PollardsRho

18 ms·

1.
by PollardsRho 7mo ago
What about bets without insider participation, where you want the market to function as an aggregator of educated guesses? OP has one reaction to insider trading, but I imagine a very common alternative would be "those insiders make th
2.
by PollardsRho 7mo ago
A lot of expressions in English started out as calques, outputs that process: you're paving the way!
3.
by PollardsRho 7mo ago
All models are wrong; some are useful. Cognizance of that is even more critical for a model like exponential growth that often leads to extremely poor predictions quickly if uncritically extrapolated. I think "are the failures of a sim
4.
by PollardsRho 7mo ago
> Given consistent trends of exponential performance improvements over many years and across many industries, it would be extremely surprising if these improvements suddenly stopped. This is the part I find very strange. Let's table
5.
by PollardsRho 1y ago
Students shouldn't be treating class material as something they "do not care to know." AI can be used in ways that lead to deeper understanding. If a student wants AI to give them practice problems, or essay feedback, or a di
6.
by PollardsRho 1y ago
If you have many metrics that could possibly be construed as "this was what we were trying to improve", that's many different possibilities for random variation to give you a false positive. If you're explicit at the sta
7.
by PollardsRho 1y ago
Advantage, sure. I just don't think that advantage is particularly meaningful in situations a human has virtually no chance of escaping. Humans also have a lot of their own advantages. How is a chatbot supposed to cross an air gap unle
8.
by PollardsRho 1y ago
If someone who is so good at manipulation their life is adapted into a movie still ends up serving decades behind bars, isn't that actually a pretty good indication that maxing out Speech doesn't give you superpowers? AI that&#x2
9.
by PollardsRho 1y ago
I don't think there's a confident upper bound. I just don't see why it's self-evident that the upper bound is beyond anything we've ever seen in human history.
10.
by PollardsRho 1y ago
People are hurt by animals all the time: do you think having a higher IQ than a grizzly bear means you have nothing to fear from one? I certainly think it's possible to imagine that an AI that says the exactly correct thing in any situ
11.
by PollardsRho 1y ago
Why is 2) "self-evident"? Do you think it's a given that, in any situation, there's something you could say that would manipulate humans to get what you want? If you were smart enough, do you think you could talk your wa
12.
by PollardsRho 1y ago
Thanks for sharing this proof! As someone who enjoys math but never got myself through enough Galois theory to finish the standard proof, it's fantastic to see a proof that's more elementary while still giving a sense of why the g
13.
by PollardsRho 1y ago
At that point, you'd be better off just using a recursive algorithm like the one in GMP. You're swapping out arbitrary-length for arbitrary-precision.
14.
by PollardsRho 1y ago
The compound-interest intro to e (the value of 1 dollar compounded continuously for a year at 100% interest), to me, has several useful advantages over different introductions that are more mathematically rich: - It's elementary to the
15.
by PollardsRho 1y ago
I will die on the hill that TOML should be used for the vast majority of what YAML's used for today. There are times a full language is needed, but I've seen so many YAML files that use none of the features YAML has with all of th
16.
by PollardsRho 1y ago
They then say there's an approximation for Fibonacci, which makes me think that's what they're calling Binet's formula. (I'd also expect an author with this mathematical sophistication to be aware of Binet's fo
17.
by PollardsRho 1y ago
I don't think it's controversial to say that asymptotic analysis has flaws: the conclusions you draw from it only hold in the limit of larger inputs, and sometims "larger" means "larger than anything you'd be a
18.
by PollardsRho 1y ago
Very cool! What's meant by "it’s already too much to ask for a closed form for fibonacci numbers"? Binet's formula is usually called a closed form in my experience. Is "closed form" here supposed to mean "
19.
by PollardsRho 1y ago
It seems to me that much of recent AI progress has not changed the fundamental scaling principles underlying the tech. Reasoning models are more effective, but at the cost of more computation: it's more for more, not more for less. The
20.
by PollardsRho 1y ago
It's not that technical work is guaranteed to be in your codebase 10 years from now, it's that customers don't want to use a product that might be good six months from now. The actors in the best position to use new AI advanc
21.
by PollardsRho 1y ago
Previous experience isn't manual edge cases, it's training data. Humans have incredible scale (100 trillion synapses): we're incredibly good at generalizing, e.g., how to pick up objects we've never seen before or unders
22.
by PollardsRho 1y ago
The time span on which these developments take place matter a lot for whether the bitter lesson is relevant to a particular AI deployment. The best AI models of the future will not have 100K lines of hand-coded edge cases, and developing th
23.
by PollardsRho 2y ago
> The models keep getting better at an exponential. Isn't it the opposite? Marginal improvements require exponentially more investment, if we believe Altman. AI is expanding into different areas, and lots of improvements have been m
24.
by PollardsRho 2y ago
The math underpinning an AI model exists independent of the hardware it's realized on. I can train a model on one GPU and someone else can replicate my results with a different GPU running different drivers, down to small numerical dif
25.
by PollardsRho 2y ago
What incentives do any humans have to so totally delegate the functioning of the core levers of societal power that they're unable to prevent their own extinction? "Better machine alternatives" implies that the police and mil
26.
by PollardsRho 2y ago
It's hard to characterize the entropy of the distribution of potential diseases given a presentation: even if there are in theory many potential diagnoses, in practice a few will be a lot more common. It doesn't really matter how
27.
by PollardsRho 2y ago
There has been a huge increase in context windows recently. I think the larger problem is "effective context" and training data. Being technically able to use a large context window doesn't mean a model can actually remember
28.
by PollardsRho 2y ago
> its scaling keeps going with no end in sight. Not only are we within eyesight of the end, we're more or less there. o1 isn't just scaling up parameter count 10x again and making GPT-5, because that's not really an effect
29.
by PollardsRho 2y ago
It's wonderfully idealistic to believe that the people who would pay $10 a gallon for gas are the people that needed it the most and not just the people with the most disposable income. I've known people who would happily pay $10
30.
by PollardsRho 2y ago
Given how much the author talks about professional standards, one would think they would write professionally. Also, is the author aware of why people use Anaconda? Conda environments can make it significantly easier to link CUDA or Fortran

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