Archimedes

Karma: 416

Archimedes 12 Jul 2024 21:57 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Dweomite’s comment on: Pantheon Interface

Even for people who understand your intended references, that won’t prevent them from thinking about the evil-spirit association and having bad vibes.

Being familiar with daemons in the computing context, I perceive the term as whimsical and fairly innocuous.

Archimedes 5 Jul 2024 4:37 UTC
12 points
9
on: AI #71: Farewell to Chevron
The section on Chevron Overturned surprised me. Maybe I’m in an echo chamber, but my impression was that most legal scholars (not including the Federalist Society and The Heritage Foundation) consider the decision to be the SCOTUS arrogating yet more power to the judicial branch, overturning 40 years of precedent (which was based on a unanimous decision) without sufficient justification.

I consider the idea that “legislators should never have indulged in writing ambiguous law” rather sophomoric. I don’t think it’s always possible to write law that is complete, unambiguous, and also good policy. Nor do I think Congress is always the best equipped to do so. I don’t fully trust government agencies delegated with rulemaking authority, but I have much less trust that a forum-shopped judge in the Northern District of Texas is likely to make better-informed decisions about drug safety than the FDA.

FWIW, I haven’t really thought much about Loper as it relates to AI, tech, and crypto specifically. The consequences of activist judges versus the likes of the DOJ, CDC, FDA, and EPA are mostly what come to mind. Maybe it’s attention bias given recent SCOTUS decisions versus more limited memory of out-of-control agencies but I feel uneasy tilting the balance of power toward judicial dominance.

Archimedes 5 Jul 2024 1:53 UTC
1 point
0
on: The Potential Impossibility of Subjective Death
This is similar to the quantum suicide thought experiment:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortality
Check out the Max Tegmark references in particular.

Archimedes 21 Jun 2024 3:55 UTC
11 points
0
on: Actually, Power Plants May Be an AI Training Bottleneck.
[Epistemic status: purely anecdotal]
I know people who work in the design and construction of data centers and have heard that some popular data center cities aren’t approving nearly as many data centers due to power grid concerns. Apparently, some of the newer data center projects are being designed to include net new power generation to support the data center.
For less anecdotal information, I found this useful: https://sprottetfs.com/insights/sprott-energy-transition-materials-monthly-ais-critical-impact-on-electricity-and-energy-demand/

Archimedes 21 Jun 2024 3:47 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: William_S’s comment on: Claude 3.5 Sonnet
I can definitely imagine them plausibly believing they’re sticking to that commitment, especially with a sprinkle of motivated reasoning. It’s “only” incremental nudging the publicly available SOTA rather than bigger steps like GPT2 --> GPT3 --> GPT4.

Archimedes 19 Jun 2024 14:36 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Unnamed’s comment on: [Linkpost] Transcendence: Generative Models Can Outperform The Experts That Train Them
Exactly. All that’s needed for “transcendence” is removing some noise.

I highly recommend the book Noise by Daniel Kahneman et al on this topic.

Archimedes 16 Jun 2024 19:22 UTC
−1 points
0
on: Thoughts on Francois Chollet’s belief that LLMs are far away from AGI?
My hypothesis is that poor performance on ARC is largely due to lack of training data. If there were billions of diverse input/output examples to train on, I would guess standard techniques would work.

Efficiently learning from just a few examples is something that humans are still relatively good at, especially in simple cases where system1and system 2 synergize well. I’m not aware of many cases where AI approaches human level without orders of magnitude more training data than a human ever sees in a lifetime.

I think the ARC challenge can be solved within a year or two, but doing so won’t be super interesting to me unless it breaks new ground in sample efficiency (not trained on billions of synthetic examples) or generalization (e.g. solved using existing LLMs rather than a specialized net).

Archimedes 29 May 2024 0:30 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Bohaska’s comment on: Level up your spreadsheeting
Ah, I was under the impression that OP was covering both, not only things relevant to Google Sheets.

Archimedes 26 May 2024 17:11 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Bohaska’s comment on: Level up your spreadsheeting
Ah, I do see the LET function now but I still can’t find a reference to the Power Query editor.

