Thanks. Everything is completely stateless at this point and there's a defined close time with everything being on the server side in terms of timestamps.
Could you give me a link to what you're referring to and what you have seen in the past with this specific problem?
I think I have it solved but would like to know more as words can have multiple definitions.
Basically, this is software that allows you to deploy your own prediction market platform from scratch that you own and control. You can invite friends and add users, anyone can add questions and make bets toward those contracts.
Most importantly, anyone can host this completely for free either on a local machine or a VPS.
The setup process includes a command line interface which allows you to enter a few options and it sets everything up for you...assuming you have a server such as Digital Ocean and a domain you can use.
I do this in my free time with some others who are of course listed on the Github repo.
We will be moving to a services based architecture at some point soon, but for this release it's basically a, "pretty good monolith."
We have been through a few different release cycles since the last time I posted. I added some GIFs to the readme to clearly show how easy it is to get it going. I would love it if anyone wants to give it a try. We included automatic SSL establishment via Traefik.
First off, I'm glad we all got our daily thought about the Roman Empire in today. Secondly, this author is much more qualified than me to either agree or refute this; I believe we need to be incredibly skeptical when reading about Roman Engineering failures. I wrote and researched about this, using some of Vitruvius' writings last year: https://patdel.substack.com/p/why-didnt-ancient-rome-have-a-....
* Rome was incredibly paternalistic, so pointing out the failures of others without appropriate aristocratic station might not have been quite the exercise in pure engineering that we might consider engineering to be today, even though Rome obviously made great engineering accomplishments and one might think that celebrated Roman architects could not be writing anything other than in a strictly professional manner. I think that when we read Vitruvius through a modern lens, we might think, "Oh this dude was a real professional, he makes good points," when in reality I think, at least in the example I point out in my blog post, I think he might have been using an example of failure to say, "See? Only royals, aristocrats and rich people should even try to innovate."
Granted, there wasn't liability insurance for architectural or engineering failures as far as I am aware so this belief may have been prudent in terms of saving lives, but I think there was probably a primarily social-religious reasoning for it.
The idea of the rich, hereditary classes, the father of the household, the ones in charge being the only ones, "allowed," to innovate was deeply held in Ancient Rome, much like in Confucianism and other agricultural societies that have formed through human history. "Don't rock the boat."
I don't think it was until the 1500's or so that humanity started to collectively emerge out of that type of mentality as pre-industrialization and the scientific revolution began. Eventually the aristocrats (in Europe) saw non-royals being so successful at being industrialists, they wanted in on the game and removed laws that prevented them from engaging in capitalism.
The author writes:
> Its failure became a cautionary tale of an unrealistic project that sought to go beyond what nature allowed. Five decades later, the Roman senator and historian Tacitus claimed that evidence of this ‘futile ambition’ could still be seen in the rock faces near Avernus. Interestingly, Tacitus did not blame the vainglorious and weak-willed emperor alone, but also the architects who conceived the project and were judged to have ‘frittered away the resources of a Caesar’.
I read that as the author saying that Tacitus was angling the engineering failure analysis in a political way, not a purely engineering post-failure-analysis way. E.g., the project might have even been a success but then Tacitus just lied about it, we don't know.
That feedback came straight from my basal ganglia.
Though I'm guessing that was a pretty expensive domain name. So in lieu of changing it, on this issue I can be bought off.
But I will accept a bribe in the form of a medium sized T-Shirt to not make fun of you further. The T-Shirt must include an anthropomorphized gaussian curve in a math meme format and the curve-person must be clearly labeled as being name, "Kurt Osis."
Any Kurtosis logo must be either non-existent or super non-prominent so that I can at least pretend that it's a meme and then maybe tail into where it came from. A huge emblazoned Kurtosis logo on the back or front will be unacceptable (although Kurt Osis could have that logo on his or her or their shirt).
As a both devops and ML professional at my job (it's a small company), I viscerally cringe at the same kurtosis for this company (which I just learned about). There could be some kind of latent jealously/projection causing that cringe, but here's my rationale (could be very specific to my career):
* Devops folks don't seem to tend to like math and often got there by practicing, "computers, IT, having fun hooking things together and getting them running."
