aneil

I'm really puzzled about LangChain. It looks like a lot of cruft and abstraction over something that is very simple. Every senior engineer I know feels the same way. Please explain why I'm wrong.

> Lisp’s unusual syntax is connected to its expressive power. How? Not because of “homoiconicity”, a word that has no meaning but leaves people somewhat impressed, because it sounds fanciful and mathematical. It’s because of uniformity.

No, it _is_ because of homoiconicity, which though a fancy word, does mean something: code is data. That is the reason Lisp syntax works. Clojure is less uniform, but it is still homoiconic, and that is why it has the same powers as CL.

Why is he still out on bail?

> Whatever index card system or similar the operating procedure in the room prescribes for keeping track of state?

You're missing the point. A bit is just some electrons. It could be a scribble in a notebook. But consciousness integrates several pieces of information into a coherent experience. The bits in an index card system could as well be some scratchings of graphite in a notebook. How would consciousness arise from graphite in a notebook?

> We don't have any 'scientific theory' of qualia. We don't even know if they exist,

I differ on this. The only thing I know for certain the universe contains is qualia. You, the idea there is a "me", atoms, bits, axons and electric potentials are merely ideas, which "I" apprehend as qualia.

> or how they would manifest in the physical world.

Correct, that is the question. But the Chinese room thought experiment shows it's not merely by information processing. I mean, atoms in a room are processing information - they are computing the next state of all of the atoms in the room. Are they conscious? How about a subset of those atoms? Are those conscious in a different way?

The point is that the consciousness-is-computation idea is just too weak to even be a physical theory.

> Regular meat-and-bone people lose consciousness all the time, and regain it later. No big deal.

So what? There are lots of REAL physical processes that are disrupted in a human being when they lose consciousness.

The point of the Chinese Room is to show that information processing alone is insufficient for consciousness. For example is information processing happening when the person pauses for a minute - or not? For a second, for a millisecond? What about when the pen comes off the paper? What about when he's sharpening his pencil? How exactly does the consciousness=information processing idea work for these situations? It's a nonsense idea that doesn't hold up to careful inspection.

And it's exactly akin to saying we get nuclear power by simulating a nuclear power plant in a computer.

On the other hand, if we believe that consciousness is like an ordinary physical property of the universe, either emergent or fundamental, then it should be related to other physical properties, just as electromagnetism is to mass and energy.

Why is "emerging from computation" simple? As an explanation, it seems vastly more complex. I mean, the laws of physics don't even contain terms for defining or valuing computation. Even my examples (which were meant to be bad arbitrary explanations) at least have the benefit of being describable as physical quantities. So at least one side of the explanation is already grounded in things that physics recognizes.

I think the burden is on the proponents. Otherwise anyone could make any assertion - for example, that action potentials cause consciousness, or that influx of ions cause consciousness, or that vibrations cause consciousness, or that only humans are conscious. Like "computation is consciousness" those are just all just, perhaps, correlates of consciousness, not mechanisms for producing it.

But the argument shows it's absurd to think the room is conscious. What if the person in the room takes a coffee break or goes on vacation? What connects the next computational step they do to the previous one and the next... which then somehow gives rise to a fragment of qualia. That seems like an impossibly complex and unlikely scientific theory.

You could execute a loop that reflects on an internal model using pen and paper. Is that system conscious? Imagine only one computational step of that loop happening everyday. Does qualia arise from that? What is detecting that that one step is part of a larger series of steps that can be considered a computation? What provides the continuity?

This is why the strange loop idea implemented using traditional computation doesn't make sense to me.

Well that explains part of it.

It does look like they plan to do something about it finally: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/v3frc1/what_were_wo...

> Performant

> One consistent message from redditors has been that performance on the site and native apps could be better. We agree. That’s why the Reddit engineering team is working on making the Reddit platform faster and more reliable.

> A quick heads-up–this section is for engineers and robots. If you like a bit of nerdy tech talk, read on. If you don’t want to get lost in the technical details of what it takes to keep a site likeReddit running, you may want to skip ahead to the ‘Excellent’ section.

