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snarkconjecture

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Quine Game

adam.scherl.is
1 points·by snarkconjecture·vor 3 Monaten·1 comments

Hex Runes

adamscherlis.github.io
2 points·by snarkconjecture·letztes Jahr·0 comments

Iterated Log Coding

adamscherlis.github.io
109 points·by snarkconjecture·letztes Jahr·36 comments

Iterated Log Coding

adamscherlis.github.io
3 points·by snarkconjecture·vor 2 Jahren·0 comments

comments

snarkconjecture
·vor 16 Tagen·discuss
No, it's ^J because `J` is 0x4A in ASCII and `\n` is 0x0A, just as `I` is 0x49 and `\t` (tab, ^I) is 0x09.

In the stone age, pressing CTRL flipped that bit, so ^J is literally "ctrl-J".
snarkconjecture
·letzten Monat·discuss
Unless I'm mistaken, this uses "standard deviation" to refer to standard error throughout. They differ by a factor of sqrt(num_samples).

This is actually much more commonly useful than the t distribution, in my experience. You can squint at a histogram (or some summary stats), eyeball the stdev, approximate the stderr in your head, and get a pretty good sense of confidence.

I most often find myself doing this for the Bernoulli distribution, where it's also handy to know that the stdev is sqrt(p(1-p)), or "about 1/2 if p is middling, or sqrt(p) when it's small" (and you can flip the polarity to handle p→1).
snarkconjecture
·letzten Monat·discuss
The map contains a bunch of references to America, the West Indies, Guiana, and Mexico. (Often with a connotation of "faraway exotic place" or "exciting new international development".)

He may not have written about the British colonies but the New World was clearly at least somewhat present in his mind and his audience's minds.
snarkconjecture
·vor 2 Monaten·discuss
> These reactors can be made safer, but they all still have a foundational design flaw which means the ultimate goal should be replacing rather than continually spending money reinforcing.

This was about the Fukushima reactors that were completely destroyed? In response to a discussion of Belgian reactors that are completely different?
snarkconjecture
·vor 3 Monaten·discuss
> the underlying working principles are the same as GPT-2

I don't think anyone was claiming otherwise. Sonnet is still better at writing code than GPT-2, and worse than Opus. Workflows that work with Opus won't always work with Sonnet, just as you can't use GPT-2 in place of Sonnet to do code autocomplete.
snarkconjecture
·vor 3 Monaten·discuss
I am much more likely to fault them for omitting important information specifically to hide a weak point of the product rather than out of laziness.
snarkconjecture
·vor 3 Monaten·discuss
Write a Python quine with three or four hands tied behind your back
snarkconjecture
·vor 4 Monaten·discuss
Computer screens have three-dimensional color spaces. Tetrachromacy doesn't change that.
snarkconjecture
·vor 4 Monaten·discuss
Tetrachromacy wouldn't affect a test taken through a phone screen.
snarkconjecture
·vor 4 Monaten·discuss
Deep neural networks can generalize well even when they're far into the overparametrized regime where classical statistical learning theory predicts overfitting. This is usually called "double descent" and there are many papers on it.
snarkconjecture
·vor 11 Monaten·discuss
It's more like saying pi is approximately "3..14". Easily corrected syntax errors aren't as bad as semantic errors.
snarkconjecture
·letztes Jahr·discuss
Versions numbers for LLMs don't mean anything consistent. They don't even publicly announce at this point which models are built from new base models and which aren't. I'm pretty sure Claude 3.5 was a new set of base models since Claude 3.

What do mean by "it's a 1.0" and "3rd iteration"? I'm having trouble parsing those in context.
snarkconjecture
·letztes Jahr·discuss
Not really. Dirac's trick works entirely at a depth of two logs, using sqrt like unary to increment the number. It requires O(n) symbols to represent the number n, i.e. O(2^n) symbols to represent n bits of precision. This thing has arbitrary nesting depth of logs (or exps), and can represent a number to n bits of precision in O(n) symbols.
snarkconjecture
·vor 2 Jahren·discuss
I think it's better phrased as "find the best rule", with a tacit understanding that people mostly agree on what makes a rule decent vs. terrible (maybe not on what makes one great) and a tacit promise that the sequence presented has at least one decent rule and does not have multiple.

A rule being "good" is largely about simplicity, which is also essentially the trick that deep learning uses to escape no-free-lunch theorems.
snarkconjecture
·vor 2 Jahren·discuss
For the individuals shown in the graph, this buys about $6k per American (and after the first year you can't do it again).