nomonnai (u/nomonnai)

nomonnai commented on LLMs understand nullability dmodel.ai/nullability-gen... · Posted by u/mattmarcus

hatthew · a year ago

I am slowly coming around to the idea that nobody should ever use the word "understand" in relation to LLMs, simply because everyone has their own definition of "understand", and many of these definitions disagree, and people tend to treat their definition as axiomatic. I have yet to see any productive discussion happen once anyone disagrees on the definition of "understand".

So, what word would you propose we use to mean "an LLM's ability (or lack thereof) to output generally correct sentences about the topic at hand"?

nomonnai · a year ago

It's a prediction of what humans have frequently produced in similar situations.

nomonnai commented on A university president makes a case against cowardice newyorker.com/news/q-and-... · Posted by u/pseudolus

nomonnai · a year ago

It's not an equation in what it does to people. Yes, abduction is worse than being yelled at.

However, it's pointing out that the general principle has been established: "People whose opinion I don't like can be banned from society." At first, it's only removing individuals from public discourse (cancel culture), then it's removing people physically (deportation).

This is always the endgame of eroding core liberal values. This has been pointed out to the illiberal left time and time again, to no avail.

nomonnai commented on Open Euro LLM: Open LLMs for Transparent AI in Europe openeurollm.eu/launch-pre... · Posted by u/joecobb

misiek08 · a year ago

You are maybe in 0.005%. If project has even a presentation at the end it’s already being considered successful. And I thought it’s maybe Poland only, but Germant and France is the same (I’ve seen this myself, not heard from 3rd party)

nomonnai · a year ago

It's not only Poland. I've had the misfortune of suffering through a couple Horizon projects, with partners from many European countries. Same experience as you had. "These are not serious people" sums it up.

nomonnai commented on Go should sometimes be a no-go brainbaking.com/post/2024... · Posted by u/Tomte

zwnow · a year ago

Yea lets build a whole docker setup for this little Sudoku app that never will have more than 100 users. I mean, for fun overengineering small projects can be a great learning experience but for work? Keep it simple, stupid.

(In case it wasn't clear, im agreeing with your point and just giving some example)

nomonnai · a year ago

Yeah but what does simple mean? I struggle with that a lot. In my experience, keeping it simple means not being flexible when requirements change. Adding new features becomes tedious or even a mess. Keeping things simple is an art, certainly not an easy one.

nomonnai commented on A wonderful coincidence or an expected connection: why π² ≈ g roitman.io/blog/91... · Posted by u/signa11

john-aj · 2 years ago

Chiming in from theoretical linguistics: it is impossible for natural languages to "count", i.e. make reference to numbers other than 0, 1 or infinity.

As an example, there are languages where prenominal genitives are impossible (0).

Then, there are languages, such as German, where only one prenominal genitive is possible (1):

> Annas Haus

> *Annas Hunds Haus

Finally, there are languages, such as English, where an infinite number of prenominal genitives are possible (infinity).

> Anna's house

> Anna's dog's house

> Anna's mother's dog's house

> Anna's mother's sister's ... dog's house

But there are no languages where only two or three prenominal genitives are possible.

This property is taken to be part of Universal Grammar, i.e. the genetic/biological/mental system that makes human language possible.

nomonnai · 2 years ago

As a German speaker, the claim "more than one prenominal genitive is impossible" seems interesting but perhaps not entirely accurate. As a non-linguist I probably misunderstand the meaning of prenominal genitive and might be missing your argument's point. For the overarching discussion we should note though the great variety of refering to "more than one element" in German.

> Anna's mother's sister's dog's house

> Das Haus des Hundes der Schwester der Mutter von Anna.

It's difficult to parse though. We only get to know about Anna at the end of the sentence. Consequently, we avoid such sentences or use workarounds.

> Von Annas Mutters Schwester dem Hund sein Haus.

If you ever use such a construction German speakers will correct your bad language but they will perfectly understand the sentence's meaning.

A quick search brought me to this presentation: https://www.linguistik.hu-berlin.de/de/staff/amyp/downloads/...

