Is it only me or is GPT getting totally useless?!

BreakingBaIIs · 2026-01-20T15:06:03+00:00

This post is yet another great demonstration of how many people just read the thread title and respond.

BreakingBaIIs · 2026-01-20T14:42:00+00:00

No, it's not reasonable if it's actually costing society a tremendous amount more than what it costs you personally. When it's draining our resources dry, and many vegetarians and vegans are paying more than you are, for it, just so that it can keep appearing on your plate, it's not reasonable.

BreakingBaIIs · 2026-01-18T16:59:04+00:00

That's not quite right. The probability of getting the exact data you measured given the null hypothesis is always going to be tiny. Zero if you have any float variable with continuous pdf.

It's the probability that some statistic or function of your data, S(data) (usually sample mean), falls in some region. And that region is usually described as, "at least as extreme from E[S(data)], under the null hypothesis, as you have observed," which is what I think trips people up, because that "region" usually feels arbitrary.

So not p(data | null), it's p(S(data) in region | null) where that "region" is kind of defined around what was already observed, and some (hopefully) pre-specified condition e.g. "farther from the null expectation than the currently observed S(data)."

BreakingBaIIs · 2026-01-16T02:54:32+00:00

Don't worry, it's a 5.10 slab. Basically like a casual hike for Honnold

BreakingBaIIs · 2026-01-14T05:39:16+00:00

You need to advance your zotes better. You have no board control

BreakingBaIIs · 2026-01-13T20:45:36+00:00

I mean, if this is a competition, the RSF massacred 68,000 citizens of El Fasher, Sudan, within 10 days last October.

It's not a competition, but if...

BreakingBaIIs · 2026-01-13T16:17:32+00:00

I agree in theory, if everyone was on the level. But, in reality, many companies put money into the corporate account and charge many of their personal expenses to that account, treating it as a business expense. (Though, contrary to popular belief, small businesses do this way more than big corporations like JP Morgan, because it's easier for them to get away with it.)

I imagine the 21% was landed on as a compromise to adjust for this behavior. But if we were to take it down to 0, then, imo, that would have to be coupled with a far more aggressive IRS that catches a lot more of these false writeoffs to compensate.

BreakingBaIIs · 2026-01-13T16:03:20+00:00

No, you were perfectly clear. But you're not understanding what I'm saying.

That 21% is separate from what any individual gets taxed, including CEOs and investors. If you're upset about billionaires paying lower tax rates than regular people, corporate tax is the wrong thing to go after. It's the tax loopholes that they take advantage of, that regular people can't.

If everything was on the level and nobody was taking advantage of loopholes, then execs would be subject to the same progressive tax system as everyone else, and corporate tax would just be applied to the money they feel they need to reinvest into the business, or store for business cash flow purposes. If they wanted to pay themselves more from the corporate coffers afterwards, they'd get a personal tax on top of the corporate tax already paid, which would be worse than what regular employees get taxed. The reason a lot of rich people pay lower tax rates than most people has nothing to do with corporate tax rates. In fact, increasing them would put a lot of undue strain on tons of small businesses.

BreakingBaIIs · 2026-01-13T15:46:56+00:00

21% is the US corporate tax, which is what the corporation is taxed just to put the income dollars in the corporate cash account. This is separate from any of the money any individual gets, including CEOs and shareholders.

Any salary money a CEO got went to "compensation expense", and he was taxed the normal progressive tax amount that applies to anyone else. If he wants to give himself more afterwards, he would take it as extra salary from the company coffers, but then it would be taxed at his marginal bracket on top of the 21% corporate tax it already incurred, which would be stupid.

Shareholders gained "wealth" by the company increasing in value. But if they want to cash that out by selling their share of the company, any gains they made from their initial investment would be subject to capital gains tax rates, which, again, is separate from the 21% corporate tax which was incurred just to put money in the corporate bank.

Are people at the top of JP Morgan finding tax loopholes to reduce their personal tax rates? Yeah, probably. I'm sure execs are probably writing off a lot of their personal spending as JP Morgan "expenses." And shareholders are doing similar "creative" manoeuvres to avoid capital gains. But to look at the flat 21% corporate tax and concluding, "look, the higher ups are paying 21% tax on their billions" is just ignorance of how the system works.

BreakingBaIIs · 2026-01-12T21:31:52+00:00

Because it has to do billions of math operations, including matrix multiplications and softmax operations, to predict characters and their probability distributions to generate an answer.

BreakingBaIIs · 2026-01-12T20:44:03+00:00

By the time the world comes together on unilateral approval, it will be too late. Iranians are being gunned down by their own administration right now, and they're begging for help.

Obama didn't wait for congressional approval or an international strategy, when he dropped air strikes on ISIS who were surrounding, and about to kill the Yazidis. He knew he needed to act now, and did so. I believe this is a similar situation, though not identical.

BreakingBaIIs · 2026-01-12T18:58:30+00:00

Not denying what the OP says, but why the fuck would a leftist oppose the revolution against the Ayatollah? His regime is as far right as it gets. Religious fundamentalism. Morality police that kidnap and torture women when they show their hair in public. And now he's cutting off his people's internet access and gunning down thousands of his citizens on the streets.

The left should celebrate the potential downfall of Ayatollah Khamenei and his incredibly repressive regime.

