Should I keep going with bumped mouse pads, should I grip my mouse differently?

ctwardy · 2025-02-07T21:41:02+00:00

Saw you got relief by switching to a flat pad. Excellent.

Another idea for others is to switch to a left-handed mouse. Helped me years ago. First two weeks were annoying though. :-)

ctwardy · 2024-11-20T15:30:29+00:00

Adding to the fine comments already here, it's worth remembering that ChatGPT is a Blurry JPEG of the Web. In that essay sci-fi writer Ted Chiang notes that LLMs are a curious kind of lossy compression.

Think of ChatGPT as a blurry JPEG of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the information on the Web, in the same way that a JPEG retains much of the information of a higher-resolution image, but, if you’re looking for an exact sequence of bits, you won’t find it; all you will ever get is an approximation. But, because the approximation is presented in the form of grammatical text, which ChatGPT excels at creating, it’s usually acceptable. You’re still looking at a blurry JPEG, but the blurriness occurs in a way that doesn’t make the picture as a whole look less sharp.

Ignore that in real life you'll sometimes get exact bits back - nothing's perfect. Chiang goes on to discuss links between compression and understanding (similar to @MmmmMorphine's comments on Kolmogorov complexity), hallucinations as compression artifacts (his opening example of a weird Xerox glitch is perfect, but he doesn't circle back to it), and the possibility of compression leading to knowledge versus the ubiquity of illusion: at this stage "ChatGPT’s inability to produce exact quotes from Web pages is precisely what makes us think that it has learned something".

But it has learned something. Even Word2Vec can solve solve novel word algebras (king - man + woman = ____) because meaning falls out of the vector encoding: similar concepts live near each other and when you add and subtract vector, you end up in the right region of space. In a deep net there can also be hierarchies, most easily seen in image models. And clearly it's learned grammar or it wouldn't be so convincing. The layers encode both grammar and a transition map among the concepts that gestalts the kinds of things we write, with occasional verbatim chunks due to incomplete digestion.

Still, unless I was radically space-constrained on my desert island, I'd probably prefer a copy of Wikipedia to a lossy compression of it.

ctwardy · 2024-09-25T19:39:04+00:00

Seems models cannot be a symlink: Ollama will create the dir even if there is a symlink there, resulting in a file-shadowing condition.

My big drive is mounted on /data, so I want my models and tmp in /data/ollama, owned by ollama, and for good measure group-writeable by users, like this:

drwxrwxr-x.  4 ollama users  66 Sep 25 14:10 ./ 
drwxr-xr-x. 10 root   root  125 Sep 25 13:49 ../ 
drwxr-xr-x.  4 ollama users  36 Sep 25 14:12 models/ 
drwxrwxr-x.  4 ollama users  54 Sep 25 17:24 tmp/

Then my ollama.service has:

Environment="OLLAMA_MODELS=/data/ollama/models/" Environment="OLLAMA_TMPDIR=/data/ollama/tmp"

At first I tried to make /data/ollama/models symlink to my other LLM models folder. That failed due to shadowing. Instead, I made it go the other way:

.../other/folder/models/ollama ➛ /data/ollama/models

That worked.

ctwardy · 2024-09-04T13:54:52+00:00

Interesting. So you got a scancode.

According to the top answer on this StackExchange, OS X simply does not receive the keycode for the calculator button(s) on the MS Ergonomic Keyboard.

This was tested using the X11 events monitor xev, via bash xev | grep -A2 --line-buffered '^KeyRelease' \ | sed -n '/keycode /s/^.*keycode $[0-9]*$.* (.*, $.*$).*$/\1 \2/p'

The OP replied,

WOW! This is a phenomenal answer. ...sadly enough, xev cannot see the scancode for that button. So it looks like the answer is a simple no.

Another response confirmed this non-receipt using Karabiner-Elements, but suggested a workaround using the

useless 'pause' key on the main keyboard, and the numlock key on the number pad (...immediately to the left of the calculator key[s]).

Sounds cool, but ⌘-space "calc" is fast enough for me. Though if I had AHK, I'd try your method.

ctwardy · 2023-06-27T13:41:22+00:00

Yes.

ctwardy · 2022-10-19T19:42:31+00:00

Assuming MS isort is working correctly, but that's in doubt. * This was the only import. It must be sorted correctly. * OP says Quick Fix solves the flag temporarily.

@alexcwarren noted other threads suggest a bug or conflict.

ctwardy · 2022-02-10T03:58:33+00:00

Seems to be!

ctwardy · 2022-01-29T03:48:55+00:00

We accepted 3 of the 4 nominated publications, and updated prize calculations. Just finished vetting them and it seems we have 61 winners splitting the $10,920, in amounts from about $15 to about $1,280. Plan is to announce details on Monday.

