I want to improve my communication skills so I’d love pointers on this.
Where exactly did I imply that it was the cost of the degree that is the constraint? Everyone knows poor kids and even middle class kids don’t pay anything to go to elite schools. I simply don’t think that means they face financial constraints exiting undergrad (or during undergrad). Why would they when HRT is paying $500k for new grads?
There’s this weird belief that I should feel sorry for people that didn’t come from means but got into Yale or Brown or Stanford. Sorry, they’re just as alien and inrelatable to me as Jeff Bezos’ kids. These people are in an entirely different plane of existence and ability so I have a lot of trouble thinking they wouldn’t have unlimited opportunities exiting university that I can’t even dream of.
Rich kids do get cut off from their parents but that's usually when they get off the rails, e.g start doing drugs or drinking heavily, drop out of school. When attending university most of them get some form of support from their rich families.
No, it is disqualifyingly clueless. The author defends one neural network, one bag of effectively-opaque floats that get blended together with WASM to produce non-deterministic outputs which are injected into the DOM (translation), then righteously crusades against other bags of floats (LLMs).
From this point of view, uBlock Origin is also effectively un-auditable.
Or your point about them maybe imagining AI as non-local proprietary models might be the only thing that makes this make sense. I think even technical people are being suckered by the marketing that "AI" === ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini style cloud-hosted proprietary models connected to chat UIs.
I'm ok with Translation because it's best solved with AI. I'm not ok with it when Firefox "uses AI to read your open tabs" to do things that don't even need an AI based solution.
local, open model
local, proprietary model
remote, open model (are there these?)
remote, proprietary model
There is almost no harm in a local, open model. Conversely, a remote, proprietary model should always require opting in with clear disclaimers. It needs to be proportional.
The harm to me is the implementation is terrible - local or not (assuming no AI based telemetry). If their answer is AI then it pretty much means they won't make a non-AI solution. Today I just got my first stupid AI tab grouping in Firefox that makes zero intuitive sense. I just want grouping not from an AI reading my tabs. It should just be based on where my tabs were opened from. I also tried Waterfox today because of this post and while I'd prefer horizontal grouping atleast their implementation isn't stupid. Language translation is a opaque complex process. Tabs being grouped from other tabs is not good when opaque and unpredictable and does not need AI.
That is a good point, and I think the takeaway is that there are lots of degrees of freedom here. Open training data would be better, of course, but open weights is still better than completely hidden.
I don't see the difference between "local, open weights" and "local, proprietary weights". Is that just the handful of lines of code that call the inference?
The model itself is just a binary blob, like a compiled program. Either you get its source code (the complete training data) or you don't.
You've lost the plot: The [local|remote]-[open|closed] comment is making a broad claim about LLM usage in general, not limited to the hyper-narrow case of tab-grouping. I'm saying the majority of LLM-dangers are not fixed by that 4-way choice.
Even if it were solely about tab-grouping, my point still stands:
1. You're browsing some funny video site or whatever, and you're naturally expecting "stuff I'm doing now" to be all the tabs on the right.
2. A new tab opens which does not appear there, because the browser chose to move it over into your "Banking" or "Online purchases" groups, which for many users might even be scrolled off-screen.
3. An hour later you switch tasks, and return to your "Banking" or "Online Purchases". These are obviously the same tabs before that you opened from a trusted URL/bookmark, right?
4. Logged out due to inactivity? OK, you enter your username and password into... the fake phishing tab! Oops, game over.
Was the fuzzy LLM instrumental in the failure? Yes. Would having a local model with open weights protect you? No.
Sounds like you don't know how RLHF works. Everything you describe is post-training. Base models can't even chat, they have to be trained to even do basic conversational turn taking.
That is 20% of trading volume, a lot of which is day/week trading, which goes up the more they buy and sell to each other. This does not mean 20% of their assets under management are retail. The "voice" of the retail market is still tiny, it is only because institutional investors are betting with each other off what reddit is going to do that things actually move.
To an MBA type, addictive drugs are the best products. They reveal people's latent preferences for being desperately poor and dependent. They see a grandma pouring her life savings into a gambling app and think "How can I get in on this?"
I think its more subtle; they fight for regulations they deem reasonable and against those they deem unreasonable. Anything that curtails growth of the business is unreasonable.
This thread is an exaggeration. Disney could have operated Micky Mouse themed casinos on its premises with probable success, it could also lobby to change regulation that is associated with that.
