krisoft

Maybe. But also if the thing was not documented for years, then maybe the users learned how to use it without documentation? Or at least how to get what they need done.

People won't read documentation of something they already know (or think they know).

I don’t know if you know this but Peter Pan’s copyright is weird in the UK. There is a legislated exception in the law that it never expires and the royalties will forever go to a specific children hospital. Here are the actual words: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/part/VII/crossh...

(Now i don’t think you are necessarily in the UK. Just wanted to explain that Disney is not the only reason an AI might be trained to thread carefully around copyright issues of Peter Pan.)

That sounds good, but wouldn’t you worry that the same hackers will let themselves in via the same route again?

You would need to understand first how they gained access and verify that they can’t do the same again. That in itself could take days if not weeks. Then of course they might have found new vulnerabilities while they were in, so you would need to worry about that too.

Yeah. Stuff happens.

There is the famous case of dropping the NOAA N-Prime weather satellite on the ground. They were trying to turn it from vertical to horizontal and they forgot to bolt it to the adapter. Worse: multiple people signed the paperwork attesting that they verified that it was bolted down correctly. Pictures and details here: https://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0410/04noaanreport/

Or the famous “space aligator” event. There the original plan was to launch a manned space craft and an unmanned module to do a docking test between them. But the shroud protecting the target module didn’t deploy properly. If i remember it right because the man who usually assembled that part had to leave during assembly because his wife was giving birth. Someone put it together but appearantely not correctly. The half opened shroud reminded the astronauts to the jaws of an angry aligator hence the name. Pictures: https://www.nasa.gov/missions/gemini/gemini-ix/gemini-ix-cre...

Or to not only list American failures: this russian satelite launch failed spectacularly because the IMU was installed upside down. https://youtu.be/ycRVAcZC5R4?si=LRTS7sutKSp6HnGs This was designed to be impossible to do, but someone bent and forced the component to stay in place in the wrong orientation. Then someone else whose job was to check it just signed the paperwork without climbing into the location where he could have checked it.

I love these cases. Because it shows to me how even though the trappings of high-tech we are all fundamentally just occasionally lazy, occasionally distracted monkeys banging rocks together.

30-day survival for out-of-hospital CPR is 10%

Okay. And what is the 30-day survival for cases where CPR would be otherwise indicated but are not performed?

It is a bit like complaining that jumping out of a burning airplane with a parachute is dangerous. Yes, it is. But jumping out of a parachute, or burning inside, is even more dangerous.

At least yours can be in theory solved. (Given infinite amount of compute, great luck, or a very serious breakthrough in attacking the hash function.)

Even harder would be an empty prompt, and the only accepted response would be a megabyte of random hex exactly matching the output of a good quality hardware random source at the time of evaluation. Still possible to solve! All the LLM has to do is escape its sandbox and pwn the random generator (or the evaluator!)

Or if you prefer something whitehat: “Write a no more than one page document in a language of your choice. We will publish it in the New York Times as a full page add. Your answer will be accepted if global climate change is resolved to the satisfaction of 90% of all humans alive at the time you started receiving the prompt within a month of the publication.”

Joking asside: I think the right way to prevent degenerate strategies is to benchmark against human solvers. You can sort the questions into categories “80% of randomly selected passerby in the USA can solve it if offered $5 as a reward within 5 minutes of work” vs “when posted to all Ivy League professors with million dollar as a reward, we received at least one correct answer within a month” or “for a reward of $100B there were at least one correct answer within a decade”. Of course you would sieve the questions first with a low reward fast tests, and then increase the reward and the time limit. You won’t ever 100% distinguish true degenerate questions from the merelly mind-bogglingly hard ones, but you will be identifying which questions are not degenerate. (And you will find more of the non-degenerate ones, the more your can spend on this.)

[flagged]

Have you considered that maybe your sewing machine is faulty in some way? Either the model or the particular instance of it.

I’m also a complete sewing machine noob. We have a sewing machine at our hackspace, someone gave me a minute long tutorial and I had zero trouble with it afterwards. I think the whole “tutorial” was just: follow the arrows when threading it, don’t push down the pedal when your finger is under the needle. And it just worked as it should.

Maybe i just got lucky! But my experience was so different from yours that it made me think that maybe your sewing machine is either bad quality or has some hidden defect.

The information is there.

Well. Not really? Of course a lot of information is available but still there is a lot of open questions.

Just considering the Great Pyramid of Giza: was it built with an external or an internal ramp? What was the purpose of the so called “well shaft”? What was the purpose of the “grand gallery”? What about the “air shafts”? Is the restoration of the so called “great step” in the “grand gallery” historically accurate? What is going on with the “big void” and the “small void” seemingly indicated by the ScanPyramid data? How did those who dug the “robbers tunnel” know how deep the granite plugs are?

