Really? Apart from the one at the Moulin Rouge, I had a great time at all of the Christmas parties I've been invited to by my current employer. Of course getting with the vast majority of my colleagues helps.
Interesting, I did not know that. Sure helped create the massive urban sprawl that LA is today, I mean it's basically one city all the way to San Bernardino, almost 100 km to the east.
For Ukraine it's very much an existential war. If they lose, Ukraine will cease to exist. The only way of winning is, well, winning this war. It is also very much a real war, with hundreds of thousands of deaths on both sides, a true massacre not seen in Europe since WW2.
Trumps stupid war on Iran on the other hand is really just some air strikes, and Iran can win by just not losing, which is easy, because the US will not invade.
It's interesting how casually we replace concern for the population with concern for the political entity. No, the Ukrainian identity will not cease to exist with the replacement of the political entity.
What Russia has done in the past is take people who want to hold onto their old national identity and send them to labor camps far away where most will die, and migrate Russians to the areas so as generations go by Ukrainian identity would be fully gone.
Do you have a source for this? The closest thing I've heard of was vague reports of children being shipped to Russia. I'm not denying it has ever happened, but the question is what is the motivation, how systematic is it, etc.
Ask Ukrainians what they think about that. Putin made it more than clear that he wants to erase the Ukrainian identity. [1] In this case, the political entity of Ukraine represents the Ukrainian population, which wants to be free, democratic, Europe-oriented, and last but not least, never ever be under Russian dictatorship again.
Russias attitude towards Ukraine has turned borderline genocidal since the start of this war.
This bit is not about the stock, it‘s about bonds. They made about $70B (?) in the IPO and now issued bonds for about $25B. This debt is rated at junk level now.
True. This slide also struck me the most, but for the data it shows. Free cash flow for all the hyperscalers basically evaporated in the last couple of months, with Oracle in the minus. What does this mean?
I just had this thought:
This is the story of the Great Western Desert eXploration Railway Company. Let's call it WestX for simplicity. They are building a 2000 miles railway line from the east coast into the great western desert. There is nothing there in this desert, but its a great place to set up antennas. The place is called Sunshine Plateau. Unfortunately, there is also absolutely nothing on the entire 2000 miles going there, no water, no coal, no midwest, no great planes, no gold, just empty, barren desert. So every train going out there has to haul all the coal and water it needs for the 2000 miles trip along with it. It needs about 200 wagons of water and coal to pull one wagon of antenna stuff out into the desert, but in the future, they'll build an engine so powerful, it can haul 2000 wagons of coal and water into the desert along with 10 wagons of antennas. Its a big leap forward. In the future, this super steam engine will also be able to roll back to the east coast all on its own, because its all downhill from Sunshine Plateau. The antennas need replacement every couple of years, but there is enough demand for antenna signal to run the train operation at a small profit. Also, the government likes to place some spy stuff there every once in a while, also some science stuff, and every now and then a tourist takes the journey because the view from Sunshine Plateau is really great. But thats not all! In the future, once the super engine works perfectly as promised, they will not roll all of them back down to the east coast, but they will keep an entire train at Sunshine Plateau. Then they will haul a looot of trains with a looot of coal and water into the desert to refill this one single trains 2000 fuel wagons, so it can haul 10 wagons of stuff even further out into the desert. 10 wagons! Sadly, there is no California after the desert, just another desert named Moon Hole and then behind that another desert, named Mars Basin, but thats okay because there may be gold there to exploit. WestX just has to find a way to produce coal and water out in the desert to haul that potential gold back to the east coast. But thats still not all! WestX operates a newspaper where every jerk is allowed to publish racist stuff. It runs at a loss but that doesnt matter, because trains and newspapers go well together. There is also a new hype at the east coast, named thinking machines. They're amazing and are almost always right in their answers. Other companies are at the forefront with those thinking machines, but WestX also has a little sidehustle in this business, even though their thinking machines suck. BUT! They could install those thinking machines up on Sunshine Plateau! Takes only 2000 wagons of coal to put 10 wagons of thinking machines 2000 miles out there into the void, but there is a lot of sunshine up on the plateau. The competitors just install their superior thinking machines back at the east coast, where there is also sunshine, but also cheap coal and lots of other energy resources. Anyhow, thinking machines! The Great Western Desert eXploration Railway Company will soon open up to investors at the good old Wall Street and they value themselves at $15'000'000'000'000 to $20'000'000'000'000. Some grumpy naysayers say thats quite a lot of money for a railway company that doesn't make any profit, but if all their plans work out exactly as promised, you may even not make a loss! The founder, Elon Rockefeller, who is mostly busy publishing racist articles in his newspaper every single day, and also runs a horse carriage business, has a great track record of delivering on promises, and is a well respected man.
