HN user
You might enjoy “Motel of the Mysteries” then, a large format illustrated paperback that I grew up with, which showed some hilarious conclusions about 1980s ‘culture’ by some future-millennia archaeologists. They conclude for instance that the TV box is an object of worship because all the architecture in the motel is designed around or points toward it!
Interestingly, there was an artist a few years back who (for an unrelated project) had almost 400 people across a range of ages draw a bicycle and 75% of those faced left! So this seems to actually go slightly against the human drawing intuition.
https://www.gianlucagimini.it/portfolio-item/velocipedia/
On the other hand, I notice that the prompt says to draw a pelican riding a bicycle, implying motion... and since most of us read left to right, I think it's usually natural to draw an object in motion moving left to right as well, which means the bicycle should be facing right. So maybe that specific setup is more natural here.
Either way, for humans bicycles are actually really hard to draw from memory. In fact, I substitute teach, and sometimes as an activity I have my students draw bicycles from memory in 60 seconds. Most make pretty serious errors, usually the frame or chain connections: they can tell it's wrong but still can't draw a more correct one. I use it as an object lesson about the difference between recognition and recall - most students never realize that much of their studying can end up being the former, when tests and life almost always ask for the latter. This helps explain why many students go from "that makes perfect sense" when going over review problems to a total mind blank only a few minutes later (especially in math!).
Similar here. I saw an email wanting the 20 bucks to continue and I outright laughed. There’s no planet on which that plan offers equivalent value to the OpenAI or Anthropic equivalents.
They might have success if they tried maybe a 12-15 dollar tier.
I wouldn’t say “literally” every industry: stuff like clothing, shipbuilding, consumer electronics assembly, certain rare earth raw materials, all we have pretty little participation in. But these are as you point out the exceptions that prove the rule.
I knew reddit was in its terminal phase when I started seeing FarmVille-style ads for some stupid reddit homegrown minigame in the top right of new reddit
Or this one as an example of a YouTube programming creator who uses a teleprompter i think quite cleverly as a way to have his eyes centered on the camera/webcam https://youtu.be/IG-H5poJMvY
Conversely, I read a lot of fantasy webnovels, and “discrete” shows up all the time when they mean “discreet” (which is 90% of the time what a normal author wants). It is legitimately my pet peeve.
DENSE_RANK() vs RANK() claims another victim
You can to some extent model a flexible number of conversations in a room in terms of a kind of graph theory: duration, number of participants, correlations or overlap between participants, and so on. The assertion here is that those particulars change the fundamental nature of what is taking place. Though “kinetics” or “mechanics” are probably more apt terms for the framework of those interactions, I see no reason to dismiss it out of hand.
To be fair, if you pay the repairman, your elevator also goes up :)
I think in general the model makers and to some extent their clients want a slightly higher pass rate over efficiency. This makes sense: for critical first week impressions clients notice pass rate much more, and only later start to grapple with cost. For example this is why High is the default reasoning for Fable, not Medium, and that choice of priorities propagates throughout the stack.
Looks to be within the realm of natural variance expected from naturally variable models, ie error bars.
Another somewhat similar concept is how you can write Quarto markdown notebooks and have them output a RevealJS slideshow
Oh very interesting, I didn’t realize I should probably be using Fable Medium more than High, due to how that curve and the cost looks!
Beat me to it. The Wikipedia page for example looks like an advertisement for tutoring firms, and when you dig into the sources, it’s pretty oversold
I really never thought it would come up in a HN thread but I’m actually working on a modified version of Anki as a personal project (not quite ready yet though, but will open source probably in a few weeks) where improving the editing/curating/creating experience is a big focus. I’m trying to make it markdown-based too.
Just to pick your brain real fast, when creating new cards (from scratch?) what would a better experience look like for you?
The tricky question at the forefront of education research is, at least in my mind, trying to thread the needle between effective techniques that students don’t like, ineffective techniques that students do like, and poorly defined techniques that administrators like. And on top of all that student self-reports aren’t actually very reliable indicators of learning progress at all!
I think the book Superlearning just gives the simple rule that you should spend 10% of your budgeted time on meta concerns (what to learn, what order, what strategies to use, etc) and that’s always seemed a sensible, good-enough default that takes away the doubt. Knowing how deep to go is, as you point out, only half the battle unfortunately, but the rule helped me at least.
Except the same companies have shown (see: closure of the DS online storefront) it's still an issue, just 20 years delayed instead of 10. Sure, it's better, but it's not good. I'll still take it of course, but we need to pressure lawmakers to set up something more fair and stable.
There are different grades of vendor lock-in. There's mechanical lock-in (which is a thing, like .claude folders) and economic lock-in but then we don't pay enough attention to behavioral lock-in. Habit is powerful, and if you can habituate users into a certain flow, change feels bad and they are more likely to stay.
It didn't stop all of Facebook's behavior, far from it, but we did get to see Zuckerberg hauled in front of Senate committees multiple times (who we do vote for).
This has never happened in China, and will never happen, nor anything like it. Some open oversight is almost always better than possible secret oversight (and do you think that the Chinese government has user privacy on even its top 10 priorities?)
Has anyone created a tool for easily doing this? Imagine if all the Virginia Guiffres of the world created crypto-provable diaries they could later reveal.
Bombs are a bit of a non sequitur here. The point is that Chinese companies are demonstrably hostile to American ones historically (and threatening in some specific structural ways to the American consumer). The presentation may be similar but to attribute American ethics to a Chinese decision is dubious.
Yes you can! Well, mostly, depends on how pedantic you are with definitions: you can transplant layers but not weights, which in common parlance are conceptually similar. But usually it isn’t a good idea for a few reasons.
There’s a really fascinating example[1] where a guy identifies a particular set of layers and transplants them. Overgeneralizing, early layers are encoders and the later layers are decoders and in the middle some blocks seem to do specific things or tasks related “reasoning”. So you can actually create a FrankenLLM and it sometimes works.
This needs architectures to be roughly similar however and internal representations to be consistent-ish so for “stealing” it’s not really a thing (other practical concerns aside)
I’m not normally one for doom and gloom, everything is getting worse kind of thinking. However, one observation from the past few years in particular is exactly that thing, a specific kind of faulty media literacy.
Someone will read Lord of the Flies, for example, and come to the conclusion that it says something real about human nature. No dude, it’s just a story. Someone made it up. It’s not real. It can be interesting and insightful, even a useful mental framework or thought experiment, but it’s not proof or evidence at all! But I increasingly see people treat fiction as if it’s real things that actually happened, and that worries me.
It might be irrational but ticks terrify me (grew up in the Northwest where they aren’t so much a thing) and make me want to avoid moving to the East entirely
If they have a year sub, then yes I agree (even if it’s implicitly always part of the risk of buying so far in advance) but if they are month to month this position is absolutely nonsensical.
Memory? Doubt it.
But I’m hopefully optimistic that we’ll see a renewed emphasis on speed and responsiveness, since users do notice that despite most products ignoring it.
To be fair, the US has long followed a model prioritizing district-level control, this isn’t anything new.
It’s not just critical thinking skills, it’s also that there’s a big difference between recognition/following instructions, and recall/generating your own memories of an approach. But most students don’t recognize the difference. In other words, “following the route” is a big part of the problem - it doesn’t engage the brain the same and isn’t representative of real world use, and having something explained well doesn’t mean you can in turn explain it well yourself (the more revealing test of internalized true understanding)