It definitely wasn't causation, the causation flows the other way (criminalizing a proxy for a political belief as an end run around the first amendment).
What you're describing is (pre-)training. Distillation requires richer labels, the probability distribution over tokens (it would be logits rather than probabilities but that's not important). From a chat transcript you can only understand the argmax/most likely token of that distribution (and only if the API allows you to set the temperature to 0). It's not impossible for an API to give you that but they won't if they don't want you distilling their models.
The intuition is that distillation exploits not only the "right" answer but the relationship between answers (what's the second most right answer? the third? etc).
If you dig into them you'll see there's lots of features that aren't adding new protocols. But incidentally they added a new protocol in March (mqtt). You'll also see that the list of bug fixes is prolific.
All of the low hanging fruit that could be discovered by self-funded gentlemen scientists has been picked. That doesn't scale to a supercollider or a large RCT. Funding at the whims of rich benefactors is very susceptible to petty politics.
Politics is irreducible from human affairs, privatization doesn't eliminate politics. It relocates it to a different set of actors. That could be a better set, but when it is it's because it's a more local and hands on group of people, not because those people happen not to work for the government. Governments are awkward because they are deep bureaucracies, and deep bureaucracies divorce the decision makers from the impact of their decisions. Weaker feedback leads to worse decision making. Not because there is a magic property of government that makes it uniquely bad. Large corporations, universities, and other deep non-governmental bureaucracies have similar pathologies.
That's something of an exaggeration, they are empowered to do violence and collect taxes and other things that are more problematic when abused, but still, privatization isn't a silver bullet.
>Politics is irreducible from human affairs, privatization doesn't eliminate politics. It relocates it to a different set of actors.
We ideologically privatised the water sector into regional private monopolies in the UK, and anyone who's had experience with the water monopolies knows this is the truth.
I don't know, maybe it's the way I was raised, but to me it just seems like common sense that a privatised monopoly is going to be worse in literally every metric imaginable, than maintaining public ownership - not just with regards to water and/or similar critial-to-life infrastructure, but everything in general. Highway 407, the most expensive toll road on the planet, is a prime reminder to Ontarians why privatisation is objectively bad.
I think you can in the limited sense it supports the idea privatisation doesn't remove politics, just relocates it and often into a less democratically accountable place to boot.
Whenever a person or group has power over another person or group, politics necessarily exists. I don't think this fact can be avoided, as much as advocates of privatisation often argue that it can be.
That sounds like excellent grounds for suspicious but I don't know what you mean. We were talking about Peter Higgs for example. I don't think Peter Higgs could have self funded CERN. I don't think a thousand Peter Higgs could have. Nation state level resources are the table stakes for fundamental research into particle physics, because everything beneath that barrier has already been explored - I don't think that's really controversial.
It's definitely an exaggeration to say that all science on a shoestring budget has already been accomplished, there are new frontiers out there. But once they start gaining momentum, the low hanging fruit will be consumed in due course. Methodically searching a domain works and works from the most tractable end up until it is at the frontier of what is tractable given our current technology/constraints.
I don't really understand the alternative hypothesis. That there's an infinite amount of low hanging fruit? What's this 100% failure rate?
The points your making make sense. I am thinking of it like this: Say there is an elegant argument. It checks out at first. Then you do the unit analysis, and find out the units don't match! But you still don't find the flaw in the original argument; maybe because it's suble in some way. That's where I am: Very smart people have been writing things in the vein of your post here for millenia, and it always seems convincing in the light of contemporary knowledge! Then is proven to be incorrect by major advancements.
Perhaps this will help: Indeed high energy physics is a very high budget project! But there are many areas of the natural sciences which are not high energy physics. This area has been a big deal over the past few decades, and I wonder if it's an over-commitment at the expense of other areas.
You can do many molecular bio lab techniques with a budget of $10k in equipment and reagents, for example. (If used/entry level) I believe there are also many areas in science, chem, and bio which can be done on a theoretical level, or with computers, etc.
Another angle: We are in the earliest steps of neuroscience. Many biology tools and techniques are borrowing something serendipitous we found in nature (CRISPR, TAQ polymerase etc, leveraging living cells' equipment to produce proteins etc). We have no concept of a general chemistry simulator. Molecular dynamics simulations can only work on very small systems for very small timescales, and are based on many approximations, and assumptions which provincialize them. We are very likely missing a big picture of the lower levels of GR/QM. It is very hard for me to agree with "Yep we're good; nothing left to discover here without really expensive equipment!".
Yeah, I agree. It works as an argument for why science can't rely on wealthy benefactors, not for understanding what is possible with a given budget at a given point in time. And biology and chemistry are good counterexamples where capabilities are getting smaller and cheaper.
I would point out that that's on the back of a huge amount of research funded by grants and performed in national labs, but it doesn't impact your argument.
