newhaus1994

the natural language tasking for actions between apps is the first thing that's made me excited about anything related to the latest AI craze. if apple can keep it actually private/secure, I'm looking forward to this.

"Oxen of the Sun" is, in a sense, the apex of English literature to me. The modernists had a knack for essentially believing that if they just tried hard enough and wrote with enough complexity, they could capture essential truths about existence, and this chapter is the height of Joyce's effort in that regard. It is a chapter both about and structured like the birth and evolution of language, incorporating a density of reference and linguistic type that is somewhat absurd in its breadth.

This is all to say that Ulysses is a book written for people who like the idea of a Rube Goldberg machine of literature. I happen to be one of those people, but there are brilliant literary scholars who hate the book.

Yeah, my understanding is the ULMFit paper was the “genesis” Of fine-tuning in the way we mean it now.

IR theorists sometimes try to get around this by narrowing the focus to direct great-power wars, which always felt like a cop-out to me (I'm a political scientist)

EDIT: although to be clear, the last time I checked, I believe the stats still back up that overall fatalities from military conflict have been at historic lows. I generally prefer what little Hegemonic Stability there may be to the multipolar shitshows of the early 20th and mid-to-late 19th centuries.

I really do love New England towns in general. I went to undergrad at a small Vermont college and being walkable or bikeable to restaurants, bars, grocery stores, etc. but also being immersed in nature was one of the greatest experiences I've ever had.

Perhaps I snuck in a bit of a hot take I had when doing my thesis ;) I find that GR’s cadence and vibe follow Ulysses; the psyche deconstruction that occurs alongside physical meandering through mundane locations are so similar (to me) as to be inescapable.

I think it's worth trying again--it has a story, but its plot structure is in direct conversation/opposition to the modernists, so it's looser, more chaotic, and more deconstructed. As such, I read GR forcing myself to let go of the pressure to comprehend the plot and rather to focus on the impressions the book was imparting on me.

To be entirely clear: it's weird as hell.

I wrote my undergrad thesis on Gravity's Rainbow and the book has stuck with me more than perhaps any other. It's a post-modern retelling of Ulysses, for one, but not just that. It's a post-apocalyptic novel but also a novel incredibly concerned with reconstruction following WWII. It's a critique of industrialization, but also a critique of the pop movements resisting industrialization.

It's the most difficult book I've ever read--took me several months to work through. But I treat it similarly to how Finnegans Wake should be treated: don't try to understand everything, but rather find something on every page you can relate to or appreciate.

“Just” linear alg, LOL. I made it through calculus 2/3 in high school but linear algebra gives me fits, especially since I only ever learned it in a data science context. Linear algebra is freakin’ tough!

My understanding is that multi-modal models are the primary focus of OpenAI right now, due to their stated goal of achieving AGI. This product is probably better thought of as an offshoot of their work to create a fully generalizable model, rather than a specific attempt to provide translation/transcription services.

This appears to be heterodox here, but this statement is nothing to be alarmed about. IRBs have been mandating this type of risk analysis for decades for the subjects of research, and it is barely a leap to start thinking about collateral damage as well.

This feels weird at first glance, but the IDE is staying as RStudio. I love the company and all they’ve done to make data analysis more accessible, so good on them and may they succeed even more in the future.

Still not sure what Quarto is above and beyond a normal RStudio notebook, though.

Zerohedge really shouldn’t be tolerated here at this point in time, to be honest.

This is some good climate news for once. The fast pace of renewable energy rollout can and will help us avoid catastrophe.

Love the design but debit cards always feel a bit dicey to use.

at this point, it should be abundantly obvious that the point of mask-wearing is collective protection from asymptomatic people. You’re a bad person because you’re actively putting others in harm if you’re not wearing a mask in public, because there is a chance you’re an asymptomatic carrier.

Clearly. I also think that the pain of the centralization of tech like this will be felt in the scope of years, while the increase in the automation of propaganda and radicalization will be felt in the coming months.

Like I replied to the other poster, I strongly support open-sourcing tech. Centralization of tech like this helps exacerbate the problem: state and sophisticated nonstate groups have the resources to develop it indigenously, while the public can't dig into it and start developing a set of norms and best practices to approach detection and mitigation.

In spite of all that we're studying wrt abuse potential, I (and my team) generally support open-sourcing tech, and I hope that we can contribute not to "oh this is dangerous, don't release" but rather to "oh this is dangerous, it's already released, what are we going to do now?"

