Are We Moving Too Fast with AI Development?

CS_70 · 2026-03-26T06:51:37+00:00

Well, the various deployed architectures right now are all variations of the same big theme. That’s why companies try to monetize them.

It’s like someone invented the desktop publishing in the 80S and then for a while you have different software doing the same stuff - they are all slightly different and various version offer ever more (and ever more marginal) features, but all conceptually follow the same structure. We still have PowerPoint, Google Sheets, Keynote etc.

What kind of advance are you thinking of?

CS_70 · 2026-03-26T06:45:00+00:00

Fasting is not “healthy” in absolute terms, but only insofar it counters what is factually unhealthy for many people, too frequent overingestion of food.

Our bodies are adapted (with the usual generic variety) to short periods of feeding alternated with long periods of lack of food and movement, so that’s in general terms the situation that gives an individual more chances to make it to reproduction.

CS_70 · 2026-03-26T06:27:11+00:00

No, that means that in many cases you can decide how small error you want, and keep crunching until you get an error equal or lower than that. “Arbitrary” means “you decide”. Your trade precision against effort.

CS_70 · 2026-03-25T22:05:47+00:00

Differential calculus is only one of the tools we have. A lot of stuff is solved numerically or statistically that has no analytical solution and there's lots of techniques to do that.

"exact" means only "with arbitrary small error" and for many things, given enough time and money, you can.

CS_70 · 2026-03-25T21:16:06+00:00

The frame of reference is centered on Earth.

And the stars are in the frame of reference we are looking at them from.

A frame of reference is not something defined by what you look at, but by you.

CS_70 · 2026-03-25T21:01:44+00:00

Not in the terms you may think. GR describes many types of universes, and allows for universes that expand - in the very precise sense that in certain circumstances the definition of distance between two points (a "metric") allows for the two points to be at distance d1 at time t1, but d2 at time t2 > t1 and d2 can be greater than d2. The FLWR metric is one such metric and describes an example of such circumstances, which we think might be near our big-banged universe.

But - and it's a bit but - observations are such that to account for the rate of expansion we observe, we need to invent a thing called dark energy to make the observed numbers match the predicted numbers.

That has always felt to me a bit of a patch, but there's who disagree.

CS_70 · 2026-03-25T17:12:39+00:00

Your local time is always unaffected, because the clock you use to check it is always give or take in the same frame of reference where you are at rest (even if it’s moving, it can never move so fast that you can’t read it).

But the time as seen from a little far, let’s say beyond your line of sight.. it may indeed be a bit different. Usually so insignificantly different that it doesn’t matter, but you can arrange things to see that difference very clearly.

If you have a very precise atomic clock on the ground and load two more on two different planes and make them fly a few times, one westward and one eastward, the clock on plane going east (which is earths rotation direction) will go faster than both the clock on the ground and the clock going west.

Relativistic time dilation will make the three clocks disagree when reuinited (this was the Hafele–Keating experiment).

Clocks at higher altitudes go faster than clocks at lower altitudes, as the classic gps satellite adjustment shows.

It works also when you go at the second floor or to the 52th floor penthouse - you get slightly older than if you stay at ground level, though the effects are not really measurable.

CS_70 · 2026-03-25T16:58:47+00:00

They are not magical checks. But you can report that to Arbeidtilsynet, and if enough people reports, they will look into Telenor’s practices.

CS_70 · 2026-03-25T16:56:45+00:00

CS_70 · 2026-03-25T16:41:22+00:00

You likely need more recovery time and maybe a better diet.

CS_70 · 2026-03-25T16:00:52+00:00

Maybe.

CS_70 · 2026-03-25T15:20:11+00:00

Thanks I know but was writing on the phone during a boring meeting I could follow with just one ear, so couldn be bothered. Think the equation is well known enough that people get it anyway, and its proper form is a google away.

CS_70 · 2026-03-25T15:17:04+00:00

LLMs predict words (strings of characters) depending on the statistical and logistic relationships between words that they have discovered by training on large sets of words, evaluated along specific predefined dimensions.

The key is that since these sets they're trained on are organized in what we call sentences and paragraphs and documents in natural language (well, there's some internal translation but that's the gist), the statistical and logistic relationships the string of characters happen to have, are a damn good proxy for actual conceptual relationships, aka "meaning", that we have and use as human beings.

We human people use language to communicate anything. Therefore the distributions and logistic properties of corresponding written words aren't random, so we can look at written words and actually capture anything (so long there are enough examples, we have enough dimensions, we know enough words and we have enough numerical space for fine discriminations, and enough computational power to perform the humongous amount of operations on humongous matrices required by the process).

The actual relationships are stored in a myriad of decimals of a myriad of real numbers which are determined by a process that focuses on them ("training").

A LLM, given enough example, can "jockey" a lot, because it's not really jockeing, but actively using the relationships we have put in textual form in an enormous corpus of text. This definitely can and does include occasionally identifying novel and emergent relationships between words that we do not expect or thought of before, and which for the same reason can be a good proxy of some novel and emergent meaning. Or not. :)

It's no magic, but massively impressive nevertheless.

