Preferences

9dev
Joined 7,639 karma
Head of Engineering @ matchory.com

<first letter of my company name> at 9dev.de

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/radiergummi; my proof: https://keybase.io/radiergummi/sigs/_bPlsZ-Tii8Qag-Ne5n2bNSqVB8CDqke1kLgzTytb-s ]


  1. Fair enough. To someone with a background in biology, it sounds like an argument made by a software engineer with no actual knowledge of cognition, psychology, biology, or any related field, jumping to misled conclusions driven only by shallow insights and their own experience in computer science.

    Or in other words, this thread sure attracts a lot of armchair experts.

  2. They don’t understand anything, they just have text in the training data to answer these questions from. Having existential crises is the privilege of actual sentient beings, which an LLM is not.
  3. You, and OP, are taking an analogy way too far. Yes, humans have the mental capability to predict words similar to autocomplete, but obviously this is just one out of a myriad of mental capabilities typical humans have, which work regardless of text. You can predict where a ball will go if you throw it, you can reason about gravity, and so much more. It’s not just apples to oranges, not even apples to boats, it’s apples to intersubjective realities.
  4. They get to wear Raybans and a fancy badge doing it?
  5. In other news, Americans discover why the GDPR isn’t such a bad idea after all!
  6. The yearly release cadence annoys me to no end. There is literally zero reason to have a new CPU generation every year, it just devalues Mac hardware faster.

    Which I guess is the point of this for Apple, but still.

  7. I would argue the reason the early web is a good memory now is that it was only used by a handful of nerds back then. All that encryption is there for a reason, and simplicity gives way to complexity because the internet of today has to serve orders of magnitude more people and use cases than it used to.
  8. I always wonder how people make qualitative statements like this. There are so many variables! Is it my prompt? The task? The specific model version? A good or bad branch out of the non-deterministic solution space?

    Like, do you run a proper experiment where you hand the same task to multiple models several times and compare the results? Not snark by the way, I’m asking in earnest how you pick one model over another.

  9. So it is the Zionists for you. I should have guessed so.
  10. No, that's what I was getting at. Thinking "they" are in charge is actually very widespread, with varying opinions on who "they" actually are—whether it's billionaires for you, the Rothschild's for others, or Reptilians for some.

    How great it would be to have a select few evil masterminds, a clear enemy to roil against! That isn't reality, though. Would the super-secret council of puppet masters have allowed Trump to become president of the USA (again) and ruin the economy? You'll have an answer to that, obviously. It matters little. Reality is far more complex, shadow masters prefer stability over chaos, and the world is generally full of competing and opposing interests.

    A few rich men might hold a lot of power in their hands, I give you that; but unless you limit "the world" to mean an arbitrary smaller region of earth, nobody is in charge of it all.

  11. I know its satisfying to think of the government as some singular nefarious entity, but the reality is far worse: There is no one in charge. It’s chaos all the way down.
  12. The point I am making is that the reason artefacts of highly automated production (even with minimal human labor required) will never become accessible for very low human labor, because all that automation has its own cost. We can externalise that as long as possible and defer the bill to somewhere or someone else, but it will have to be paid eventually.

    > […] those are things that should still be solved at a much higher level of abstraction […]

    I don't think that makes much sense. If a data center consumes all available electricity in a given municipality, it may provide AI services at a very low cost, but thereby makes the region uninhabitable. There is no way to "solve" this at a higher abstraction level. Or alternatively, consider a factory producing consumer goods, which emits toxic fumes; we can limit the amount of fumes the vicinity of the factory is exposed to by implementing very expensive filters—thus increasing the final price of the goods—or externalise all the negative effects—such as health risks in the population, ecological demise, and subsequently lower property values—to society, achieving a lower final price.

    Currently, we often pick the latter option, because it usually has the better profit margin. I agree that it's a systemic issue that must be addressed holistically, but the actual solutions have to be implemented at all levels of the production chain. And this means the cost attached will have to be included in the price of all goods.

  13. It doesn't matter much how exactly those costs are passed on; someone has to eventually pay for them. That includes the energy itself, which doesn't come for free, but also the bill for environmental damage and resource exhaustion that we will have to pay at some point. You can argue that that'll be the case only in the far future, but then you're just externalising the cost—again—to future generations. It's all moot: Someone will pay for it eventually.
  14. Another one for the graveyard!
  15. You're completely omitting externalised cost, though. As it stands, all this production requires gargantuan amounts of energy that have to come from somewhere, and cause pollution and waste that must be accounted for. As long as these factors aren't solved—if they can be solved in the first place—either the prices for consumers or the manufacturing cost must reflect this, I don't see the increased degree automation affecting prices much.
  16. Sidenote, I love spotting random binary numbers out on the wild
  17. Maybe it’s just me, but these sample workflows don’t look less complicated, just another kind of complex? If you’re already heavily using CUE in your project this lateral complexity shift might make sense, but I don’t see why I would start using it…
  18. I don’t see that happening in Belgium, though?
  19. The rest of the journey is going to take him through the EU though, no major obstacles to expect here, so the 17km daily seem very much doable.
  20. > Unlike the simplicity of taste, we have a huge array of smell receptors, with most of them having much more indirect associations

    Slightly unrelated, but what I find very cool is thinking about your taste sense as a hyper-sensitive molecule detector. Individual aromas are just the signal your brain generates for different kinds of molecules, and it's very good at that. That's why at wine tastings, for example, people come up with all these elaborate terms for specific aromas—it's a way to name the molecule composition.

This user hasn’t submitted anything.