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traes commented on I Am An AI Hater   anthonymoser.github.io/wr... · Posted by u/BallsInIt
tensor · 4 days ago
Very few of them, if any, are true.

Firstly, the author doesn't even define the term AI. Do they just mean generative AI (likely), or all machine learning? Secondly, you can pick any of those and they would only be true of particular implementations of generative AI, or machine learning, it's not true of technology as a whole.

For instance, small edge models don't use a lot of energy. Models that are not trained on racist material won't be racist. Models not trained to give advice on suicide, or trained NOT to do such things, won't do it.

Do I even need to address the claim that it's at it's core rooted in "fascist" ideology? So all the people creating AI to help cure diseases, enable technologies assistive technologies for people with impairments, and other positive tasks, all these desires are fascist? It's ridiculous.

AI is a technology that can be used positively or negatively. To be sure many of the generative AI systems today do have issues associated with them, but the authors position of extending these issues to the entirety of the AI and AI practitioners, it's immoral and shitty.

I also don't care what the author has to say after the intro.

traes · 4 days ago
Come on now. You know he's not talking about small machine learning models or protein folding programs. When people talk about AI in this day and age they are talking about generative AI. All of the articles he links when bringing up common criticisms are about generative AI.

I too can hypothetically conceive of generative AI that isn't harmful and wasteful and dangerous, but that's not what we have. It's disingenuous to dismiss his opinion because the technology that you imagine is so wonderful.

traes commented on First American pope elected and will be known as Pope Leo XIV   cnn.com/world/live-news/n... · Posted by u/saikatsg
hn_throwaway_99 · 4 months ago
> That's an interesting thought but if they're actually that concerned about it then they'd wait longer than four months.

I don't think they had much control over when Francis died.

traes · 4 months ago
Sure, but there clearly wasn't much concern if an American got 2/3rds of the vote on day 2. They didn't have to elect a new pope this quickly.
traes commented on Honey has now lost 4M Chrome users after shady tactics were revealed   9to5google.com/2025/03/31... · Posted by u/tantalor
buzzerbetrayed · 5 months ago
Why do retailers offer those discounts then? Why not deactivate them instead of allowing honey to give them to their users? Am I misunderstanding what honey does?
traes · 5 months ago
That would mean deactivating all discounts. Honey actively scrapes for them, so as soon as a discount is available on the internet it will find it. Not an impossible solution, but not a popular one.

You could probably be clever and come up with a more complicated discount scheme that's not so easy for Honey to take advantage of, but that adds complexity for users as well.

traes commented on Adventures in Probability   buttondown.com/jaffray/ar... · Posted by u/kiyanwang
jackthetab · 10 months ago
Any sources that discuss this viewpoint wrt the determinant? Seems I'm still at the "seemingly-arbitrary number" stage.
traes · 10 months ago
The entire 3blue1brown series[0] on linear algebra is well worth watching, it has really intuitive graphical explanations of a bunch of concepts. Here's the one on determinants in particular[1].

TL;DW the determinant represents how much you scale the area/volume/hypervolume (depending on dimension) of a shape by applying a matrix transformation to each point.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNk_zzaMoSs&list=PLZHQObOWTQ...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ip3X9LOh2dk&list=PLZHQObOWTQ...

