* Posts by FeepingCreature

291 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Oct 2018

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Twitter now worth just a third of what Musk paid for it

FeepingCreature

Re: The Seething is Real

I sometimes feel I'm the only person whose opinion of Musk *or* Twitter has been pretty much entirely unaffected by Musk buying Twitter? I've always thought of him of "free thinker that occasionally sees clever market holes that other people miss and has the gumption to go for them, and at other times makes hilarious unforced mistakes."

And of course Twitter always was a shithole. It's no less or more a shithole now.

AI, extinction, nuclear war, pandemics ... That's expert open letter bingo

FeepingCreature

Re: Should be...

None of that would reduce AI risk, of course, except in that it would hold back progress. Which may itself be useful!

Mozilla so sorry for intrusive Firefox VPN popup ad

FeepingCreature

I use Waterfox Classic. I just have a copy of Firefox open on the side for the sites Waterfox Classic is bad at. I only use it selectively because Waterfox Classic with TMP just has a hugely better UX for me.

(You can have my scrollable dynamic width multirow tabs when you etc etc)

ChatGPT can't pass these medical exams – yet

FeepingCreature

Re: Passing grade - mirror, indicate before passing

To be fair, the self-driving numbers are in part because the autopilot gets to choose to disengage in operation when it hits a problematic situation. Drivers can generally not decide to stop the car and bail in the middle of an intersection.

To complete the blind comparisons, I would also be extremely interested in "ChatGPT answer delivered by a doctor" and "doctor's answer delivered by the ChatGPT website."

FeepingCreature

Passing grade

> "I don't think a patient would be comfortable with a doctor that only knows 70 percent of his or her medical field. If we demand this high standard for our doctors, we should demand this high standard from medical chatbots," he added.

Then why is 70% the passing grade?

As the joke goes: "What do you call the person who graduates medical school with the worst grades in their year?" "Doctor."

OpenAI's ChatGPT may face a copyright quagmire after 'memorizing' these books

FeepingCreature

"Memorized passages"

In other words, the "Quotes" section of goodreads.com violates copyright on a massive scale.

Everyone jumping on the "ChatGPT Bad" bandwagon misses the forest for the trees. The model knows these passages because they're being quoted massively on the Internet. There are hugely popular websites dedicated entirely to gathering quotes. Inasmuch as the model violates copyright, it's only because nobody else has ever given a damn about it.

Ask it about song lyrics next! I reckon they'll all be in there - not because OpenAI have maliciously fed it with copyrighted datasets, but because copyrighted segments of text on an internet crawl are as common as dirt.

US watchdog grounds SpaceX Starship after that explosion

FeepingCreature

Re: Good thinking that man

And that's why the launch was scheduled for 4/17, I presume. Because Musk psychically knew the weather would delay the launch and 4/20 was going to be the day in the week with the best forecast.

If only he used his amazing psychic powers for good!

SpaceX's second attempt at orbital Starship launch ends in fireball

FeepingCreature

Yep, the launch pad damage is an actual failure, I agree. And the Raptors have had ongoing quality control problems.

"Elon Musk has overaggressive timelines" is not a premise that even the most rabid Elon stan has ever disagreed with. :P (The running gag on /r/spacex is that Elon gives estimates in Mars years.)

My only disagreement is with the failure to separate constituting a major mission failure.

FeepingCreature

I just barely can't edit anymore, so here's a link to the spacex.com site for "Starship Flight Test" as of 04-16: https://web.archive.org/web/20230416045641/https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=starship-flight-test which lists the flight plan as "Flight Test Timeline | Best Case Scenario" and explicitly states "Completion of the milestones below are not required for a successful test".

FeepingCreature

Yes, that was the intent assuming everything went well, that's what it said in the flight plan. However, these articles were not written by SpaceX, and in everything SpaceX themselves put out they emphasized that they'd be plenty happy if the rocket cleared the tower without exploding.

FeepingCreature

Do you have a link for separation being the main goal?

I just meant that the steps you put in your flight plan are the happy path; the maximum viable outcome, not minimum.

FeepingCreature

There was a mission plan, yes; they didn't *intend* to fail. However, I believe this is largely because flight plans don't have a notion of "stretch goals". These steps can be categorized in "must succeed" and "would be nice if everything goes well"; I believe the only "must succeed" step was 1 and a bit of 2.

If your mission requires steps 1 through 4 to succeed, and you think there's a 50/50 chance of failure to step 4, you don't launch. Conversely, the mission did not require all four steps.

FeepingCreature

"Anything beyond the launch tower is a success" has been the messaging for actual months.

Here's Elon saying publically in advance that he gives a 50% chance of mission failure: https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/elon-musk-starship-has-a-50-50-chance-of-reaching-orbit-on-first-try

You're assuming because the goalposts are now so short that they were moved. Nope. They were always there.

FeepingCreature

Re: orbital velocity

Starship's fuel is so much heavier than its payload, that payload mass basically doesn't matter before separation.

