dragonwriter

The frontier is a multidimensional space defined by the “best” combination of traits a model can have in multiple dimensions: parameter size [smaller is better], various task metrics, and relative token generation speed on like hardware [faster is better], and active memory requirements [smaller is better] are all possible dimensions, and a model on the frontier of the current options space is one where getting better on one of those measures cannot be done without getting worse on at least one of the others.

apart from gecko and v8 why dont we have browser engines?

You mean apart from Gecko and Blink (v8 is a JS engine, not a browser engine.)

But we do, for open source engines we also have WebKit and NetSurf and some others.

Maybe so, but you clearly aren’t a representative sample of corporate decision-makers when it comes to AI (or broader IT) services.

That's a losing proposition for any token provider

The specialized models for targeted verticals being discussed may well not be sold by tokens, but instead be behind the scenes powering dedicated packaged solutions where the customers don't have raw access to the model. Token providers still won’t have a moat, but AI isn't just selling tokens.

Uh, while the sale to the Oracle-led group was government mandated, the use of Oracle Cloud for hosting by the new US TikTok is just self-dealing by the new ownership.

Of course, when your “customers” are just self-dealing, that’s also not a great sign.

Also, even knowing both what will happen and when is a separate thing from having access to capital. You can't really tell that someone posting that hasn't already also taken the biggest leveraged position they can (unless that person is so rich that doing so would itself visibly move the market, which most people who might post comments are not.)

Pretty sure Google fits any definition of major model maker that SpaceX does, and had their IPO long before SpaceX.

Meta and Microsoft both are also significant makers of GenAI models that are public, though neither has a big tentpole LLM line that they sell access.to commercially like OpenAI, Anthropic. Google, SpaceX, which I infer might be what you mean by major model maker.

Maybe so, but this story is about a phenomenon more related to NorCal’s Silicon Valley than the SoCal porn capital that sometimes gets called by a name that is an intentional mockery of the NorCal one, referencing a common component of breast implants rather than the substrate for computer chips.

“Banana republic” is specifically a term referring to countries that are puppets of the United States on behalf of commercial interests (the trope-naming example being Gautemala on behalf of United Fruit Company); in the absence of an imperial power pulling US strings on behalf of that powers’ commercial interests which dominated the US economy, it would be hard for the US to be reasonably described as going the direction of a “banana republic”.

What it is more going the way of a major power resenting a weakened position in the world falling into authoritarian and/or kleptocratic nationalist dictatorship leaning on the propaganda of restoring national greatness, somewhere between Hitler’s Germany and Putin’s Russia, which is a very different situation than a banana republic.

Ultimately, as a member of a legislative body, if you don’t like the way the executive bodies charged with inplementing a law are doing so, your choices are:

(1) Work with other members of the legislative body to hold the executive accountable for failures, via hearings, sanctions (often, if at the same level, including removal), etc., or

(2) Work with the same body to file a lawsuit as a body to compel compliance, which has additional enforcement provisions (including contempt orders by the court for noncompliance) not available with the bare law and no court case,

(3) Taking any avenue open to the public at large (including individual lawsuits, public advocacy including including electoral advocacy against any elected executive officers involved, etc.).

What is not generally an option is unilaterally assuming the role legally assigned to the executive in inplementing the law, or simply assuming whatever other powers you imagine are best to realize the intent of the law even if they are outside of its letter.

So what else are you suppose to do? I think it's reasonable to decide that if no one is enforcing the new local law, that it may be the commissioners purview and authority to enforce after exhausting all his options.

County commissioners are generally legislative officers. While the legislative body is smaller, this really no different than a member of Congress deciding that the they don’t like the way DOJ is enforcing federal law and deciding that gives them arbitrary power to take whatever action they feel is appropriate to manifest the intent of the law.

The purpose of a college degree is NOT a job... but the purpose of a college LOAN is 100% a job, and it's very important to differentiate between the two.

No, the purpose of a college loan is to enable a student to pay for college with future earnings. It can be perfectly rational even if the loan/degree doesn't improve job prospects (and even more especially so if it doesn’t “improve” them in a purely financial sense that ignores the borrower’s actual utility function.)

The purpose of this test (like the special accounting rules imposed on the postal service) is not to better fulfill the purpose of a college degree or the purpose of a college loan. The purpose of the test is to increase the administrative compliance cost of participating in the college loan program as a means of stifling the program. Like the special accounting rules imposed on the Postal Service, its how you use the political power you have to chip away at a public program that you feel is too popular to abolish directly.

You have the right to a degree in XYZ... you should NOT have the right to a taxpayer backed grant/aid/loan/whatever to gain said degree unless you're on a reasonable path to become a tax payer yourself as soon as you are done with the degree.

You have an inherent right to neither, but while any public policy must observe rights, it need not be limited to them.

That’s trivially false in the case where “math” or “programming” is the domain of the writing, but its also false more generally.

The harness is the software that runs the model, and, in the case of agents, implements the agentic loop, and provides capabilities external to the model (either directly or by interfacing with other systems.)

You need a harness for ANY use of a model because otherwise you just have a bunch of numbers that are the weights and no actual software that does anything with them, and you can’t have agents without a harness that provides the capabilities that define agents.

I am no writer but to me it seems like writing is one of the easiest tasks with barely any logic or reasoning

Virtually all logic or reasoning is, in one way or another, part of the support for writing. It’s what separates actual writing from generating nonsense that happens to fit grammar rules.

