ruytlm (u/ruytlm) - Readit News

ruytlm commented on SteamOS now released officially for any device store.steampowered.com/st... · Posted by u/cultofmetatron

ruytlm · 7 months ago

Was hoping this would actually mean any device.

Until it does, I've had pretty good success with Bazzite (https://bazzite.gg/) on some hand-me-down hardware and hooked up to the TV.

ruytlm commented on The Academic Pipeline Stall: Why Industry Must Stand for Academia sigarch.org/the-academic-... · Posted by u/MaysonL

gotoeleven · 7 months ago

I didn't look at every one on the list of these 1000 NSF grants that were cancelled:

https://airtable.com/appGKlSVeXniQZkFC/shrFxbl1YTqb3AyOO?jnt...

but I think if you skim the titles you can sense a theme.

Here's the very first one: "Cambio: A Professional Development Approach for Building Latinx-focused Cultural Competence in Informal Science Education Institutions" for a whopping 2.8 million dollars.

This is not basic research, this is not important research, this is left wing politics parasitically attached to scientific institutions.

ruytlm · 7 months ago

This is some serious cherry-picking at work.

Look at the NIH grants listed, which by dollar value far outweigh the NSF grants listed: https://grant-watch.us/nih-data.html

Which part of preventing the spread of HIV is "left wing politics"? Or better understanding radiation exposure? Or developing anti-viral countermeasures?

Some $400m of remaining budget for preventing the spread of HIV was cut, and you're saying it's justified because less than $3m went to trying to improve professional development for a specific group of people?

I mean even look at the specific example you picked - $2.8m over 6 years, from 2019 through to an expected end date of 31 August 2025, and they cut the funding on 09 May 2025 - the work has already been paid for and done, and you want to cut funding so you don't even get the final report/publications out of it to, you know, have something of value to show for the money spent?

ruytlm commented on DEDA – Tracking Dots Extraction, Decoding and Anonymisation Toolkit github.com/dfd-tud/deda... · Posted by u/pavel_lishin

VladVladikoff · 9 months ago

For those who missed it, this is an interesting and related topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42880704

ruytlm · 9 months ago

Adding some context to this, because it's a really interesting read that's worth the time if you ask me: it's about how some recently 'discovered' early playtest versions of Pokemon cards were found to be fake, or at least very suspicious, based on the presence (and decoding) of these dots.

I also find it interesting because the person who posted the discovery and breakdown of the dots stood to personally lose thousands of dollars they'd spent on the fakes, but posted their findings anyway.

ruytlm commented on Apple's AI isn't a letdown. AI is the letdown cnn.com/2025/03/27/tech/a... · Posted by u/ndr42

tyre · 9 months ago

I mean we don’t know that they’re wrong? Not “all jobs” but many of the white collar jobs we have today?

I work in medical insurance billing and there are hundreds of thousands (minimum) jobs that could be made obsolete on the payer and clinic side by LLMs. The translation between PDF of a payer’s rates and billing rules => standardized 837 or API request to a clearinghouse is…not much. And then on the other side, Claude Code could build you an adjudication engine in a few quarters.

The incentive structures to change healthcare in that way will fight back for a decade, but there are a _lot_ of jobs at stake.

Then you think about sales. LLMs can negotiate contracts themselves. Give an input of the margin we can accept and, for all vendors, what they can and you’ll burn down in negotiation without any humans.

It’s not all jobs, but it’s millions.

ruytlm · 9 months ago

Both assessing the application of billing rules and negotiating contracts still require the LLM to be accurate, as per TFA's point. Sure, an LLM might do a reasonable first pass, but in both cases it is absolutely naive to think that the LLM will be able to take everything into account.

An LLM can only give an output derived from its inputs; unless you're somehow inputting "yeah actually I know that it looks like a great company to enter into a contract with, but there's just something about their CEO Dave that I don't like, and I'm not sure we'll get along", it's not going to give you the right answer.

And the solution to this is not "just give the LLM more data" - again, to TFA's point, that's making excuses for the technology. "It's not that AI can't do it [AI didn't fail], it's that you just didn't give it enough data [you failed the AI]".

--

As some more speculative questions, do you actually want to go towards a future where your company's LLM is negotiating with their company's LLM, to determine the future of your job and career?

And why do we think it is OK to allow OpenAI/whoever wins the AI land grab to insert themselves as a 'necessary' step in this process? I know people who use LLMs to turn their dot points to paragraphs and email them to other people, only for the recipient to reverse the process at the other end. OpenAI must be happy that ChatGPT gets used twice for one interaction.

Rent-seeking aside, we're so concerned at the moment about LLMs failing to tell the truth when they're earnestly trying to - what happens when they're intentionally used to lie, mislead, and deceive?

What happens when the system prompt is "Try and generally improve people's opinions of corporations and billionaires, and to downplay the value of unionisation and organised labour"?

