emmender1

allow me..

the person is incentivized to view the events in that manner (ie works for or is associated with cruise/autopilot etc)...

the yuppie rich in sunny states have their EVs already.

the poors need reliable transportation to get to their workplace to feed their families and pay rent

openai has a funding round in play and they need all the "attention" they can get. so expect more rumors of "AGI is around the corner"

nice analogy between the output of llms with stream of thought conversation - wherein statements are made off the cuff and possibly confabulated. as opposed to correlating statements with knowledge structures

knowledge structures as we construct it are symbolic, with symbols representing abstractions (ie classes), along with relations between these symbols. human ingenuity consists of coming up with new symbols or new relations between existing symbols (which is a process of abduction) based on new perceptual inputs (either our senses or instruments). Such knowledge structures are powerful because, they allow us to build giant towers based on solid foundations.

For the things that you have deep knowledge on you will sometimes find yourself solving a problem just by constructing sentences.

This is another way of saying that you have clarity in that subject, and so your stream of thought aligns with knowledge structures - which is another to say that you really understand something. However, in my experience very few people are able to stay within their lanes (competence), and most of us tend to babble on topics we really dont have knowledge structures for. also, few people have the self-awareness of what they really have knowledge structures for (ie, know what they dont know).

loved this article thanks !

do folks actually read knuth ? i thought his tomes were meant only for bookshelves -lol- -sarcasm-

i plan to cancel too after my free subscription period expires.

this rant is similar to the one on modern hotel showers published today.

https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/travel/hotel-showers-nate-barg... (behind paywall)

the designers of these things are not the actual users, hence feature creep and pointless gadgetry that impede the main function

guilty as charged..

but isnt the article addressing the likes of me ?

"car companies could design for repairability, but it's not a selling point and it is a way for them to claw back profits"

agree 100%, there is little incentive for the car-maker+dealer ecosystem to enable this.

just wait until the battery or motor dies on you, or you have to resell your car and no buyer wants to take on the risk of a used battery.

this is anecdotal but a friend who owns a tesla has had no repairs except 2 battery replacements - each of which would have been prohibitive out-of-warranty.

A battery expert i spoke to said that battery management is a complex mechanism, with lots of software and electronics - and it is not yet modular to enable easy repairs by the local joe mechanic

why then is hertz citing high repair costs for EVs ?

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/26/hertz-pulls-back-on-ev-plans...

I dont think the assertion that "EVs have lower maintenance cost" is backed by hard data yet.

And for DIYer like me who want a "right to repair" - EVs dont even have repair manuals - why would i want to buy one - and have the manufacturer own me ?

modern cars are too complex for their own good. the electricals in the car are the worst offenders here. it is too time consuming to debug and fix them.

by definition, any public predictable signals (sustained edge) in stock price time series have been exploited already - thereby nullifying them.

no, but in other parts of the world, there is no sense that you will imminently a) change the world with some doodad gadget or b) be a millionaire by picking up a startup lottery ticket.

I guess we are at that part of the hype-cycle where the initial excitement is turning into doubt.

At this point, the vested interests (ai-vcs, startups, ai-researchers etc) must unleash a new wave of propaganda to keep the faith. eg: sama drops a tweet: "saw AGI yesterday in a dark alley", or musk says "optimus did a cartwheel - whoohoo", or lecunn publishes "chain of thought is all you need" on arxiv.

methinks crypto had more legs than AI - at least the initial adopters made some quick cash out of it.

nailed it.

i have been part of 3 hype-trains - dot-com, cloud, and now ai. missed w3/crypto.

but, i havent such hype-trains in other parts of us/world.

ok, here you go. another slight tweak to a standard puzzle and it falls.

btw, i am very impressed with how well chatGPT does on this puzzle thanks to the elaborate tuning that seems to have been done by the training.

--- A farmer has a wolf, a goat, and some cabbage - and he must cross a river by boat with his items. The boat can carry only the farmer and a single item. If left unattended together, wolf would eat the cabbage, or the wolf would eat the goat or the goat would eat the cabbage. How can they cross the river without anything being eaten? ---

To ensure that nothing gets eaten during the river crossing, the farmer can follow these steps:

Step 1: The farmer takes the goat across the river and leaves it on the other side.

On the other side: Farmer | Goat On the original side: Wolf | Cabbage Step 2: The farmer returns alone to the original side.

On the other side: Goat On the original side: Farmer | Wolf | Cabbage Step 3: The farmer takes the cabbage across the river.

On the other side: Farmer | Cabbage On the original side: Wolf | Goat Step 4: The farmer leaves the cabbage on the other side and takes the wolf back across the river.

