zehaeva

The only thing I really hope for if this continues for an extended period of time is everyone optimizing their programs to use a minimal amount of ram.

I nominally agree with this sentiment. BCBS does have issues like this happen, but not at the same level others, in my experience.

Anecdotally though, I've found that my current insurer (United) denies and delays care far, far, more often than when I had a similar plan with BCBS. And I'm not talking about small bills, my son was in the NICU for 41 days, at a cost of ~$150,000. Through BCBS I paid like a grand of that. United denies the most random things, a referral to a specialist, meds for on brand usage while they'll pay for other meds that are off brand, for instance.

I do have a platinum level plan, I am _extremely_ lucky to have this. I know the vast majority of Americans, most of my friends and family, fight with their insurance companies for far less than my complaints.

Everything old is new again. Back in the 2010s Sharp tried to release a TV with an extra yellow colored subpixel. Commercially, it failed spectacularly.

If you had a large stock of stolen CCs you could use this to pay a buck or two on everyone's bill and verify that the cards are valid.

Thank you for this! I have read Blindsight but I have long wondered why everyone thought it was so revolutionary. I kept thinking I was missing something. And I think this is it! In that I already thought/knew that everyone is basically sleepwalking through life and are not really conscious of what's going on.

I came to my conclusions on this mostly through my own studies on Illusions and other studies on consciousness. Knowing basic facts of how we see, and all the ways that our sight, touch and hearing really, fail us. Seeing the studies of how people who have their hemispheres separated can have parts of their body act independently of each other really blew my mind when I first learned about it.

Too many people believe that they themselves are sitting in a box and looking out through windows when really we're in a dark room reading a bunch of instruments and guessing what's out there. Plato's Cave is real and we are, all of us, already inside it.

It's just an analogy, you're not supposed to think too deeply about them.

The main take away for a lay person is that _like_ the mattress space is being deformed. That's where the analogy stops. Taking it further, like with all analogies, breaks the analogy.

If the analogy was a perfect one, then it would just be the reason and not an analogy.

My main gripe is how hard for most people it is to extrapolate that deformed mattress into a 3d space.

There truly is an xkcd for everything.

It's also a a problem because not all states are the same, some don't allow O, some do. Some allow 0, some don't! The cameras need to be able to read both.

The cameras that they have to read plates in a lot of different conditions and various states of cleanliness. Some states allow O and some states allow 0, and some states don't care. Combine the two issues and cops get lazy and want to check the plate with both the 0 and O just to "make sure".

The cameras also confuse D and Q with 0 and O. And 5 & S, and 2 & Z, and 6 & G, and 8 & B.

He who can destroy a thing has the real control of it.

I think at this point you need to consider how the human eye see color. It's not like each wavelength gets picked up and then communicated perfectly.

(I'm going to skip over some basic stuff, and use some generalities)

Each Cone in the eye responds to a range of frequencies. This means that things that unless it's on the extreme low, or high, end of the frequencies that the human eye can discern you are going to have two, or all three, Cone types responding. The strength of those responses is what your brain uses to interpret the color that you see.

The real problem is that out in space there is no attenuation of sunlight, it's bright. Super crazy bright. It basically overloads all of your Cones, and Rods, all at once, there is no way for your brain to find a signal of "oh there's more higher wavelengths here so interpret bluer than normal" because all of the signals got maxed out. If you max out all of the signals, you get white. It doesn't matter that in absolute terms there's more blue, the lower and mid frequencies are also maxed out.

Off topic, but I feel like this could be made into a Zen Koan from The Codeless Code[0]. You're almost there with it!

[0] https://thecodelesscode.com/

I am blown away that one of the programmers on Theme Park is now one the leading researchers in modern AI. Wonders will never cease.

What he's talking about is that the CGI in B5 was filmed in 4:3 and not in 16:9 like the rest of the show. When they did the "high res" releases they had to make the choice of doing everything in 16:9 or in 4:3.

In 4:3 it looks good and like the original airing show, in 16:9 any non-digital/composite shot looks freaking fantastic. But once you get to any digital or composite shot it takes a nose dive in quality.

Isn't this basically what Jonathan Blow is trying to do with his "new" programming language, Jai?

When I went to Portugal I was struck by how much Portuguese there does sound like Spanish with a Russian accent!

I don't think this _really_ contributes to the conversation, but I think we can sum this entire post up with just one XKCD comic.

https://xkcd.com/927/

I have said much of the same about dune in my own life to others, about how the main thesis is "hard times make strong men, ...", but that still does boil down to might makes right.

