Think about all the times in llm gets it wrong, the fact that would have helped to get it right is something that was lost. I suppose this isn't proof it's lossy just maybe we don't know how to get the data out.
Or look at it another way LLMs or just text prediction machines, whatever information doesn't help them predict the next token or conflicts with the likelihood of the next token is something that gets dropped.
Or look at it another way these things are often trained on the many terabytes of the internet yet even a 200 billion parameter network is 100 or 200 GB in size. So something is missing, and that is a way better compression ratio then the best known algorithms for lossless compression.
Or we can look at it another way, these things were never built to be lossless compression systems. We can know by looking at how these things are implemented that they don't retain everything they're trained on, they extract a bunch of statistics.
I think extraction from the model itself is a bad idea. But extraction from external sources, such as the deep research reports LLMs generate, or solving problems where we have validation of correctness is a good idea. The model is not validating its outputs by simply doing another inference, but consults external sources or gets feedback from code execution. Humans in chat rooms could also provide lots of learning signal, especially when actions are judged against the outcomes they cause down the line, using hindsight.
So in short what works is a model + a way to know its good outputs from bad ones.
Just thinking that an unexpected event can't happen on the road shows a huge lapse in judgment and that's just the first sentence. Thinking they're special and different other people is another big red flag.
I'm not as solipsistic as you. I understand that there are other people perhaps less educated that maybe run the same 100m of empty road 10 times a week for years without event. Then they start thinking maybe I can do some other stuff while I run this boring route. Which is fine again for years until something happens.
I'm not saying its right, I'm straight up militant in my driving. I'm saying its part of human nature. Anytime you fight that you are going to lose. So a product that reduces the distractions even a bit can be a net good thing.
Why does it so often seem that the people complaining about censorship are the ones punching down?
Why is it so often someone's right to complain and make problems for others but never concern about people's right to be tolerated when they're being decent humans?
Either people need to be banned who insult others and use slurs and those who maliciously push right up against the rules, or they will bully people out. Look at modern X/Twitter allowing hate speech has pushed out advertisers and something like half of the users?
This is basic Paradox of Tolerance stuff, decent people aren't Banning anyone for pointing out actual arguments like discussing if "question" is okay, asking for extra context if this guy did something else or if this is council overreach. But people complaining about wokeness, DEI, diversity hires, or other technically allowable but obviously hostile nonsense are clearly just trying to attack other people and often in ways that are racist dog whistles. If people insist on being hostile up to the amount allowable by the rules instead of just trying to get along then the rules need to keep changing and adjusting and of course the people who are willfully choosing to be assholes will scream "censorship". Before teaming up with someone complaining about censorship be sure they're actually at risk of censorship and not just trying to use Free Speech as a shield to hurt others.
> Why does it so often seem that the people complaining about censorship are the ones punching down?
You mean, pushing down and saying people should be banned... like you?
[Either people need to be banned who insult others and use slurs and those who maliciously push right up against the rules, or they will bully people out. Look at modern X/Twitter allowing hate speech has pushed out advertisers and something like half of the users?]
The fact is that you are just using the notion of 'paradox of tolerance' as a tool for defending your prefered kind of censorship, in the same mischievous way you say people use the notion of free speech "as a shield to hurt others". Is this or you are not being mischievious, so I think it would be polite to also admit the very probable possibility that those people claiming that their free speech is being violated may also have something to say on the topic, instead of just assuming they are being malicious and that they are "punching down" on others (or similar things).
Don't you think doing that would be more productive?
The article clearly has gaps simply by not being an hour long read on the Atlantic, one obvious gap is that it doesn't seem to have a statement from the person removed after they were removed.
> one obvious gap is that it doesn't seem to have a statement from the person removed after they were removed.
I think the article is written by the person that was removed. It is lacking any statement of the standard foundation who removed him. No such statement exists, even on the internal committee mailing list it is just an "fyi, that person is no longer on the committee" without any reasons.
I can piece something together from his previous behavior on the committee mailing list, but that information is not public and I'm not at liberty to share.
