https://archive.ph/VZpQ0
Readit Newsqrios commented on Will Creative Work Survive A.I.? nytimes.com/2025/12/16/op... · Posted by u/thm
Correction: (a) we can observe the effects of human-level intelligence but we don't actually know what human intelligence is because intelligence is best described as a side-effect of consciousness (aka the experience of qualia) and science has yet to provide a convincing explanation of what that is exactly.
> … what human intelligence is because intelligence is best described as a side-effect of consciousness …
Is "human intelligence" and "intelligence" equal?
And: How to become conscious before being intelligent?
Or: If intelligence is a side-effect, how often this side-effect can't be observed?
Xor: What if an intelligent being denies being conscious?
> When you’re looking at a pre-training dataset in the frontier lab and you look at a random internet document, it’s total garbage. I don't even know how this works at all. It’s [stuff] like stock tickers, symbols, it's a huge amount of slop and garbage from like all the corners of the internet
Seems like there would be low hanging fruit in heavier pre processing then? Something deterministic like a reading level score. Or even a tiny model trained for the task to pick out good data?
"low hanging" is relative. At least from my perspective. A significant part of my work involves cleaning up structured and unstructured data.
An example: More than ten years ago a friend of mine was fascinated by the german edition of the book "A Cultural History of Physics" by Károly Simonyi. He scanned the book (600+ pages) and created a PDF (nearly) same layout.
Against my advice he used Adobe tools for it instead of creating an epub or something like DocBook.
The PDF looks great, but the text inside is impossible to use as training data for a small LLM. The lines from the two columns are mixed and a lot of spaces are randomly placed (makes it particularly difficult because mathematical formulas often appear in the text itself).
After many attempts (with RegEx and LLMs), I gave up and rendered each page and had a large LLM extract the text.
duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46046916
9 days ago
117 comments
qrios commented on AI Boom Is Turning Malaysia's Palm Oil Estates into Data Centers bloomberg.com/news/featur... · Posted by u/rbanffy
This is actually a clever way to distinguish if the browser supports XSLT or not. Actual content is XHTML in https://xslt.rip/index.xsl
The author is frontend designer and has a nice website, too: https://dbushell.com/
I like the personal, individual style of both pages.
> This is actually a clever way to distinguish if the browser supports XSLT or not. Actual content is XHTML in https://xslt.rip/index.xsl
I agree it is a clever way. But it also shows exactly how hard it is to use XML and XSLT in a "proper way": Formal everything is fine to do it in this way (except the server is sending 'content-type: application/xml' for the /index.xsl, it should be 'application/xslt+xml').
Almost all implementations in XML and XSLT that I have seen in my career showed a nearly complete lack of understanding of how they were intended to be used and how they should work together. Starting with completely pointless key/value XMLs (I'm looking at you, Apple and Nokia), through call-template orgies (IBM), to ‘yet-another-element-open/-close’ implementations (almost every in-house application development in PHP, JAVA or .NET).
I started using XSLT before the first specification had been published. Initially, I only used it in the browser. Years later, I was able to use XSLT to create XSDs and modify them at runtime.
qrios commented on Offline Math: Converting LaTeX to SVG with MathJax sigwait.org/~alex/blog/20... · Posted by u/henry_flower
In my experience the MathML support is still mediocre, especially on Chrome.
Thnx for sharing!
With Safari (standard and tech preview) the rendering looks strange (at least). The root sign does not have a strait line at the top (for many fonts) and at least the partial derivative is not rendered as italic (for all fonts).
There is nothing precise about crafting prompts and context—it's just that, a craft. Even if you do the right thing and check some fuzzy boundary conditions using autoscorers, the model can still change out from beneath you at any point and totally alter the behavior of your system. There is no formal language here. After all, mathematics exists because natural language is notoriously imprecise.
The article has some good practical tips and it's not on the author but man I really wish we'd stop abusing the term "engineering" in a desperate attempt to stroke our own egos and or convince people to give us money. It's pathetic. Coming up with good inputs to LLMs is more art than science and it's a craft. Call a spade a spade.
I agree with you one hundred percent.
But: Interestingly, the behavior of LLMs in different contexts is also the subject of scientific research.
can't believe it's 2025 and some still need to go to some place to vote. I can vote since I can remember(at least 20 years) by mail for anything, we also vote multiple times a year(4-6 times), we just get 1 Month before the things to vote by mail and then mail in back votes. Hope we can soon vote online to get rid of the paper overhead.
Is that you? The same guy with the comment "hahahhahaha"[1] on "Women dating safety app 'Tea' breached, users' IDs posted to 4chan"[2]?