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mannykannot

12,948 karmajoined 13 лет назад

Submissions

Death of a Strawman: The Epistemology of a Language Model

mvaleadvocate.substack.com
2 points·by mannykannot·4 месяца назад·0 comments

Photons that are not there influence superconductivity

arstechnica.com
3 points·by mannykannot·4 месяца назад·0 comments

How AI Is Learning to Think in Secret

lesswrong.com
3 points·by mannykannot·6 месяцев назад·1 comments

Mandiant releases rainbow table that cracks weak admin password in 12 hours

arstechnica.com
4 points·by mannykannot·6 месяцев назад·0 comments

Tree proof (semantic tableau) generator

umsu.de
2 points·by mannykannot·10 месяцев назад·0 comments

comments

mannykannot
·14 часов назад·discuss
Why complicate matters with pasta at all when spider silk is, at least metaphorically and rhetorically, at hand?

As hinted at by its 2017 postscript, this article is a mess of incommensurable comparisons.
mannykannot
·13 дней назад·discuss
This seems to tacitly assume that the outliers on either side have equivalent weight with respect to whatever is being investigated, while the explicit premise behind this proposal is that in this case they do not.
mannykannot
·22 дня назад·discuss
I take your point, as demonstrated here, that even straightforward written language can be completely misunderstood, and that emoji might help alleviate that, though how they could help in the particular case here is not clear to me.
mannykannot
·23 дня назад·discuss
> You choose to participate here instead of having face-to-face conversations.

Nothing about the comment you are replying to implies an abstinence from face-to-face conversations, and the suggestion is not very plausible.
mannykannot
·23 дня назад·discuss
Anyone claiming those developments enabled the expression of something previously inexpressible would have been mistaken.
mannykannot
·23 дня назад·discuss
If only Keats or Plath had emoji!
mannykannot
·30 дней назад·discuss
And in the next paragraph:

"However, there are niche applications where the much higher costs of computing in space could be justified. Examples include ... active collision avoidance in the increasingly crowded low Earth orbit."

A self-justifying purpose!
mannykannot
·30 дней назад·discuss
It seems that in most ports they are required to hold and treat it (and, perhaps to a lesser extent, in inshore waters.) Fouling the places they take their customers to is ultimately bad for business.
mannykannot
·в прошлом месяце·discuss
A two meter cubed volume would be sufficient to hold that much. I would guess that cruise ships store more urine than that, though presumably not separated from everything else humans dump into toilets.

With the qualification 'in orbit', I imagine it is.
mannykannot
·2 месяца назад·discuss
I have something I want to remove rust from, so I have been thinking about sand blasting. Thus, this thought popped into my head: how spectacular would it be to use aluminum powder? (To be clear, I am not going to try this.)

My wife’s reaction to this was “You guys…” but I know she would absolutely want to watch if someone was going to try it.
mannykannot
·2 месяца назад·discuss
I would guess you need something rigid and dense to generate enough pressure, though I don’t know if that rules out your suggestion. It does not have to be a ball.
mannykannot
·2 месяца назад·discuss
The claim made in your first sentence is actually a reason to be concerned.
mannykannot
·2 месяца назад·discuss
The claim that disasters happen to older plants is not refuted by the observation that lessons learned are applied to the whole fleet.

One might object that there is selection bias in the original claim, due to the slowdown in construction of recent plants, but that is a separate issue. A more thorough investigation of the causes of all events leading to a significant degradation of safety margins would be needed to determine whether and how older designs are inherently more risky and whether that risk can be adequately mitigated given the constraints imposed by their design.

The fact that, prior to Chernobyl, there were several foreshadowing incidents with RBMKs which should have raised serious concerns, suggests that 'lessons learned' isn't much of a reason to be satisfied with the status quo.
mannykannot
·2 месяца назад·discuss
Yes - a point supported the Vera benchmark: https://github.com/aallan/vera-bench
mannykannot
·2 месяца назад·discuss
This will serve as an interesting empirical test, then: will LLMs do better with Vera than with Go or other languages? The testing so far seems inconclusive (https://github.com/aallan/vera-bench), but the authors make this interesting observation:

"No LLM has ever been trained on Vera. There are no Vera examples on GitHub, no Stack Overflow answers, no tutorials — the language was created after these models' training cutoffs. Every token of Vera code in these results was written by a model that learned the language entirely from a single document (SKILL.md [https://veralang.dev/SKILL.md]) provided in the prompt at evaluation time."

If LLMs do much better with Vera (or something like it) than with traditional languages, we may be entering a time when most machine-written code will be difficult for humans to review - but maybe that ship has already sailed.
mannykannot
·2 месяца назад·discuss
Full disclosure: I didn't figure this out myself, I got it from Ms. Vale's review.

I agree that the term "welfare trap" is a loaded one. This looks to me to be a case of refusing to look through the telescope in case they might see something they do not want to.
mannykannot
·2 месяца назад·discuss
On the other hand, an accurate digital simulation of a mechanical calculator really does calculate. The "a simulation is not the real thing" objection breaks down when the function is information processing, on account of information's substrate independence.
mannykannot
·2 месяца назад·discuss
There's interesting commentary on this paper from Maggie Vale here: https://substack.com/home/post/p-194580145

One of her points is that there are various pesky consequences for AI companies if AI becomes to be seen as conscious, such as what the paper calls the "welfare trap": if AI systems are widely regarded as being conscious or sentient, they will be seen as "moral patients", reinforcing existing concerns over whether they are being treated appropriately. This paper explicitly says that its conclusion "pulls the field of AI safety out of the welfare trap, [allowing] us to focus entirely on the concrete risks of anthropomorphism [by] treating AGI as a powerful but inherently non-sentient tool."
mannykannot
·2 месяца назад·discuss
I would guess that Ada Lovelace was completely written out of the story in 1930.
mannykannot
·3 месяца назад·discuss
I cannot, of course, speak about this particular incident, but a person inclined to skip procedures expressly implemented to avoid the problem which occurred, or who ignores clear warnings that a problem is developing, is a liability, not a trained asset.