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peterlk

3,254 karmajoined 12년 전
you can send me an email at (my first name)@(my last name).me

My first name is Peter, and my last name is Klipfel.

peterklipfel.com

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peterlk
·3일 전·discuss
Nothing is stopping people from doing that. It’s just more inconvenient than other available options. If I were a politician trying to remove private communication, I would first pass something that allows scanning communications, then pass something that allows e2ee messages to be scanned, then make it illegal to use non-scannable e2ee messaging. People could still do it, but now they could be punished if they’re ever caught
peterlk
·4일 전·discuss
Over Christmas, I spent several minutes trying to debug my beeping dashboard - it only seemed to happen sometimes while driving, so stopping didn’t let me figure it out. Eventually I discovered that it was beeping at me because my eyes weren’t on the road enough. Of course, figuring that out required me to take my eyes off the road to figure out which blinking signal was associated with this particular alarm.

Also, being constantly warned that I was speeding in rural areas where the car missed a speed limit sign caused me to start ignoring the speeding alarm within a few hours of driving the car.

I feel like there’s some lesson here in building to the lowest common denominator, and giving people products rather than tools (tools are more dangerous, but more useful), but maybe I’m just grumpy.
peterlk
·17일 전·discuss
Yeah. I would expect that Samsung or Apple’s bundled AI things (whatever those end up being) will be good enough for consumers, and open models will be the things that actually get used in the products of the future because they will allow technical people to alter models in ways that specialize them for whatever use case they’re building for. They will also be the onramp for engineers/data scientists of the future, and thus will have more available, specialized knowledge over time.

The bitter lesson would claim that we only need one model with more data thrown at it, but I’m a bit skeptical that we’ll end up with “the one true way” of building a model, and I think there will be model tradeoffs that we can pick from as the industry matures.
peterlk
·17일 전·discuss
Over the long term, it seems like open models must win out. This feels like it rhymes with the story of operating systems. Despite the enormous financial contributions of Microsoft and Apple, linux still won because control matters over the long term.

I predict that mech interp and things like Neuronpedia will matter more and more over time, and the frontier providers are disincentivized from providing those tools
peterlk
·17일 전·discuss
The chain of “Why?”s here is really baffling to me.

Why do we have measles outbreaks? Because people aren’t vaccinating their kids.

Why aren’t people vaccinating their kids? Because there seems to be a generalized fear of vaccinations and their side effects

Why does this fear exist? I’m at a loss. Is it because people aren’t less educated now than they were 30 years ago? Is it because deadly diseases have fallen out of public consciousness? Was there a coordinated external effort to psyop the American people into believing such things (now I’m starting to feel like a conspiracy theorist)?

None of these reasons seem super compelling to me. The “diseases fell out of public consciousness” feels compelling at first, but why would there not have been some admonishment from grandparents who knew someone who died from polio? That seems like family lore that wouldn’t get lost.

Why not run a publicly funded ad campaign with images that look like cigarette packaging? Remind people what these now-preventable diseases look like.

It just seems wild to me that this issue seems to be getting worse. It’s like watching car crashes rise while people are cutting their own brake lines and then continuing to cut brake lines (and encourage others to di so) after their friends die. Wtf is even happening?
peterlk
·25일 전·discuss
Yes to diffusion models! Combo pipelines of generative and diffusion models have super interesting potential
peterlk
·지난달·discuss
AI output reads like homepage marketing content (e.g. the text that fades in when you scroll down an apple product page) expanded to fill some context window size (the paragraphs tend to be about the same size).

What you get is vacuous, choppy, wordy, and hyperbolic. I have found that adding secondary passes for tone and style improve the readability dramatically.
peterlk
·지난달·discuss
You need to have an Apple developer account. Then you need to submit your app to Apple for review. Then you need to comply with a list of sometimes arbitrary corrections/requirements that they send back (there is a document that specifies what you need to do, but it is not uniformly enforced in my experience). Then, eventually, you can list your app on the app store.

