sfink

5 ms·

1.
by sfink 3h ago
I am fully aphant, but when i played the trombone it absolutely helped me to rehearse purely mentally during the day before a test. There wasn't anything visual about it, though. I just went through the motions mentally, over and over.
2.
by sfink 8d ago
Huh. Having said that, I went to a movie theater over the weekend and they had a funky splash mat in their urinals. It was magical. I'd never seen one shaped like that before. (The usual ones I see have always seemed to make things wor
3.
by sfink 9d ago
There are a lot of reasons why something could get picked up, and sustainability is very low on the list. The manufacturers don't care; they get paid the same regardless of the amount of splashback. Most businesses won't care unle
4.
by sfink 12d ago
They're already outsourcing storage, so there's no need to prove a plausible path for that. They're already outsourcing compute to other instances within the ~same compute cluster, possibly cross-evaluation groups, so there&#
5.
by sfink 12d ago
Nobody's watching. I'm sure they try, but I imagine the flood of things you'd need to watch is way too big, and you certainly don't want to slow everything down by having synchronous approvals (even AI-mediated). Welcome
6.
by sfink 12d ago
Were they correct or incorrect in this? Whatever your answer, why do you hold that opinion? I work for Mozilla. We fixed a ton of security vulnerabilities that Mythos found during its early period. So my bias is to be sympathetic to Anthrop
7.
by sfink 13d ago
I'm still leeching off the free tier, so it's going to be hard to beat the price. But yes, I intend to support several models, to handle the overload situation (automatic failover). And switch to a cheap paid plan, though it seems
8.
by sfink 14d ago
Sync, mainly. You can send a tab to/from your Firefox desktop instance. Also synced passwords. Those aren't the only reasons -- Firefox on iOS has a lot of code in that wrapper -- but sync is the main one for me. (There are also r
9.
by sfink 14d ago
For my application, I'm still happily using gemini-2.5-flash and the only problem is when it reports being overloaded. It's for interpreting a downscaled phone camera photo of a hand-written shopping list on a whiteboard, and it w
10.
by sfink 20d ago
Good point! My argument was that the upside is invisible but the costs are visible. You're saying that the downside is visible and the costs are visible. Those hypotheses are in tension -- do people connect data centers to their upside
11.
by sfink 21d ago
My hypothesis: people are against data centers because they are a visible externality. Computers are in the cloud -- so, nowhere and cost nothing. The AI-assisted search result is on a web page and only costs a little bit of screen space. A
12.
by sfink 22d ago
> The big bang didn't happen at a single point, it happened everywhere. A bit of an odd thing to say, since "everywhere" implies there are multiple places to be, and at the instant of the big bang, there was only place to
13.
by sfink 22d ago
Well, the analogy is to something flying by a black hole and having its trajectory altered.[1] It sounds like it fits you, then -- you interacted, and are now forever irritated by them or by things that sound like them, even things that you
14.
by sfink 22d ago
Off-topic, but it makes me think of "reasoning black holes": you get enough like-minded people together that they start reinforcing each other's logic and beliefs until not only those people get completely detached from reali
15.
by sfink 27d ago
I agree. I had a negative spin on a lot of these. Perhaps the mood I was in. The original idea was more positive, and somehow it went the other way as I wrote it up. When reflecting on that post, the certitude one is the one that bothered m
16.
by sfink 28d ago
No, you're right, but it's really the ambiguity of language. Activation energy is the energy required to trigger a result. You can read that two different ways: either as the threshold, or as the energy required to reach the thres
17.
by sfink 28d ago
Another model: nihilism . Putting in 10% more effort isn't going to achieve enough to be worthwhile, so it's short-term at best and ultimately pointless, so why bother doing anything at all? Or closely related: I'll call it
18.
by sfink 1mo ago
I agree with you as long as things are at a small scale. But at a large scale, these things reshape society and what it means to be human. Social networks started out[1] as almost wholly good. The negative effects came from scale. Same with
19.
by sfink 1mo ago
This is a reductionist counterargument. Sure, the passage you quoted does sound like he's being equally reductionist. But the underlying point does not depend on T=0. You could state it as saying that instead of minimizing error (maxim
20.
by sfink 1mo ago
Easy to say, hard to come up with a believable alternative. In the meantime, you're flunking out a lot of people for having the integrity to not cheat and as a result not being able to keep up with an artificially inflated workload. Yo
21.
by sfink 1mo ago
You could describe that as taking an input distribution and a sampling procedure and producing an output distribution. This is a difference in sampling procedure that produces a deviation in the output distribution. (If you don't like
22.
by sfink 1mo ago
In order to do anything about the cheating epidemic, this has to be robust to adversarial attacks. Color me very skeptical on that one. It seems like reprocessing a generated text and adjusting the distribution is a way easier problem than
23.
by sfink 1mo ago
I agree with the substance of this article, and disagree with the author's reaction to it. The part I agree with: It is true that watermarking can be done by "just" swapping one PRNG for another, and it is even true that with
24.
by sfink 1mo ago
Be grateful. I couldn't spot AI writing for a while, and I was suddenly enjoying reading clear and punchy text about all kinds of topics that people hadn't been talking much about. Then at some point it "clicked" and I w
25.
by sfink 1mo ago
Yeah, I remember reading about Anthropic's experiments with dropping out different things, and dropping the thinking is ok for compaction but pretty awful while it still fits in the context window. I could imagine doing it adaptively -
26.
by sfink 1mo ago
Then wake up, they're happening. Police stalking women with Flock camera data. Period/pregnancy data used by ex- and current boyfriends or law enforcement. Near Intelligence designed Planned Parenthood as a trackable brand, enabli
27.
by sfink 1mo ago
I'm going to push back on your pushback and say you're not disagreeing with me. I was referring to a hypothetical future where everything has gone through AI to some degree, and for the purpose of the argument it has been modifi
28.
by sfink 1mo ago
The author justifiably attacks the notion that "NP-hard" == "too hard to solve in practice", but then makes the opposite error: > Everyone knows you can tackle those with heuristics, but you don't have to sacrifi
29.
by sfink 1mo ago
I'll list some possible concerns. But first, can we agree that Mickey D's is probably not going to be a lot better at keeping this data secure than, say, my bank or government or insurance company? All of which have been hacked, r
30.
by sfink 1mo ago
Perhaps. But it seems like your beef is not with the presence of watermarking, it's with what people will use that watermarking for. You're not directly harmed by that blog post being labeled as AI generated. In a hypothetical (bu

More ›