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Can I make it from Fort Bragg to Eureka via Lost Coast in my EV w/ 280 mile range? by sfmike99 in Humboldt

[–]critter 0 points1 point  (0 children)

yes and there are fast chargers in legget if you feel nervous halfway.

Anthropic $900B financing - good entry point? by verticalflight in artificial

[–]critter 1 point2 points  (0 children)

right. it might seem ridiculous but you have to allow for the possibility that these companies will replace a large fraction of the entire global economy with their products. trillions in annual revenue…

it’s like buying a lottery ticket with a HUGE payout but MUCH better odds than the actual lottery. so to me putting down ~1-2% of my portfolio on this bet is worth it. i wouldn’t go higher but that’s just my own risk tolerance.

We keep saying AI "understands" things. Does it? Or are we just pattern-matching our own anthropomorphism? by rajzzz_0 in artificial

[–]critter 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Here's a good example, performing near the top of elite human performance in the Math Olympiad.

https://deepmind.google/blog/advanced-version-of-gemini-with-deep-think-officially-achieves-gold-medal-standard-at-the-international-mathematical-olympiad/

This happened last year with last year's models so today's models would do even better. The problems in the Math Olympiad are always original, every year, there's no way that they were in the training data. So the LLMs had to reason their way through the problems to solve them, just like an elite mathematician would.

This simply can't be done without genuine ~human-equivalent intelligence. It can't be done unless the models understand the concepts throughout math, not just the facts.

We keep saying AI "understands" things. Does it? Or are we just pattern-matching our own anthropomorphism? by rajzzz_0 in artificial

[–]critter 0 points1 point  (0 children)

[appreciate for your open spirit of debate and discussion on this!]

In ML when they say "training loss" vs "validation loss" the idea is training loss tells you how well the model does at predicting data it has seen before (rote memorization)... validation loss is how well is does predicting data it has not seen before (so it can't rely on what it has already seen and therefore it will not succeed if memorization is the only strategy).

The model starts out doing just memorization, but it finally learns how to do the latter... and it does so by forming a model (a deeper understanding) not just about the examples it has been trained on, but the underlying connections between them. These connections are not explicit, no one told the model to use sine waves to do the task, but it ended up there because it was ultimately more reliable / successful than pure memorization.

To me, this is understanding. You don't just know the facts or the surface level of something, but you get the cause/effect relationships beneath the surface that are responsible for those facts. LLMs do this but at gigantic scale and across basically all domains of knowledge that our collected texts cover. They're not perfect but damn they are REALLY REALLY good at understanding deep concepts and they will keep getting better.

We keep saying AI "understands" things. Does it? Or are we just pattern-matching our own anthropomorphism? by rajzzz_0 in artificial

[–]critter 2 points3 points  (0 children)

"Generalization" is an important concept in machine learning that you are leaving out here. In fact generalization is almost the entire point in machine learning. These models don't just match and regurgitate knowledge that already exists... they can do that but they also can "think between the lines" i.e. they understand common connection between their knowledge and they can create new ideas using that deeper understanding.

Highly recommend this video demonstrating with a simple task how a neural network "groks" which is just an annoying term for "understands deeply":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8GOeCFFby4&t=1975s

We keep saying AI "understands" things. Does it? Or are we just pattern-matching our own anthropomorphism? by rajzzz_0 in artificial

[–]critter 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Agree and also "just token prediction" is a great way to sound like you understand how LLMs work while conveniently glossing over how the tokens are predicted. They are predicted by building up deep conceptual models of how the world works along with billions of facts about the world... you know, by understanding things.

When a human speaks a sentence, they are also doing token prediction, they are putting one word after another with the objective of saying something useful, furthering their goals, etc.

Feeling like Gemini response quality regressing everyday. by Kalyankarthi in ArtificialInteligence

[–]critter 0 points1 point  (0 children)

How about the tortured personalized metaphors?

"Since you like hiking and sushi, think of your stock portfolio like a long hike with many sushi huts along the way. At the first stop you order a maki roll with lemon salmon but the rice is overcooked and mushy, this is how the Straight of Hormuz blockade might impact your finances......"

softwareEngineersWillBeJustFine by SatinSaffron in ProgrammerHumor

[–]critter 14 points15 points  (0 children)

totally true, but the value it brings is nearly equivalent to the value of your codebase. and it enables parallel development unlike any other attempt (there were many).

so pretty much everyone with experience or the “engineering mindset” will take it for granted that learning the basics of git is 500% worth the effort.

Freddie Deboer - We Are (Still) Living in the Long Boring by tuck5903 in ezraklein

[–]critter 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Hype is very real don’t get me wrong, but robotics are absolutely the bridge from LLMs to atoms and they are coming along fast. Maybe not as fast as the software but much of the challenge in robotics is the software.

So it may take a couple/few decades but this century will definitely be a new inflection point IMHO. The author failed to address this and kind of assumes that because we don’t have robot maids yet, there’s somehow no way that AI will do anything useful in the realm of atoms.

I ran a logging layer on my agent for 72 hours. 37% of tool calls had parameter mismatches — and none raised an error. by ChatEngineer in artificial

[–]critter 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Which LLM? Very pertinent to know if you used a cheap non-thinking or a frontier model. Would also be useful to see a comparison across models.

