szvsw (u/szvsw) - Readit News

szvsw commented on Staying cool without refrigerants: Next-generation Peltier cooling news.samsung.com/global/i... · Posted by u/simonebrunozzi

rcxdude · a month ago

Also the area that needs insulating, and in the extremes the amount of air that needs to be exchanged with the outside to make the house livable, and the heat generated by the people living in it (stick a 100W lightbulb in a fridge and see how cold it can get).

The insulation is actually solvable, and for heating can basically remove the power requirements: a house heated and using heat exchange on air leaving vs entering can be heated a lot just by having people inside it, let alone the other energy they use for other purposes. It's just more expensive to build this way, and with cheap energy it can a long time to pay back. Cooling you can't push down past the heat generated inside the house divided by the COP of your cooler, though.

szvsw · a month ago

Yep, PassiveHouse standards which typically include an extremely tight envelope which forces installation of outdoor air supply famously can get away with just a few hundred watts of heating capacity because of heat exchange on the incoming and outgoing airstreams!

szvsw commented on Staying cool without refrigerants: Next-generation Peltier cooling news.samsung.com/global/i... · Posted by u/simonebrunozzi

closewith · a month ago

Definitely not the volume of air. The thermal mass of air is tiny.

The difference is in the thermal mass of the building and the surface area exposed to the sun.

szvsw · a month ago

Sure I was playing a little fast and loose there, but (a) the large surface area of the home (and resulting conductive transfer through the walls + convection transfer via infiltration through gaps) is directly a result of the fact that you need a significantly larger volume for humans to move around in and live in than you do to store food and (b) even if we do look directly at the volume of air, the difference is significant since at the end of the day, since for any given constant deltaT, your energy spent is still linear with mass or volume. And we are talking about roughly 2-3 orders of magnitude difference in air volume between a house and a refrigerator.

Anyways, if you write out all of the heat balance equations, you get a few W/m2 of flux on the inside wall of the home and a few W/m2 of flux on the inside faces of the fridge, assuming a typical wood frame construction in summer time and steady states all around.

So yes, of course multiplying the flux through the home’s wall by the surface area of the home results in a massive heat gain value compared to the heat gain conducted through the surface of the refrigerator, but that’s arguably precisely because of the two different volume requirements.

szvsw commented on Staying cool without refrigerants: Next-generation Peltier cooling news.samsung.com/global/i... · Posted by u/simonebrunozzi

throwaway81523 · a month ago

I thought Peltiers can't lower the temperature by more than 40 degrees F, in practice less than that. This is not cold enough for a refrigerator on a warm day.

szvsw · a month ago

FWIW, in a typical apartment or single-family home, refrigeration uses a fraction of the energy that space cooling (also via a refrigeration/vapor compression cycle) requires on a warm day (and probably year round too unless in very mild climates). The psychrometric chart path is different so there are of course differences in the amount of energy required for the sensible and latent components, but the real difference is just the volume of air that needs to be dealt with.

My point being that at least from an energy and carbon perspective, lowering the space cooling demand via more effective building envelopes or increasing the space cooling supply efficiency - eg via membrane or dessicant dehumidification, better heat pumps etc) is far more impactful on a macro scale than better refrigeration.

Granted refrigeration in a warehouse eg is really also space cooling, but I’m just making the distinction between the dT=0-25F context and the dT>25F context. If I could only choose one technology to arrive at scale to improve the efficiency, it would be for the former context.

szvsw commented on AI agent benchmarks are broken ddkang.substack.com/p/ai-... · Posted by u/neehao

jerf · a month ago

When I was being a bad HN reader and just reacting to the title, my initial impulse was to be placating, and observe that they are probably just immature. After all, for all that has happened, this is still only a couple year's worth of development, and it does tend to take a long time to develop good benchmarks.

However the article does seem to be pointing out some fundamental issues. I'm particularly annoyed by using LLMs to evaluate the output of LLMs. Anyone with enough experience to be writing benchmarks of this sort in the first place ought to know that's a no-go. It isn't even just using "AI to evaluate AI" per se, but using a judge of the same architecture as the thing being judged maximizes the probability of fundamental failure of the benchmark to be valid due to the judge having the exact same blind spots as the thing under test. As we, at the moment, lack a diversity of AI architectures that can play on the same level as LLMs, it is simply necessary for the only other known intelligence architecture, human brains, to be in the loop for now, however many other difficulties that may introduce into the testing procedures.

Tests that a "do nothing" AI can pass aren't intrinsically invalid but they should certainly be only a very small number of the tests. I'd go with low-single-digit percentage, not 38%. But I would say it should be above zero; we do want to test for the AI being excessively biased in the direction of "doing something", which is a valid failure state.

szvsw · a month ago

> I'm particularly annoyed by using LLMs to evaluate the output of LLMs.