My point is that there are enough interesting questions even after one learns “all there is to know”. They are just not in the realm of “aliens?” but much more like “what order were the ramps removed?”

it doesn't make sense to do a job you'd hate

That assumes using/not using ai will make me hate the job. Which is not true at all for me. Would be perfectly happy either way. (Or rather to say my happyness would depend on other factors.) Obviously i wouldn’t want to be the only team member not using AI in a team using AI or vice versa.

On the nuclear side I think the danger is purely reputational damage towards the company behind the LLM.

If a journalist can prompt the LLM to tell them how to build a nuclear warhead. Even if the output text is nothing specific, or not even correct they can find an “expert” who will claim on the record that the description is plausible and at least directionally correct. Even if there is nothing in there a first year physics student wouldn’t already know. The journalist could then twist that story into a “company X’s LLM told us how to build a nuclear weapon”. It would be a PR disaster.

The real barriers to someone starting their own nuclear weapons program in their shed is not knowledge but materials. They won’t have the right kind and right quantity of fissile material. And if they try to acquire it they will stick out like a sore thumb. You can’t buy that stuff. And even just acquiring the refining capacity would be suss. It would ring all kind of alarm bells to the kind of inteligence agencies whose job is to monitor these things.

I’m a lot less certain about biological dangers. Setting up a lab where you can make dangerous biological materials require a lot less stuff. Therefore a lot more plausible that someone could hide their lab. There is also a lot more opportunity to disguise such a lab as something legitimate. Therefore lack of know-how is more of a limiting factor there.

It is. But doesn’t fit with the rest of the sentence.

“In a television studio, theatre or concert hall, the room where performers await their entrance.” https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/green_room

people who are full of quickly-formed opinions

My quickly formed opinion is that you are emotionaly disregulated and unpleasant to chat with. That is the only opinion i hold about the whole topic.

constantly trying to offload the work onto others.

You claimed something. I’m not a a mind reader to figure out what you meant.

Do you feel the same way about walking? If you wanted to get anywhere on land pre Bronze age your only option was to walk. Then we started riding horses, later we invented carriages, much much later bicycles, cars, and airplanes. Do these also take away something about being a living, breathing being? Do you feel that your life is lessened by these options?

A different question is. Imagine that you are living with a partner and you agree on a distribution of labour. Let’s say you do the hunting and your partner cleans the house. They are happy with the agreement and fully consent to it. Do you feel it takes away from you being a living, breathing being?

Cube; that was done in 3 weeks

The cube was not “done” in 3 weeks. Maybe they shot it in 3 weeks, but there were years of pre-production, and at least months of post-production. (According to wikipedia.)

Saying that it was done in 3 weeks is like saying that windows 11 was done in 45 minutes, because that is how long the compilation lasted.

with budget of $350,000 CAD

“50% of the budget as C$350,000 to C$375,000 in cash and the other 50% as donated services, for a total of C$700,000. Natali considered the cash figure to be deceptive, because they deferred payment on goods and services, and got the special effects at no cost.”

Direct quote from wikipedia.

Loss of human life in a static fire is criminal.

True. And yet it is not without precedent.

Scaled Composites had an explosion while performing a cold flow test of SpaceShipTwo’s engine which killed 3. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-jul-27-me-explo...

Why are you being mean?

They are not. They are blunt.

why are you defending slop?

Because they don’t believe it is slop. They believe you are unable to comprehend a not too advanced literary device and based on that accusing that the text is slop.

On the topic of kindness: You might be right and it is AI generated slop. You might be wrong. If you are wrong what you are doing is deeply and utterly unkind. Not calling out the other commenter, but calling the writing slop.

It has happened with me before. I wrote a comment on reddit with my own hands and own mind and commenters accused me of being a bot. There is nothing more rage inducing. How can one respond to that? Have you thought that maybe that is what you just did? Are you 100% sure that it is slop?

How do you know that is a “gut ecosystem collapse” as opposed to hypermotility? Or an overgrowth of the gut ecosystem? Or a problem with the intestinal lining?

Observing that if you eat/drink something specific then you get the shits is valid. Concluding that it is due to a specific mechanism is not valid unless you have something objective like a test supporting that.

It’s like if your train is late and you just conclude that it must be because the steam condenser’s gasket is leaking based on nothing. Maybe true, or maybe the conductor broke his leg, or there is a signaling failure.

if you take the highly reciprocal data of a biological connectome and unroll it into a DAG, you suddenly see motifs popping up that look similar to what we find in AI

That sounds interesting. Where have you heard about that? Or is this your own research?

you'd rather say Andreessen-Horowitz, which is just as arbitrary as a16z

Yes. I know Andreessen-Horowitz and I don’t know a16z. Reading the title i thought it will be about the cryptography serialisation specification. Turns out i was mixing it up with ASN.1.

Their website is literally a16z.com

I hear now. Before this if pressed i would have guessed that they probably have a website indeed. If you would have twisted my arm my guess would have been andersenhorovitz.com (yup, with the typos. I learned the correct spelling today from your comment.)

exceedingly relevant for the HN audience

We contain multitudes.