The specific details depend on the domain, of course, but I can’t see how anyone familiar with the output of writing can think that there is little logic or reasoning in doing it well.

DoD procurement rules are largely the outcome of Congress trying to prevent executive-industry corruption through mandated process.

Nano and mini, which is smaller?

mini > micro (see, e.g., -skirts, -computers)

micro > nano (see, SI)

so, mini > nano.

“It's a strong signal of unknown quality.”

Unknown quality is the absence of information, you can’t have a signal for it.

If you are using “unknown” as a euphemism for “poor”, which is the most obvious thing that makes the signal meaningful in the direction that seems apparent from context, why?.

I disagree. It is not discrimination between 2 people to charge one $200 for a 2 hour private lesson and the other $100 for a 1 hour private lesson.

Sure it is discrimination on the basis of duration sought, not discrimination on the basis of personal characteristics, and while it is discrimination, its fair to characterize it as bot discrimination between people, since different people making the same choice would be charged the same. Its obviously, in any case, not discrimination anyone would object to, but objectionability is a matter of the basis of discrimination, not the fact of discrimination.

Not always shell—Python, often a subset, is common—but a single sandboxed coding-running tool as the way to run all of the other things that would otherwise be their own top-level tools themselves seems an increasingly common approach.

Charging people a price relative to the cost of a service is not discrimination.

Yes, it is discrimination. Treating people differently on any basis is discrimination on that basis.

It may or may not be illegal discrimination depending on the specifics and the governing law, and it may or may not be unjust discrimination depending on the specifics and the applicable moral framework, but all discrimination means is differential treatment on some criteria.

Abusive controlling partners rarely are long-term timeframe rational, because being long-term timeframe rational is at odds with being an abusive controlling partner.

Humans are rarely “long-term timeframe rational” (rational choice theory is very much a known-false model of human behavior on both the individual and aggregate level), but there is nothing about abusively exploiting an initially trusting and eventually dependent telationship that it is inconsistent with long-term rationality.

Same outcome, different implementation, instead of compiler plugins or bytecode rewrite, it gets patched via the languages dynamism.

While the robust dynamism of Ruby (or Python) can allow it to be used in a patching-like way, the only dynamism that is essential to the implementation is the dynamism of runtime polymorphism (common in statically-typed, AOT-compiled OO languages.) The language feature it relies on that C++ and Java don’t have is multiple inheritance that gets resolves to a defined order you can call back up from a concrete method with “super”. There is no reason a static OOP language that supports runtime polymorphism couldn’t support this; it wouldn’t even need to add overhead to compiled classes that don’t make direct super calls from their own methods.

I can't imagine that model lifetimes will ever justify using model-specific ASICS for public serving (maybe something like serving fixed certified AI models in a vehicle or robot) over more generic GPUs/NPUs until after the AI bubble pops.

Also one would say monkey patching on Python and Ruby frameworks is another way to do AOP.

IIRC—and it may have changed in the several years since I made use of it for this, but I don’t see why it would—the standard way to do AOP in Ruby is leveraging modules-as-mixins which are a core language feature, monkey patching is unnecessary (but since classes in Ruby are open, modules-as-mixins can be used to monkey patch classes provided by someone else just as easily as being done at class definition time.)

Aspect-oriented programming has annoying implementation in languages like Java which don’t natively support the right abstractions and where you are fighting the language to do it.

Its kind of unfortunate that those are also the languages also which do the most to shape people’s understanding of AOP.

That's the classic question of when the state should step in to correct bad parenting, and when it should leave well enough alone

Well, no, this is the slightly different classic question of whether, in order to prevent (or, more realistically, on the pretext of preventing) bad parenting, the state should impose a universal totalotarian papers-please approach to basic life activities which requires everyone to prove identity to refute the assumption that they are a child so that it may impose its own (also bad, because totally one-size-fits-all and corcumstance blind) parenting on every child, without regard to the imposition on the liberty of every adult necessary to do so.

Stepping in to correct bad parenting happens when there is a system to identify bad parenting requiring correction and intervene only where such is identified, not when you are imposing a universal regime on everyone on the justification that without it, some will act as bad parents. While both are approaches frequently proposed, they are different and should be distinguished.

That might seem an attractive intuition based on observing damage and having an understandable intuition of how damage should relate to energy, its wrong.

Energy is force × distance. For gravitational potential (and, equivalently, the kinetic energy acquired when that is tranformed into kinetic energy by a fall), the force is the force of gravitational attraction between the body and the object it is falling toward (the object’s weight) and the distance is the distance of the (actual or potential, as appropriate) fall.

The nonlinearity you observe in damage is because damage is a complicated outcome that depends on a lot more than aggregate energy involved.

Any superintelligence operating under a consistent moral framework will decide to extinguish humanity with as little ecological damage as possible, because humans cannot coexist with other life on this planet.

There are plenty of internally consistent moral frameworks which would not favor this action even if the premise were true (and that premise seems at best unjustified and at least overstated.)

Prohibition and The War on Drugs in the US are two good examples of something that had altruistic origins

The War on Drugs had the purpose (not just in its origin but in its perpetuation) of inflicting harm on elite-disfavored subsets of the population that could not be openly targeted for Constitutional reasons, which is about as far from an altruistic reason as it possible to get.

The word “openly” in my post there for a reason; the commercial models are not openly distilled from competitors: many open source models have in their model documentation that distillation was done from a dataset drawn from specific other models, including commercial models.

That distillation might be inferred from the behavior of commercial models is not the same as them openly doing it.