Enginerrrd

It ebbs and flows. It’s actually quite fun to watch. When an interesting article pops up, inevitably a series of echos rise to the front page in the form of subjects corresponding to the various Wikipedia links one would need to fully understand a particular article, or sometimes just tangents that come up.

I was going to say… my children frequently ride with their bars backwards without issue.

I don’t think the issue is the fact that the songs were AI generated as much as it is he faked tens of thousands of customers (presumably in free tiers) streaming the songs that he owned in order to collect royalties. That does indeed sound like garden variety fraud to me.

If you and I have a contract that I’ll pay you for unique shoppers referred to my store and you just go in yourself to trigger the door counter 10,000 times wearing different disguises, it’s pretty clear that you have defrauded me.

Such a tax would be highly regressive I think.

When a government collects taxes they have to think how to invest that money to maximize gdp growth. Subsidizing road infrastructure is a pretty good use of those funds IMO, though admittedly I’m probably biased as a transportation engineer.

CA uses fuel taxes to fund road infrastructure, which isn’t the worst approach… the heaviest users (‘heavy’ both figuratively and literally) invariably pay the largest share, although EVs are messing up that equation.

Yes, Easily, and by multiple orders of magnitude.

Man, we don’t have tools to deal with these clowns. I had the gas tank in my truck drilled. I doubt they got even 5 gallons worth of gas, worth about $25 at the time. The fix cost me $2500. I found out from the shop that there had been a string of these going around town. After some digging, I came up with an order of magnitude estimate of somewhere around 50 such instances. So, what was undoubtedly just a couple of people at the most had done probably over $100k in damages to get maybe $1200 worth of spoils. Even if caught, unless they confessed to more, they’d probably only ever risk getting linked to a single one of these crimes and face a tiny fraction of the consequences they deserved. Such a drain on society.

If you subscribe the the many worlds interpretation, you can basically look at observers as existing within the space of eigenvalues of operators acting on the massively entangled wave function of their respective universe.

That’s… hilariously not exactly new either. It can be said that our enemies and allies in 2006 were the almost exact opposite of the conflict in the 1980’s when we were funding the afghan mujahideen to fight the soviets.

So theoretically in another 20-30 years we can take a guess at who we’ll be fighting.

It’s not so interesting I think.

They’re basically just taking equations of the form f(x,y)=k where k=0, and asking “ah but what about when k!=0”?

Indeed, looking at the constant as a variable by looking at the equation f(x,y)=z IS quite useful. (I’m reminded of Feynman favorite trick for solving integrals). That generalization trick is actually useful in MANY contexts. But there’s nothing novel here.

To be fair, Russia also sends people out to inflame active protests and try to push them into greater extremism.

I encourage you to try it sometime. They mash up wonderfully with the skins on.

> Given the extent to of the gold rush and the long history of Silicon Valley stealing ideas, and arguing it’s not immoral

Not just Silicon Valley but also OpenAI, specifically.

The astrophage was pumped around the ship to act as shielding for cosmic rays too.

I have to say having just done a very tricky project with a long DSP pipeline in gnuradio, that LLMs are a godsend for getting up to speed on gnuradio blocks. I too found it historically impenetrable, but was able to get a pipeline completed. That said, prepare yourself for a lot of debugging and work to diagnose problems if you’re doing anything of sufficient complexity.

I think it’s just that Japanese culture represents a very sophisticated antithesis to many western cultural pillars. Collectivism over individualism, incredible development of the aesthetics of simplicity and emptiness compared to the ostentatious and sometimes baroque western aesthetics, neat and tidy compared to cluttered, the fanatical emphasis on mastery of technique, or things that can’t be produced via shortcuts, etc etc. Overall I think the Japanese are viewed as much more disciplined and conscientious which is valued in the west. And a lot of these things seem like wizardry to Americans because we’re lacking the routines and building blocks that lead to it. In essence the Japanese are very process oriented, and Americans see the results and want them but don’t understand the process side of things as it’s not intrinsic to our culture. Yet the results are admirable… whether or not Americans would actually want to live the process that leads to those results is another story. That’s the gist of it I think.

That’s not too much a concern I think. Most of the real pathogenic qualities result from known genes. Inventing a totally novel virus that is also pathogenic is basically science fiction right now. Splicing together known components that could be bad in combination is closer to current technology.

I think it’s possible this might just require reworking the transformer architecture a bit to give it an inherent awareness of the contents of its attention. Kind of a working memory workspace of sorts.