Archimedes 26 May 2024 5:50 UTC
7 points
0
on: Is there an idiom for bonding over shared trials/trauma?
There doesn’t appear to be an existing term that neatly fits. Here are some possibilities:
One-word terms:
Traumaraderie (portmanteau of “trauma” and “camaraderie”)
Two-word terms:
Stress bonding (a technique for bonding rabbits)
Trauma bonding (this is sometimes used to mean bonding between victims even though it also means bonding between victim and abuser in other contexts)
Trauma kinship
Survivor bond
Longer terms:
Friendship forged in fire
Shared trauma bonding
Mutual suffering solidarity
Camradery through adversity

Archimedes 26 May 2024 5:09 UTC
1 point
0
on: Level up your spreadsheeting
~~I’m surprised to see no mention of the~~ ~~LET function~~ ~~for making formulas more readable.~~
Another glaring omission is Power Query in Excel. I find it incredibly useful for connecting to data sources and transforming data. It’s easily auditable as it produces steps of code for table transformations rather than working with thousands of cells with individual formulas.
When it comes to writing about spreadsheets, it’s just about impossible to even skim the surface without missing anything, especially considering many aspects like array formulas, VBA macros, pivot tables with DAX measures, and Power Query can go super deep. I own a 758-page textbook just on Power Query and multiple books on Power Pivot / DAX.

Archimedes 13 Apr 2024 3:54 UTC
2 points
1
on: Math-to-English Cheat Sheet
Some of these depend on how concise you want to be. For example,

“Partial derivative with respect to x of f of x, y” may be shortened to “partial x, f of x, y”.

Conciseness is more common when speaking if the written form is also visible (as opposed to purely vocal communication).

Archimedes 4 Mar 2024 23:23 UTC
4 points
0
on: Anthropic release Claude 3, claims >GPT-4 Performance
AI Explained already has a video out on it:

The New, Smartest AI: Claude 3 – Tested vs Gemini 1.5 + GPT-4

Archimedes 24 Feb 2024 3:02 UTC
7 points
4
on: Why you, personally, should want a larger human population
Supposing humanity is limited to Earth, I can see arguments for ideal population levels ranging from maybe 100 million to 100 billion with values between 1 and 10 billion being the most realistic. However, within this range, I’d guess that maximal value is more dependent on things like culture and technology than on the raw population count, just like a sperm whale’s brain being ~1000x the mass of an African grey parrot’s brain doesn’t make it three orders of magnitude more intelligent.

Size matters (as do the dynamic effects of growing/shrinking) but it’s not a metric I’d want to maximize unless everything else is optimized already. If you want more geniuses and more options/progress/creativity, then working toward more opportunities for existing humans to truly thrive seems far more Pareto-optimal to me.

Archimedes 23 Feb 2024 22:04 UTC
3 points
0
on: When do “brains beat brawn” in Chess? An experiment
Leela now has a contempt implementation that makes odds games much more interesting. See this Lc0 blog post (and the prior two) for more details on how it works and how to easily play odds games against Leela on Lichess using this feature.
GM Matthew Sadler also has some recent videos about using WDL contempt to find new opening ideas to maximize chances of winning versus a much weaker opponent.
I’d bet money you can’t beat LeelaQueenOdds at anything close to a 90% win rate.

Archimedes 16 Jan 2024 2:23 UTC
9 points
15
in reply to: Alexandre Variengien’s comment on: The case for training frontier AIs on Sumerian-only corpus
Why not go all the way and use a constructed language (like Lojban or Ithkuil) that’s specifically designed for the purpose?

Archimedes 26 Dec 2023 21:18 UTC
21 points
4
on: Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims
All the pics and bragging about how wonderful their adventures were really rub me the wrong way. It comes across as incredibly tone deaf to the allegations and focusing on irrelevant things. Hot tubs, beaches, and sunsets are not so important if you’re suffering from deeper issues. Good relationship dynamics are way more important than scenery and perks, especially in a small group setting.

Archimedes 12 Dec 2023 3:29 UTC
3 points
0
on: When will GPT-5 come out? Prediction markets vs. Extrapolation
The markets you linked to roughly align with my intuition that GPT-5 before 2025 is likely, although maybe not fully released publicly.

Things to keep in mind:
1. We know that GPT-5 is officially in development.
2. The hype since ChatGPT went public is huge and competition is substantial.
3. Because of hype and competition, investment will be large in terms of dollars and talent.
4. There will be strong incentive to show a return on investment rather than holding back and waiting for something worthy of calling “GPT-5”.
Other than the amount of investment in next-gen models, most of my intuition is related to the human and marketing factors involved. OpenAI won’t want to lose its lead by waiting many years.

Archimedes 23 Nov 2023 2:16 UTC
12 points
11
in reply to: Tamsin Leake’s comment on: So you want to save the world? An account in paladinhood
That sounds rather tautological.

Assuming ratfic represents LessWrong-style rationality well and assuming LW-style rationality is a good approximation of truly useful instrumental reasoning, then the claim should hold. There’s room for error in both assumptions.

Archimedes 16 Oct 2023 22:52 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Vladimir_Nesov’s comment on: My AI Predictions 2023 − 2026
My hunch is that there’s sufficient text already if an AI processes it more reflectively. For example, each chunk of text can be fed through a series of LLM prompts intended to enrich it, and then the model trains on the enriched/expanded text.