Even though I largely agree with parts of what you wrote, if you squint your eyes enough you can kind of see an argument along the lines of “difficult to solve but easy to verify.”

szvsw commented on A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs addxorrol.blogspot.com/20... · Posted by u/zdw

tomhow · 2 months ago

Please don't do this here. If a comment seems unfit for HN, please flag it and email us at hn@ycombinator.com so we can have a look.

szvsw · a month ago

Hey out of curiosity were there any issues with my top level comment? Seemed pretty innocuous, curious what the problem was. Feel free to email me if it’s better suited for discussion outside of post context.

szvsw commented on Supabase MCP can leak your entire SQL database generalanalysis.com/blog/... · Posted by u/rexpository

TeMPOraL · 2 months ago

That "problem" remains unsolved because it's actually a fundamental aspect of reality. There is no natural separation between code and data. They are the same thing.

What we call code, and what we call data, is just a question of convenience. For example, when editing or copying WMF files, it's convenient to think of them as data (mix of raster and vector graphics) - however, at least in the original implementation, what those files were was a list of API calls to Windows GDI module.

Or, more straightforwardly, a file with code for an interpreted language is data when you're writing it, but is code when you feed it to eval(). SQL injections and buffer overruns are a classic examples of what we thought was data being suddenly executed as code. And so on[0].

Most of the time, we roughly agree on the separation of what we treat as "data" and what we treat as "code"; we then end up building systems constrained in a way as to enforce the separation[1]. But it's always the case that this separation is artificial; it's an arbitrary set of constraints that make a system less general-purpose, and it only exists within domain of that system. Go one level of abstraction up, the distinction disappears.

There is no separation of code and data on the wire - everything is a stream of bytes. There isn't one in electronics either - everything is signals going down the wires.

Humans don't have this separation either. And systems designed to mimic human generality - such as LLMs - by their very nature also cannot have it. You can introduce such distinction (or "separate channels", which is the same thing), but that is a constraint that reduces generality.

Even worse, what people really want with LLMs isn't "separation of code vs. data" - what they want is for LLM to be able to divine which part of the input the user would have wanted - retroactively - to be treated as trusted. It's unsolvable in general, and in terms of humans, a solution would require superhuman intelligence.

--

[0] - One of these days I'll compile a list of go-to examples, so I don't have to think of them each time I write a comment like this. One example I still need to pick will be one that shows how "data" gradually becomes "code" with no obvious switch-over point. I'm sure everyone here can think of some.

[1] - The field of "langsec" can be described as a systematized approach of designing in a code/data separation, in a way that prevents accidental or malicious misinterpretation of one as the other.

szvsw · 2 months ago

> That "problem" remains unsolved because it's actually a fundamental aspect of reality. There is no natural separation between code and data. They are the same thing.

Sorry to perhaps diverge into looser analogy from your excellent, focused technical unpacking of that statement, but I think another potentially interesting thread of it would be the proof of Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem, in as much as the Godel Sentence can be - kind of - thought of as an injection attack by blurring the boundaries between expressive instruction sets (code) and the medium which carries them (which can itself become data). In other words, an escape sequence attack leverages the fact that the malicious text is operated on by a program (and hijacks the program) which is itself also encoded in the same syntactic form as the attacking text, and similarly, the Godel sentence leverages the fact that the thing which it operates on and speaks about is itself also something which can operate and speak… so to speak. Or in other words, when the data becomes code, you have a problem (or if the code can be data, you have a problem), and in the Godel Sentence, that is exactly what happens.

Hopefully that made some sense… it’s been 10 years since undergrad model theory and logic proofs…

Oh, and I guess my point in raising this was just to illustrate that it really is a pretty fundamental, deep problem of formal systems more generally that you are highlighting.

szvsw commented on A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs addxorrol.blogspot.com/20... · Posted by u/zdw

Kim_Bruning · 2 months ago

Has anyone asked an actual Ethologist or Neurophysiologist what they think?

People keep debating like the only two options are "it's a machine" or "it's a human being", while in fact the majority of intelligent entities on earth are neither.

szvsw · 2 months ago

Yeah, I think I’m with you if you ultimately mean to say something like this:

“the labels are meaningless… we just have collections of complex systems that demonstrate various behaviors and properties, some in common with other systems, some behaviors that are unique to that system, sometimes through common mechanistic explanations with other systems, sometimes through wildly different mechanistic explanations, but regardless they seem to demonstrate x/y/z, and it’s useful to ask, why, how, and what the implications are of it appearing to demonstrating those properties, with both an eye towards viewing it independently of its mechanism and in light of its mechanism.”

szvsw commented on A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs addxorrol.blogspot.com/20... · Posted by u/zdw

gtsop · 2 months ago

No.