The last few times I've seen technical groups kick someone out over racism, including anti-semitism, they picked one point where the person kept doubling down after a very long history of borderline rule following behavior that was clearly malicious. I would be very surprised to see if this was different.
While I agree in principle that we can't allow the word question to be destroyed by hate speech, there are always assholes who ride up to some line to be dicks to someone using whatever the boundaries of the rules are. I want to know what happened here and if that was the case.
On economic, I hear talk about looking for 2 trillion in cuts; that's likely to cause economic stagnation all by itself as previously observed in e.g. UK austerity measures since the financial crisis in the late 00s.
Even on a smaller scale, any given cut is hard to forecast as a good/bad idea for the organisation itself (in the case the government) even for the guy at the top: for example consider that Musk cut what he thought of as pointless waste in each of his businesses, which works great in Tesla and SpaceX, has been a disaster for Twitter.
Also, China is close to a peer, and deploying renewables and battery vehicles as fast as possible — and yes also coal last I heard.
Then there's the talk of Musk being brought in despite the obvious conflict of interest. Wonder how that's going to play out, but given a substantial part of his wealth comes from electric vehicles, it's worth noting.
On the other hand he wants thousands of Starship launches and has yet to demonstrate the Sabatier machines that would be necessary for (1) Mars and (2) making this carbon neutral on Earth.
Looking at the figures on China it feels like Coal is cheap and easy to deploy as a short term measure, but they're also investing heavily in renewables as you said (2X the rest of the world combined last year) and Nuclear.
For just how much is made there, and on a per capita basis, China isn't doing too badly - neither is the UK, the US on the other hand has had super cheap energy for a long time, and a whole lot is predicated on it, so it's going to be tougher (even tougher now).
China is fakeing most of it and our press only reports it as existing and true to coax our politicians into doing something ..anything.
My tip: If you read fantastic news, google the location and look on it from space. Any game changer should be visible and viable from orbit. And it is but often enough..no powerlines or tramsformers. Planned economies, they reach their goals, to promote bureaucrats , reality be damed.
The goal seems to be to be as irrational and self-harming as possible, because rationality itself is considered some kind of narcissistic injury. So I don't expect this to end well.
Neither Musk nor Thiel understand the structural differences between being a CEO and running a successful country.
China does understand them. It is in many ways a terrible place, but China has made insanely successful investments in education, engineering, and infrastructure, and is far better at planning for and building the future.
The US has gone in the opposite direction. Make high quality education increasingly unavailable and/or unaffordable, cultivate a popular culture of superstition, narcissism, and irrationality, and impoverish the population so talented individuals are either trapped in cultish, increasingly directionless corporate bureaucracies, or on the verge of homelessness.
And tech in the US only exists because of immigrants. If it becomes hostile to immigrants the smart people will go elsewhere - and that will be that.
China is better at one thing: projecting and tellingthat story. Their planning is so shortsighted, they only recently reverted the one child policy, even though a "running" out of young workers could be expected since the 90s.
Why does a totalitarian propagandaposter, that publicly does not get is shit together on demographics until its to late be trustworthy when it comes to green energy ?
The OCP was never perfectly enforced, and until the 90s China had a total fertility rate above replacement levels — 2.73 in 1990.
As for trust, trust simply isn't how anything is done on the international stage, so nobody in the US needs to trust China any more than anyone in China needs to trust the US (or indeed any other pair of nations): we know China has surpassed the USA as the biggest combined source of greenhouse gases, and monitoring stations showed Chinese factories were to blame for surprise increased in banned ozone depleting gasses; what makes the rest of us believe the statements about their renewables is audits and satellite imagery, which also tell us the limits of those roll-outs.
> The goal seems to be to be as irrational and self-harming as possible, because rationality itself is considered some kind of narcissistic injury. So I don't expect this to end well.
While both Trump and Musk clearly demonstrate (the popular conception of) narcissistic injury when being told they're wrong, Musk also demonstrates that there are conditions where he doesn't respond so poorly — rockets.
I have no idea if that's going to make a difference.
> Neither Musk nor Thiel understand the structural differences between being a CEO and running a successful country.
