datastoat

11 ms·

1.
by datastoat 3mo ago
I believe that chain-of-thought reasoning blocks don't really correspond to what humans think of as reasoning. (See section 6.2.2 of the Fable/Mythos system card about "illegible reasoning", and the questions raised by t
2.
by datastoat 6mo ago
Goodhart's Law of Specification: When a spec reaches a state where it's comprehensive and precise enough to generate code, it has fallen out of alignment with the original intent. Of course there are some systems where correctness
3.
by datastoat 9mo ago
Wouldn’t it be handy if the browser could intelligently join this author’s sentences into paragraphs?! (in connection to the thread about Mozilla putting AI in the browser)
4.
by datastoat 1y ago
Darwin would claim otherwise! Single cells plus random mutation plus selective copying = rocket ships.
5.
by datastoat 1y ago
> They should also share their prompts Here's a recent ShowHN post (a map view for OneDrive photos), which documents all the LLM prompting that went into it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44584335
6.
by datastoat 1y ago
Author: "5% chance of shipping something that only looked good by chance". One philosophy of statistics says that the product either is better or isn't better, and that it's meaningless to attach a probability to facts,
7.
by datastoat 2y ago
Empirical Bayes is exactly what I was getting at. It's a pragmatic modelling choice, but it loses the theoretical guarantees about uncertainty quantification that pure Bayesianism gives us. (Though if you have a reference for why empir
8.
by datastoat 2y ago
Non-Bayesian NN training does indeed use regularizers that are chosen subjectively —- but they are then tested in validation, and the best-performing regularizer is chosen. Thus the choice is empirical, not subjective. A Bayesian could try
9.
by datastoat 2y ago
I like Bayesian inference for few-parameter models where I have solid grounds for choosing my priors. For neural networks, I like to ask people "what's your prior for ReLU versus LeakyReLU versus sigmoid?" and I've never
10.
by datastoat 3y ago
The article explained that there are two roughly equal drivers: (1) Water is a better heat reserve than land, and winds tend to blow eastwards, so Europe gets air warmed by the sea and the US east coat gets colder air that's come from
11.
by datastoat 3y ago
It'd be fun (and a bit scary) to use an LLM as a shell replacement. We'd give it the history of our commands as per the recent post [0], as well as their outputs, and it would turn natural-language commands into proper bash. The x
12.
by datastoat 3y ago
According to the Wikipedia page for eszett [0] it evolved from "sz", as the name "eszett" suggests. (I only realized the link with "z" when I saw "tz" ligatures on street signs in Berlin.) Given that
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by datastoat 3y ago
They use Pyodide, a full Python interpreter in WASM: https://pyodide.org/en/stable/console.html Pyodide includes manyuseful Python libraries including numpy, pandas, and matplotlib.
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by datastoat 3y ago
Windows 8 (Metro) used semantic zoom. It's been a while, but I do remember that one of the apps that used it very nicely was Photos. A search for "windows metro semantic zoom" comes up with lots of articles about semantic-zoo
15.
by datastoat 3y ago
As an Australian I'm used to hearing "antipodean" and sometimes "antipodes", so "octopodes" sits well!
16.
by datastoat 3y ago
That xkcd comic highlights the problem with observational (as opposed to controlled) studies. TFA is about A/B testing, i.e. controlled studies. It’s the fact that you (the investigator) is controlling the treatment assignment that all
17.
by datastoat 3y ago
I’m curious! Why “Bayesian”?
18.
by datastoat 4y ago
I tried... I pointed out a problem and asked ChatGPT to fix it, unsuccessfully. I asked it for a proof of correctness, then pointed out a problem in its proof and asked ChatGPT to fix it, again unsuccessfully. (It's all in the notes I
19.
by datastoat 4y ago
You're right, ChatGPT is probabilistic. None of this is graded by the way -- it's all just for fun and bragging rights. I've asked students to share their full dialog, both prompts and replies, so the whole class gets to see;
20.
by datastoat 4y ago
I'm trying something similar with an introductory Algorithms class. After we go through Breadth First Search, there's a practical assignment where students are asked to modify the algorithm to return _all_ shortest paths. Then I a
21.
by datastoat 4y ago
I’m in the same boat as you — sensitive teeth, but can’t not rinse. What works for me is to treat the toothpaste as a “post-rinse medicated rub”: squeeze out a bit more, and rub it over the most sensitive teeth.
22.
by datastoat 4y ago
> Please, please: learn some probability via measure theory. You’ll start reading machine learning papers wondering how people ever express themselves precisely without it. The entire field seems to be predicated around writing things li
23.
by datastoat 4y ago
Indeed, there are Bayesian neural networks and there are non-Bayesian neural networks, and I shouldn't have implied that all neural networks are non-Bayesian. I'm just trying to point out that there is a dichotomy between the Baye
24.
by datastoat 4y ago
In my example, of predicting a coin toss, the naive output is a probability distribution: it's "Prob(heads)=0.5, Prob(tails)=0.5". This is the distribution that will be produced both by the person who sees 2 heads and 2 tails
25.
by datastoat 4y ago
Probability estimates are not the same thing as uncertainty. Consider tossing a coin. If I see 2 heads and 2 tails, I might report "the probability of heads is 50%". If you see 2000 heads and 2000 tails you'd also report the
26.
by datastoat 4y ago
One other point to make about MPTCP: it has a congestion controller that takes pains to be fair with respect to regular TCP. It's a subtle problem... MPTCP sender -> [link1 | link2] -> shared link -> MPTCP receiver There might
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by datastoat 4y ago
Suppose the sender has a single interface, and it's the receiver that has multiple interfaces. With MPTCP, the sender will learn that there are multiple paths available, and it'll balance its load adaptively over those paths. I do
28.
by datastoat 4y ago
MPTCP is a drop-in replacement -- but its original designers were paranoid about e.g. packet-sniffing middleboxes, so they made it opt-in. Suppose for example there's a packet-sniffing security appliance along the path, and it only see
29.
by datastoat 4y ago
> This seems very much like an outsider's critique Spot on! This same sentiment was expressed very well in a paper evaluating the R language [1]: "This rather unlikely linguistic cocktail would probably never have been prepared
30.
by datastoat 4y ago
What you provided isn't (just) maths, it's a modelling assertion: that failures are independent from part to part, and independent from day to day. I'm skeptical about your first assertion -- think of the effect of a power su

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