Why would you ever want to amplify a false understanding that has the potential to affect serious decisions across various topics?

LLMs reflect (and badly I may add) aspects of the human thought process. If you take a leap and say they are anything more than that, you might as well start considering the person appearing in your mirror as a living being.

Literally (and I literally mean it) there is no difference. The fact that a human image comes out of a mirror has no relation what so ever with the mirror's physical attributes and functional properties. It has to do just with the fact that a man is standing in front of it. Stop feeding the LLM with data artifacts of human thought and will imediatelly stop reflecting back anything resembling a human.

szvsw · 2 months ago

I don’t mean to amplify a false understanding at all. I probably did not articulate myself well enough, so I’ll try again.

I think it is inevitable that some - many - people will come to the conclusion that these systems have “ethics”, “morals,” etc, even if I or you personally do not think they do. Given that many people may come to that conclusion though, regardless of if the systems do or do not “actually” have such properties, I think it is useful and even necessary to ask questions like the following: “if someone engages with this system, and comes to the conclusion that it has ethics, what sort of ethics will they be likely to believe the system has? If they come to the conclusion that it has ‘world views,’ what ‘world views’ are they likely to conclude the system has, even if other people think it’s nonsensical to say it has world views?”

> The fact that a human image comes out of a mirror has no relation what so ever with the mirror's physical attributes and functional properties. It has to do just with the fact that a man is standing in front of it.

Surely this is not quite accurate - the material properties - surface roughness, reflectivity, geometry, etc - all influence the appearance of a perceptible image of a person. Look at yourself in a dirty mirror, a new mirror, a shattered mirror, a funhouse distortion mirror, a puddle of water, a window… all of these produce different images of a person with different attendant phenomenological experiences of the person seeing their reflection. To take that a step further - the entire practice of portrait photography is predicated on the idea that the collision of different technical systems with the real world can produce different semantic experiences, and it’s the photographer’s role to tune and guide the system to produce some sort of contingent affect on the person viewing the photograph at some point in the future. No, there is no “real” person in the photograph, and yet, that photograph can still convey something of person-ness, emotion, memory, etc etc. This contingent intersection of optics, chemical reactions, lighting, posture, etc all have the capacity to transmit something through time and space to another person. It’s not just a meaningless arrangement of chemical structures on paper.

> Stop feeding the LLM with data artifacts of human thought and will imediatelly stop reflecting back anything resembling a human.

But, we are feeding it with such data artifacts and will likely continue to do so for a while, and so it seems reasonable to ask what it is “reflecting” back…

szvsw commented on A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs addxorrol.blogspot.com/20... · Posted by u/zdw

szvsw · 2 months ago

So the author’s core view is ultimately a Searle-like view: a computational, functional, syntactic rules based system cannot reproduce a mind. Plenty of people will agree, plenty of people will disagree, and the answer is probably unknowable and just comes down to whatever axioms you subscribe to in re: consciousness.

The author largely takes the view that it is more productive for us to ignore any anthropomorphic representations and focus on the more concrete, material, technical systems - I’m with them there… but only to a point. The flip side of all this is of course the idea that there is still something emergent, unplanned, and mind-like. So even if it is a stochastic system following rules, clearly the rules are complex enough (to the tune of billions of operations, with signals propagating through some sort of resonant structure, if you take a more filter impulse response like view of a sequential matmuls) to result in emergent properties. Even if we (people interested in LLMs with at least some level of knowledge of ML mathematics and systems) “know better” than to believe these systems to possess morals, ethics, feelings, personalities, etc, the vast majority of people do not have any access to meaningful understanding of the mathematical, functional representation of an LLM and will not take that view, and for all intents and purposes the systems will at least seem to have those anthropomorphic properties, and so it seems like it is in fact useful to ask questions from that lens as well.

In other words, just as it’s useful to analyze and study these things as the purely technical systems they ultimately are, it is also, probably, useful to analyze them from the qualitative, ephemeral, experiential perspective that most people engage with them from, no?

szvsw commented on The Future of MCPs iamcharliegraham.substack... · Posted by u/tylerg

quantadev · 4 months ago

I had the exact same reaction to the plural "MCPs". That's silly wording. There are no multiple MCPs. It's a single protocol. It's hilariously awkward wording to say you built "an MCP". It's like saying you built "an FTP", or "an HTTP". I guess every Web App is really just "an HTTP". We've been talking wrong all these years. lol.

szvsw · 4 months ago

On the other hand, IP addresses have crossed into the popular lexicon in exactly this manner… it’s common enough to hear people say “what’s my “ip?” or “are there any free ips?” or what are the IPs for x/y/z”.

I agree that it sounds stupid and incorrect, but that doesn’t necessarily mean using MCP as a metonym for MCP server.