I have no option about Thiel in this regard, despite him generally giving Bond Villain vibes. Musk I agree; if I was cryogenically frozen tomorrow and woken in 50 years to the news that Musk built his Mars colony but it failed catastrophically, I'd guess Musk's lack of understanding about governance was why.
I think even in this context there is a chance that the scale is tipping more and more towards going the renewables way will be more lucrative than not, and those deniers will not deny money.
Then again, maybe I‘m too clueless on this topic + naive.
My strongest data point is that the Chinese government is heavily pushing renewables, and I‘m pretty sure they don’t to this due to the selfless goodness of their hearts.
Its also a vote for degrowth as things get swept away ever faster then they can rebuild. With the longterm planning that insurance enables, reality will have its say at the end of the day.
People voted for real/current issues, not for abstract/future issues. They voted like shareholders. It is how people are when they are struggling.
Their struggle is built in to the inflationary currency they use. If they were to use a less inflationary currency (1%/yr), e.g. gold backed, they would struggle less, but the oligarchy won't allow it.
I agree that the issue is desperation; you can’t worry about 40 years from now when you’re barely making rent. What I really don’t understand is why you single out the fact that we have an inflationary currency as the cause of this desperation when there’s a million other factors.
> why you single out the fact that we have an inflationary currency
Because it is the core factor. The inflation rate has vastly exceeded 1% for many years, and I consider this ideal target to be tolerable in the long-term. Even the Fed's target of 2% is an abomination when compounded, as it exceeds gold's mining rate. The moneyprinting that has occurred has benefited the rich at the expense of everyone else.
As for Bitcoin, it isn't really a sustainable technology as a currency. It will have major problems in the years ahead as its mining rate dwindles, with transactions becoming too expensive. Once it has been fully mined, its transaction cost then has no bounds. As this progress, its miners could slowly start to choose to discontinue transaction-affirming operations that are no longer worth the hassle.
The rich aren't really subject to inflation, as they have stock market ETF holdings that appreciate well. The poor are subject to it strongly because their incomes don't scale with inflation. The middle class are also subject to it for the same reason, but also because their meager savings dwindle in purchasing power.
It's copyright infringement, not theft.
The media industries just want to guilt trip consumers into thinking it's theft, but it's not. Neither legally nor actually.
I don't think it matters if the judge agrees with me.
Cases will be brought before judges based on money. Big pirates that are somehow making money doing it will be brought in front of a judge and some love will impact them.
Anybody hypothetically pirating one steam game to play for themselves because they felt alienated by Steam isn't going to be dragged in a judge.
What is the dividiing line between single organism and clones with connecting structure, like shared roots?
It seems like a fuzzy gradient to me. Maybe some biologist can share what makes the distinction clear, but I can imagine a gradient ranging from fully distinct autonomous disconnected clones all the way to clearly a single organism that only grows outward into a large sphere.
Clearly Pando is somewhere in the middle of this gradient. What is Pando's position on that gradient and why is "bunch of individual clones" somewhere else? How is another tree sharing a roots not a single individual too?
Super confused here because the distinction seems completely clear to me? Relatively few plants, when mature, will start growing clones up from their roots, but it's a known growth pattern. They're called suckers, and I've never heard them referred to as distinct individuals.
But most plants can be cloned by taking a cutting and giving it continuous water + air and letting it start growing a new root system. I've never heard anybody suggest the cutting is not a new, distinct plant.
On a team you are emotionally (or maybe even just financially) invested in it feels bad, but when I was at EA they almost worked hard to make it hard to become emotionally invested.
At a company the size of EA almost certainly this will be used to play politics and even if it hurts the company as a whole people will use it to have larger control over the now smaller company.
Or look at it another way LLMs or just text prediction machines, whatever information doesn't help them predict the next token or conflicts with the likelihood of the next token is something that gets dropped.
Or look at it another way these things are often trained on the many terabytes of the internet yet even a 200 billion parameter network is 100 or 200 GB in size. So something is missing, and that is a way better compression ratio then the best known algorithms for lossless compression.
Or we can look at it another way, these things were never built to be lossless compression systems. We can know by looking at how these things are implemented that they don't retain everything they're trained on, they extract a bunch of statistics.