In my experience fable can absolutely find very subtle bugs just by reading code and thinking. Last example I saw was a very subtle race condition that neither I not the author noticed. It wasn’t a security issue, but it could have been.
But you can always use the best algorithm no matter what your implementation language is, so it still makes sense to prefer a language that makes it easy to write fast code.
there is an entire genre of riddles based on this kind of misdirection that works on humans, such as "A plane crashed on the border or US and Canada. Where do they bury the survivors?"
As with humans, comprehension is not a binary property of the agent - it is a quality that can be present in some situations and absent in others. LLMs may emit correct outputs sometimes because they do comprehend the input, and emit incorrect outputs in other cases when they do not comprehend the input.
In order to show that LLMs can't comprehend, we'd have to show that there are no (or at least very few) situations in which they exhibit comprehension, not show that there are some situations in which they don't.
Even if pre-training was the only training step, it still wouldn't necessarily follow that the only thing the model is doing is stitching words together probabilistically, unless you expand the definition of "probabilistically" to the point that it becomes meaningless. This kind of thinking assumes that design of the training process and the "design" of the artifact that training produces must be similar.
audiophiles (https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/turntables-with-pace....) also claim that turntables can be rated on "timing, rhythm, and pace" in which supposedly the timing of the music can be affected by the turntable's mass and other properties.
How this would occur without also producing grossly audible pitch distortion never seems to be discussed.
The "Einstein can't get a cat into a carrier even though he is smarter" is just a hilariously bad argument. All cat owners can get their cats into a carrier! And most cats don't want to get in, because they hate the vet! And it's almost entirely because the humans are smarter!
You can even get a literal tiger into a carrier, even though it can kill you easily. You just drug its food and wait till it passes out. This is because you are smarter than it, and know that tranquilizers exist and how to obtain them, which is a strategy that cats of any size are not even able to conceive of, and probably can't understand what happened after it's been done to them.
> The goal is not to force individuals to not replace their phones, but rather to provide that as an option at all, for those who want it.
But my point is that you need to recognize that in so doing, you are taking away the option of having other things, such as waterproofing, larger batteries, smaller/lighter phones, etc. There is no free lunch.
That's an odd reply since by that argument they also flocked to a phone with no replaceable battery, which was pretty standard in the 2000s.
But you could be right. I guess this will be an experiment to watch: If EU consumers show a strong preference for replaceable batteries once they become more widely available, we can expect manufacturers to start offering it in other markets as well.
One of the most frustrating things about HN is that people seem so unaware of how idiosyncratic their preferences are. If you stood on the street corner and asked every passerby what they would change about their phone, I think you would be there all day before someone said "I wish I could replace the battery".
It's okay to have idiosyncratic preferences (I certainly do), but people should recognize that this law will make phones _worse_ for most people, because this law will force phone manufacturers to compromise the things that most people want in order to provide something that most people don't want.
I suppose someone will say that this law is necessary for environmental reasons, regardless of people's preferences. But that's nonsense, because the law doesn't actually require people to replace batteries rather than replacing their phone, and by the time batteries wear out, most people are going to want a new a phone. At the very least we'd need to see some data that shows that most people replace batteries when it is possible to do so.
I bought a north face backpack for college in 1998. It cost $60. It was an extravagant expense for me at the time and I felt horrible about it for weeks.
That backpack is currently at college with my son, who used it all through high school as well. It is by far the oldest and most durable daily-use object I’ve ever owned.
Communist regimes, especially the USSR, had nearly unlimited power to impose exactly the policies that supposedly would help.
Open societies, in contrast, must balance many competing interests and voting factions, meaning that free market supporters have limited power to enact their preferred policies, meaning they rarely can be implemented in a “pure” form.
It has never been the case that publishing a work entitles you to a share of all profits that are downstream of your work. Copyright law protects your ability to receive profits that result from the distribution of the work itself, but that's quite limited.
If you publish a cookbook, you should get a portion of the sales of the cookbook itself, and no one should be allowed to distribute copies of it for free to undermine your sales.
What you don't get is a portion of the revenues of restaurants that use your recipes!
They don’t allow unlimited “extraction” of wealth. It is inherently limited by the need for people to take the other side of a trade.
Importantly, people who either thought they had better information (and were sadly wrong) or people who were simply gambling. It’s not like prediction markets are taking money from orphanages.