enord

This is due to utf-16, an unforgivable abomination.

Wait… are you betting on exponential or logarithmic returns?

Bad writing is perennial

It’s a real shame Dijkstra rubbed so many people the wrong way.

Maybe his incisive polemic, which I greatly enjoy, was all but pandering to a certain elitist sensibility in the end.

To make manageable programs, you have to trade off execution speed both on the cpu and in the organization. His rather mathematized prescriptions imply we should hire quarrelsome academics such as him to reduce performance and slow down product development[initially…] all in the interest of his stratified sensibilities of elegance and simplicity.

Sucks to be right when that’s the truth.

These are all expository diagrams. Second-hand and auxiliary by nature.

Diagrams can be authoritative, and the ones I’ve seen will break some or all of these rules because they represent natural heuristics that practitioners are expected to fill inn themselves.

Memoization is the word here. Can be done in different ways—- of which storing the stack frame is one.

Ah! That’s actually recursion again.

In the aggregate, almost no programmer can think up code faster than they can type it in.

And thank god! Code is a liability. The price of code is coming down but selling code is almost entirely supplanted by selling features (SaaS) as a business model. The early cloud services have become legacy dependencies by now (great work if you can get it). Maintaining code is becoming a central business concern in all sectors governed by IT (i.e. all sectors, eating the world and all that).

On a per-feature basis, more code means higher maintenance costs, more bugs and greater demands on developer skills and experience. Validated production code that delivers proven customer value is not something you refactor on a whim (unless you plan to go out of business), and the fact that you did it in an evening thanks to ClippyGPT means nothing—-the costly part is always what comes after: demonstrating value or maintaing trust in a competitive market with a much shallower capital investment moat.

Mo’ code mo’ problems.

Yes indeed! Except you can also do no memoization, such as the goto statement!

I find the prevailing use of “recursion”, i.e. β-reduction all the way to ground terms, to be an impoverished sense of the term.

By all means, you should be familiar with the evaluation semantics of your runtime environment. If you don’t know the search depth of your input or can’t otherwise constrain stack height beforehand beware the specter of symbolic recursion, but recursion is so much more.

Functional reactive programs do not suffer from stack-overflow on recursion (implementation details notwithstanding). By Church-Turing every sombolic-recursive function can be translated to a looped iteration over some memoization of intermeduate results. The stack is just a special case of such memoization. Popular functional programming patterns provide other bottled up memoization strategies: Fold/Reduce, map/zip/join, either/amb/cond the list goes on (heh). Your iterating loop is still traversing the solution space in a recursive manner, provided you dot your ‘i’s and carry your remainders correctly.

Heck, any feedback circuit is essentially recursive and I have never seen an IIR-filter blow the stack (by itself, mind you).

Ah yes, the taboo of sound reasoning.

These are very good questions that deserve unequivocal answers. Alas…

That’s neither here nor there. Everything can be statistically modelled but very few things are reasoning.

Same with turing machines.

The killer feature isn’t even fully indexed queries for ever, it’s the serialization formats.

Need to do a non-trivial merge of complex domain graphs? Why have you tried string concatenating turtle files?

Most vendors use three indexes for triples and 4 or 6 for quads. All the indexes are covering, which is to say they triplicate all data—-in other words the database consists only of indexes.

Aint that just neat?

With the caveat that I was exactly wrong about the books de-listing, I feel you are making my point for me and retreating to a more pragmatic position about defaults.

The (quite entertaining) saga of Nightshade tells a story about what is going to be content creators “default position” going forward and everyone else will follow. You would be a fool not to, the AI companies are trying to end run you, using your own content, and make a profit without compensating you and leave you with no recourse.

Listen, most website and book-authors want to be indexed by google. It brings potential audience their way, so most don’t make use of their _right_ to be de-listed. For these models, there is no plausible benefit to the original creators, and so one has to argue they have _no_ such right to be “de-listed” in order to get any training data currently under copyright.

Well then I could have been much clearer because I meant something like the latter.

An ML model can neither have nor be in breach of copyright so any discussion about how it works, and how that relates to how people work or “learn” is besides the point.

What actually matters is firstly details about collation of source material, and later the particular legal details surrounding attribution. The last part involves breaking new ground legally speaking and IANAL so I will reserve judgement. The first part, collation of source material for training is emphatically not unexplored legal or moral territory. People are acting like none of the established processes apply in the case of LLMs and handwave about “learning” to defend it.

What did I write to give you that impression?

Oh come on, you’re being insincere. Wether or not the model is learning from the work just like people is hotly debated as if it would make a difference. Fair use is even brought up. Fair use! Even if it applied, these training sets collate all of everything

I feel like I’m taking crazy pills TBQH

I’m completely flabbergasted by the number of comments implying copyright concepts such as “fair use” or “derivative work” apply to trained ML models. Copyright is for _people_, as are the entailing rights, responsibilities and exemptions. This has gone far beyond anthropomorphising and we need to like get it together, man!

If there is something new about EA it is, as a matter of public record, not the use of statistically rigorous cost-/benefit analysis. The hubris!

Anyhow, I will admit that the (putative) indifference to specific causes, so long as they are E and A, and (ostensibly) apolitical posture is original.

They are ofcourse transparently performative. Animal welfare cannot be measured but only assumed, and should therefore by their own “philosophy” rank lower than the lowest net positive measurable utility at any price.

Whatever else “effective” implies, it must include some change in society to be materially meaningfull. While this is not a standard the Longtermist arm adheres to, the rest of EA and the “philosophy” demand it. It doesn’t take all that much imagination to see which political project EA is most aligned with…

I just really feel… you didn’t, like at all, read what I wrote, you know?

These are technicalities IMO. There is nothing else to EA than the current institutions, people and praxis. If they become unfashionable or dishonored their moment will pass.

It’s not some special new kind of cause, it’s just charity with an almost intolerably smug self-image.

The only reason a factory owner would admit to overloading the production line before selling his company is incompetence.

This post is a public service for potential investors.

That would just depend on a whole host of specifics. Incidentally, the same specifics as for regular statistics as ML is also statistics, and is sensitive to experimental design and sampling just the same.

Full disclosure:

I (too) designed this pedal. I’m the other guy in Fjord Fuzz (or Fjord Pedals whatev), here to take questions and accusations of flagrant misrepresentation.

Easy. You pay the juniors to study and take some busy dev leads out of their schedule to coach them.

The trick is to find the most productive trade of time. Not too much obviously, but very likely not zero.

Doing nothing is a big opportunity cost.

The «air» is here an allegory for «large language corpus». It is self-evidently true that as we move backwards through history we eventually pass the first language utterance for any given definition of language or utterance. From here on out, the «air» is indeed «thin». There are still other things, but no «air» (i.e. «language corpora»).

Haha I love how you stay so polite while being a pompous a#$. A real double bind! I would apologise for being obtuse but I must say the Gloves Are Off. Good day to you sir!