The take-away seems to be: "German does not work like English" (slide 8) so be careful when comparing PreGen in German and English.

nomonnai commented on Xkcd: CrowdStrike xkcd.com/2961/... · Posted by u/mvolfik

theandrewbailey · 2 years ago

I love how the hover text references https://xkcd.com/303/

nomonnai · 2 years ago

What came to my mind whithout seeing the hovertext. I'm old.

nomonnai commented on The Objects of Our Life (1983) stevejobsarchive.com/exhi... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar

quacked · 2 years ago

What an excellent speaker. Despite many moral issues with his character, I am a big admirer of Jobs in a professional capacity.

I have found that audiences genuinely appreciate when you speak powerfully and simply; you can rephrase something like

> "we're considering many different possible pathways, and some of them we're finding are less optimized to meet our institutional goals"

to

> "we're not sure what to do, and so far most of the ideas we thought of were pretty bad"

and your audience laughs and leans in. I try to emulate that Jobs-ian style at work and a lot of people seem to like my presentations.

I think people really like it when someone takes the responsibility of standing up and saying "let's not overcomplicate this, I'll take responsibility for making the decisions and I don't spend a lot of time trying to hide my real level of knowledge. In fact, I may know less than some of you." (Even if that's probably not true.)

Another good (albeit hyperbolic) example of this is Jeremy Irons' speech near the end of Margin Call (2011) where he tells the junior analyst to "speak to me as if I am a very small child, or possibly a golden retriever." In fact, that's also an explicit direction given to flight controllers at NASA during their training.

nomonnai · 2 years ago

> I have found that audiences genuinely appreciate when you speak powerfully and simply

Unfortunately, that only works if the speaker has interesting ideas to share. Often, obtuse language hides the lack of interesting ideas. Sometimes, there are no ideas at all.

Saying "most of our ideas were pretty bad" only works if an interesting idea comes afterwards. But such every interesting idea requires a lot of work; work that many speakers have not performed.

nomonnai commented on Show HN: Create Music with R github.com/flujoo/gm... · Posted by u/hackoo

tgv · 2 years ago

Using the addition operator for manipulation is a bit unusual. Why did you choose it? I don't have R studio or anything on my computer, so I can't test it, but do things like

    music <- Music() + Meter(4, 4) + Line(...) + (Line(...) + Articulation(">", 1))

work?

nomonnai · 2 years ago

In base R, `+` is the usual arithmetic operator for numeric and complex vectors. I'm not a super R expert but I'm pretty sure the addition operator is overloaded here. It simply means:

    add(Music(), Meter(4, 4), Line(...), Line(...), Articulation(">", 1))

Edit. Found the definition in the source [1]. I think the approach is similar to Go's approach to method definition [2]. Methods are defined on types, i.e., methods are functions with special receiver arguments. The infix notation instead of prefix notation is just syntactic sugar.

[1] https://github.com/flujoo/gm/blob/69d639be86b0cef80d815a73a6...

[2] https://go.dev/tour/methods/1

nomonnai commented on AI system achieves 96% accuracy in determining sex from dental X-rays psypost.org/ai-system-ach... · Posted by u/mpweiher

r0ze-at-hn · 2 years ago

This isn’t a surprise or shock. The Jaw bone development is highly influenced by sex hormone exposure. I personally look at the jaw bone (followed by the rest of the skull) before the pelvis when guessing the probable sex of a skeleton.

nomonnai · 2 years ago

Are you doing that in a professional capacity or is this more of a hobby?

nomonnai commented on Google Scholar search: "certainly, here is" -chatgpt -llm simonwillison.net/2024/Ma... · Posted by u/wanderingmind

dougb5 · 2 years ago

After late '22 I noticed a surge in superlatives like "vital", "essential", "crucial", and "pivotal" in essays and cover letters from students. ChatGPT uses words like these whenever you ask it to write an essay, and it's a dead giveaway. It's ruined the legitimate uses of the words.

Pick one of the Google Scholar results from the article and you'll find something awful like this (the start of the second paper): "The carriage of goods under international commercial law is a complex and essential aspect of international trade."

nomonnai · 2 years ago

> surge in superlatives like "vital", "essential", "crucial", and "pivotal"

This is very interesting. It could also be an effect of Grammarly, which suggests these replacements for the generic "important." Perhaps it's a combination of several effects.