sixo (u/sixo) - Readit News

sixo commented on AGI is an engineering problem, not a model training problem vincirufus.com/posts/agi-... · Posted by u/vincirufus

adastra22 · 2 days ago

There are many working quantum computers…

sixo · 2 days ago

ah, I mean, working in the sense of OP: that a system which overcomes the "engineering hurdles" is actually feasible and will be successful.

To be blocked merely by "engineering hurdles" puts QC in approximately the same place as fusion.

sixo commented on AGI is an engineering problem, not a model training problem vincirufus.com/posts/agi-... · Posted by u/vincirufus

glitchc · 3 days ago

We don't know if AGI is even possible outside of a biological construct yet. This is key. Can we land on AGI without some clear indication of possibility (aka Chappie style)? Possibly, but the likelihood is low. Quite low. It's essentially groping in the dark.

A good contrast is quantum computing. We know that's possible, even feasible, and now are trying to overcome the engineering hurdles. And people still think that's vaporware.

sixo · 3 days ago

On the contrary, we have one working example of general intelligence (humans) and zero of quantum computing.

sixo commented on US to review all 55M visas to check if holders broke rules bbc.com/news/articles/cvg... · Posted by u/vinni2

empyrrhicist · 4 days ago

Take PSA, since it's a simpler example. You're right that, if we screen everyone, taking action based on the outcome causes more harm than good. The response is to calibrate... which means we don't learn anything usefully actionable from the test and shouldn't apply it.

With the MRI, you don't get back simple dichotomous things, but you get back potential indications. That can be scary - talk about calibration all you want, but if patients see things and start thinking about the big C word there are likely to be a lot of unnecessary biopsies.

The bottom line is that it's possible to imagine a benefit, but it is not reasonable to pretend it's as simple as "just re-calibrate your interpretation of the results!". There's a reason that a lot of thought goes into when to do screening.

sixo · 4 days ago

> which means we don't learn anything usefully actionable from the test and shouldn't apply it.

This just isn't true. In practice any such screening model can ALWAYS improve with more data—basically because the statistical power goes up and up—up to an asymptote set by noise in the physical process itself.

> That can be scary

Handling that is the job of professionals, is now and will continue to be.

It is extremely reasonable to imagine a benefit! What is doubtful is imagining there wouldn't be one!

I find the line of reasoning in this whole anti-MRI-everyone argument to be bewildering. I think it is basically an emotional argument, which has set in as "established truth" by repetition; people will trot it out by instinct whenever they encounter any situation that suggests it. It reflects lessons collectively learned from the history of medicine, its over-estimation of its own abilities and its overfitting to data, and its ever-increasing sensitivity to liability.

But it is not inherently true—it is really a statement about poor statistical and policy practices in the field, which could be rectified with concerted effort, with a potential for great public upside.

Not that any of this matters at the current price point. But, on a brief investigation, the amortized cost of a single MRI scan is ~$500-800—perhaps 1/5 what I would have guessed!

sixo commented on US to review all 55M visas to check if holders broke rules bbc.com/news/articles/cvg... · Posted by u/vinni2

shazbotter · 4 days ago

MRIs produce shadows that are indistinguishable from cysts or tumors all the time. They are benign, but no amount of data will reduce them. And telling someone "you have a shadow here, it's probably benign" makes people anxious and they go, "maybe I should boost it?" Which is needlessly invasive.

sixo · 4 days ago

huh, well, if it's true that "no amount of data will reduce them" then my point is wrong, but I highly doubt that's true.

sixo commented on US to review all 55M visas to check if holders broke rules bbc.com/news/articles/cvg... · Posted by u/vinni2

empyrrhicist · 4 days ago

... yeah? You'd expect the false positive rate to be HIGHER when you're not looking at an enriched patient subset. That's why we're careful about recommending certain kinds of screening. See also: PSA screening.

sixo · 4 days ago

Well, you missed my point. I'm not talking about "you look at the MRI and see something and say it's a positive", I'm referring to the process of reading MRIs as like a statistical model (even if in practice it exists in the minds of radiologists) which is trained on the corpus of MRI data. That model will depend in some way on the distribution of positive/negative examples in the corpus; if the corpus changes the model has to then be updated to match.

Point is, the false positive concern is only a concern if you use the old model with the new corpus. Don't do that! That's dumb!

The net effect of MRIing everyone on public health would likely be enormously positive as long as you don't do that.

sixo commented on US to review all 55M visas to check if holders broke rules bbc.com/news/articles/cvg... · Posted by u/vinni2

shazbotter · 4 days ago

Vile.

You know why we don't give everyone a full body MRI every year? Too many false positives, too many benign findings that result in unnecessary action, too expensive.

This is the same. It's going to have errors, it's going to find benign things, and it's going to be expensive. It's going to hurt people who fundamentally did nothing wrong.

If it's expensive and hurting innocent people, it sure looks like cruelty is the point.

sixo · 4 days ago

The MRI analogy is not good. The false positive risk is only against the present-day distribution of MRIs mostly taken of symptomatic patients; if we had the dataset of "annual MRIs for everyone" we would very quickly recalibrate our sensitivity to the new baseline.

sixo commented on Myths About Floating-Point Numbers (2021) asawicki.info/news_1741_m... · Posted by u/Bogdanp

thwarted · 13 days ago

You still can't divide by zero, it just doesn't result in an error state that stops execution. The inf and NaN values are sentinel values that you still have to check for after the calculation to know if it went awry.

sixo · 13 days ago

In the space of floats, you are dividing by zero. To map back to the space of numbers you have to check. It's nice, though; inf and NaN sentinels give you the behavior of a monadic `Result | Error` pipeline without having to wrap your numbers in another abstraction.

sixo commented on A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008) prog21.dadgum.com/29.html... · Posted by u/Bogdanp

abullinan · 14 days ago

It takes a village. Also to be successful in tech it takes an asshole. No way around it. At some point all successful companies share an overly aggressive visionary. The entire company doesn’t need to be toxic, but the apex does. If you don’t like it, don’t climb the ladder.

sixo · 13 days ago

Skill issue. There are other ways to get those results, but being an asshole is the lowest-hanging, and is nearly free if the people around you don't have the self-respect to walk away.

sixo commented on Claude Code is all you need dwyer.co.za/static/claude... · Posted by u/sixhobbits

georgeburdell · 15 days ago

For me, I can’t get into using AI tools like Claude Code. As far as I go is chat style where I’m mostly in control. I enjoy the actual process of crafting code myself. For similar reasons, I could never be a manager.

Agents are a boon for extraverts and neurotypical people. If it gets to the point where the industry switches to agents, I’ll probably just find a new career

sixo · 15 days ago

At one point in my life I liked crafting code. I took a break, came back, and I no longer liked it--my thoughts ranged further, and the fine-grained details of implementations were a nuisance rather than ~pleasurable to deal with.

Whatever you like is probably what you should be doing right now. Nothing wrong with that.

sixo commented on Ask HN: How can ChatGPT serve 700M users when I can't run one GPT-4 locally? · Posted by u/superasn

jl6 · 18 days ago

If the explanation really is, as many comments here suggest, that prompts can be run in parallel in batches at low marginal additional cost, then that feels like bad news for the democratization and/or local running of LLMs. If it’s only cost-effective to run a model for ~thousands of people at the same time, it’s never going to be cost-effective to run on your own.

sixo · 18 days ago

That determines the cost effectiveness to make it worth it to train one of these models in the first place. Using someone else's weights, you can afford to predict quite inefficiently.