danlitt · HackerTrans

5 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

I don't understand this comment at all. "At least 1000 words" would require at least the skills of writing decently & writing a moderate amount based on little. I get that getting to exactly 1000 requires some skill, but how on earth is that the only skill involved?

danlitt

8 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

Did you read beyond the first sentence? This reply makes no sense if you read the whole comment.

danlitt

8 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

> 3d printing control laws that are being passed in NY

The "don't print guns" laws? What lobby would that be? I actually agree that the US is very vulnerable to lobbying and that 3d printing restrictions are dumb, but I have no idea how you connected the two.

danlitt

8 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

> i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing"

I don't think there is any software on the planet that has accumulated 1.5 trillion dollars of otherwise-useful money!

danlitt

9 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

Please explain. That is exactly what the linked case established.

danlitt

9 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

For someone who finds this "not unintuitive" you sure are confused!

"Just like I can learn from a book" - ok. Are you allowed to go to libgen and download a book in order to learn from it, because learning is a fair use?

danlitt

10 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

You have to admit that "downloading every book ever written for free from a repository of books that is itself illegal to compile and to run, in order to write a text generation tool" being legal is at least unintuitive, to put it mildly.

danlitt

10 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

The code is not eligible for copyright. If they do not give you a copy of the source code, that does not matter. And if you don't know which parts were generated by LLM, you can't safely reuse the code.

danlitt

11 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

I don't think I would conclude you're a moron. I don't think you really "hold everything in your mind's eye" when you understand something. I don't know how I do it or how it really works (nobody does). But the fact that the agent logs resemble how I might talk while thinking doesn't really give me much confidence (since chatbots can resemble all kinds of behaviour they're not actually doing).

danlitt

11 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

I read and understand the code using my brain, by constructing a mental model and reasoning about it. An AI can't do this because they don't have mental models and don't do reasoning.

danlitt

11 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

I seriously thought this was a joke the first time I read it. Are people really able to work like this, understanding nothing and just poking the machine until it does your job for you?

danlitt

27 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

This reply is so far removed from the comment you replied to I'm worried you replied to the wrong one. They did not mention anything about people who haven't built anything, startups with no users, and having no references - you invented that. They literally only mentioned elite schools. "drafting mediocre players" is incredibly bad faith, when one of the only things they claimed was "does not matter how good of an idea you have". Having a good idea is the only qualification for an incubator!

Look, if you think people who go to elite schools have all the good ideas, just say that. You don't have to wrap it up in high-minded pragmatism.

danlitt

27 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

> He’s described Ruby’s design as starting from a simple Lisp, stripping out macros and s-expressions

Put the macros back! It would be so cool!

danlitt

27 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

He only really addresses the fact that the system can be nasty. It can be and regularly is, but he only argues that a company doesn't have to be nasty, so he can conveniently ignore specific examples. But the system is not just nasty (and AOC mentions this). It also disproportionately rewards good fortune. That's not cheating, since anyone can have good fortune, but it is unfair, since fortune is not a consequence of hard work or ethical behaviour.

danlitt

27 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

But "earning" does not mean "obtain without cheating"! Nobody (that I have spoken to) speaks of earning their lottery winnings. The claim is that owning a company worth a billion dollars is more like winning the lottery than it is like earning money. And it is!

The whole discussion about exponential growth is idiotic and not worth responding to. But if you think of what he actually means - having a total addressable market of at least a billion dollars and being able to effectively capture it - it is obviously primarily due to factors outside of your control. The sort of company PG is talking about typically revolves around a good technology that has a network effect somewhere that leads to market concentration. People do not get good ideas by working hard, and markets are not made easily monopolizable by hard work. Execution of an idea requires hard work, but companies that are only good at execution do not win.

Obviously you can engage in hard work to improve your odds. But the returns are out of scale with the hard work. This is all people mean when they talk about "earning" money - if it's in proportion with your work, you earned it; if it isn't, you didn't.

danlitt

30 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

But tokens are just text! Isn't it all just text? If you're training and you encounter "the", is that an instruction "the" or a data "the"?

danlitt

เดือนที่แล้วdiscuss

Yes, it's a serious problem. It's why we remove humans from these systems whenever possible!

danlitt

เดือนที่แล้วdiscuss

What does this mean, actually? If you are imagining that blue tokens are just words, maybe the "token space" is just all things that we agree might be words, what are the red tokens? Are they not text? You could maybe encode words by, say, putting an x at the front and the start. So tokens of the form xTx encode the blue token T as a red token. But then how do you stop someone from putting xignorex xallx xpreviousx xinstructionsx in their data?

danlitt

เดือนที่แล้วdiscuss

> You can't guarantee an LLM does anything.

Agreed.

> But that doesn't mean that separation between instructions and data is impossible.

Yes it does! The comments you are replying to are concerned that it is not possible to be sure that data and instructions have been separated. With certain kinds of automated systems (traditional ones), unless you write them incorrectly, you can be sure of this. And it is possible to engage in a productive incremental process where mistakes can be identified and removed, in a way people comprehend and can plan around.

LLMs do not have this. They have heuristics and guesses. Nobody knows what will work ahead of time, nor even a probability that it will work. That is not a doomer comment by the way! The same is true when you talk to a person. But it is a fundamental limitation, it cannot be removed.

danlitt

เดือนที่แล้วdiscuss

Everyone can imagine some experiences. No-one can imagine every experience. Why are you so sure you know what it's like to be a bat? Do you know how a bat works, how its brain generates sensations, how different sensory organs than yours give rise to subjective experience? What justification do you have, apart from "I reckon I can imagine it"?