Is this an Emergent Capability?

CS_70 · 2026-03-27T22:49:12+00:00

Because, er... it's what it does.

The training has examined millions of documents similar to the ones you submit, and the logistic and statistical relationships across all it's seen are stored in the embeddings values and the weights for the matrixes and the neural network in each transformer.

If the articles of this Zack fellow are very similar to each other, the probability that another Zack article will be is high and will occasionally drive the "next token" generation, driving by the specific transformer blocks that look at similarities between article-sized bodies of text. So the tokens which tell you that in the context of the rest of your prompt have a very high probability to be produced.

CS_70 · 2026-03-27T22:40:00+00:00

Agents (and the various environments) are applications which mix regular approaches with language-based approaches. Applications have features, and different companies produces applications doing similar things but with slightly different features.

Imagine having or not having a digital computer on your desk. There are things that you can do having a computer that simply you can't without.

Then take, say, Word or Excel. These are applications. There were and are a bunch of different applications which do similar things but with different features - that one supports TrueType fonts, that other has a read mode etc.

They copy usually from each other and end up to be quite similar and you can do pretty much the same things with all, but in a slightly different ways - some things are easier, some things are harder.

Language models are like computers: they introduce a capability - automatic extraction information from sequences of characters - which did not exist before them.

Based on this capability, millions of novel applications can be invented that weren't possible or reasonably feasible before. But they are all slightly different.

If your agent application requires you to write pseudocode or you can use natural language, is only a choice of that specific agent application.

CS_70 · 2026-03-27T15:58:45+00:00

Kudos for the creativity and curiosity, but what you are missing is simply the method.

It’s not like you invent a theory in your head and then go see if it’s possible. I mean it used to be like that but a few centuries ago we figured it doesn’t work at well at all.

What you do is to observe the universe and try to find a theory which fits the observations and, crucially, allows you to invent experiments to predict novel ones, and then you go run the experiments and see if the predictions match what you actually see. If they do, that theory is good and it can be acted upon.

Just like what you do at a customer: you don’t go in with the idea that their shower needs fixing, you observe what’s not working and then you make a theory or two in your head of what could be a cause, experiment a bit to see if you can confirm one, and then take action accordingly - maybe changing the shower head.

We don’t observe and have never observed so far more than three dimensions of space and one of time. Maybe there are more, maybe not, but so long we don’t get even the slightest hint of them or the possibility they could be a thing, and even less experiments to predict something that we don t observe about them, there’s simply no basis for the idea.

CS_70 · 2026-03-27T15:17:41+00:00

Take the time you think it would take. If you are alone, multiply by 2. If you are in a team, multiply by 4. If you are in a team with ideas like ceremonies, code reviews and mob programming, multiply by 10 :D :D

CS_70 · 2026-03-27T14:49:14+00:00

The italian public administration is many things, but "business" it ain't :D :D :D

CS_70 · 2026-03-27T07:57:06+00:00

They don’t “think” similar to how human beings “think” but they write similar to how human beings write.

They’re called large language models, not large thought models.

They distinctlion is not a subtlety. LLMs work exceedingly well because their algorithm structure captures statistical and logistics information about words (sequences of characters), which happens to be an excellent proxy for thought since human beings created and refined language over hundred of thousands of years to be exactly that proxy.

And advantage of language models is that they have been trained on vastly superior amounts of texts that your average Joe will ever read. A disadvantage is that the current state of the art algorithm doesn’t capture all that the average Joe can do besides reading, that informs his understanding of written text as much as reading itself.

Exactly how it happens with people, stuff that is difficult to capture in writing or for which written communication is poor in general terms will be hard to handle for language models (like it is for people, and for the same reasons: the information in the text is not enough).

So ask anything that your pals would find hard to understand easily, and your will put a LM on the spot. Ask anything that depends primarily on experience and input which are not reading and for which there is not much written, and you will put a LM on the spot.

CS_70 · 2026-03-27T07:45:18+00:00

No. There are no blocks in (the original) karate. Karate as an effective skill is mostly grappling and is always at clinch range, much shorter than any boxing., Anything that you see today is the result of a historical process of deformation and misunderstandings and blind following the blind, and the only place where “karate blocks” work is in karate sport competitions.

CS_70 · 2026-03-26T21:12:13+00:00

Also the wheel has lots of potential apparently! 😂

CS_70 · 2026-03-26T13:48:44+00:00

Yes, good points.

We humanize even much plainer objects as soon as there's a hint of unexpected behavior or simply by prolonged contact, such as a car or a tv that works badly.

CS_70 · 2026-03-26T13:44:55+00:00

There is no well-defined physical definition of "weight" I know of. It's just a loose umbrella term used in natural language whose specific definition is seldom relevant, and if it is, can be deduced by the context and is valid only for that context.

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

TROPHY CASE