I always find it strange how many HN commenters appear to have unconsciously added "exclusively" or "without exception" to the text of the comment they're replying to.
Related, Raymond Chandler says in his letters that he taught himself to write a novelette by copying one (by Erle Stanley Gardner). He took the original story and wrote a detailed synopsis, then wrote a novelette from the synopsis, compared it to the original, did rewrites, and so on until he understood what tricks Gardner had used to make the scenes work.
I disagree! It's easy to check that an AI program meets its specification, which is to process input tokens and generate output tokens. :)
If you're talking about verifying whether it produces the correct tokens, that's not generally something you can specify in advance with AI. I mean: if your task is one where you can precisely specify which output tokens are correct for a given input, then the task doesn't need AI, no?
I see what you're getting at, but I think you're focusing on the incidental. An animation is good if it's clear and intuitive in motion. It may often be the case that good animations also look nice in a screenshot halfway through, but (a) they don't always, and (b) working well in motion is obviously the more important of the two goals.
As such it makes no sense to worry about the latter thing - it's not a signal whether the animation is good or not.
Look at the youtube example - it has two pieces of UI animating from from a start point to an end point, and the paths are such that they momentarily overlap. There's nothing buggy or janky about it in motion; TFA is just saying that if you ignore the motion and take a screenshot mid-transition it looks odd. Same complaint as what GP describes, and silly for the same reasons.
> Placing an undue emphasis on civility is how bad actors control the conversation.
The load-bearing word in that claim is "undue", and it's not justified here. I'm not doing arcane rules-lawyering, I'm just saying people should avoid doing things the site guidelines quite specifically ask them not to do.
> I’m not advocating for this rule to change (I’d appreciate if you didn’t straw man and mischaracterise what I said),
I wasn't suggesting you did, I was suggesting the person I originally replied to might.
I'm fond of linguistic bugbears, and have actually sent that same article to people before :D But what you're missing is that the less/fewer debate is over their use as adjectives, and TFA's title uses "less" as an adverb. It's asking for AI agents to be less human, not for them to be fewer in number. Swapping it to "fewer" would make the title's meaning no longer match the article.
Now please sit a moment and reflect on what you've done. :P
Nice to have these all collected nicely and sharable. For the amusement of HN let me add one I've become known for at my current work, for saying to juniors who are overly worried about DRY:
> Fen's law: copy-paste is free; abstractions are expensive.
edit: I should add, this is aimed at situations like when you need a new function that's very similar to one you already have, and juniors often assume it's bad to copy-paste so they add a parameter to the existing function so it abstracts both cases. And my point is: wait, consider the cost of the abstraction, are the two use cases likely to diverge later, do they have the same business owner, etc.
Not at all - didn't mean to sound snarky, I just wanted to add that I was omitting details and caveats.
FWIW, personally I think it muddies things to frame the question as if "..using statistical token generation" was a limitation. NNs are Turing-complete, so what LLMs do can just be considered "computation" - the fact that they compute via statistical token generation is an implementation detail.
And if you're like most people, "can cognition happen via computation?" is a less controversial question, which then puts LLMs/cognition topics easily into the "in principle, obviously, but we can debate whether it's achievable or how to measure it" category.
The high-order bit for for each case is the category it's in and the "Outcome" column - that summarizes if the solution was full/partial/wrong, if AI had assistance, etc. Then further discussion for each one is linked from the number.
Then the "Literature result" columns have a citations for where similar published results were found. The ones with no "Literature" column, like in the first section, are cases where no similar published results have been found (implying that the solution would not have been trained on). Note that in some cases a published solution was found but it wasn't similar to the AI's.
(this is all explained with more detail and caveats at the top of the page)
What you're asking for is exactly what's in the link you replied about. It collects analysis of each solution (or attempt), and info about whether the AI's solution could be found anywhere in the literature.
"Heck no! I'm going to climb up a tree, cut the soles off my shoes, and learn to play the flute."
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