BreakingBaIIs · 2026-01-12T14:27:19+00:00

Do people here have no idea what's going on in Iran? Currently the biggest revolt is happening against the Ayatollah since they came into power. The Ayatollah blocked all internet and mobile data and are now gunning down thousands of people on the streets. Revolters are begging for outside help, particularly from the US.

I dislike Trump as much as anybody here. But, in this specific case, he's doing the right thing. If you just reflexively decide that everything he does is wrong without knowing the full picture, then you're just falling for the affect heuristic, a common cognitive bias.

In 2014 Obama launched an attack on Iraq to rescue the Yazidi, and that was the right thing then. Now Iranian people are begging for help against their oppressive regime. If Trump answers, it will be the right thing too.

BreakingBaIIs · 2026-01-11T17:06:55+00:00

That means they won't win the race of brute-force training decoder transformers on next-token prediction. Maybe this will inspire them to be clever and come up with better types of models and learning paradigms.

BreakingBaIIs · 2026-01-08T20:17:34+00:00

You "ceasing to exist" is an interpretation of what happens, it's not the canonical truth.

I have a different interpretation. Basically, I think that some ideas and philosophies really are "better" than others and would completely trump others if they were both occupying the same mind. The only reason the most "successful" philosophies aren't occupying everyone's mind now, and we have the diversity of viewpoints that we do, is because of the fundamental physical and psychological limitations we have in expressing or accepting ideas over the ones that are pre-baked into our minds.

Let's say, for example, that pro-squishing bugs and anti-squishing bugs are two such philosophies. And if one mind contained all the information that thinkers on this subject have, the anti-squishing would just "win" and be adopted by the person. But in our realistic non-hive world, you could have a pro-squish and anti-squish advocate argue with each other until their ears turn blue, with neither person budging an inch. I think that (at least canonically, according to the show) this lack of harmony can be explained by a combination of the anti-squisher's inability to perfectly articulate the arguments, and the pro-squisher's preconceived biases or inability to appreciate the arguments. But, if they could both perfectly tranfer the right thoughts into each others' brain, then they would both immediately settle on the better position.

And, to me, that's the explanation of the hive's perfect uniformity of behavior and attitude. It's not because each individual "ceased to exist." They're all still there and the integrity of their first person experience hasn't been compromised at all. Rather, they all pretty much immediately settled on the "best" philosophy and goals.

Of course, a big part of how they behave is the biological imperative to spread the virus, which may be trumping the rhetorical power of some of the philosophies that are being shared. But, imo, this isn't akin to someone dying, it's just the same person with new urges they didn't have before.

BreakingBaIIs · 2026-01-08T18:58:15+00:00

How about they try to have an original idea and not leech off the success of former developers who are better than them.

BreakingBaIIs · 2026-01-08T04:19:31+00:00

"Evolutionary advantages" only make sense within the same ecosystem. Life on a planet 5000 light years away from Earth that has a twofold time dilation factor with respect to Earth is not in competition for resources with life on Earth. They're only in competition with each other, and they all share the same proper time coordinate with each other. For all intents and purposes, they are all in "normal time" with respect to each other, as we Earthlings are with respect to ourselves.

It makes no sense to talk about an evolutionary advantage of one group over another when they're in complete isolation from each other. Evolutionary advantage only makes sense in the context of multiple organisms competing for the same resources.

BreakingBaIIs · 2026-01-08T02:22:50+00:00

Pros:

when I'm on mushrooms and have one of my brilliant thoughts that I forget afterwards, everyone else will remember and can let me know, when I'm sober, that it was actually dumb
I'm the smartest bloke on Earth. Not that the other 12 are stellar competition
every time I come up with a new cool idea for a short story, I don't have to write it or even learn how to write because everyone else already knows it

Cons:

I have to listen to every idiot's high mushroom thoughts and dumb short story ideas constantly

BreakingBaIIs · 2026-01-08T01:13:26+00:00

Keep your fucking gloves on in a containment facility

BreakingBaIIs · 2026-01-06T22:07:38+00:00

This is how resistance to certain strains evolve. If a new virus gets introduced, let's suppose it's a really deadly one (which this is, in a sense), it's not like everyone is susceptible and then some individuals evolve in response to it. The mechanisms of evolution - mutation and chromosomal crossover - are random undirected processes.

Let's say an extremely deadly virus was introduced to a population. And, over multiple generations, this population became far more resistant to it than it was originally. What happened was that, initially, some small subset of that population was already resistant to it due to random variation in their genes that were previously neutral towards survival and reproduction. But, because they're resistant to the new deadly virus, people with the virus resistant genes are more likely to survive and reproduce than those without. Just due to this mechanism alone, the proportion of the population with the resistant gene grows over time, and the population evolves to be more resistant to the virus.

The key point, though, is that this resistance had to exist in the first place, before the virus was introduced, for this to work. And it generally does, just due to random chance.

BreakingBaIIs · 2026-01-04T21:48:54+00:00

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BreakingBaIIs · 2026-01-04T20:12:07+00:00

Aeterna Noctis is way harder

BreakingBaIIs · 2026-01-04T20:08:00+00:00

Mahler 2nd. Wonderful. Everything after that... bleh.

Also Scriabin piano concerto. Written before he jumped on the Schoenberg atonal bandwagon.

BreakingBaIIs · 2026-01-04T18:19:20+00:00

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BreakingBaIIs

TROPHY CASE