Posts by FeepingCreature 291 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Oct 2018
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.
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."
> "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."
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.
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.
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".
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.
"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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
> 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.
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".
(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.
"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.
> 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?
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.
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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