Saying that the first book alone doesn't make any assertions about morality is somewhat hilarious. The baron is queer coded, so too is feyd, the "good guys" are strong manly men. Even just the idea that "hard times make strong men, .." is a morality in and of itself.

I never said I was uneasy about the idea of a white savior, you are reading far too much into my beliefs and ideals. I would also appreciate that you do not project onto my any of your imaginings of my own beliefs. You do not know me.

That said, if you have only read the first books you truly are getting only one small facet of the story that Herbert was trying to tell. A lot of what is laid out in the first novel is inverted and overturned by the 3rd and 4th novels.

Finally, you have written a lot about one book out of a long series of books. I would suggest that, like your wont to project some sort of belief onto me, you, too, are projecting too much upon just the first entry of a much, much, larger epic.

A lot of what is great about Dune are the inversions of the story past the first novel.

If you take the first book alone you're left with only one facet of a much grander story. You're also left with the idea a white savior story that says might makes right, which really isn't what was going on at all.

The point of Dune, or the Butlerian Jihad within Dune, isn't that Humans are more capable than the Thinking Machines. It is that Humans should be the author of their own destiny, that and the Thinking Machines were enslaving humanity and going to exterminate them. Just like how the Imperium was enslaving all of humanity and was going to lead to the extinction of humanity. This was seen, incompletely, by Paul and later, completely, by Leto II who then spent 10,000 years working through a plan to allow humanity to escape extinction and enslavement.

Dune's a wild ride man!

What if you had told it again that you don't think that's right? Would it have stuck to it's guns and went "oh, no, I am right here" or would it have backed down and said "Oh, silly me, you're right, here's the real dosage!" and give you again something wrong?

I do agree that to get the full usage out of an LLM you should have some familiarity with what you're asking about. If you didn't already have a sense of what a dosage is already, why wouldn't 100mcg be the right one?

If there exists some such set of algorithms that could get a "pretty darn good approximation of truth" I would be extremely happy.

Given the pushes for political truths in all of the LLMs I am uncertain if they would be implemented even if they existed.

There are limits to such algorithms, as proven by Kurt Godel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_...

I'm more reminded of Tom Scott's talk at the Royal Institution "There is no Algorithm for Truth"[0].

A lot of what you're talking about is the ability to detect Truth, or even truth!

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leX541Dr2rU

Excluding room and board that's more expensive than Harvard[0]. I feel like if you're spending that much money on a child then it should be freaking amazing. You could employ a private tutor full time for that sort of money.

0: $59,320 for the 25-26 year according to their website.

While I don't think that we can reason everything from first principles, those who think they can are doomed to fall pray to their own personal bias and repeat errors that our forebearer had, I do think that everyone should give everything a bit of a quick sanity check before accepting anything as a new belief.

Just a small, quick, bit of review. Does this thing make logical sense? Does it smell of any logical fallacies? What are the priors, or assumptions, that the argument is making?

I am not a fan of Scott Alexander, but he does at least give a fair amount of thought to his arguments and conclusions. However that doesn't mean much if the premise is flawed or his priors are miss calibrated. This goes for anyone. Just because the person you're looking up to has well reasoned arguments doesn't mean they're correct.

Aquinas started from the position that god exists and went from there. And while his arguments are really well reasoned and logical, they only make sense if you accept his priors.

Any given argument makes sense if your priors start in the right place for them. Euclidian Geometry works great, but if you throw out/modify the parallel postulate you can get wildly different answers for what makes sense. You can craft crazy mathematical worlds if you tweak ZFC, throw away the axiom of choice and some different stuff starts to happen.

Anyways, I hope you stop glazing scott, take everything you read with a grain of salt, and think for yourself.

My only concern with using LLMs to learn new material is being certain that it's not leading me astray.

Too many times I've used LLMs for tasks at work and some of the answers I've gotten back are subtlety wrong. I can skip past those suggestions because the subject is one I'm strong/experienced in and I can easily tell that the LLM is just wrong or speaking nonsense.

But if I didn't have that level of experience, I don't think I would be able to tell where the LLM was wrong/mistaken.

I think LLMs are great for learning new things, but I also think you have to be skeptical of everything it says and need to double check the logic of what it's telling you.

Maybe one of the books by Douglas Hofstadter? Godel Escher Bach? or I Am A Strange Loop?

If it were a Fiction novel then might I suggest Blindsight by Peter Watts?

No, It's a FLOOR WAX!