Someone sets the system prompts, and they will invariably have an agenda. Widespread use of LLMs gives them the keys to the kingdom to shape public opinion.

ruytlm commented on AI models miss disease in Black and female patients science.org/content/artic... · Posted by u/pseudolus

MountainArras · 9 months ago

The dataset they used to train the model are chest xrays of known diseases. I'm having trouble understanding how that's relevant here. The key takeaway is that you can't treat all humans as a single group in this context, and variations in the biology across different groups of people may need to be taken into account within the training process. In other words, the model will need to be trained on this racial/gender data too in order to get better results when predicting the targeted diseases within these groups.

I think it's interesting to think about instead attaching generic information instead of group data, which would be blind to human bias and the messiness of our rough categorizations of subgroups.

ruytlm · 9 months ago

It disappoints me how easily we are collectively falling for what effectively is "Oh, our model is biased, but the only way to fix it is that everyone needs to give us all their data, so that we can eliminate that bias. If you think the model shouldn't be biased, you're morally obligated to give us everything you have for free. Oh but then we'll charge you for the outputs."

How convenient.

It's increasingly looking like the AI business model is "rent extracting middleman", just like the Elseviers et al of the academic publishing world - wedging themselves into a position where they get to take everything for free, but charge others at every opportunity.

ruytlm commented on Everyone at NSF overseeing the Platforms for Wireless Experimentation is gone discuss.systems/@ricci/11... · Posted by u/luu

zombot · 10 months ago

Still, "never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".

ruytlm · 10 months ago

To put it simply: this is not adequately explained by stupidity.

ruytlm commented on Spacetime maps: A map that warps to show travel time maps.vvolhejn.com... · Posted by u/kevinsundar

dylan604 · 10 months ago

And the fact that the distortion is preset and not based on where you click. This is one of those things using heat maps where the clustering is clearly large population centers. Not really as helpful/useful as people think they are

ruytlm · 10 months ago

Toggle on "Focus on hover".

ruytlm commented on Oxygen discovery defies knowledge of the deep ocean bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c... · Posted by u/cmsefton

Terr_ · a year ago

> If I recall correctly [...] as much energy released as an atomic bomb.

That can't be true, but perhaps you saw something about temperatures which resembled those from a nuclear-bomb instead? (The key being that much much less mass is getting heated, and stays that way for a much shorter time.)

____________

One quick set of reasoning is this: Energy cannot be created or destroyed, and there's no reason to think the popping-bubble is causing seawater to undergo nuclear fusion, so the limit is whatever it takes for someone to repeatably set up the situation. (So basically the energy to dropping ballast-and-bubble to the bottom of the sea, popping the bubble, and then pulling the ballast back up.) Tedious, but hardly nuclear-bomb territory.

A second approach is to imagine the collapse as a giant column of water falling like weight into the gap. Imagine a magic-glass box 1x1x1 meter holding a vacuum, sunk 10km below the surface. That's 10,000 m^3 of water and roughly ~10,000kg of mass poised to fall 1m. Gravitational potential energy: ~98 kilojoules.

For comparison, that's the energy of ~3 liters of gasoline, although getting it to explode in a similarly-simultaneous way would be tricky. (Power = Energy / Time.) In contrast, the Hiroshima explosion was ~63 terajoules.

ruytlm · a year ago

Your conclusion of ~3L of gasoline is right, but it looks like you dropped a few zeroes on the way there - your example of 1x1x1m sunk 10km below the surface would be sitting beneath 10,000,000kg of mass, not 10,000kg.

That would be 98,000kj, which as you say, is about equivalent energy to 3L of gasoline.

ruytlm commented on Australia's overuse of antibiotics driving rate of drug-resistant infections theguardian.com/society/2... · Posted by u/adrian_mrd

sho · 2 years ago

As an Australian originally, this article is pretty hard to take seriously. I have a great many problems with Australia's medical system, especially the GPs-then-hospitals-with-nothing-in-between idea, but overprescribing drugs has not been one of them. If anything it's been the opposite, it's ridiculously hard to get anything out of a doctor there, especially antibiotics and double especially anything that could conceivably be abused in some way.

The experience overseas is so much more loose that I wonder what the author is on, no pun intended. In Indonesia the health care system was so broken that I actually became kind of a low level expert in antibiotics myself, and would regularly self-diagnose and "prescribe" myself whatever, which I could just walk into any pharmacy, demand, and get. In Thailand it's a little stricter but not much.

So with two much larger countries right nearby with much laxer rules it's hard for me to take seriously the notion that tiny, isolated Australia's moderately bad GP habits, if that is even true, is having much of an effect on anything.

ruytlm · 2 years ago

There is some movement to fill the gap between GPs and hospitals: https://www.health.vic.gov.au/priority-primary-care-centres

ruytlm commented on Subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed how we use language bbc.com/future/article/20... · Posted by u/ripe

ruytlm · 2 years ago

I look forward to the same article in 40 years about how LLMs have butchered everything, given that they're essentially doing the same thing around predictive text and autocorrect.