> Improving platform stability

> Last year, a major priority was improving feed load times (also known as Cold Start Latency) so that redditors could tap into their feeds and scroll through posts quickly, without waiting or watching little blue spinners tell them the page is loading. Because of those efforts, we saw drops in wait times across the board—iOS went down -11%, Android -19%, and the backend was down -25%. We also made improvements that reduced crashes and errors, resulting in a 64% reduction in downtime and a 97% reduction in background error rate.We’ll continue to invest in these sorts of latency and stability improvements, while also investing in a design system to componentize Reddit’s user interface (UI).

> Making Reddit faster, faster, faster!

> Another big factor in a webpage’s performance is how much stuff it loads. The number of requests for assets, the size of those assets, and how those assets are used are all good indicators of what sort of performance the site will generally have. Reddit’s current web platforms make a lot of requests and the payload sizes are high. This can make the site unwieldy and slow for redditors (especially in places that may already have slower internet service).

> We’ve already begun work on unifying our web (what some of you call new Reddit) and mobile web clients to make them faster, clean up UX debt, and upgrade the underlying tech to a modern technology stack. (For those interested in such things, that stack is Lit element, Web Components, and Baseplate.js. And the core technology choice is server-side rendering using native web components, which allow for faster page loads.) Stay tuned, because we’ll be sharing more on these efforts later in the year, and there’s some exciting stuff on the way.

Maybe if they can just focus on making their video servers work sometime in the next decade.

I'm a founder. I agree, it's a scam. The constraint I bump up against is that VCs expect standard terms which means that stock options will be granted with tight post-exit expiry schedules. The best we've managed to do is to give people the right to 83b election. The whole structure creates such an adverse situation for employees - forcing people who are usually not in a position to take risk (like this guy) into a risk position and a taxable event.

If anyone has good workarounds for seed-Series B level companies, I'd love to hear.

I was thinking of the Pinski-Narin method, but there are other earlier uses of eigenvector calculations over very similar data: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1002.2858.pdf

Specifically, some manager at Mozilla was scared of it.

How did they even get that patent? It's a well known 70s era bibliometric algorithm.

Evil genius.

All what information?

Some reddit users said this is normal?

Ok!

I thought I was alone when I unsubbed. I couldn't believe everyone was watching the trash Netflix was churning out. I take their decline as a positive statement about humanity.

Here's a video that explains the effect visually https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYDh5d9pfu8

Put a sign on your inner front door: "Did you commit your changes?"

This is all solid. I would only add that it's our duty to avoid the news as its largely a source of propaganda serving the interests of concentrated capital and the two party system.

It was Joe's content to do with as he pleased, and his decision was to sell it and allow someone else to do with it as they pleased.

That's simple enough, but it's also simplistic because it assumes that property rights are the only thing we should care about.

Which value is more important - property rights (which depend on socialized services like justice and enforcement) or free speech (which thrive by removing regulation)?

Jesus. A lot of indiscriminate nuking of content with the Feb 4 date. Tim Ferriss, Comedian Russell Peters, Dan Savage, Giorgio Tsoulakis (the "It's Aliens" guy), Kyle Kulinski. What a shit show.

I'd love for someone to get Neil Young's take on this now.

Exactly my experience. I got sucked into using more than once, thinking it would be better next time, but there are just so many sharp edges.

At one company, someone accidentally set the write rate rate high to transfer data into the db. This had the effect of permanently increasing the shard count to a huge number, basically making the DB useless.

A slap on the hand.

The worst part of the keyboard is the touchbar. I'd say well over 50% of my attempts to adjust sound level fail due to triggering other functions. I've been using this thing for over a year, and I hate it more every day. I don't even have the option of getting a normal keyboard if I want the fastest mac. It is as though they did no user testing at all.

This is called putting lipstick on the pig.

The pig, in this case, being marginal utility theory.

The lawsuit alleges Harvard didn't even meet the applicants.

It looks pretty bad for them.