cubefox

I wonder whether this is more the fault of Hassabis or Pichai. They are clearly both less capable than Altman or Amodei.

I guess they meant to release Gemini 3.5 Pro shortly after 3.5 Flash, but then Mythos/Fable and later GPT-5.6 came out with higher performance than 3.5 Pro, so the managers decided not to release it.

Probably because you have too few upvoted comments. The rules likely got stricter when LLMs started to infiltrate Hacker News.

I think it's unintentional. People usually dislike any recognizable "AI look", but they do like other aspects which might have an unrealistic AI look as a side effect.

For example, Google's Imagen 3 usually looked a lot less fake than the newer Imagen 4, but the latter still scored higher on most benchmarks because it made fewer mistakes and had better prompt following capabilities.

A similar thing happened with Dalle-E 2 and Dell-E 3: The new model was better but also more fake looking.

I thought the multiplications during training (backpropagation) are quite computationally expensive. The method from the paper above doesn't need any multiplications.

Yes, I'm not committing the logical fallacy of confusing truth values and moral values.

Unrelated: The document viewer on this website has a semitransparent gradient at the top, which shows a pretty strong horizontal Mach band [1] at its bottom. Any ideas how to avoid these in CSS?

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_bands

There was also a NeurIPS paper which successfully trained 1-bit models directly without floating point weights or any quantization: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.16339

I didn't see any further work in this direction however. The paper seems to have been mostly overlooked.

One might gently recommend reading the "Political and social views" section

This obviously changes absolutely nothing about his status as greatest logician since Aristotle.

By the way, he is also the person who could be, more appropriately than anyone else, called "father of analytic philosophy", since he strongly influenced Russel, Wittgenstein and Carnap, all themselves major figures of early analytic philosophy, and wrote influential analytic philosophy classics like "On Sense and Reference" more than 130 years ago.

Michael Dummett (who was, according to an obituary, "among the most significant British philosophers of the last century and a leading campaigner for racial tolerance and equality") marked Frege's 1884 book "The Foundations of Arithmetic" as the beginning of analytic philosophy.

Is it just me or does this article have a lot of LLM-isms?

The greatest logician since Aristotle

Not to diminish Gödel's work, but the greatest logician since Aristotle was clearly Gottlob Frege, the inventor of modern predicate logic.

The graph actually peaked in 2014. That's a decade before AI became a thing while the Software engineering workforce grew a lot since then.

That's obviously because initially there were a lot of basic newbie questions to be asked, and those continued to be relevant in search results, so the amount of new questions went down over time, as there were fewer relevant unanswered questions left.

Everyone trumpeting the "bad SO moderation" angle is delusional. Stack Overflow was far better than conventional forums. Without LLMs, SO would have stayed popular, there is no doubt about it. The massive decline was clearly and obviously caused mainly by LLMs.

Progressive decoding isn't expected to speed up decoding, it's expected to speed up displaying large image files, especially for downloads via slow mobile connections.

Example: https://youtube.com/watch?v=UphN1_7nP8U

Interesting also that even this article doesn't mention "DRM" anywhere despite the fact that this is exactly the worst case scenario DRM critics have always warned about.

(Personally I would consider DRM okay if Sony's behavior here was illegal without a full refund.)

The fact that mathematicians cannot devise a method to factor that large product, despite large amounts of money and research time, is what’s valuable!

Well, programmers couldn't devise such a method either. You seem to assume that mathematicians are better than them at finding efficient algorithms, which isn't very plausible.

But even then your argument breaks down when you consider more complicated cryptographic structures.

Even if help of mathematics is needed there, applied — rather than pure — math might still be sufficient.

I doubt that pure mathematics can claim the success of cryptography. For example, no result from advanced mathematics is required to know that factoring the product of two large prime numbers is slow.

"useless" pure math often turns out to have scientific applications.

I don't think that's true for a reasonable interpretation of "often". I'm pretty sure the vast majority of pure math research is and remains useless.

Also, you're misusing the term "self-referential". You seem to mean that it's a closed system ... but it's not, since mathematicians interact with it.

Then which better term do you propose? The point was that its subject matter lies within itself, which is very different from science and philosophy.

so your argument ends up being circular --- useless math is useless.

It's not circular: You can replace "pure" with "useless" and the argument stays the same. I contrasted useless math with useless science and useless philosophy for a reason.

Finally: so what?

I'll just point out that "so what" is not a counterargument. If you agree with my point but find it unimportant: that's fine with me.

Solving Erdős problems seems at least as justifiable as finding the trillionth digit of pi or writing an Apple ][ emulator in Brainfuck or playing those video games that you demonize by calling them addictive.

The difference between achieving a new record for a video game, and pure math research, is that nobody is confused about what the former is: It's a game, or a sport. Speed runners or chess champions or pi digit calculators don't confuse themselves with noble researchers advancing the frontier of human knowledge.

It already had a browser. You don't need an app when you have a browser. The addiction is built-in as a latent capability.

There still seems to be a difference between useless pure math research and useless science or useless philosophy. Science, even useless science, still has a subject matter that is relevant to us independently of science, the real world. And philosophy studies concepts (like "knowledge") that occur in natural language and thought, and those concepts are relevant to us independently of philosophy. But pure math is entirely self-referential. Pure math abstractions are used only in pure math. Pure mathematics is relevant exactly to pure mathematics and those who study it.

This reminds me of certain simple but addictive video games: "What are these virtual coins good for?" "You can buy better equipment" "Why do you need this equipment?" "To get more virtual coins of course!"

The ad is not sexist, it's sexy/sexualized and humourous, which is something else. And of course it is from 2010, just before the great ... cultural shift.

https://x.com/a_green_being/status/2076598897779020159

Some of these correlations could be merely due to the "healthy vaccinee effect": https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/healthy-vaccinee-e...

Yes, though the above only addresses studies based on Zostavax. Shingrix might still offer some protection from dementia.

Maybe it's my brain fried first by internet then by the smartphone.

Same. I started to read significantly less once I had a PC with Internet access. Also stopped playing video games. Then, with smartphones, I stopped reading books altogether.

Schopenhauer made a similar point in his essay "On Reading and Books".

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Books_and_Reading

https://fs.blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Arthur-Schopenhau...

That's crazy speed!

Avoid even audiobooks. Big corporations want to grab your attention by trying to market audiobooks as books for busy people, but don’t fall for the trap. A book is just boring black text on a white page because that’s how it’s meant to be consumed, and it requires your entire attention. Listening to audio while cooking or cleaning or whatever you do is not the same thing; you are not 100% concentrated on the content. Also, reading is faster than listening, so use your time wisely.

Most of the evidence of its anti-dementia effect relates to an earlier version of the vaccine, which used a weakened form of the live virus. It has since been largely replaced by a new one, Shingrix, which contains just a sprinkling of proteins from the virus and is seen as safer because it cannot cause an infection.

Unfortunately the apparent anti-dementia effect of this old vaccine (Zostavax) recently turned out to be a statistical illusion: https://youtube.com/watch?v=qlTnnQytOJ0

It is not clear whether the effect from Shingrix (the new one) is real or not. We currently don't have a case-control study which could prove causation.