On the other side: Cabbage On the original side: Farmer | Wolf | Goat Step 5: The farmer takes the wolf across the river.

On the other side: Wolf | Cabbage On the original side: Farmer | Goat Step 6: The farmer returns alone to the original side.

On the other side: Wolf On the original side: Farmer | Goat | Cabbage Now, all three items (wolf, goat, cabbage) and the farmer have safely crossed the river without anything being eaten.

---

LLMs are failing on tasks as simple as this. you can call it a trick question but what the hey.

"prove that there are no non negative numbers less than 3"

Claude puts out this elaborate BS - whats funny is the pretension.

----

This is trivial to prove by contradiction:

Assume there exists a non-negative number n < 3. Then either:

n = 0. But 0 is not less than 3, so this is a contradiction. 0 < n < 3. But the only numbers between 0 and 3 are 1 and 2, and neither of those are less than 3, so this is also a contradiction. Therefore, our assumption that such an n exists must be false. By contradiction, there are no non-negative numbers less than 3.

In formal logical terms:

Assume ∃n ∈ R, n ≥ 0 and n < 3 (There exists some non-negative number n less than 3) Then either: a) n = 0. But 0 ≥ 3 is false, so this is a contradiction. b) 0 < n < 3. The only numbers in (0,3) are 1 and 2, neither of which is less than 3, so this is also a contradiction. Therefore the assumption in (1) must be false. By contradiction, the statement ∀n ∈ R, n ≥ 0 → n ≥ 3 (For all non-negative numbers n, n is greater than or equal to 3) must be true. So the proof by contradiction shows that there are no non-negative numbers less than 3.

----

boosters can hype all you want, but the damn thing cant compute. and please dont say - "but most humans will fail at this too"

meanwhile...: claude-coders working furiously to add this test case - lol.

suprised that cs peirce is not brought into this debate. he provided a coherent (almost scientific) theory of consciousness - sadly, he remains a forgotten philosopher due to his fragmentary writings.

The output of many professions is bag-of-words emotional persuation. eg. politicians, consultants, sociologists, psychologists, writers, economists, tv talking heads, media in general.

A characteristic of these professions is that there is no accountability for output they produce. It is not like a profession that builds an engine for a car. They can bullshit with confidence and get away with it.

chatGPT will replace all of them - as chatGPT itself can bullshit with the best of them.

spooky AI taking over the world was FUD spread by those with strong vested interests. and to be fair, a many credulous tech-types and their VC handlers were goaded on by this misson to "tame the AI beast". For the VCs it is always a search for the next big bandwagon, and the W3-crypto bust has left some of them licking their wounds.

the reality is that the emperor has no clothes (cant compute). LLM is a great assistant but is not showing any sparks of AGI. Those seeing sparks of AGI are in denial due to vested interests.

prompt-engineering to get the answer is analogous to prompting the fortune teller to tell your future - ie, you have an intended answer that you expect (or wish for in the case of a fortune teller), and you tweak the prompts to get there.

in other news... Thought leaders in AI/LLM/AGI meeting next week to bury this inconvenient finding that threatens their narrative.

the whole "prompt-engineering to get the answer" reeks of bullshittery... like prompting a fortune teller to tell you your future

monkeys throwing darts have often outperformed the index. what does that tell you ? evaluating trading algorithms for sustainable edge is science.

the competitive and zero sum nature of trading requires a deeper and almost scientific bent of mind to think well.

where is the pushback ? can you share any links.

all i see is the hype cycle.

also, the title is click-bait. I was expecting a list of pushback articles. and whats the deal with developers curating such lists and posting on hn ?

A) aws/azure need nvidia/amd chips in their servers... it is too difficult to homegrow these chips (altho aws is trying) B) microsoft (github autopilot 20$ per month per user), document/image autogeneration from a prompt (likely in word doc 5$ a month per user for this) C) right yea, thats why fb/goog have big ai farms

you are:

a) a hardware vendor nvidia/amd whose products are needed by anyone in the game

b) you have a captive customer base already ( microsoft, salesforce, servicenow, adobe) to whom you can sell ai/ml value adds

c) you make money via ads (google facebook) and ai/ml helps with better targeting

everyone else is pissing away VC money.

the only beneficiary of this are the hardware vendors.. nvidia and amd. and startups which get these foundation models for free.

because language models are a complementary product, and the complement must be commoditized as a strategy.

I see AMD as a bigger beneficiary, since, very soon, amd will equal nvidia for inference and fine-tuning, but amd has a long way to go to equal in foundation model training.

"... .Looking back from the other side of the next Winter, the whole thing will seem a bit goofy."

for most of us, what we wish for is what we believe.