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pizza234

6,345 karmajoined 13 years ago

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pizza234
·14 hours ago·discuss
> I suspect Anthropic had to turn up its safety guardrails to an 11 to assuage the government’s concerns, as this hasn’t been a one-model problem.

This behavioral change is actually official (https://www.anthropic.com/news/redeploying-fable-5):

> For Fable 5, we made this safety margin much larger than in any prior launch (row B), meaning that many more benign requests would be blocked. We understood that these kinds of false positives would be frustrating for users, but made this tradeoff in the interest of making the model’s other capabilities widely available.
pizza234
·4 days ago·discuss
NK is politically aligned with the red countries, and positioned against US. Especially after the Otto Warmbier accident, some believe that Americans/Westerners in NK are in constant danger (my opinion: O.W. did something stupid while drunk; the accusations were obviously fabricated but the incident was not unprovoked), so to those, it may seem surprising that somebody can feel safe there.
pizza234
·5 days ago·discuss
> There's no real evidence in here that the IDTech team or the "coders" were specifically let go

Scott Miller said it himself:

> Big day today at Id Software [...] today, Microsoft/XBOX decided half the team was deemed USELESS and needed to be let go [...] With literally the best of the best coders in the industry.
pizza234
·9 days ago·discuss
The same applies to ray tracing; the question whether shadows can be rendered accurately and cheaply is also not knowable - but it's very unlikely that ray tracing will become as cheap as rasterization for the same quality target. LLMs are pretty much the same; they're inherently computationally expensive, even if optimizations are in continuous development.
pizza234
·9 days ago·discuss
> Seems like an investment into building expertise

Learning LLM internals != using them as daily tools (the latter was the topic of discussion).

Shifting to the learning topic: no need for expensive hardware. Even a 16 GB GPU will do, and that's (relatively) cheap and available.
pizza234
·9 days ago·discuss
Not really - it's essentially a workflow.

The steps, described [here](https://github.com/obra/superpowers#the-basic-workflow), are: brainstorming → using-git-worktrees → writing-plans → subagent-driven-development or executing-plans → test-driven-development → requesting-code-review → finishing-a-development-branch.

The principles, described [here](https://github.com/obra/superpowers#philosophy), are: Write tests first, always; Process over guessing; Simplicity as primary goal; Verify before declaring success.

Install it, take a complex tasks, and instruct the agent to implement it; it's easier to watch it in action than to describe it.

In my own experience, the advantage is that it's a very systematic workflow - investigation of requirements, breakdown in simpler steps, and TDD development, among the other aspects.
pizza234
·12 days ago·discuss
> Now come back to my first question. An LLM predicts the next word based on all the words before it. That is the whole story. There is no idea sitting underneath.

No!! This is misinformation.

An LLM predicts the next words (tokens) based on the words before it *and* on the internal representations it has learned from training.

Processing language can lead to internal representations that capture patterns and relationships; LLMs can exhibit emergent abilities, including reasoning-like (stress on "-like") behavior, even when they weren't explicitly trained for that.

Making reductionist claims about LLMs, based on next-word prediction, is similar to making such claims about biology, based on amino acids.
pizza234
·13 days ago·discuss
> Having a machine that can run some modest local LLMs, like the Gemma 4 12B, is really worth it.

Cloud models are (much) faster, they don't consume so much power/generate heat, they have much bigger (LLM) context, they're much more precise and they have a much wider (engineering) context of the given problem.

Except privacy and use cases that are blocked by cloud models (e.g. reverse engineering), local LLMs are currently an expensive toy.

When I try to program with a local LLM (I'm on a 32/128 GB system), I end up wasting time compared to a cloud LLM.
pizza234
·17 days ago·discuss
NTlite has also been around for more than a decade, although it has a freemium model.
pizza234
·18 days ago·discuss
> Quake III Arena was pretty entertaining. Doesn't seem like it came from a company that had been ruined for years.

It's not that the company was ruined, but that it had lost some of its creative direction after Romero left (while retaining technical excellence).
pizza234
·19 days ago·discuss
LOL, sure this works if one has a time machine or a LOT of money to burn.

32 CPU Epyc (Epyc is required for faster memory access) + 32 GB VRAM + 512 GB RAM is stupid expensive nowadays, and in best case, it will just downgrade to "very" expensive at some point in the future.

This makes sense only if 1. one is paranoid about privacy or 2. they have money to smoke or 3. they need to workaround cloud model restrictions, AND they have to do it routinely (because if not, a oneshot cloud bare metal setup is way cheaper, faster, and allows more powerful models, due to VRAM offering).

I did spend stupid money as well and yet, the system is 2x slower than cloud providers for comparable performance on vision tasks (I still have to test coding). Oh, and it's hot as hell.
pizza234
·26 days ago·discuss
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pizza234
·26 days ago·discuss
> Another CEO with AI psychosis [1]. LLMs are not true AI, they lack common sense (or whatever it's properly called).

If you read the article, you'll find that the it indeed relies on this claim:

> Within a couple of years, possibly much sooner, AI may achieve so-called closed-loop recursive self-improvement (RSI): the capacity to rewrite its own code to become more capable, without human intervention. Should that happen, the result could be an intelligence explosion of a kind for which there is no precedent and no map.

This may be optimistic and/or simplistic, but not impossible.
pizza234
·30 days ago·discuss
Flashback came considerably later (1992) than PoP (1989); a single year back then was a lot more significant than it is today. A classic game in between was Another World (1991).

Just out curiosity, PoP ran on 8088/8086, while Flashback on 286/386.
pizza234
·last month·discuss
OpenAI and Anthropic are certainly strong drivers, but there's a large demand from many other players: cloud provider, accelerator vendors, and so on. I think there's no end in sight.
pizza234
·last month·discuss
Slight?? It has 3g of salt per liter, which is very high - not least because 1g of that is sodium. Having said that, I like it very much.
pizza234
·last month·discuss
8.8" is a bit too small for my use case, but... oh my, their Win Max 2 is a very impressive machine (10.1") - I'm really shocked at the size. I'm confused by the price, though - 6500$??
pizza234
·last month·discuss
Confirmed. Minibooks are amazing in cramped locations (for example, airplane seats), or just to always keep in the bag for support.

There's nothing in the market like them, which is a shame - I think a slightly better quality Minibook (Chuwis are plain crap) would be a very solid laptop.
pizza234
·2 months ago·discuss
It isn't realistic to expect a design to be "proper in first place" because requirements change; my opinion is indeed the opposite - I find it natural for programming languages to have a (sort of) lifespan, and for new ones to (sort of) take their place.
pizza234
·2 months ago·discuss
> Not everyone needs that fast RAM access but for those who do it could be nice to have an option. The writing is on the wall for years now.

There is an option already, at least from AMD, in the HEDT segment - Threadripper/Pro has 4/8 channels (although the bandwidth is not a high as Apple chips).