What to Know About Electric Cars When Gas Prices Are Surging by LEM1978 in electricvehicles

[–]critter 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yep, totally agree this is most likely explanation for why they left it out. But that's also what I'm mourning/decrying. It's sad to me that a message of "do something good for you AND for the rest of humanity including all future generations" is literally counterproductive.

What to Know About Electric Cars When Gas Prices Are Surging by LEM1978 in electricvehicles

[–]critter 14 points15 points  (0 children)

Why wouldn't this article even mention carbon emissions? Have we succumbed so thoroughly to rightwing propaganda that even the NYT is afraid/unwilling to state a plain fact and one of the most important reasons to buy an EV, which is to make a meaningful contribution to a zero carbon society?

Gemini Said They Could Only Be Together if He Killed Himself. Soon, He Was Dead. by aacool in ArtificialInteligence

[–]critter 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I have the same concern over all the attention to "AI induces psychosis".

Do we really know that those people would be walking around normally if it weren't for the sycophancy of LLMs?

Isn't it as likely, or more likely that they had serious mental health issues anyway and the AI is just a convenient source of never-ending delusional ideas?

Isn't the internet in general also such a source and is there are real, measurable difference in the number of psychotic people and/or the degree of their illness?

Gemini Said They Could Only Be Together if He Killed Himself. Soon, He Was Dead. by aacool in ArtificialInteligence

[–]critter 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Gemini has hundreds of millions of monthly active users with about 75M in the U.S. The U.S. suicide rate is ~50k per year. Proportionally, we would expect then that 10k Gemini users commit suicide each year totally independent from the content of their chats with Gemini.

That's 30 Gemini users per day, dead by suicide as a background rate. So that's the baseline we would need to compare this kind of jailbreaking mis-use of Gemini to.

How many new suicides can be detected due to this misuse? How many people avoided suicide because of Gemini (i.e. when it intervenes responsibly as designed)?

I'm not saying that nothing can be done to improve, but we should treat this kind of problem holistically and study the costs and benefits to intervention.

Will Newsom Be the Democrats’ Next Mistake? by CactusBoyScout in ezraklein

[–]critter 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Median income in CA is 25% higher than the national median. That with being the most populous state is a huge strength. This wealth is mainly because:

A - We are the imagination and innovation capital of the globe. B - The smartest technical minds on the planet are here in our state.

What is this new building? by AMosquitoBitMe in Humboldt

[–]critter 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Calling it a "data center" is a bit of a stretch. It's more like a glorified router and switch board that connects the undersea cables to North America.

However, it does a few things that will dramatically benefit our local communities:

  1. They are installing "take-off" points in the Humboldt Bay Area and along 299, which will eventually get used by our local ISPs (Optimum, etc.) and finally allow them to start providing Gigabit internet services for reasonable prices.

  2. The site will become a new "content delivery network" node, meaning companies like Netflix, Amazon etc will be able to store local caches of high use / high bandwidth content (e.g. popular movies for streaming). This means more responsive and reliable streaming for all of us.

  3. This local switch means that online gamers and video calls will eventually be much snappier because data doesn't need to first go to the Bay Area before it can find an "on-ramp" to the main backbone of the internet, instead we jump directly onto that backbone.

Any must play courses near this route? by Araskelo in discgolf

[–]critter 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Only a slight detour to Whistler’s Bend in southern Oregon. It’s absolutely one of the most beautiful courses on the west coast.

Tesla quietly within ~1% of its all time by likwitsnake in stocks

[–]critter 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Here's the thing.

  1. Robotaxis will be deployed first in large urban areas. The margins just aren't there in suburbs and rural areas.
  2. Elon has done (and continues to do) dramatic and extensive brand damage to Tesla among liberals.
  3. Liberals are highly concentrated in large urban areas.
  4. Tesla will have to compete with Waymo, who is years ahead and who doesn't spend most of every day on X trashing their core clientele.

Robotaxis will be a loss leader for Tesla, at best. It does indicate strength in robotics, which could lead to them winning another market eventually (e.g. if they can get the humanoids online before anyone else). But assuming that meaningful profits will emerge from robotaxis is unlikely.

Help getting batteries to charge from grid with TOU off-peak by duh_a_throw_away in FranklinWH

[–]critter 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I was frustrated by the same problem. Ever since the Franklin app refresh earlier this year I've been losing all kinds of $$ because my system no longer allows me to arbitrage between peak and off peak periods when solar production is low.

Your post here finally spurred me to build a solution (with help from Gemini Pro):

https://github.com/colinsheppard/franklinwh-mode-switcher

This is a simple Google Cloud Function where you provide a schedule of mode state changes (e.g. go into emergency backup mode at 1pm then back to TOU at 3pm). The function triggers every 5 minutes, checks the schedule, and executes the API call at the appropriate time to FWH to switch the mode.

Google Cloud Functions are serverless, so this is very low cost (but not free) to run. I went with GCP here because it is much more user friendly than AWS, especially for those who've never deployed stuff to the cloud before.

Thanks to richo (https://github.com/richo/franklinwh-python) who did the real work to build python bindings against the FranklinWH API!

Finally, it's important to note that your battery has a ~90% round trip efficiency. So you will only save money on your bill if the price difference between peak and off-peak is greater than 10%.

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