> I don't think Peter Higgs could have self funded CERN. I don't think a thousand Peter Higgs could have
Higgs didn't use the LHC to write the paper which won him the Nobel prize.
Additionally, I think it's worth considering that the availability of the money that built the LHC alleviates the drive to find different solutions.
As they say, "necessity is the mother of invention." I frequently think of the great pyramids and people being baffled on how they would build something of that scale without modern equipment. It's hard to get your mind to come up with novel ideas when it already knows that you'd use cranes, trucks, etc. to do it today.
Why are you interpreting clear communication of a window of downtime with 2 weeks notice as a "lack of cooperation"? That's what cooperation looks like. It's not explicit but my read was that they're not even taking a vacation - they're just doing the rest of their job, a lot of which is probably going to be shipping fixes for vulnerabilities that are already triaged.
I don't know what a next generation CAPTCHA should look like, but I know anything game-shaped will be a trivial target for RLVR. That's like trying to beat Stockfish. That ship has sailed.
It's massive and complex codebase. From the looks of it, pretty much what you'd expect, lots of chores, work on the test suite, keeping docs up to date, bug fixes. I didn't see any new features on my light skim but I'm sure they land occasionally.
Atlas shrugged, but only for a month. I kid, it's well deserved. I do worry about their contract work loophole - if people disclose vulnerabilities publicly, their clients may pressure them to ship a fix anyway.
I've been noticing an unusual number of spuriously dead comments from accounts in good standing for a while now. My suspicion is false positives due to holding back the AI wave yet some of the casualties really don't seem to make any sense.
To be honest I don't think my account is in 100% good standing, but I can't say for certain. There's definitely some dead comments on my account that are deserved and I think there are some small limitations that are or have been placed on it (probably fairly). Mostly around flagging and vouching.
I think that if you get a certain number of comments flagged or downvoted within a certain time window, your account gets flagged as a spammer and has a permanent rate limit applied. Above another threshold, it gets shadowbanned. I think the length of the account's history is also relevant. But https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia
Yeah, I have seen several people who are completely shadowbanned (all comments dead) without any visible reason. There seems to be no way to report this.
Hmm. Interesting. If it was [dead], probably a false positive from a naughty comment filter; if it was [flagged][dead], difficult to say, potentially even an accident, or maybe people didn't like the joke. Given the non-negative karma, I would guess the first. Regardless, I appreciate the vouch.
That's fucked up. If those are your values, that's all well and good, but you can't expect someone else to make the same decision.
Job interviews are a performance where you demonstrate you understand what professional expectations are and can abide by them. It's not dishonesty to not respond "I drink too much" when they ask "what's your biggest weakness?" just like it's not dishonesty to respond "can't complain" when someone asks "how are you today," even if you have a lot to complain about.
Once I interviewed someone and they described their tax fraud scheme to me. We didn't go with that candidate. Not per se because they committed tax fraud; because they demonstrated terrible judgment.
Having any kind of integrity is expensive, financially, emotionally and sometimes physically.
Software development is not that high-stakes of a job anyway. There is always another interview. I got another one soon enough, where the employee AI policy fully aligned with mine, so telling the truth was an easy, pleasant experience.
Imagine you are a pilot or doctor. Any kind of interview reply that doesn't fully align with your values now carries a real risk for human lives.
What I'm telling you is that it isn't an issue of integrity, and that only makes sense from a false premise - that the strictest, most blunt response is what is truest, what is being asked for, or a reflection of your alignment with the organization's values. That's really not the case. If I asked you how you were doing would you tell me about the traumas you're currently processing? Would you feel like it was a violation of your integrity if you didn't?
If that's what your values are, okay, I'm not going to tell you how to live, but it would be premised on a misunderstanding of what "hi, how are you today?" means.
I am not worried about what my pilot said in a job interview, I'm worried about what the check pilot thinks of their performance. Worrying about what they said in a job interview is like worrying about what they scored on the SAT. Once that hurdle is cleared, it instantly becomes irrelevant, because it was never measuring what we're actually interested in. It's a filter for people who are completely unqualified, it doesn't really measure a level of performance or alignment.
Culture begins at the front door, corporate or personal.
I would expect absolute sincerity from pilot or a doctor during the interview, including history of mental health and professional mistakes. Authority over lives of people must come with full transparency. If you are caught lying or misrepresenting your experience and skills, not only you would lose your job, you should be blacklisted from occupation as well.
In every skill, everyone benefits from honesty, both employers and employees. But I am aware this is a minority view.
Again, while I respect that that is your view of sincerity, I don't agree, and I'm not talking about lying, which is obviously inappropriate. Framing is not the same as lying (though taken to an extreme it becomes a lie of omission). There's also just a misunderstanding of what is being asked by questions like "what's your biggest weakness?" Language can be ambiguous, just because a very literal and extreme interpretation of a question exists doesn't mean that is what is being asked.
I don't think we're going to bridge this gap but I also don't think that's really necessary. People have different values and it is what it is.
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