However companies have balancing factors which are other than maximizing short term profits, such as moral image
maybe these tech companies do not subscribe to your notion of modern day gestapo (an organization that was involved in killing 10+ million people in horrible ways) or a "genocide" that is minuscule in comparison to american bombings in Japan, which were similarly in the context of war and actually targeted civilians
Maybe your use of these hyperboles are just an artifact of speech deficiencies of our social media engineered reality?
All life grows and consumes as much as it can. It's what makes it life. "Control" happens when there's more life contesting the same limited resources, and usually involves starvation, but if the situation persists on evolutionary timescales, then some life adapts to proactively limit growth. Then, if some of that adapted life unadapts itself, we call that "cancer", which I think is what you were going for.
To be fair, businesses should assume that customers actually "want" what they create demand for. In the case of misleading or dangerously addictive products, regulation should fall to government, because that's the only actor that can prevent a race to the bottom.
The folks who succeed most in business are the type who have an intuition for what's best. They're not some automaton reading too far into and amplifying the imperfect and shallow signals of "demand" in a marketplace.
Because all people everywhere are psychopaths who will stab you for $5 if they can get away with it? If you take that attitude, why even go to "work" or run a "business"? It'd be so much more efficient to just stab-stab-stab and take the money directly.
> It'd be so much more efficient to just stab-stab-stab and take the money directly.
which is exactly what the law of the jungle is. And guess who sits at the top within that regime?
Humans would devolve back into that, if not for the violence enforcement from the state. Therefore, it is the responsibility of the state to make sure regulations are sound to prevent the stab-stab-stab, not the responsibility of the individual to not take advantage of a situation that would have been advantageous to take.
> I would not want to live in a society of these kinds of people.
of course not. Nobody does.
However, what happened to your civic responsibility to keep such a society to make it function? Why is that not ever mentioned?
The fact is, gov't regulation does need to be comprehensive and thorough to ensure that individual incentives are completely aligned, so that law of the jungle doesn't take hold. And it is up to each individual, who do not have the power in a jungle, to collectively ensure that society doesn't devolve back into that, rather than to expect that the powerful would be moral/ethical and rely on their altruism.
I agree with the sentiment that we should not make a habit with resting on our rights and that government has an important role to play. However, I do not think we (society) necessarily deserve our situation because others are maliciously complying with the letter of the law and we should have just been smarter about making laws. At the end of the day we are people interacting with people, and even laws can be mere suggestions depending on who you are or who you ask. Consequently, if someone 'needs' the strictest laws in order to not be an ass, then I just do not want them in whatever society I have the capacity to be in; these are bad-faith actors.
what i'm trying to imply is that every single actor, as an individual, are "bad-faith" actors. That's why it's only when collectively can each bad-faith actor be "defeated". But when society experience an extended period of peace and prosperity brought about by good collective action from prior generations, people stop thinking that such bad-faith actors exist, and assume all actors are good faith.
> I just do not want them in whatever society I have the capacity to be in
and you dont really have the choice - every society you could choose to be in, with the exception of yourself being a dictator, will have such people.
> and you dont really have the choice - every society you could choose to be in, with the exception of yourself being a dictator, will have such people
in ancient times, you could banish people from the village
I'll indulge your straw man because it's actually pretty good at illustrating my point. 99.9% of people are not psychopaths. But you only need .1% of people to be psychopaths. In a world where you get $5 and no threat of prosecution for stabbing people, you can bet that there will be extremely efficient and effective stabbing companies run by those psychopaths. Even normal people who don't like stabbing others would see the psychopaths getting rich and think to themselves "well, everyone's getting stabbed anyway, I might as well make some money too". That's what a race to the bottom is.
In the behavioral science (of which economics should be a sub-field of) this is called perverse intensives. A core-feature of capitalism, is that if you don‘t abandon your morals and maximize your profits at somebody else’s expense, you will soon be out-competed by those who will.
> why would you go to grade school and high school at institutions that produce graduates like that?
Do you not know how U.S. K-12 public schools are funded by local property taxes, which means the quality of a child's education is a direct causal relationship of the wealth of their neighborhood?
Why don't these children just grow up in richer neighborhoods?
Do you not know that the US is a Federal system and there are (at minimum) 50 different ways that schools are funded?
California's schools (for instance) aren't funded by local taxes, they're funded by the state and allocated funding based on a formula[1] of performance, need, population, etc. They can be augmented by local taxes, but in practice that's rare as the wealthy just avoid the system altogether; instead, opting for private institutions.
That's at least 12% of the population that is not funded in the manner you outline.
Equity remains a valid criticism of LCFF in California specifically.
