Notices by Tim Kellogg (kellogh@hachyderm.io)

some say that Trump isn’t capable of producing an intelligible sentence, but that’s simply not true, as judge Merchan is about to show us

do you ever think about how some organisms, like lobsters, don’t age and are effectively immortal, but most do age? like, we evolved to die. it was evolutionarily advantageous to die, otherwise most organisms would be immortal

the lesson i HOPE political pundits take from the Harris campaign is that short campaigns are good, actually. more energy over a shorter period of time is definitely better. stop with these 2-year political seasons

this headline feels like it was written by someone from GenZ who never actually saw a commercial for the energizer bunny

@mattly @Emily_S OTOH if a company realizes it has no support contracts on 95% of the supply chain for their primary source of income, that should set off some big alarms

@futurebird @dahukanna @PavelASamsonov why? because that’s not exactly what they’re doing. as you scale up model size, new capabilities emerge, things they weren’t trained to do. “emergent behavior” isn’t a theory, it’s an observation. the open question is, what other sorts of capabilities will emerge when we scale further up. will they acquire an element of surprise? idk, i’d say no but i’ve also been wrong so far about what their limits should be

@futurebird @dahukanna @PavelASamsonov hmmm… 🤔 most applications of LLMs don’t simply use the model alone. it’s typically a mixture of the trained model + banks of knowledge + input from the user. i’ve definitely built LLM apps that interview SMEs and then turn around and use that as a bank of knowledge in another app

@mrcompletely @futurebird @dahukanna @PavelASamsonov yep, agreed. what LLMs do today is just “system 1” with a little faking “system 2”, if that makes sense. but it’s hard to say if those other aspects won’t spontaneously emerge with scale. then again, are there easier ways to develop those systems? like, maybe symbolic reasoning will emerge, but why not just wire in our existing systems that do it?

@mekkaokereke i’ve been trying to do more to negotiate between the needs of critters and my squeamish daughters. i try my best to relocate bees, wasps and spiders without killing them

“One House Republican called the incident "vile" and said it has caused concern among GOP lawmakers.”

anonymous coward, show thyself!

https://www.axios.com/2024/05/22/rnc-vials-blood-capitol-police-suspicious

i took a picture of my daughter’s math assignment and #gpt4o completely it with 100% accuracy. i had a talk with her about how these tools for cheating will always be available to her, but if she uses them she won’t learn.

thought: she’s doing this math because she wants to. what happens when she’s assigned work, and the cheat way seems more attractive?

this is a tough time to be a kid

@futurebird ha, BLAS and LAPACK are written in fortran and almost all linear algebra libraries use them for array operations, e.g. numpy. so there’s a chance several of the programs you use are running fortran, especially anything ML/AI related

Let’s be honest, if you’re a software engineer, you know where all this compute and power consumption is going. While it’s popular to blame #LLMs, y’all know how much is wasted on #docker, microservices, overscaled #kubernetes, spark/databricks and other unnecessary big data tech. It’s long past time we’re honest with the public about how much our practices are hurting the climate, and stop looking for scapegoats https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-staggering-ecological-impacts-of-computation-and-the-cloud/

@HistoPol the origins of the word are "using it for something it wasn't designed to do"

e.g. here i used cardboard for a guitar stand https://hachyderm.io/@kellogh/111721658155606039

when i say "i'm hacking", it's that kind of ad hoc solo building.

programming on a SCRUM team is more about the team itself. at some point, it's less about the code you write or the things you create, and more about how the rest of the team can work on it. it's a different skill, the fact that code is involved is incidental

i use the word “hack” a lot to mean “writing code”. it’s been used that way a long time, but it’s still not common. i like it, because the sort of code i write when i’m hacking does indeed have a lot of overlap with the infiltration kind of hacking, in that it often starts from, “i wonder how this thing works”, and evolves from there. the other kind is also about building as well, in a different way. btw “hacking” is distinct from SCRUM board coding

@twilliability It's pretty cool. I think it's potentially the start of a big trend https://timkellogg.me/blog/2024/01/03/birb (that has an RSS feed too :blobfox:)

e-bikes are urban 4-wheelers

such a high quality take on trust and #AI. there’s interpersonal trust and social trust, and confusing them leads to breakdowns in society. the solution is to regulate them the people creating AI, not AI itself https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/12/ai-and-trust.html

@BillySmith @inthehands @jmeowmeow The flaw of averages? https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-force-discovered-the-flaw-of-averages.html

@inthehands @jmeowmeow I'm a huge fan of Waldorf education. They bake in curiosity from the very beginning. At all ages it's all about recognizing where the kid is at and meeting them there, using creativity & engaging them in stories. They really don't spend much time on math & reading/writing, but when they do spend time on it, the kids soak it up like a sponge