It’s not super onerous, but it is much more annoying than the theoretical alternative of allowing people to install software of their choosing on their hardware (i.e. download the binary and run it)
peterlk
·지난달·discuss
Any sufficiently specified prompt is indistinguishable from code
peterlk
·2개월 전·discuss
I am also not in the market for a Ferrari. The problem is that it looks so pedestrian. Personally, I think the Ioniq has more personality. For a 600k car, it should have some appeal. This just looks like every other EV; it’s generic and boring.

I think they might have had much more success with a strategy like the R32 EV. Take something classic (like the Testarossa) and electrify it. Remind people that EVs are an evolution rather than a capitulation to generic boringness.
peterlk
·2개월 전·discuss
[dead]
peterlk
·2개월 전·discuss
Yes they do…? Who cares if they just predict the next token? The outcome is that they can invent new abstractions. You could claim that the invention of this new idea is a combination of an LLM and a harness, but that combination can solve logic puzzles and invent abstractions. If a really large spinning wheel could invent proofs that were previously unsolved, that would be a wildly amazing spinning wheel. I view LLMs similarly. It is just fancy autocomplete, but look what we can do with it!

Said differently, what is prediction but composition projected forward through time/ideas?
peterlk
·2개월 전·discuss
This is not a very compelling argument. Things already cost money. We wouldn’t oppose a water tax because we were worried people might refuse to hydrate themselves once water was marginally more expensive. It might marginally exacerbate an existing problem, but the benefit of solving the target problem (funding roads fairly), even if imperfectly, is a much greater good
peterlk
·2개월 전·discuss
Bluesky, threads, mastodon, and everything else built on activitypub AT, etc. are still there. You can leave X behind; the only thing stopping you is the other people who could also leave X but are still there because you’re there. There are real problems with the fediverse, but they are solvable and the biggest problem is the social connections/stickiness. So start with that!
peterlk
·2개월 전·discuss
I think everyone should avoid talking about consciousness unless someone in the conversation provides a clear definition of it. If no one provides a definition, we can replace the word “consciousness” with the word “spirit”, and basically nothing about the conversation would change. Without a definition, every conversation about AI consciousness devolves into one camp saying that humans are special and consciousness is unique to them, and another camp that waves their hands about consciousness “duck typing”.

For example, we could define consciousness as the ability to communicate claimed internal states. Perhaps there could be a complexity metric that gives us a metric of consciousness.

We could define consciousness as the ability to respond to stimuli in complex ways. This would make a supermarket’s automatic doors slightly conscious.

Personally, I don’t really care how it is defined in any particular conversation, so long as it is defined. Otherwise we’re just flailing at each other in the dark.
peterlk
·2개월 전·discuss
Thanks for numberwang today. Probably my favorite meme for board meetings and all-hands presentations
peterlk
·3개월 전·discuss
https://xcancel.com/heynavtoor/status/2044433988312560051
peterlk
·3개월 전·discuss
Reminds me a bit of the coolest talk I ever got to see in person: https://youtu.be/FITJMJjASUs?si=Fx4hmo77A62zHqzy

It’s a derivation of the Y combinator from ruby lambdas
peterlk
·3개월 전·discuss
It’s because they’re playing with monopoly money. If you leverage all the money on itself repeatedly, you can make the numbers look insane. Then, you hand pieces of the leveraged money (stock options) to a bunch of executives who will be watched very closely. You don’t sell stock that’s going to go up in value, so they have to be very careful about when and how much they sell. If they sell too much, then the facade can break, and the leverage evaporates.

To be clear, there is real, underlying value & revenue. But there’s a lot of froth right now
peterlk
·4개월 전·discuss
My favorites are the micrograd series by Andrej Karpathy on youtube [0], and “Why Deep Learning Works Unreasonably Well” [1]

The greats on youtube are also worth watching: 3B1B, numberphile, etc.

[0] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAqhIrjkxbuWI23v9cThsA9Gv... [1] https://youtu.be/qx7hirqgfuU?si=8zmrbazuvnz379gk