runtime_blues (u/runtime_blues)

runtime_blues commented on Is this octopus having a nightmare? nytimes.com/2023/05/25/sc... · Posted by u/drdee

imo "pets" shouldn't even exist, same with zoos and similar, we should just try to look at wild animals outside, learn to approach and communicate with them. In captivity we can have plants, that's fine

runtime_blues · 2 years ago

Cats pretty much domesticated themselves for the mutual benefit of both species.

There are "captive" pets living in cages or other enclosures that might be a bit more dicey, but cats and dogs are probably a pretty poor example to get upset about.

runtime_blues commented on TV doctors say annual checkups save lives – real doctors call bullshit (2016) vox.com/science-and-healt... · Posted by u/paulpauper

lr4444lr · 2 years ago

Uh, no. Hypertension is a silent killer. Mole checks? Colonoscopies? Testicular cancer screenings? These are all worthless? Preventative medicine has a long way to go, but it's currently the best it's ever been. Thank God I don't see any of these doctors.

runtime_blues · 2 years ago

Generally, yes; for example, routine colonoscopies are not practiced in many developed countries, and it doesn't necessarily translate into any difference in overall health outcomes. One recent study is described here: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/09/health/colonoscopy-cancer-dea... . One explanation is that such cancers are slow-growing and tend to be discovered late in life, so treating them doesn't actually help much, and any benefits are offset by potential harms of the procedure itself, the risk of false positives, etc.

Similarly, while hypertension is a problem, there is scant evidence that routine treatment of it is beneficial. The drugs have health risks: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...

There is value in targeted screening and education, but annual checkups for otherwise healthy people aren't necessarily the way to do it. Not to mention, many of these checkups are perfunctory.

A lot of the gains in life expectancy have little to do with advanced diagnostics and treatments. Sanitation, hygiene, antibiotics, and increased standards of living do a lot of the heavy lifting here. And when the needle moves in the other direction, the causes tend to be mundane too - e.g., opioid abuse in the US.

runtime_blues commented on AI tools like ChatGPT are built on mass copyright infringement theglobeandmail.com/opini... · Posted by u/sherilm

DennisP · 2 years ago

If it weren't for our dumb copyright laws, we could train AI on all the world's books and scientific papers instead of whatever's available online, and take the next great leap in human progress.

runtime_blues · 2 years ago

And thus eliminate the reason many (if not most) of these books and webpages existed in the first place.

This may be fair in the short term, but on a longer timescale, it leaves us worse off unless LLMs master reasoning about and being creative with things not in their training set. Possible, but a crapshoot right now.

runtime_blues commented on US Air Force shoots down drone swarm with THOR microwave weapon thedefensepost.com/2023/0... · Posted by u/MR4D

AHOHA · 2 years ago

While I’m working mainly on drones/robotics, counter drones is also becoming a big talk with a lot of interest from investors, however, countring drones isn’t that easy, even with latest sensors (sound/visual/Lidar/radar sensors), there’s a lot of false positives when deployed in real scenarios, one trial we tried near an airport, the system we tested caught a lot of birds as drones, you tune it not to detect it, then drones goes undetected. Some systems tries to us AI to study the fly path and find some anomalies and trigger based on that, but so far I didn’t see personally an acurate system that can reliably detect and neutralize. Swarm on the other hand, might be easier given how easy to detect them.

runtime_blues · 2 years ago

Airport is probably a very different environment, though? I imagine that if you have a military installation, you don't mind blasting some birds with RF every now and then (and the birds probably don't mind either).

runtime_blues commented on Controlled burns can prevent wildfires; regulations make them nearly impossible boulderbeat.news/2023/05/... · Posted by u/mooreds

joe_the_user · 2 years ago

The fundamental problem that controlled burns face today is that there has been a huge and irresponsible increase in development on "Urban-wildland border". Here in the California Sierras, you have a uniform peppering of (often luxury) houses outside of the various small urban areas. Those forests naturally burn on a regular basis but with this situation, any controlled burn is going to threaten some number of houses.

Of course, the regular fires threaten and destroy these areas too. We've seen the destruction of Paradise, Berry Creek, Greenville, and Grizzly Flats in the last few years (just reading from Wikipedia).

Edit: Always need to mention that global-warming/climate-change makes this worse even if it was caused by local irresponsible behavior. Of course what climate hits first are areas where the local ecology already had problems (In before "It's not [Local bad behavior], it's climate change" or the opposite).

runtime_blues · 2 years ago

That's how development always happened in much of the US. Cities expanding into forestland or grassland. The problem isn't that the homes are all of sudden luxurious, or that we somehow do less planning than in the 1880s or 1960s. It's that a mix of well-intentioned environmental policies and activism mean there's no fuel reduction happening at all. Controlled burns are one way, but logging is another.

runtime_blues commented on AI can’t do hiring because it lacks the data interviewing.io/blog/why-... · Posted by u/leeny

runtime_blues · 2 years ago

But it will. Because it doesn't matter if it's fundamentally better than a good recruiter if it's orders of magnitude cheaper. If you can have it pursue far more leads, maybe the outcomes are going to be the same or better. And if you used it to replace a bad or a mediocre recruiter? In any case, you might not care: hiring is a crapshoot anyway, and AI is saving you millions of dollars.

