nsagent

7 dagen geledendiscuss

[flagged]

9 dagen geledendiscuss

> As it can run in the background doing “chores” while I sleep.

Slightly off topic, but this reminds me of the night family in Rick and Morty.

nsagent

9 dagen geledendiscuss

Sadly, the major ML/AI/NLP conferences are being inundated with AI slop papers. That will arguably have a bigger impact on the quality of research moving forward.

nsagent

12 dagen geledendiscuss

  Wouldn't it be wiser to get out of the market into fixed rate assets like government bonds?

I did that earlier this year ahead of the April earnings reports. I was a bit too early to the punch, but I prefer that versus being too late.

I just hope the companies aren't considered too big to fail. Bailing them out would be a bad idea.

https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/publications/no-bailout...

nsagent

13 dagen geledendiscuss

Sadly, like intelligence and reasoning, I think emergence is a word that people discuss while having different understandings of what the word means.

In the paper I linked, they talk of a particular take on the word that is commonly discussed in the ML research: between one discrete step and the next a phenomenon came into existence without existing before (i.e. it occurred spontaneously). The paper then goes on to refute specific claims. That's all I'm pointing out (I could point out similar issues with research into reasoning).

I think it's difficult to pin down "emergence" in the general sense as it likely goes into a deep philosophical argument like consciousness, so I'm unwilling to state whether or not some notion of "emergence" actually takes place. In that sense I agree with you.

nsagent

13 dagen geledendiscuss

Then they are naive. I've seen this a lot first hand during my PhD. Interpreting results in a way that reinforces their beliefs and ignores alternate hypotheses.

Frequently, those alternative hypotheses are demonstrated to be true. For example, "emergence" as was researched and proclaimed by many labs, including places like OpenAI and Anthropic is due to using too few discrete steps in sampling a continuous phenomenon. See "Are Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models a Mirage?" [1] for example.

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.15004

nsagent

15 dagen geledendiscuss

Hate to bring the whole Bun rewrite drama into this discussion, but it seems the Bun team thinks it makes sense to trade a potentially faster compile time in Zig to a likely slower compile time in Rust due to the claimed advantages of a memory-safe language with a robust type system.

That approach seems entirely counter to the claims in this post. Obviously, different teams can have different perspectives, but I'm surprised just how different they are (especially for someone on the Haskell board).

I'd love to better understand why the LLM flow works for Bun, but feels untenable for Scarf. Maybe the Scarf team could learn from the Bun team's approach?

nsagent

15 dagen geledendiscuss

I'm sorry, but I'm not sure what works best for a beginner. I started my PhD when the original Transformers paper [1] had just been released. I had no background in NLP whatsoever and used the original paper to write a Transformer and the full training pipeline from scratch during the first couple months of my PhD without referencing any existing code (only reading the paper and it's references).

So I'd say, if you're motivated you could do the same. That said, I've always been a self-starter and I started my PhD after working for a decade. I'm sure there are other resources out there, but I'm not equipped to say what's best for a beginner (I found the original paper to be excellent, but most everyone during my PhD, including my advisor, found it to be inscrutable; I think it's written more like an engineering focused paper, which might be why researchers found it difficult to grok, but with my previous industry experience it seemed quite clear).

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762

nsagent

15 dagen geledendiscuss

I'm unwilling to speculate whether or not OpenAI is breaking their agreements (I honestly have no clue), but as an NLP researcher I'm certain they could launder data by having an LLM rewrite it and subsequently train on the rewritten data.

Papers like "Curated Synthetic Data Doesn't Have to Collapse" [1] and "How to Synthesize Text Data without Model Collapse?" [2] demonstrate it's possible to do this.

Since OpenAI's Privacy Policy [3] explicitly allows for the use of deidentified data, it's possible they consider rewrites (maybe paired with a model used to identify explicit PII) to be deidentified. Whether OpenAI's legal team thinks rewriting in this way technically means they aren't training on your data isn't something I'm able to comment on.

Here's the relevant Privacy Policy statement:

  We also aggregate or de-identify Personal Data so that it no longer identifies you and use this information for the purposes described above, such as to analyze the way our Services are being used, to improve and add features to them, and to conduct research. We will maintain and use de-identified information in de-identified form and not attempt to reidentify the information, unless required by law.

Please note all the hedging words I used (maybe, possibly, etc). I honestly have no clue if they are doing this. I'm merely elaborating on a possible loophole like you asked.

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07724

[2]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.14689

[3]: https://openai.com/policies/privacy-policy/

nsagent

16 dagen geledendiscuss

The restaurants get to set those values though. A coffee shop near me puts the default options as $1, $2, $3 for low order totals. So if I go in and get a coffee (which is $4.50), the lowest tip option is 22% and the highest is a whopping 66%.

I've seriously gotten tip fatigue and have been working to move back to a sane standard. I've noticed the places that have these crazy tips, also pay their staff well.

nsagent

16 dagen geledendiscuss

I was actually surprised to hear my brother-in-law deride LLMs as being useless for areas he has expertise in when I visited for the 4th of July.