traes commented on Notes on Taylor and Maclaurin Series   eli.thegreenplace.net/202... · Posted by u/ibobev
traes · a year ago
Something that seems to be frequently lacking in discussions of convergence in introductory texts on Taylor series is the possibility that the series DOES converge, but NOT to the approximated function. It's not sufficient to conclude that the derived Taylor series must converge to cos(x) because it always converges, since any of the infinitely many functions that match cosine's derivatives at x = 0 will have the same Taylor expansion. How do you know cos(x) is the one it will converge to?
traes commented on Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions   wsj.com/tech/amazon-alexa... · Posted by u/thm
fhub · a year ago
I've set a countdown timer and then asked it "how much time is left on the timer?" and it says "You have no timers set" then inside say 30s, the timer goes off. Has happened to me a half dozen times in the last 2 months (at different amounts of time left obviously). This was my primary use case of alexa and now I just use Siri on my phone when my phone is nearby. Siri isn't ideal as I find it hard sometimes to quickly see how much time is left on the timer. But at least it doesn't forget one is running.
traes · a year ago
I'm pretty sure this occurs when the timer goes off during your query, and the alarm gets queued after the response. In my experience the alarm usually goes off immediately after, though, I've never experienced a 30s delay.
traes commented on Pi calculation world record with over 202T digits   storagereview.com/news/st... · Posted by u/radicality
linearrust · a year ago
> Pi, if an infinite stream of digits and with the prime characteristic it is normal/random, will, at some point include itself, by chance.

What you are essentially saying is that pi = 3.14....pi...........

If that was the case, wouldn't it mean that the digits of pi are not countably infinite but instead is a continuum. So you wouldn't be able to put the digits of pi in one to one correspondence with natural numbers. But obviously we can so shouldn't our default be to assume our premise was wrong?

> It is a completely irrational concept, thinking rationally.

It is definitely interesting to think about.

traes · a year ago
The belief that a normal number must eventually contain itself arises from extremely flawed thinking about probability. Like djkorchi mentioned above, if we knew pi = 3.14....pi..., that would mean pi = 3.14... + 10^n pi for some n, meaning (1 - 10^n) pi = 3.14... and pi = (3.14...) / (1 - 10^n), aka a rational number.
traes commented on John McCarthy’s collection of numerical facts for use in elisp programs   www-formal.stanford.edu/j... · Posted by u/chrchr
melling · 2 years ago
He wanted to work in meters? Closer to his final result?

  (setq km (* m 1000.0))
  (setq cm (* m 0.01))
  (setq foot (* 0.3048 m))
  (setq ft (* 0.3048 m))
  (setq mile (* 5280 foot))

traes · 2 years ago
The very snippet you gave there is a counterexample to your argument. He defines miles in terms of feet (which is in turn defined by meters) allowing him to use commonly known conversion factors as a sanity check, while still keeping all values in meters. If he had used his already present definition of an inch as 0.0254 meters to define feet, he could have compounded this even further. The true answer is almost certainly that he simply did whatever came to mind first, and didn't think of defining feet in terms of inches because he hadn't defined inches yet.
traes commented on Writing a C compiler in 500 lines of Python   vgel.me/posts/c500/... · Posted by u/vgel
MrYellowP · 2 years ago
I am really confused by what people call compilers nowadays. This is now a compiler that takes input text and generates output text, which then gets read by a compiler that takes input text and generates JIT code for execution.

This is more of a transpiler, than an actual compiler.

Am I missing something?

traes · 2 years ago
To quote the great Bob Nystrom's Crafting Interpreters, "Compiling is an implementation technique that involves translating a source language to some other — usually lower-level — form. When you generate bytecode or machine code, you are compiling. When you transpile to another high-level language, you are compiling too."

Nowadays, people generally understand a compiler to be a program that reads, parses, and translates programs from one language to another. The fundamental structure of a machine code compiler and a WebAssembly compiler is virtually identical -- would this project somehow be more of a "real" compiler if instead of generating text it generated binary that encoded the exact same information? Would it become a "real" compiler if someone built a machine that runs on WebAssembly instead of running it virtually?

The popular opinion is that splitting hairs about this is useless, and the definition of a compiler has thus relaxed to include "transpilers" as well as machine code targeting compilers (at least in my dev circles).

traes commented on SlowDownAndWasteMemory()   github.com/WebKit/WebKit/... · Posted by u/lopkeny12ko
traes · 2 years ago
Wouldn't it make more sense to directly link to the line in the title?

https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/blob/ab10a90523e06df54bbb8a...

u/traes

KarmaCake day201May 1, 2020View Original