For one unremarkable observation in this area, see the following think tank report:
> States often commission cost studies to establish the level of funding required to help students meet state standards. LPI analyzed five of the more recent of these studies [...] All of these studies recommended additional weighted funding to support English learners and students considered "at-risk," which was most often defined by a measure of family income and also included other factors [...] The recommended weights for English learners in these studies ranged from 15% to 40% of the base grant level in each state. The recommended weights for at-risk students ranged from 30% to 81%. Compared to the recommended funding in these states, the LCFF’s supplemental grant weight of 20% is at the lower end of the recommended range of weights for English learners and below the range of weights for at-risk students.
The quality of an education isn't proportional to the amount of money spent; learning is remarkably cheap if a school wants to focus on outcomes. There's a bit of give in where the teacher sits on the bumpkin-genius scale (although even then, the range of salaries isn't that wide in the big picture).
Although forcing the funding to go through a collective rather than letting people choose a school and pay on in individual basis would probably deliver a pretty serious blow to the quality.
The school system is downstream broader social issues here. It can be shockingly expensive to deal with the various behavioral problems that disproportionately impact students from lower income communities. Students from stable homes with available and invested parents practically teach themselves.
The top end may not be limited by money, but the bottom of education is, especially when it comes to public k-12 schools.
I doubt most people would even believe the differences until they saw them, I wouldn't of believed public school could vary that much until I personally saw it. Going from some middling school with a half dozen rich properties around, versus a truly poor rural school, showed me how true it is. The better middle school was teaching topics that the poor rural school didn't even broach until senior year. Our civics book from the late 2000s talked about the civil rights movement as an ongoing and building issue too keep an eye on, and half the school books had kid's grandparents name signed in them. Our calculus class, which was downgraded to pre-calc after a few years because so many kids failed college calc entrance exams, had a teacher bragging about how it only took her 3 tries to pass calc 102 in order to qualify for that teaching position. You certainly didn't get very many good teachers when they pay was that far below the national median wage, and it was sad to watch them struggle to afford things as simple as whiteboard markers, or copy paper in order to print student assignments on, because yes the school couldn't afford and didn't supply copy paper for teachers to print assignments on other than a literal single ream of paper to last the entire year.
Fear not - the American school system was built on and holds fast to the supposition that the affluent should be able to avoid any unwanted exposure to the problems of those less fortunate than themselves.
I thought her writing was 10x better than your comment, which was completely unoriginal, retreads old cultural tropes, and added nothing of value.
Of course you father of daughters doesn't think she's a good feminist role model for your girls. Thank you, good sir, for being an actual feminist. How brave.
Tell me more about what you think would be a service to women? Do you have a Substack where I can read your manly wisdom?
I mean, did you not read the "If you desire the comfort of neat conclusions, you are lost in this space. Here, we indulge in the unsettling, the excessive, the paradoxes that define our existence." disclaimer?
Exactly my thought as well, in creative idea generation you have creative fluency “how frequently do you have new ideas” and creative originality “how novel are your ideas”
The creative originality of giving an LLM memory is next to zero, is such an obvious next step it’s absurdly laughable that these people are claiming the idea was “theirs” and then extrapolating that it was stolen. I stopped reading at that sentence.
Not only does it show a mindblowing lack of situational awareness on their behalf, but it also shows a huge lack of domain knowledge because people have been experimenting with all forms of additional memory to ALL different AI systems since the 60s. “Add memory to this” (working memory, long term memory, episodic memory) is such a well known thing to do in the entire AI / ML field, it also shows just how disconnected the poster is from existing research.
You are entitled to your opinion and me to my facts.
If the point of discussion here is to downvote me, there you are correct (cause the post I submit keep getting points but my karma goes down, hah funny).
Maybe I am in the wrong place, and so are all the lawsuits that claim otherwise.
We used to say "what have you been smoking?" when someone said something so confidently wrong. But these days I feel a software engineer can only believe such a statement if they were: 1) high or 2) had their critical thinking bypassed due to excessive LLM-on-autopilot use.
I'd bet money they asked Claude if this was possible and Claude said "You're absolutely right!"
Yes, they are logging. I did not say anything about that.
I said it is absurd to think this is such a unique feature, it is absurd to think that the likely explanation is OpenAI stole it, rather than independently invented it.
If you're racing to develop AI interfaces, you should expect that one of the many people on the big corps many product teams have independently thought up obvious features like this, since before the engineering team even finished their proof of concept.
Most Ivy League schools have free tuition if your parents household income is below $200-$100k and full ride room and board if below $100-60k.
Rich kids can get cut off from their parents.
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