* Data science folks don't tend to like devops and prefer to bash around on a jupyter notebook that's already given to them and then maybe extract that python and see if it runs, but they tend to come from more of a science background and got into python as a hobby or incidentally. They do not like bashing around and getting things running.
So now this company is combining a math term that has a specific meaning to an ML ops space, which is going to cause confusion.
Different sets of data can have different kurtosis measures. Sets can be platykurtic (flat gaussian curve or high kurtosis) or leptokurtic (tall gaussian curve, low kurtosis).
Now this company is coming in and telling a bunch of devops people, "Kurtosis means helm but automatically migrate data too." So they are applying the idea of, "leptokurtic deployments," presumably with the metric being, variation between the code and data parameters on those servers. Data science people who are told about it from devops people are going to initially hear, "somehow dealing with cleaning the data, like an ETL pipeline, perhaps an Airflow with data cleaning tools built in or something."
It's very confusing and not helpful to customers, I hate it. There are going to be meetings where ML/Devops people are very confused.
Naming is hard though -- but I wish they would have gone with something like, "platypus" and just have a cute little platypus baby as the logo and say, "yeah we liked the word platykurtic because we like making things regular and platykurtic sounds like platypus."
Something that we Americans are very conveniently forgetful of is that America didn't just pop out of no where on July 4th, 1776, there was in fact a huge history of us being England and that includes every single quote from every single founding father, there was additional historical context and ignoring that is basically propaganda on the level of Soviet Union or North Korea style propaganda, it's just that we don't think it's propaganda because we think we're exceptional.
I became more skeptical of this piece of propaganda when I saw the top comment from prominent COVID origins conspiracy theorist and statistics misuser on Substack (who evidently uses the pseudonym Yuri Bezmenov?) on the post, as well as likes from Academic Capture extroidinaire Richard Hanania, of the Salem Institute at UT-Austin (a business school whose name is emblazoned by a now dead billionaire to whom I as a Minnesota citizen, personally pay taxes to his estate to every time I buy food, in the form of subsidies to his Vikings stadium).
Basically I'm sitting here being lectured by people about Aristocracies while I, as a nobody schlub, pay taxes to a private party they are friends with every time I get groceries, and meanwhile see schools nearby me go on strike, there is no free daycare in Minneapolis while there is in other cities nearby because, "it's not fiscally responsible?" Ok, well I'm not an "economist," at an, "institute," so what do I know?
Anyway, I was very confused after reading this by the claim that Jefferson would not have considered himself part of the Artificial Aristocracy so I had to read about his family history. From Monticello.org:
> The origins of Jefferson's ancestors might be uncertain, but there can be no doubt that within a couple of generations the family had risen from the humble rank of "middling planter" to the county elite, and within another to the very pinnacle of society. Their spectacular rise in fortune was the result of hard work, advantageous marriage, and sheer good luck
So what I read this is, is his family were not part of the English Aristocracy, (like Washington) but go in early on Virginia Real Estate in the 1600s, which allowed Jefferson to become part of the Colonial Aristocracy (though not the formal English Aristocracy). So Jefferson is saying, "no, that Aristocracy is not cool, bro, our Aristocracy is the cool one."
It also seems that some of Jefferson's ancestors were very anti-monarchy during the English Civil War, and lost a lot of fortune upon the restoration of the monarchy, so it's super understandable why Jefferson would take this position.
The thing is, I believe Jefferson may have become a dinosaur in his own time, writing letters to Adams to re-assure himself, but actually just discussing the types of ideas that would have appealed to some of the characters straight out of Barry Lyndon. E.g., he probably was witnessing Aristocrats getting their heads cut off in France and going, "no we're not those guys, we're a natural Aristocracy, it's totally different man!"