I.e. Instead of limiting autoregression to the token level, you introduce a persistent compressed global workspace latent memory vector that is fed back into the self-attention mechanism at every layer or every token step, allowing the network to attend to its own prior attentional states before computing the next token. Obviously that’s going to involve some compression steps.

Trouble is… I think the architecture there is much simpler a tweak than figuring out how to train it.

…that’s likely to just destabilize training for not much if any gain at first. You’re probably gonna have to resort to some really clever (and currently missing) tricks to figure out how to train the network to actually use that feature.

I’m not endorsing the current administration’s policy, nor do I think it would succeed, but I find this comment really perplexing since this action is PRECISELY in line with the 2025 National Security Strategy. [1]

Also, for further insights on some of the unstated policy, I recommend reading the project 2025 document as well. [2]

Perhaps by “coherent policy” you meant “sound” or “effective”? But as it stands it certainly is coherent.

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2025-N...

[2] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24088042-project-202...

I think this is a bad way to look at it. LLMs can probably conceive of most things that are representable within the embedding space.

Ordinarily in mathematics there’s a TON of papers to write just combining low level problems with different techniques. Better still, and often considered groundbreaking is borrowing techniques from other fields and adapting them or creating analogous methods to solve problems. A lot of landmark papers have been written this way. This is also what transformers are sort of good at within other contexts. They have super human breadth so I’m hopeful they’ll become real assets in math for a long time. Though the leaps necessary to adapt a technique in a nonobvious way might be too much for a while longer. We’ll see.

Truly novel techniques are quite rate indeed and I don’t know if LLMs can represent them faithfully in their embedding space or not. My inclination is that they probably can most of the time, but I don’t know. Mathematicians would describe such thins as “alien”.

I think what I mean is just that from an individual standpoint we can’t really answer that and it’s not how vaccine evidence is collected or decisions are made. Those are always made at the population level. (Vaccine harms 1 in every 100, disease 10/100, ergo better to get the vaccine). But this says very little or nothing even about that 1/100 that was harmed. They definitely might have been better off not getting it.

It reminds me a bit of the tyranny of the rocket equation. You can always scale your fuel to get a little more delta V, with ever diminishing returns. …but for something like a DEEP space/interstellar mission, it almost always pays to wait a few more years for a faster propulsion system because you’ll get there fastest by always delaying your launch and chasing better technology.

I’m not sure how well the analogy holds up, or if there’s anything to be learned from it though.

Detecting radio signals never made much sense to me.

Even a few light years away, it’s almost infeasible to build a radio transmitter that could be detected above the noise floor. The amount of energy you’d need would be absurdly wasteful.

First pass through. After the machines invent time travel they end up accelerating the creation of skynet.

Yeah substantial degradation in really basic functionality in the last 3-4 years.

I mean, new features I don’t use and useless UI changes have been added at a high rate over the same time period, but holy Christ, it’s pretty bad when some really basic functionality bugs are getting shipped by big names all the time. Like to name one: adobe acrobat is… an absolute hot pile of garbage. Basically any browser offers a MUCH better pdf reader. I don’t understand how the paid version of a product that has only the job of processing PDFs is so bad at it, and has actually regressed over time. And the PDF editing features are also terrible. I don’t know what that program even does well anymore.

That’s impossible to know either way.

I completely agree, but I also think that an industry disrupting architecture tweak akin to the “Attention is all you need” is VERY possible to emerge at any moment.

It feels like the cognitive gaps on current LLMs are indeed structural, but also that if we solve that structural issue with a new or extended transformer type of architecture, we’ll be looking at a whole new ballgame.

I mean, basically we’re just looking at needing some type of new post training learning architecture. It’s very clear that extending context windows isn’t that. What’s needed is an honest to god, continuous learning and modification process.

Depending on what they’re doing, good finish carpenters will definitely take a bunch of moisture readings on a slab of wood before working on it.

Because the space of people interested in such things is relatively small and so a single article has knock on effects where a reader of the article or a blogger sees it and starts exploring the space and posts more about it, increasing the exposure some more.

Having opinions on Wikipedia policies is perfectly appropriate.

I would think you could, in principle, deduce the bad key from a recorded segment of the jamming signal, and only revoke when identified.

I would have to look at the math more specifically, but I would think it would be impossible to both disguise the compromised key and take advantage of the key to interfere with the signal in the way its designed to prevent. And even if you did, I’m fairly sure the jamming would only affect users whose decryption runs through your branch, and in your geographic proximity so I don’t think it would have an advantage of countering the below the noise floor decryption designed to mitigate against jamming.