does that make sense?

maaaaattttt · 2 months ago

It makes sense to me... I think. And I like this vision as well. It would explain the big bang (initial black hole formation), why the universe is expending (at probably non constant rates over time) which would be the black hole "ingesting" matter and growing and maybe also why time and space are one. Same as you, a take from complete uneducated pop-sci fueled imagination.

maaaaattttt commented on Successful people set constraints rather than chasing goals joanwestenberg.com/smart-... · Posted by u/MaysonL

maaaaattttt · 3 months ago

The Fountainhead has many flaws (IMO) but a scene I remember very well that I recall often, is the one where Peter Keating finally reaches the top of the firm, sits in his office, and starts crying. To me, and I guess to the author, it represents this aspect of having externally defined goals (as opposed to personnaly/intrinsic defined) and how unfulfilled you feel if/when you achieve them.

People (me included) often get confused and think that their goal of climbing the career ladder or being able to afford the nice <anything> is goal set by themselves only, when in fact it is a goal most likely induced by society and/or to reach a given social status. If you pause for a second and think honestly about your current goals you can probably identify the ones that are truly yours and the ones that are expected by society.

In the book "The subtle art of not giving a fuck" there is in addition to that the notion of open ended goals as a rule of thumb of good goals to have. And this to me is probably the equivalent of "constraints" in this essay. Make sure the goals you follow are set by you and not expectations of society and try to make and formulate them as open ended goals.

maaaaattttt commented on The time bomb in the tax code that's fueling mass tech layoffs qz.com/tech-layoffs-tax-c... · Posted by u/booleanbetrayal

roflmao123 · 3 months ago

Still plenty left to pay their business taxes.

maaaaattttt · 3 months ago

And if it’s employees? Do you ask them to contribute to the company’s taxes as well? After they’ve paid their own?

maaaaattttt commented on Binary Wordle wordle.chengeric.com/... · Posted by u/eh8

citizenfishy · 3 months ago

Isn't this just Mastermind?

maaaaattttt · 3 months ago

Apologies for opening a tangeant on a tangeant, but am I the only one who thinks there are 2 levels of playing master mind (and therefore wordle)? Easy level, you let the player know exactly which spots are correctly placed and which ones are there but incorrectly placed. Hard level, you let the player know only that some are correctly placed and some are there but incorrectly placed without identifiying which ones. I personnaly don't enjoy the easy level when playing mastermind, but I do enjoy the hard version which is much more investigative and in my opinion triggers the same brain process as when I'm debugging code.