Jefferson was a huge Ancient Rome nerd because he was interested in creating a society that was durable, where other societies had failed an while I believe that some of his ideas that lead to a sort of weighting of rural areas does provide stability, because cities always end up being more powerful than rural areas, I'm pretty sure that the 1800's and early 1900's was a round rejection of Aristocracy, but of course there's no way he could have seen that. Venture Capitalists, pretend Professors from UT-Austin business school who are hired help to form an intellectual framework behind Rick Scott's agendas, they know better than this, and they should do better. This is basically a circle jerk with almost zero self-awareness about how Universally hated Aristocracy of any kind is, it's like how John Bolton has been talking about running for President in 2024, there is absolutely zero self awareness about how hated and loathed a particular idea is.
Edit: Oh yeah, and also, you can't mention that Jefferson owned slaves and so maybe not every idea that came off of the top of his head should be celebrated because evidently just acknowledging that fact might be considered, "woke" according to Hanania, most likely.
Since reading this book I have also read, "Programming Ecto," as well as having actually programmed in Ecto/Elixir and have some thoughts on people's insistence that Elixir is bad at IO. I believe people who are coming from other languages are misusing functional programming in the context of Elixir, it is meant to be used to create state machines, and you can always optimize your IO within that context.
OK, so there's misinformation from industrial scale propaganda dissemination, there's misinformation from hallucination, but I think a less talked about aspect of LLM generalization of misinformation is to look at LLM's as a tool that will actually train us to think in a certain way. LLM's coupled with desirability bias could lead to a decrease in critical thought.
American founding fathers were huge Ancient Rome nerds. Did they know what the ensuing two centuries had that Rome didn't? Of course they did not, but with hindsight I can certainly bullshit on the topic and put together a hopefully entertaining article. Happy 4th!
I think most of us are all very much past the point that we understand there is a layer of manipulation in media and we have to deal with information that comes at us reflectively to the best of our ability. This article does not define how large of an actual problem COVID is now, it just lays out how media manipulation works in general.
Now, since we all are adults here and we all understand that the media gets manipulated, what are some tools we can use to understand the real state of affairs?
At least in the United States, herd immunity has been largely achieved for the time being, in conjunction with treatments and lower case levels (regardless of testing), rendering COVID less of an actual threat to a wide audience of news consumers, which is actually an OK thing.
Healthcare systems are overloaded, in part due to an aging population, in part due to mass quitting during COVID, in part due to an obscenely unhealthy and obese population, and a population that is getting older on average. People who don't know about this yet will understand when their time comes to go to the Emergency Room and they get a huge massive kick in the pants having to wait for hours and hours, or die. So that's a separate issue in it of itself beyond COVID, it's just that if COVID comes back, or any other disease comes back, healthcare availability becomes worse.
So basically, if a thing is not objectively dangerous to a wide audience, it doesn't make as much sense to report on it, because it's less relevant. You can set up an alert condition, "Red," but if that alert condition is constantly, "Red," forever, then it becomes less actionable, particularly if the result of the underlying problem behind the alert is of lower consequence.
None of this is meant to say that resources or attention should not minimize the future threats of COVID or related disasters. None of this is to say that time and attention should not be spent on biological hazards, such as the chance of another pandemic springing up from zoological sources, or perhaps new variants of COVID mutating and becoming a problem again. Nor is this meant to minimize the very real problem that players with consolidated financial capital, (read: billionaires and corporations) manipulate the media, and that we should not read media blindly and unreflectively.
There's also of course the important story of healthcare effects toward vulnerable populations, and minority populations. If that's a separate story, it merits attention, but I definitely don't think raising a Red alert for all of society is a good way to solve that problem, as people just become skeptical of alerts.
But at the end of the day, if a problem of global climate change has once again become a time-weighted larger existential threat than a particular biohazard, then it makes sense to start reporting on it again, to a with a higher degree of importance or alarm. There isn't really a reason to be, "jealous," that an article on global climate change makes the round, while your chosen pet issue did not, because if your chosen pet issue really is a big problem, people are going to eventually get interested in it, almost regardless of how much money is spent covering it up. We live in a heavily manipulated environment, but it's not North Korea (yet).