FeepingCreature

Re: orbital velocity

It's definitely lower than it should have been, but SH is designed to decouple earlier than F9, and that's already relatively short: 6000-6600km/h and 70-75 km height at separation.

It's important to remember that SpaceX's rockets need to keep a good amount of dv back for landing.

Thing is, since it hit engine problems early in launch, they'd compound because the longer flight time means more gravity losses.

Scientists speak their brains: Please don’t call us boffins

FeepingCreature

Re: Out with the old word, in with the new

Sam Carter!

Google again accused of willfully destroying evidence in Android antitrust battle

FeepingCreature

The real drawback of Work from Home

No record keeping requirement for watercooler conversations. Wonder if this'll lead to more companies mandating their employees come in to work...

FeepingCreature

To tl;dr several cases covered in Matt Levine's newsletter Money Stuff: yes, apparently this exact exchange is actually very common.

OpenAI CEO 'feels awful' after ChatGPT leaks conversations, payment info

FeepingCreature

Re: from the very beginning the users should have had zero expectation of privacy

To be fair, aside from the convenient moat it presents, the whole pretext/reason for OpenAI to keep its model internal is so that they can surveil how it's used, in order to avoid "misuse". This isn't a gotcha, it's the whole premise.

Bing AI feels like ChatGPT stuffed into a suit – not the future

FeepingCreature

Re: Please.

Both of these things may be true:

- As we get older, we become less able to learn new skills

- On average, people are pretty uninterested in learning new skills anyways.

Why ChatGPT should be considered a malevolent AI – and be destroyed

FeepingCreature

Re: I quite like it

Got any source on ChatGPT stealing whole programs from Github?

FeepingCreature

Re: Gross misunderstanding of the tool

Well, it's not *entirely* coincidental.

I would say that any bearing on an aspect of reality more specific than its entire training domain is coincidental.

FeepingCreature

Re: I quite like it

If it's possible to get copyright on a short snippet of code, we can all hang up our keyboards and go take up gardening anyways.

Hubble images photobombed by space hardware on the up

FeepingCreature

"Cheap, heavy launches make space based astronomy harder." Yeah pass the glue please.

(There's actually a mission design where they propose to literally turn an entire Starship payload bay into a single giant telescope, handily beating the Hubble in size for orders of magnitude cheaper.)

If we get a telescope on the dark side of the moon within the next forty years, we will have SpaceX to thank for it.

SpaceX lobs second-gen Starlink satellites into orbit

FeepingCreature

Re: I'm no fan boi but....

That would be insane. Starlink, once it's financially positive, will be insanely profitable, probably the most profitable thing Musk has ever made. It's a perfect way for SpaceX to make efficient use of its practical monopoly on cheap launches.

OpenAI CEO heralds AGI no one in their right mind wants

FeepingCreature

Re: I don't understand.

It can learn within the context window. Large language models "learn to learn"; the relevant search term is 'in-context learning.' It's actually been shown that the weights of LLMs implement reinforcement learning at runtime.

It can't *persist* what it has learnt; but by the same token, you'd have to conclude that a human with anterograde amnesia couldn't be "thinking" either. This is clearly nonsense.

Twitter algorithm to be open sourced 'next week,' says Musk

FeepingCreature

Hate is just a feeling. I'm against harrassment, abuse, etc. but "stamp out hate" is an overreach.

Humans strike back at Go-playing AI systems

FeepingCreature

Well, but in an analogy, imagine if you looked at a bronze axe long enough, you gained the ability to chop down trees with your hands. In that case, it would be reasonable to say, with some metaphorical flourish, that the bronze axe "taught you" how to chop down trees.

This app could block text-to-image AI models from ripping off artists

FeepingCreature

Re: Copyright Immunity?

Copyright does not actually include the power to restrict anybody from looking at your art.

It is expected that you do that yourself by not making it publically visible.

FeepingCreature

> You can ask a sapient being to paint something, then ask them about it later and they'll be able to identify their own work, along with why they painted it in a certain way.

"And that's why artists with short-term memory loss are not even human beings."

You can hook a transformer network up to a painter and get similar answers.

Of course, you have no idea if the answers actually match reality.

But then, you don't know that with a human artist either.

FeepingCreature

Of course style in humans is learnt from images. What are you imagining here, that cubism existed as a movement thanks to the Purely Verbal/Mathematical Cubist Guidebook, Second Edition?

FeepingCreature

And the human brain is seeing patterns in constellations ... not by mistake? Pareidolia is intentional? Hallucinations were probably very adaptive in the savannah.

The Twitpocalypse may have begun, as datacenter migration reportedly founders

FeepingCreature

If your customers are so intent that they have *already* implemented functionality to turn your spreadsheet into a word processor, you may as well lean in and add a proper text widget.

FeepingCreature

Re: Don't be so dramatic

"turn into"? It's *Twitter.*

It is possible to extract copies of images used to train generative AI models

FeepingCreature

Re: plainly stores all of its training data

Maybe a process like: train the network on the dataset; generate lots of random images, more than the original data; train on the random images only and then lightly untrain (negative lr) on the original dataset?

