pepinator (u/pepinator)

pepinator commented on 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend thedailyadda.com/95-of-co... · Posted by u/speckx

eldenring · 11 days ago

This is how America ends up being ahead of the rest of world with every new technology breakthrough. They spend a lot of money, lose a lot of money, take risks, and then end up being too far for others to catch up.

Trying to claim victory against AI/US Companies this early is a dangerous move.

pepinator · 10 days ago

That's an awfully simplistic way of seeing things. It always surprises me how disconnected from reality Americans are.

pepinator commented on Ask HN: What trick of the trade took you too long to learn? · Posted by u/unsupp0rted

hintklb · a month ago

Realizing that buying a house is absolutely not a good investment and that the whole society is on a narrative to convince more and more people to blindly buy (realtors, lenders, other homeowners, the governments, parents,...)

Doing the real math is the trick of the trade. The math for owning has been made so that it looks like a good deal while in reality it is not at all. Most people will literally compare mortgage to their rent, or "I sold my house I bought for 500k for 1M$, therefore I made 500k$".

Treat owning as a luxury item. The same way you would own a sport car or travel on a private jet. Do the (real) math and realize Owning is costing you money.

Also don't let yourself get emotional about buying a house. Society has made it look as if buying a house was a proof of success. A lot of research shows that once people buy they lose flexibility, feel more stuck, cannot access higher paying job in a different places etc. Renting has a ton of advantages.

This calculator get most things right. As an exercise, you can try to retroactively put the numbers for the house you bought and the rent equivalent. The results might surprise you: www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/upshot/buy-rent-calculator.html

pepinator · a month ago

This is obviously not true. You don't have to do the math to realize: when you pay rent, every moth, an important part of your salary simply disappears, leaving nothing for the future. When you pay a mortgage, your paying the house you'll own. Of course, there are interests and fees and whatnot, but you'd need to pay huge amounts so that it becomes unviable; I can't imagine a single scenario where that occurs.

pepinator commented on Nvidia CEO criticizes Anthropic boss over his statements on AI tomshardware.com/tech-ind... · Posted by u/01-_-

mistrial9 · 3 months ago

> just stochastic parrots

this is flatly false for two reasons -- one is that all LLMs are not equal. The models and capacities are quite different, by design. Secondly a large number of standardized LLM testing, tests for sequence of logic or other "reasoning" capacity. Stating the fallacy of stochastic parrots is basically proof of not looking at the battery of standardized tests that are common in LLM development.

pepinator · 3 months ago

Even if not all LLMs are equal, almost all of them are based on the same base model: transformers. So the general idea is always the same: predict the next token. It becomes more obvious when you try to use LLMs to solve things that you can't find in internet (even if they're simple).

And the testing does not always work. You can be sure that only 80% of the time it will be really really correct, and that forces you to check everything. Of course, using LLMs makes you faster for some tasks, and the fact that they are able to do so much is super impressive, but that's it.

pepinator commented on Nvidia CEO criticizes Anthropic boss over his statements on AI tomshardware.com/tech-ind... · Posted by u/01-_-

scuol · 3 months ago

Just this morning, I had Claude come up with a C++ solution that would have undefined behavior that even a mid-level C++ dev could have easily caught (assuming iterator stability in a vector that was being modified) just by reading the code.

These AI solutions are great, but I have yet to see any solution that makes me fear for my career. It just seems pretty clear that no LLM actually has a "mental model" of how things work that can avoid the obvious pitfalls amongst the reams of buggy C++ code.

