abra0

Finally! I had to set up a container with X on my headless server to get a few text files reliably synced, crazy stuff.

This is a really fun problem! I suggest anyone who likes optimization in a very broad sense to try their hand at it. Might be the most fun I've had while interviewing. I had to spend a week-worth of evenings on it to fully scratch the itch, and I managed to get 1112 cycles. But that was mostly manual, before the current crop of agentic models (clopus 4.5, gpt5.2). I wonder how far you can RalphWiggum it!

Here: https://excel-esports.com/product/world-of-warcraft-mewc-202...

You're supposed to do a $0 checkout for some reason and then download them

MTG-S1 is the first geostationary meteorological sounder satellite to fly over Europe

I was confused for a minute on how it's both _geostationary_ and _over Europe_ -- you can't be geostationary if your orbit is not over the equator!

Turns out[1] the MTG-S1 satellite is in fact geostationary and parked at exactly 0°00'00"N 0°00'00"E (off the coast of Ghana), 42164 km up from the center of Earth, it's just pointing at Europe at an angle.

1 - https://space.oscar.wmo.int/satellites/view/mtg_s1

Tbh it still puzzles me why gameplay degradation specifically was chosen as a way to try to discourage piracy. I imagine many more people hit the degradations, thought the game was just buggy and abandoned it, compared to people who were motivated by bad gameplay to give the developers money.

The mindfuck angle is pretty effective though. This article wouldn't have been written otherwise.

The real question is whether these side-effects are going to be worse than 20 years of not taking it.

That's where I am too right now for personal projects, and I ended up reimplementing parts of Dokuploy for that, but I don't feel much of a need to move from "fun little docker compose" for some reason

That's a great point! I'd agree that just the extra emotional motivation from having your own thing is worth a ton. I get some distance down that way by having a large RAM no GPU box, so that things are slow but at least possible for random small one offs.

Well if you are not using a rented machine during a period of time, you should release it.

Agreed on reliability and data transfer, that's a good point.

Out of curiosity, what do you use a 2x3090 rig for? Bulk not time-sensitive inference on down quanted models?

I was thinking of doing something similar, but I am a bit sceptical about how the economics on this works out. On vast.ai renting a 3x3090 rig is $0.6/hour. The electricity price of operating this in e.g. Germany is somewhere about $0.05/hour. If the OP paid 1700 EUR for the cards, the breakeven point would be around (haha) 3090 hours in, or ~128 days, assuming non-stop usage. It's probably cool to do that if you have a specific goal in mind, but to tinker around with LLMs and for unfocused exploration I'd advise folks to just rent.

The third effort is referred to sometimes as AI not-kill-everyone-ism, a tacky and unwieldy term that is unlikely to be co-opted or lead to the unproductive discussion like around the OP article.

It is pretty sad to read people bash together the efforts to understand and control the technology better and the companies doing their usual profit maximization.

More effort spent on early commercialization like keeping ChatGPT running might mean less effort on cutting edge capabilities. Altman was never an AI safety person, so my personal hope is that Anthropic avoids this by having higher quality leadership.

rightfully so

How the hell can people be so confident about this? You describe two smart people reasonably disagreeing about a complicated topic

If there's a lot of smoke coming, people are running out of the building and you can see an ominous red glow in the windows, shouting "FIRE" is the right thing to do even if we are not going to be engulfed in flames this very second or the next. The potential costs given the evidence we all have are simply not comparable.

Bonus question on O-1: what do you think are the easiest boxes to check for a talented professionals in AI? High salary and critical capacity for established organizations are a given, but what else?

Could some knowledge have been finetuned into it, and be outside of the prompt?

Great to see investment in the most alignment-conscious of the AI orgs.

What are the tools people use to draw diagrams? I've tried many things and settled on Miro on an iPad (infinite canvas + pencil), but I still think this space is underinvested in.

The downside of diagrams from code is the loss of the wysiwyg aspect -- I want to be able to manipulate things visually.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Knightsofthebutton/comments/38q9x5/...

It was quite popular for a surprisingly long time.

Hah, that's a blast from the past. One reason it lasted as long as it did was the Knights of the Button, users who collaborated to keep it alive. I implemented the Zombie-presser, 1k+ donated accounts automatically pressing the button when no one else would. We kept it alive for a more then a month before the most embarrassing bug of my career finally killed it :D Good summary here [1].

Fun times! Thank you for the reminder :D

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jun/08/reddits-m...

GPT-4 has 32k tokens of context. I'm sure someone out there is implementing the pipework for it to use some as a scratchpad under its own control, in addition to its input.

In the biological metaphor, that would be individual memory, in addition to the species level evolution through fine-tuning

I'm not sure exactly what the ask here is.

In contrast, for our own Entity Recognition models we can (and do) calculate probabilities that explain why a certain entity is shown.

Hence, I think for API users of GPT3, OpenAI should return additional statistics why a certain result is returned the way it is to make it really useful and more importantly compliant.

For LLMs, you can get the same thing: the distribution of probabilities for the next token, for each token. But right now we cannot say why the probabilities are the way they are, same goes for your image recognition models.

Well, it should attract less investment, because presumably companies that do not value caution will capture more value.

Reading this thread makes me depressed about the potential for AI alignment thinking to reach mainstream in time :(

I'm talking more about the impact that AI will have generally. As a completely outside view point, the latest trend is so weird, it's made Bing the center of the conversation. What next?

It seems that with higher temp it will just have the same existential crisis, but more eloquently, and without pathological word patterns.

Take a snapshot of your skepticism and revisit it in a year. Things might get _weird_ soon.

I have a growing pile of very different theories concerning the layoffs (actual cost cutting, irrational investor pressure, copycat behavior, systemic risk, AI risk, etc.etc.). The article wasn't particularly interesting, it basically argued hurr durr, big tech leadership is incompetent and is just winging it.

Your comment has a new angle, but it only says how, not why. To paraphrase, layoffs are a way to fire white people in middle management in favor of women minorities. But why is that so?

Great link, and a superlatively germaine usance of the locution "apposite"! :)

GPT only got a good placement on Day 3 Part 1. It seems to not have been very useful in any other days (except for people maybe using Copilot).