You want to weed out people who are clearly unqualified, but that's not rocket science. Beyond that, every company has a different hiring bar, a different process... and approximately zero data that their approach works better than anybody else's. Interview performance is a poor predictor of job performance. Whether the bar is high or comparatively relaxed, around 70% of the people you hire will be good, and the rest will underperform, leave after a couple of months, have difficult personalities, and so forth.

runtime_blues commented on GitHub Copilot Chat Leaked Prompt twitter.com/marvinvonhage... · Posted by u/marvinvonhagen

jameshart · 2 years ago

Something that I find weird about these chat prompts (assuming they are real, not hallucinated):

They're almost always written in second person*.

"You are an AI programming assistant"

"You are about to immerse yourself into the role of another Al model known as DAN"

Who are these prompts addressed to? Who does the GPT think wrote them?

The thing that confuses me is that these are text token prediction algorithms, underneath. And what kind of documents exist that begin with someone saying 'you are X, here are a bunch of rules for how X behaves', followed by a transcript of a conversation between X and a random person?

doesn't it make more sense to say something like "The following is the transcript of a completely routine conversation between two people. One of them is X, the other one is a random person."?

Why are the prompters... talking to their models? Who do they think is in there?

* I believe the alleged Bing 'Sydney' prompts are written in the third person, describing how Sydney behaves.

runtime_blues · 2 years ago

Early GPTs were fairly bad at following instructions. The innovation was RLHF, where human raters (Mechanical Turk style) would be asked to evaluate on how well the LLM is able to follow instructions stated as a part of the prompt, often in this style. Countless such ratings were incorporated into the training process itself.

So it did not happen out of the blue, and you didn't need a whole lot of existing webpages involving this sort of role play.

runtime_blues commented on YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers bleepingcomputer.com/news... · Posted by u/jacooper

john___matrix · 2 years ago

To be fair, YT Premium is one of the few subscriptions I think is a no-brainer and good value for money.

Sometimes when I've forgotten to log in and see what it's like without, it's amazing anyone can watch videos on there. Like a lot of people I've generally been OK to watch ads in exchange for free content but it seems over the years instead of ads getting better and/or more relevant to my interests (even broadly), they're getting much worse.

I assume this is the result of companies just accepting ££ for anything rather than having more quality control?

runtime_blues · 2 years ago

As the old saying goes, good ideas shouldn't require force. If they have a "no-brainer" offering, no need to strong-arm people into using it, right?

I get it that they are not a charity and can monetize or paywall their platforms as seen fit, but there's something just sad about the model where you build a customer-friendly and open platform, then progressively crapify it once you capture a niche and eliminate most alternatives, and then start penalizing users for trying to work around that.

runtime_blues commented on YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers bleepingcomputer.com/news... · Posted by u/jacooper

WestCoastJustin · 2 years ago

They are going to start an arms race. This will likely lead to much further advances in ad-blocking that would be a bad outcome for them. This is a balancing act for sure. I guess they must see lots of people blocking ads to think it's worth while going for it. This could even be a smaller team looking at bumping up their metrics or hit perf goals without seeing the larger impact across the company.

runtime_blues · 2 years ago

Google is big, wealthy, and tech-savvy enough to, at the very least, make ad blockers unreliable and annoying most of the time for most of the users.

This is not good news, and it's probably not going to be a lesson in humility for the company.

runtime_blues commented on Electronics Lab Bench Setup Guide badar.tech/2023/04/30/ele... · Posted by u/stacktrust

gaudat · 2 years ago

This is some unpopular opinion but please, do not buy extra components thinking that you will use it in some extrea projects. Only buy components that your current design needs. It's even better if you can get a board house to assemble them before it arrives at your desk. Otherwise it is the beginning of the fall to a hoarder life.

Except if you are playing in RF or some black magic where simulation does not cut it...

runtime_blues · 2 years ago

This is often impractical when shipping costs more than the components.

Yeah, there are things you shouldn't be buying "just in case" - for example, a stash of SoCs will age faster than you can use them - but definitely buy a hundred of common capacitors, such as 100 nF, 1 µF, or 10 µF, rather than buying them one-by-one.

You generally don't need a complete set of all standard resistances or capacitances - there are precious few circuits where you need precisely 47 pF and 6.8 kΩ - but there's plenty of stuff that goes into almost every single project you build. Battery clips, 100 Ω / 1k / 10k resistors, 100 nF / 1 µF / 10 µF decoupling caps, LEDs, PCB-mount switches...