Maybe this is different for JS and Python code?

pepinator · 3 months ago

This is where one can notice that LLM are, after all, just stochastic parrots. If we don't have a reliable way to systematically test their outputs, I don't see many jobs being replaced by AI either.

pepinator commented on "The Illusion of Thinking" – Thoughts on This Important Paper hardcoresoftware.learning... · Posted by u/rbanffy

visarga · 3 months ago

"The Illusion of Thinking" is bad, but so is the opposite "it's just math and code". They might not be reasoning like humans, but they are not reducible to just code and math either. They do something new, something that just math and code did not do before.

pepinator · 3 months ago

We call it breakthrough. And it's just math and code. We've had many of those.

pepinator commented on A shower thought turned into a Collatz visualization abstractnonsense.com/coll... · Posted by u/abstractbill

gpm · 3 months ago

Really the germane point isn't that it isn't specifically a uniform distribution, but that there is clearly structure to the distribution of those points. The locations are visibly not a set of IID random variables, because IID random variables don't space out that... uniformly.

That said, while I agree "uniform" not followed by an inflection of "distribution" has many other meanings, I do not agree that it the context of math, in a context where there is a standard uniform distribution, and without other relevant context, "uniformly distributed" can properly be understood to mean anything other than distributed via the standard uniform distribution.

pepinator · 3 months ago

The notion of being uniformly distributed has a very specific meaning in mathematics [1]. If you don't believe me, maybe you believe Tao [2].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equidistribution_theorem

[2] https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2020/01/25/equidistribution-o...

pepinator commented on A shower thought turned into a Collatz visualization abstractnonsense.com/coll... · Posted by u/abstractbill

gpm · 3 months ago

> The points look quite uniformly distributed to me. If I squint, then maybe I can see some structure, but it's hard to describe and I could be imagining it.

It doesn't, these points look like what happens if you ask someone who doesn't know what a uniform distribution looks like to generate a uniformly distributed set of points though.

Here's what an actual uniform distribution looks like... much less "uniform": https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/00549caf-2ec1-4803-b909-6...

Credit to the book "Struck By Lightning" for making me aware of this fact, many years ago now. Disclaimer that the author is a family friend.

Edit: I misunderstood what was being plotted in the article, and as a result had claude plot random instead of evenly spaced X coordinates. It doesn't change my point, but this version has the appropriate distribution to compare to (evenly spaced x, uniformly randomly y coordinates): https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/a04a3023-25d3-4d99-889d-a...

pepinator · 3 months ago

Irrational rotations of a torus are uniformly distributed and closely resemble the image from the blog. The images you linked, on the other hand, are random sequences with positive entropy (which are also uniformly distributed). Confusing these two things is what happens when someone without the necessary expertise tries to sound smart.

pepinator commented on Mathematicians just solved a 125-year-old problem, uniting 3 theories in physics scientificamerican.com/ar... · Posted by u/mikhael

paulpauper · 4 months ago

It's interesting how so many important papers are always on arxiv first. it makes me wonder what purpose peer reviews serves. I think also, this is to help establish priority over the result. So getting it up on arxiv is like a timestamp to avoid someone else deriving it at the same time and getting credit by having it published first.

pepinator · 4 months ago

Peer review is important for checking the correctness of the results, among other things. It's not uncommon to find big errors; small mistakes are everywhere.

pepinator commented on Part two of Grant Sanderson's video with Terry Tao on the cosmic distance ladder mathstodon.xyz/@tao/11405... · Posted by u/ColinWright

ijustlovemath · 6 months ago

The physics of the 1800s had a lot of low hanging fruit. Most undergrads in physics can show you a derivation of Maxwell's equations from first principles, and I think a fair few of them could have come up with it themselves if they were in Maxwell's shoes. The hard truth is that the physics/math of today is just much further afield, and much harder.

pepinator · 6 months ago

That's a highly biased opinion. The Newtonian conception of physics is trivial for us, and we can say that most people could come up with the ideas by their own, but that's because our world conception is based on those ideas; it's already implicit in how we understand the world. That's why Newton was so important, there was a shift in the whole conceptualization of the physical world. With Maxwell's equations is similar. The interpretation as waves, the fact that the equations are Lorentz symmetric but no Newton symmetric, etc. All that is free for us, and it is not obvious at all.