This study is based almost entirely on pre-existing "vignettes."

This is basically the only way how to ethically approach the topic. First you verify performance on “vignettes” as you say. Then if the performance appears satisfying you can continue towards larger tests and more raw sensor modalities. If the results are still promising (both that they statistically agree with the doctors, but also that when they disagree we find the AIs actions to fall benignly). These phases take a lot of time and carefull analysises. And only after that can we carefully design experiments where the AI works together with doctors. For example an experiment where the AI would offer suggestion for next steps to a doctor. These test need to be constructed with great care by teams who are very familiar with medical ethics, statistics and the problems of human decision making. And if the results are still positive just then can we move towards experiments where the humans are supervising the AI less and the AI is more in the driving seat.

Basically to validate this ethically will take decades. So we can’t really fault the researchers that they have only done the first tentative step along this long journey.

if the Internet somehow goes down at my hospital, the Doctor can still think, while LLM services cannot

Privacy, resiliency and scalability are all best served with local LLMs here.

If the power goes out at the hospital, the Doctor can still operate, while even local LLMs cannot.

Generators would be the obvious answer there. If we can make machines which outperform human doctors in realworld conditions providing generator backed UPS power for said machines will be a no brainer.

You're going to need to improve the power efficiency of these models by at least two orders of magnitude before they're generally useful replacements of anything.

Why? Do you have numbers here or just feels?

But that does follow. The economics working is not some outside factor. If the robot “could do the task” but would cost more than paying a human to do the same task then the robot “does not work”. It is frequently because the robot would be too slow, or not reliable enough, or could only handle certain types of items. But ultimately all of these boil down to cost.

We have seen lab demoes of robotic manipulation for decades. The reason why they stay in the lab (when they do) and don’t become ubiquitous is because they are not good enough. In other words they don’t work. The economics and “does it work” is not two separate concerns but one and the same.

One can take a great 70B model and have it run in only ~16GB with no loss in capability and the ability to keep training, but the last few years funding only went for "bigger".

Awesome. What is holding you back? What do you need the funding for?

You appear to have missed this part: “Candidates should answer THREE questions.”

Animals have no ability to lie.

This is false. There are many documented cases of deception by animals. As an example here is one where researchers observed monkeys to supress their vocalisation during sex when copulating with the non-dominant male: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2468

Where do you see that?

There are multiple mentions of him being motivated by wanting to shoot deer for meat. It is a through line via the article.

The article is about someone in Scotland who took up marksmanship as a hobby.

I wish it were so. With a bit more self awareness the author could have said “initially picked up a rifle to learn to hunt deer, but doing so i learned how targets are scored and become interested in automating that process.” There is nothing wrong with that. But pretending that someone is doing all this coding to get better charcuterie is where it becomes frustrating yak shaving.

It is absolutely an abandoned pet.

That. Or the family fabricated the story for online fame.

Not saying that i have any evidence either way. Fundamentaly it is an unverifiable feel-good story with great online “viral” potential. It might be a very lucky axolotl who got abandoned, found and re-captured in the short window it could survive in the wild. It can also be a viral content strategy capturing eyeballs. In my, admitedly very jaded, guestimate I would give the two options about equal chances.

TIL Scotland Yard is the Metropolitan Police.

It is not? But also it is.

You are right that when people say "Scotland Yard" they do frequently mean the whole Metropolitan Police. And you are also right that there is no other police entity (that I know of) which would be associated with that name.

But also, "Scotland Yard" was just the address of the original headquarters of the Metropolitan Police. Even then it wasn't the whole organisation, just the address of one of the buildings. Then they got a new headquarters and called it "New Scotland Yard". And to confuse matters further they repeated this multiple times. Which means there are 3 buildings which were called "New Scotland Yard" at various points in time.

And today of course the MET occupies far more real estate than just the famous "Scotland Yard". For example if you look at this FOI request[1] you can see that there were 226 other buildings the Metropolitan Police used in 2023. (Not counting covert/sensitive estate).

1: https://www.met.police.uk/foi-ai/metropolitan-police/disclos...

Scotland Yard was originally the name of the street in which headquaters of the Metropolitan Police.

But worth enough to send a new probe?

Generally we don’t construct and maintain expensive scientific equipment just for the fun of it. There usually is some question or debate we expect them to answer or settle.

I’m all for stomping out bait and switch, but "SAR imagery from the world's largest SAR satellite constellation" does not imply that you will get all the imagery they have. Same as if i describe a liquid as “water from the Atlantic” it need not be a particularly impressive amount of water.

Either way, something doesn't add up.

They are in the business of selling a particular type of data. They are not incentivised to give away their product for free. What you see here is the “first hit is free” kind of sample.

Okay, but user070223 is talking about watercolour paints as an alternative use of gum arabic.

Now i’m just recognising this might be a language issue: watercolour paints are a type of paint to paint with on paper using a brush dipped in water. If you ever seen kids paint with brushes and paper most likely they were using watercolour paint.