Deborah

You just defined a GAN, which (1) good for you! and (2) since it’s one of the gold standards of generative AI with buckets of cash poured into it and we are where we are in terms of safety and accuracy, I assure you that it is, in fact, that hard.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network

You understand that even LLM’s boosters would describe it the same way I did, right? I hate the damn thing, they adore it, but we all agree on the facts: it’s not a data retrieval system, it’s a statistical pattern generator.

I love coming in and seeing I don’t even need to reply, all y’all are already at it.

Sure, if by “database” you mean “tool that takes every cell in every table, calculates their likelihood of those cells appearing near each other, and then discards the data”. Which is a definition of “database” that stretches the word beyond meaning.

Natural language inputs for data retrieval have existed for a very long time. They used to involve retrieving actual data, though.

@dgerard I think it’s the same DB just with extra tooling and services, but I’m not positive.

@dgerard @rinze I host mattermost. It’s mostly used by my puzzle hunt team and the various satellite teams that spin up around it (so very intensively used a few times a year), and then the rest of the year it’s a quiet social space.

They really push you toward the corporate offerings; I think those get a lot of dev effort.

I don’t love it but it’s fine. My primary gripes are mostly that it so extremely slacklike that all the places where it’s lacking compared to slack are very noticeable.

But… how can this be? I have been reliably informed by reply guys surfing in from elsewhere that “LLMs don’t work that way” and “you poor dears don’t understand how tokenizing works” and “it’s just statistically likely that they’ll regurgitate certain text, there’s no plagiarism involved”. Are all our reply guys wrong??? Heaven to Betsy!

P-hacking As A Service

This is the point, exactly. It’s not even that it’s self harm, which even the community recognizes. If that it creates active workplace hazards. Even in a completely remote environment, I wouldn’t want to be a software developer with this guy, because if he came up with a perfect algorithm that broke the build, he would keep moving forward, because the point was the algorithm, and not the fact that prod went down.

LWers read that post and said “you might be bipolar!” I read that post and said “I’m going to search your post history and find you ‘acquiring’ ADHD meds, aren’t I?”

Guess what I absolutely found?

(To be fair when I looked, from his symptom description it looks like he does have ADHD, but he also talks about mucking with his ritalin dose, taking OTC stimulants, & biohacking, in conversation with people who clearly don’t have ADHD but take the meds.)

I have to create a new awful.systems account and read from there, so I stop seeing these weenies’ replies after they get banned. The purified experience is the Awful™️experience.

Speaking as a librarian, you’re a mistaken. It is actually incredibly difficult for most people to know how to verify that a source both exists and says what your unreliable informant claims they say.

Meanwhile medium sized & large law firms have their own librarians (at least in the US), and in many places lawyers from smaller firms have access to some kind of outsourced research service. The easiest solution in the world is to ask the expert researchers whose cost is billable to the client.

Wikipedia informs me that your diet includes squid, anchovies, mackerel, rockfish, and sardines. Yum yum!

Or when you’re singing karaoke and suddenly break into a chorus of the phone number and email address of a random author of a scholarly paper whom you’ve never met whose paper has nothing to do with the lyrics of “Free Bird“?

How is a human being different from running cat my\_textbook.txt? Checkmate! Give Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie billions of dollars, for they have invented artificial general intelligence, and now we may all have robot girlfriends.

holy shit I assumed you meant phrenology in the synecdochic sense like when we say “man, andrew sullivan’s gotten out the calipers again, sigh” but no, you meant literal phrenology what the actual.

JFC I avoid AGI boosters mostly so I’m always aghast when I’m reminded of what they believe. HN commenter says (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40365850) AGI will bring:

Solve CO2 Levels
End sickness/death
Enhance cognition by integrating with willing minds.
Safe and efficient interplanetary travel.
End of violent conflicts
Fair yet liberal resource allocation (if still needed), “from scarcity to abundance”

I mean can you imagine them at any fandom con?

…oh wait i can

Figma is an angry god’s judgement upon me for something. Atheism, probably, or maybe that time I stole a peanut when I was eight.

I have a coworker who uses Figma as a spreadsheet and it saps me of the will to live.

People use it for “wireframes” (read: mockups without any of the useful features of a wireframe). It’s one of those pieces of crap that encourages people to keep adding new images to one mega, unsorted, non-navigable, non-paginated massive screen. It’s *awful*.

Matt Levine:

> ‘"We build a giant casino for crypto gambling, steal the money and use it to buy a castle for effective altruist philosophers” is even weirder? Like that’s a good assignment for a philosophy class?’

and

> ‘Fine right FTX didn’t actually buy them the castle, but now they have to sell the castle after paying back the money that FTX did give them. Probably that was for mosquito nets.’

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-05-09/bed-bath-strikes-from-the-beyond

https://archive.is/qw1uf