Might be able to get 745M down to work on a single GPU. I'm definitely not using all 24GB, so fp16 might be able to get it down enough.

We (the Middlebury Institute's CTEC) are an extremism and terrorism research lab, and so we're tracking the ways that tech is used by terrorists and extremists.

For a lot of nonstate orgs with sophisticated propaganda arms, an ideologically cohesive text generation capability would be a huge advantage in scaling up info ops. We are looking to measure whether or not GPT-2 or other neural text generators are useful for this, or if that risk is, as you say, nonsense.

I'm the lead researcher on the Middlebury Institute project looking at fine-tuning the bigger models, and I got OOM on 745M and 1.5B originally. I had to get an Azure instance with 24GB VRAM to handle it (using nshepperd's codebase). It works, but takes a while (~500 epochs takes 12 hours on a 100k word training dataset).

The criteria is pretty straightforward: you apply the "intolerance of intolerance" to the first intolerant action in the chain, i.e. the one that infringes unprompted on someone else.

When you say “you can’t blame Amazon, they’re just paying market wages” what you’re saying is “profit is the only thing that could possibly matter.”

You put your finger on the thing that bothers me most about the free-market critique of labor conditions. They all hand-wave away the responsibility that corporations have as entities run by (presumably) empathetic humans. Amazon does not have to automate away jobs instead of giving workers fairer conditions and wages. In fact, they may find that the boost in productivity that comes from happier, more rested, more focused workers more than makes up for the marginal decrease that comes from less pressure in the workplace.

The point is that we don't have to accept that corporations are, and should be, perfectly "rational" economic actors. They don't have to pursue profits at every conceivable avenue unless the market tells them otherwise.

I don't have time to reply to this in-depth, but I think that your comment actually elucidated the biggest issue, which is that this demonization and distrust of the mainstream media has conflated commercialized TV news like CNN (which, I'll freely admit, has embraced terrible framing) with actual news outlets (WashPo, Atlantic, NYTimes, etc). There is a difference between what CNN does and what WashPo does.

Also, having worked in a newsroom myself, I can attest to the fact that the firewall between sales/business and the journalists is real and strong. Not perfect, but it does a hell of a job, and is much, much better than the wild west of financing currently in the indie reporting space.

It's... pretty incredible that this comment subtly shifts the blame for fake news from networks of coordinated, decentralized, anti-mainstream actors to the mainstream. It's almost like this comment itself is about "enforcing a certain narrative."

Independent "journalists" are the ones causing a lot of the crisis of truth currently underway. Indie YouTube channels garner credibility by pushing an "alternative" viewpoint that invariably means "asserting that the news as covered by all mainstream sources is actually wrong, and that we are the only ones who can provide the Truth."

We need more sites and journalists working with the strict controls and regulations placed on those at WashPo, NYTimes, The Atlantic, New Yorker, etc., not less. I'm no fan of consolidation, but it cannot be argued that the core of mainstream jounralism is at fault for fake news. WashPo's ability to head off a scam story pushed by James O'Keefe is one of the best examples of why the MSM is specifically credible, and why indie journalism is far riskier.

I mean, that is the coalition partner in government right now, so it's a big deal...

DO other countries not use it because they are not a collection of geographically / culturally / and relatively-recently separate states that have united so there is little reason to adopt a system that fairly treats unique states in relation to a larger unified federal body?

There are plenty of countries with proportionally representative/popular-vote (or at the very least, mixed-member PR) models that are culturally and geographically diverse. Germany is the best example that comes to mind.

The people vote in thier states, the states vote for the president. Without it, all 48 other states get railroaded by the 2 with the highest population. We have a representative democracy because that's not fair.

The alternative was shown in 2016. Trump lost the popular vote by millions, but won in three smaller states by ultra-thin margins. So instead of California, Texas, Florida, and NY dominating Presidential elections, we have Iowa, Pennsylvania, and Michigan dominating them. Considering that small states are already dangerously overrepresented in the Senate, it seems reasonable to have the one truly national official elected by true popular vote.

We have a representative democracy because that's not fair.

This is wrong on two fronts. First, we have a representative democracy because southern states essentially held the Constitutional Convention hostage. Second, the truly "representative" part of government is already sufficiently exhibited in Congress. If you want empty space to have power, you already have that in the Senate (and the House, in which small states are also over-represented).