So the network memorizes the "impressions" of the original set but avoids too-close matches. Though I'm not sure if the random-images part adds anything, since you're training the network "with itself".

AI cannot be credited as authors in papers, top academic journals rule

FeepingCreature

Re: "all paper submissions must be the original work of authors"

(It does not do that.)

Seriously, I've seen that bandied about, and it's simply not how LLMs work.

When a NN regurgitates some of its inputs unchanged, it's called mode collapse and generally considered a bad thing. The whole point of NNs is that they can *interpolate*, rather than regurgitate - and they do so in a highly abstracted feature space rather than between samples.

FeepingCreature

Re: "all paper submissions must be the original work of authors"

I could see ChatGPT as a valuable assistant for getting formalisms correct and improve readability. It's definitely worthless for research, and probably worthless for analysis, though it may help generate ideas.

FeepingCreature

Re: "all paper submissions must be the original work of authors"

But so how is it plagiarism *of ChatGPT* if ChatGPT is just used as a tool?

Is my code plagiarized from vim?

User was told three times 'Do Not Reboot This PC' – then unplugged it anyway

FeepingCreature
Devil

Who trusts a big screen-filling warning message?

Honestly, probably (if I missed the email) would have pulled the power too.

Because my first reaction would not have been "Oh, IT is doing updates" but "a ransomware infection is currently encrypting my drive."

Watch Rocket Lab lift off from US for first time, put radio-sniffing sats into orbit

FeepingCreature

Re: Little competition

"Sadly," SpaceX is also enormously cheaper per kg. Generally speaking, rockets scale with size, because fuel mass goes up with cube, whereas non-fuel mass goes up with ~square.

As things stand (Wikipedia), a RocketLab launch costs ~7m$ for 300kg or ~23k$/kg, whereas a SpaceX launch costs 67m$ for 17.4t or ~4k$/kg.

And SpaceX do offer rideshare missions.

Nice smart device – how long does it get software updates?

FeepingCreature

Re: Nobody

Ah, yes! Perfect, thanks!

Took me a while to set up subdomain reverse proxying for my HomeAssistant instance, but it works now.

FeepingCreature

Re: Nobody

One thing that's missing for me is geofencing an Android phone as a trigger. That aside, Home Assistant runs great.

Activision prevails as court tosses 'frat house' culture lawsuit

FeepingCreature

Re: Remember kids...

The free market punishes poor behavior to the degree that consumers care about it.

Seems to be working.

Intel offers desktop chip that can hit 6GHz if everything goes right, you can keep it cool, stars align, pigs fly

FeepingCreature

Re: Intel could have been years ahead...

Good question there. 86 are comparatively tiny- how high could you clock one nowadays?

ChatGPT has mastered the confidence trick, and that's a terrible look for AI

FeepingCreature

> Do enough talking to the bot about subjects you know, and curiosity soon deepens to unease. That feeling of talking with someone whose confidence far exceeds their competence grows until ChatGPT's true nature shines out. It’s a Dunning-Kruger effect knowledge simulator par excellence. It doesn’t know what it’s talking about, and it doesn’t care because we haven’t learned how to do that bit yet.

The converse of this argument, which I agree with, is of course: if ChatGPT is this convincing, cogent and generally smart now, how good will it be once we do learn how to do that bit?

UK's Online Safety Bill drops rules forcing social media to remove 'legal but harmful' content

FeepingCreature

Re: An exercise in pointlessness

"Lawful but awful" ... aren't they the people who make the laws? Sounds like "we want you to stop embarrassing us, but not in a way where people can say that the drawbacks are our fault."

FAA wants pilots to be less dependent on computer autopilots

FeepingCreature

To be fair, Sully could have returned to the airport - if he'd had literally superhuman reaction speeds. Unachievable for a human pilot in the heavy stress situation of a birdstrike, and I want to take nothing away from Sully's clear thinking and quick reactions. But a computer could possibly have saved that plane in a far less dramatic fashion.

FeepingCreature

Also subscribe to MentourPilot

Video on Asiana 214: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pLRMJyD9TY

In my personal opinion, airplanes rely far too much on heavily modal interfaces.

Twitter engineer calls out Elon Musk for technical BS in unusual career move

FeepingCreature

Re: Remind me where the procedure is in a REST call.

RPC is a bad way to think about REST. That doesn't affect the question of whether REST is RPC in fact, which it trivially is.

All abstractions are leaky.

Time Lords decree an end to leap seconds before risky attempt to reverse time

FeepingCreature

Re: TAI = UTC + 37 seconds, am I missing something?

Which is why, for another spicy take, environmentalists are right about the outcomes but ruinously wrong about the remedy. Far from reducing consumption, we need to massively increase our electricity consumption and go all-in on nuclear and fusion research. Only this way will we gain the economy of scale for the cheap, plentiful electric power necessary to run the desalination plants that are our only shot to prevent the coming water crisis.

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