This is an uncharitable summarization of what Hinton's actual statement was. He said, "might," and "could," a lot, not, "is."
The key here is that it's speculative.
That being said, a lot going on in AI, it's wild out there, difficult to know what's going on. I tried to encapsulate some of the ramifications of all of the Open Source stuff going on with this article here: https://patdel.substack.com/p/viva-la-revolucion-ofopen-sour...
> Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread.
What am I able to play with? Why does this say on the first page that it's an essay? Where is the link to be able to download and play with it? Am I missing something?
So forgive my, "adversarial," questions here, but you seem to be encouraging adversarial thinking, which is laudable, but also invites adversarial thinking onto the construct you're building as well.
Marqt, much like prediction markets, is not seeking truth, it's creating a map of a showcase of whoever bought into a particular market's emotions.
It sounds like you're motivated by creating a repo of human feedback reinforcement data which could then be used to further train or fine-tune LLM's, perhaps even to sell, is that correct?
> important for society to accurately define truth in an age when information travels (and changes) faster than ever, and when LLMs so confidently lie and have been heavily prompted to avoid controversial topics.
Yeah, I don't think what you're building is getting at the goal of, "truth," it's getting at the goal of building something sellable per my question above. To the extent that someone will be willing to buy that human feedback database is a function of what they may be trying to accomplish.
Much like in the world of so-called prediction markets, I see several of your markets as being heavily biased toward speculation and feelings, as opposed to a pragmatic approach to predicting a future outcome. What I mean by that is, you could create a really excellent scientific model and way of monitoring under what conditions a dam will break, or you could poll local people around a dam whether they feel like it will break, and you may get wildly different means and variances from the two methods. In all likelihood, there is no extra new synthesized knowledge about empirically what will physically happen with the dam that a group of average people off the street will have about that dam, in the context of a society with functioning infrastructure and tens of thousands of working dams. What you will have is a database on people's emotions about the dam, or perhaps dams in general, or the company behind the dam, etc.
So what are you really doing to, "make the world a better place?" You're not, you're making it worse by selling a vision of, "truth," that is actually muddling certain applications of practical engineering or scientific predictions further.
I think if you instead tweaked your pitch and just honestly stated that it's a repo of groups of people's feelings on various topics (and who those groups are, to the extent that you can figure that out), and not a way to, "beat LLM's with real truth," then it would be a lot more responsible.
On the other hand, you could just be a troll trying to actively muddle the truth further, in which case you can just ignore my advice, that's fine too.
> Inside the marqt maker is a fine-tuned BERT model that roughly ensures the statement is sensical, grammatical, and not a question.
Can BERT conduct logical reasoning? So further to the above, it sounds like you're using an LLM to clean human feedback data, if that's the real crux of your plan, to make reinforcement data cheaper, and everything else is a sort of 4D chess, bravo, cool project!
That's John Hammond's business model in Jurassic Park: build a bunch of chimeras that look like what people imagine Dinosaurs to be, clickbait people into visiting his park by calling them actual Dinosaurs.
Florida, California, Texas, New York, and to a certain degree the unique states, Alaska, Hawaii, do have, "something special," about them due to their sheer size or uniqueness.
What does Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan have? They need to be really attractive places to live because they aren't inherently (though some parts are, they are really far away from population centers). People don't go on, "vacation to the Midwest," they go to other, better landscapes. I'm sure there are outliers and I know there are outlier locations, I'm speaking in generalities here. I have driven over a significant portion of the Midwest, it's few and far between. You can't arbitrarily make beautiful mountains pop up in Iowa, and it's cold. At least if you're in Arkansas, it's got the Ozarks, warm weather pretty much year-round.
So really the only thing we midwestern states can do is look deeply inward and improve ourselves, that's really the only thing, other massive or more interesting States can rest on their laurels for a bit because people are inherently going to want to move there. Can you tell I'm not running to be the Governor of Minnesota any time soon? ;-)
Could you give me a link to what you're referring to and what you have seen in the past with this specific problem?
I think I have it solved but would like to know more as words can have multiple definitions.