He was complaining that he would ask how to perform a certain repair on a car, and the LLMs he tried (ChatGPT & Grok) would give him a long involved process and he'd ask why not do it this simpler way and it would say, oh you're right! He just found it gave bad advice and realized (rightly) that in areas he has less expertise in he has no way to judge how good the outputs are.

This is from a guy who loves tech, historically worshipped Elon, loves his Tesla, and (rightfully again) didn't buy into SpaceX because he thought it was overvalued.

In the past when I visited for holidays he was liable to have a positive outlook on LLMs and their utility. Seems telling that he's starting to see the cracks.

nsagent

17 dagen geledendiscuss

MacPorts

nsagent

17 dagen geledendiscuss

Your links show you used a fuzzer, but that doesn't address the other half of Andrew's statement. Is Andrew misreporting/misremembering your conversations?

EDIT: It's really telling that asking a factual clarification question is somehow downvote worthy. I probably shouldn't be surprised, but this epitomizes the reason online discussions devolve in to flame wars (even moreso than real life, though it happens more and more there as well).

The answer could be as simple as we didn't use a fuzzer until recently so both are accurate. I honestly don't know, which is why I'm asking. Yet somehow just asking is triggering to people.

nsagent

17 dagen geledendiscuss

Treat it as a data point and make your own decisions (he does back it up with several sources that indicate a workaholic mentality with that expectation for others). Hiding it ends up perpetuating the behavior unseen.

*Below is an aside that explains why I think it's better to air these things even if it seems like "rumors and gossip."

I know first hand how toxic some people are irl compared to their public persona. There was a professor in my department during my PhD who was known to be a slave driver, but there are no accounts of it outside of the department. We would have to warn incoming students about working with her, though sometimes they wouldn't believe it could be as bad as we said. I spoke with one of her students after she left the lab due to being hospitalized for exhaustion from overwork: the professor contacted her while she was still hospitalized and asked her to complete a task ffs!

nsagent

17 dagen geledendiscuss

Andrew could have been more tactful in his blog post (though as I've grown older I often find less tact to be more effective), but it really sounds like accommodating Bun was a net negative for Zig.

  When Jarred joined the Zig community about 5 years ago, I described him as someone who had strong "beginner energy".

I wouldn't call it beginner energy, though I understand it might seem like that. Rather, it's an approach to development and no amount of time changes it.

nsagent

17 dagen geledendiscuss

I think that post highlights a difference in philosophical approach to software development. Bun is focused on moving fast and will deal with the consequences as they come. Zig takes a more planful approach.

I've experienced both in my career and I fall solidly on the planful side. It's why stopped using homebrew and I've avoided huggingface packages as much as possible.

nsagent

24 dagen geledendiscuss

Not surprising. It seems that the comment section of every coding agent thread has at least one person mentioning they use "tokenmaxxing" to increase their token usage because it was brought up during their quarterly review, at a standup, or some other communique from on high.

Just wonder what happens when more and more companies introduce similar restrictions. Will that lead to devaluations of the LLM companies?

nsagent

28 dagen geledendiscuss

From the article he linked:

  If a subsequent probe fails, the system cross-references threat intelligence platforms like Shodan to match the host and falls back to their specific indexing methods.

So it uses Shodan, but is not purely a mirror.

nsagent

29 dagen geledendiscuss

This is the fundamental tension in law making and government in general.

Leaving room for nuance reduces the seeming capriciousness seen in the enforcement of some laws that look heavy-handed when applied strictly, while said underspecification can allow for abuse instead.

As long as people are individuals with their own volition this tension will exist.

nsagent

vorige maanddiscuss

You appear to be arguing with a strawman; at least you seem to have ignored a central part of my message:

  The issue is that the test is positively correlated with success in an undergraduate program, so they threw out the baby with the bathwster. The real issue is that the SAT is not able to distinguish the capabilities among students to the degree it purports to.

Submissions

Claude shows subtle biases to Anthropic across carefully controlled tests

No Bailouts for Big Tech Billionaires: Policies for When the AI Bubble Bursts

Kasane: New drop-in Kakoune front end with GPU rendering and WASM Plugins

Research Shows Verbatim Recall of Copyrighted Books in LLMs

All OpenReview Data Leaks

wBlock: The next-generation ad blocker for Safari

Recommended Practices for NPOV Research on Wikipedia

Sam Altman challenges Elon Musk with plans for Neuralink rival

Apple's MLX adding CUDA support

Potemkin Understanding in Large Language Models

The AI Review Lottery: Widespread AI-Assisted Peer Reviews Boost Paper Scores

DeepMind: Learning Robot Soccer from Egocentric Vision

Infini-Gram: Scaling unbounded n-gram language models to a trillion tokens

TySON: TypeScript Object Notation

Infini-Gram: Scaling unbounded n-gram language models to a trillion tokens

Hyperledger Aries: Decentralized IDs and Messaging in Rust, Python, Go and More

Nb: CLI+web note/todo/bookmark/kb app in a single portable script

Promotion of Scientific Pubs on ArXiv and X on the Rise and Impacts Citations

As aggravating as the NIPS rigor police was, I wish they'd come back

Ask HN: How do you ethically promote your work

comments