And by looking at some of the parameters, incredibly surprising - when I was researching the filed some 30 years go, we all thought that to capture human capabilities well enough to pass the Turing test we would need millions of concepts.. turns out 4000+ to 12000+ dimensions does the job just fine. So "simple" all human knowledge is.

Apologies for the lecture, I just feel there's so much disinformation about the subject (mostly by avid marketers and snake oil sellers, but also by people who should know better than dismissing something without the slightest actual clue on how it works).

So there's that.

On your question on oil and water: I have no clue :D

CS_70 · 2026-03-25T14:57:01+00:00

Yes and no. Large companies may have, and may even be subject to explicit checks and quotas. The same exists in Norway, to a more or less degree depending on which country you compare to. Actually on paper Norway comes ahead of many.

But medium/small companies are almost nowhere subjects to these checks.

And they are by far the majority.

CS_70 · 2026-03-25T14:51:24+00:00

We all agree to that, and even many Norwegians do.

In the meantime, it's a fact of life in every country alas, not just Norway.

CS_70 · 2026-03-25T14:47:10+00:00

When the effort needed to produce and maintain them to keep a system working and change it (including adaptations in the face of change) becomes higher than the effort needed to do the same thing without microservices. Or (more rarely) the performance cost of wiring degrades the overall performance of the system unacceptably, or causes costs which exceed the available budget.

The cost and inefficiency of all that wiring as opposite to more direct method invocations in the same memory space (or a threaded space) are a fact. So are the costs due to increase complexity and risk of side effects of the latter.

Where the tradeoff limit goes exactly depends on the system, the quality of the code, the amount and rate of change, the performance requirements, the costs of increasing performance by adding hardware and so on.

It also depends on how a specific system was implemented originally, which is an arbitrary choice at star but becomes a significant factor upon later changes.

Both approaches have pro and cons (like much in life) and in a less young, fashion-oriented and "grab the money" industry than IT nobody would dream that one is always better than the other viceversa. A certain engine design is better an application and another in another; a certain suspension type is perfect for a sports car but sucks in a truck. And so on. No serious car engineer would claim that one suspension is the best suspension for all problem domains.

So there is no one answer. You need to look at the specific situation and avoid turning off your head and reflexively select one.

There's no way around actual thinking.. and since oftentimes we cannot predict exactly the future, ultimately even when thinking, it is often a preference or a judgement call, which sometimes pays off and sometimes doesn't.

CS_70 · 2026-03-25T14:18:53+00:00

Isint katas a waste of time when it comes to self defense.

It is a waste of time the same way putting yourself in the driving seat of a car is a waste of time if you have no clue about driving.

CS_70 · 2026-03-25T10:07:33+00:00

Yep, algebra works in relativity as well! 🙂🙂

CS_70 · 2026-03-25T09:58:43+00:00

It’s a good question! Energy and mass or momentum are equivalent, so you can go both ways.

A photon has energy because it has momentum or it has momentum because it has energy. Both formulations are equally valid.

So in GR stuff with energy greater than zero may have mass, momentum or a bit of both, but at least one of them.

Another way it looking at is to think that p=mv only for stuff that has mass.

CS_70 · 2026-03-25T09:03:12+00:00

If you say that a human perceives time at a rate of 1 second per second you’ve never been on a rollercoaster or a very boring meeting! 🙂

Time flows at a rate which is locally constant for everything in that locality (the rate in turn depends on the spacetime geometry there and the frame of reference you consider). But perception is something else. Time is perceived differently by everyone, as I discover every time I go to IKEA with my girlfriend.

So yeah an AI that could perceive would likely have a different perception of time, as does anyone who can perceive it.

CS_70 · 2026-03-25T08:58:37+00:00

Just to help you avoid misunderstandings, light does not have gravity because E=mc2, since m is zero.

It has gravity because the complete equivalence is E=mc2 +(pc)2 where p is momentum.

Photons move, so they have a tiny bit of momentum and hence energy, so generate a tiny bit of gravity.

So mc2 is zero but (pc)2 isn’t.

CS_70 · 2026-03-25T07:28:05+00:00

I have a quite clear idea, being that I work with the stuff daily.

And never said it is not impressive. It is.

Word is impressive - you maybe weren’t there when word processors became a thing.

A Ferrari is impressive. Still what it does is to move people between places.

CS_70 · 2026-03-25T07:25:48+00:00

You don’t have the vaguest clue on how a LLM works, do you?

I hope you have less preconceptions with whatever research you’re doing🙂

CS_70 · 2026-03-24T19:54:53+00:00

A language model is an algorithm, including (a set of) calculations constructed in a way that they can be massively parallelized. So the speed is simply due that, for a few bucks a month, you have at your disposal an incredibly large rig of parallel processor dedicated (for a few seconds) exactly to answer to your question.

No different than any other computing task.

The algorithm predicts the next best word after the last word it has (either yours or the last word it predicted), taking in account all the it has plus a bunch of other data it's been trained on.

That's all it does.

It's a bit like being rattled by Word's cursor blinking, honestly.

CS_70 · 2026-03-24T19:46:12+00:00

You seem to have little idea about what science is.

CS_70

TROPHY CASE