I fell for it a few minutes the other day. Debugging an issue with a device, the AI wrote "I have a strong hypothesis about the cause in the code". I asked it to write out the hypothesis & create a test plan to validate it. It made a test plan, but no hypothesis. The test plan did not reproduce the issue, and it turned out to be a hardware design problem not in the code at all. But for a moment in there I thought it actually had a hypothesis, I forgot that it's not thinking beyond what's written in the chat. Someone who was going to reproduce & fix a bug would probably write "I have a strong hypothesis about the cause" or similar, so it played along & wrote that.
If the hypothesis is not printed out in the context, then it cannot hold it past that turn. You could prompt it to generate said hypothesis first (or set of hypotheses), and only then act on them. And then things might work.
Definitely not exactly a human. OTOH Low hanging fruit is low.
You could reverse that argument. The only thing that ever happens in a human mind is a Sodium-Kalium semi-permeable membrane balancing out (meaning going from polarized to unpolarized) and triggering the tiniest of explosions spreading one of 4 chemicals around. Repeat a few billion times per second for ~80 years.
The Eliza effect is off the scale.
What I'm trying to say is that the underlying method is not a valid reason to discredit one thinking process over another.
I remain baffled that anyone thinks dragging brains into discussions of these things does anything but make everyone more confused. This kind of thing is exactly what I'm getting at—that it's common for even people in the computer technology field to think the comparison is apt, or illuminates anything, is a wild indication of how inclined we are to be tricked by computer programs that happen to operate on language.
You are baffled because of your own ignorance of the underlying principles under discussion. Do you believe in a dualist interpretation of reality, that the process of thinking is somehow nonphysical? That these programs operate on language is besides the point. The fact you think this is why it's interesting shows you don't even understand the argument.
Are you familiar with the physical church turing thesis?
The effect is not quite what you think it is, and people don't quite take the right lessons.
Similar to the eliza effect, people still take the original reading of Clever Hans: "he couldn't really do maths, he's just taking social cues from his handler"
But what's the actual difference between Eliza, Clever Hans and RLHF? They're doing the similar things, right?
Now look at how we valued that in the 20th vs 21st century:
How much does an ALU even cost anymore? even a really good one? (it's almost never separate anymore, usually on the same silicon as the rest of the cpu/microcontroller)
Meanwhile... what's the TCO to deploy a sentiment classifier? Especially a really good one?
Counterpoint: When is the last time you, as a human being, honestly did that?
This isn’t trying to be glib or contentious, it’s a commentary on the nature of human existence. If you have, then your answer will show it. If you have not, your silence or excuses will also.
All the time? This morning when I dreaded getting up so early for work. Last night when I showered. The day before after playing some board games with friends. Normal people do introspect, despite the current fad among a few oddball elites in Silicon Valley [0].
This article reads like it’s been proofread or written out from an outline or bullet points given to an AI. And ALMA’s own posts that it references are just meandering ramblings, they’re really a slog to get through.
I think I’ve always tended to immediately notice the signs of sloppy thinking in the writing style and it’s been such a reliable heuristic that AI writing kind of short circuits me. I tend to get down a couple of paragraphs before I pause and realize “Wait a minute, this isn’t SAYING anything!” Even when there is an underlying point the writing often feels like a very competent college student trying to streeeeeetch to hit a word count without wanting to actually flesh their idea out past the topic statement.
Thought is a derivative of sensory processing. LLM does not have a physical body to interact with the world, nor does it develop itself and learn anything by experiencing the world, it has no subjective experience or subjective feeling, it has no qualia, it's symbols are not grounded in physical reality and it's "thoughts" is a mere simulacrum. Anyone personifying an LLM is just derealised by convincing outputs, not realising that manipulating symbols according to rules does not imply understanding
I mean, there are still philosophers metaphorically fist fighting about this stuff. Last time I stepped into the fray on this topic I got clapped back by someone from an area of philosophy of mind from after I graduated. It was an interesting perspective that was unaware of, but I studied language, not mind:
> you randomly sample letters from the alphabet and those letters make up actual words, then actual sentences
That sounds like a decently apt description of how I (a human) communicate. The only thing is that I suppose you implied a uniform distribution, while my sampling approach is significantly more complicated and path-dependent.
But yes, to the extent that I have some introspective visibility into my cognitive processes, it does seem like I'm asking myself "which of the possible next letters/words I could choose would be appropriate grammatically, fit with my previous words, and help advance my goals" and then I sample from these with some non-zero temperature, to avoid being too boring/predictable.
"it" is also not "thinking". It is still randomly (though not all words are equal probabilities) sampling from a distribution of words that have been stolen and it been trained on
If "randomly sampling from a trained distribution" can't produce useful, meaningful output, then deterministic computation is even more suspect. After all, it's a strict subset. You're sampling with temperature zero from a handcrafted distribution.
(this post directionality ok, but there's many a devil in the details)
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