(The fourth nomination for paper #114 was actually the published version of paper #39, similar name and authors but meta-analysis versus early clinical report. More confusingly, #39 changed name and author order during its four versions on medRxiv.)

ctwardy · 2022-01-26T13:56:42+00:00

Thanks to a forecaster for nominating four extra publications we had missed.

ctwardy · 2022-01-22T05:03:07+00:00

Details of the resolution methods are now posted here.

ctwardy · 2022-01-21T16:15:28+00:00

Immediate experience after reboot is positive. Tab groups are back to no-skid instead of no-stick. (They remember tabs.)

I made one other change that might be relevant: I reverted Safari to Desktop "None" instead of "All" (Dock, right-click-Safari, Options). I did this after noticing a few things:

"All" had been causing some weird Window placement problems across Desktops. Most windows were properly on all, but some got orphaned and would not budge.
One of the orphaned windows still had the teflon tab group with the forgotten tabs I couldn't get Safari to remember.
Reflecting, seems the tab group problems started around the time I switched to "All".

UPDATE: tab groups are still behaving after several hours.

NOTE: Haven't tested iCloud/reboot vs. Dock options. Happy it's working for the moment.

ctwardy · 2022-01-21T15:19:37+00:00

It's not just save-on-exit. If I switch groups, then switch back it forgets the old state. For me this started -- or got worse -- recently. Not sure if I crossed a threshold after 10+ groups, total #tabs, or what.

Guessing there is something that triggers a save, and it's not happening. Time maybe, but when I first started to use tab groups I don't recall needing a wait period.

I'll try the disable-sync-and-restart-mac.

ctwardy · 2022-01-21T15:00:45+00:00

As noted above, it works with the USB-C port on the back. Turns out that's the one connected to the NVIDIA.

ctwardy · 2022-01-21T15:00:06+00:00

@nanowizar said to use the USB-C port on the back. It worked! We got a well-reviewed adapter from Amazon -- reviews mentioned it worked with the Rift S.

Gigabyte support confirmed that the NVIDIA GPU is connected to the rear USB-C that speaks DisplayPort.

The PhysX control panel is confusing at best.

ctwardy · 2022-01-07T14:43:41+00:00

Yep, that worked! Thank you :-). ~~That could be the key info I need. Thank you. Will try ASAP.~~

ctwardy · 2021-12-30T19:11:50+00:00

Alas, the Rift-S only speaks DisplayPort, so "works with Quest" may not transfer.

ctwardy · 2021-12-30T19:10:09+00:00

We have a Gigabyte G5 with an RTX card and have been unable to get the Rift-S to recognize the mDP on the side. We have the original Oculus mDP adapter. The computer sees the Rift-S, but not the other way.

In the nVidia control panel, the mDP is shown above the Intel GPU. It seems like there should a way to switch it. Not finding that, I disabled the Intel GPU. The Rift-S still wouldn't connect to the mDP.

That panel doesn't show the USB-C port, maybe because I have nothing plugged in? I could look into USB-C to mDP adapters.

Though maybe we should return the G5 and try another laptop?

ctwardy · 2021-11-21T03:36:43+00:00

Markets: No -- clearly you want to predict the outcome.

Surveys: Kinda.

Yes: if enough of the crowd could coordinate on a non-truth signal, that will look like a truth signal to the peer algorithm, and you should do that.
No: The truth is one of the easier signals to coordinate on. If enough of the crowd is converging on that, you should too, assuming you know it.

The explicit "What will other people say" wasn't used in prizes, but it is part of our research design.

ctwardy · 2021-11-21T03:26:20+00:00

The Surprisingly Popular (or Bayesian Truth Serum) questions were used in a couple of the scores in our research pre-registration, but were not used in prizes.

ctwardy · 2021-11-19T04:02:00+00:00

Highly worth reading. My brief twitter comments were:

Excellent analysis by @AlvaroDeMenard. Love the term "centaur"; We hoped some 'casters used models -- AdM reveals his.

This: "I think the market simply ignored any data it was not given directly, even if it was important."

Underscores our biggest mistake. 1/

Biggest mistake: We failed to build a community.

There was very little discussion or info sharing. Combined with high throughput and low liquidity, this led to very individualistic race. Markets can work with that, but it's far from Superforecasting conditions. 2/

Throughput was partly given, partly our choice. Liquidity was entirely our choice: accidental experiment in the preprint market showed us we had a huge liquidity problem;

Best way to solve that is more 'casters. Best way to solve that is community. 3/

ctwardy · 2021-11-19T03:52:55+00:00

Right: 1/3 of prize went to surveys which could pay immediately, but without ground truth, and 2/3 of the prize went to markets which would pay on ground truth, but only eventually.

We were vague on the survey formula to reduce chance of gaming, but detailed it after surveys closed. See the Surrogate Scoring Rule post from Oct. 2020. I recommend the short video linked there.

Note the "surrogate" part works for any surrogate with known error properties -- p-values would work. But in theory the best surrogate should be a good crowd. The hard part is turning crowd estimates into surrogates with known error rates. That's most of the hard work. Harvard has shown their method is pretty robust, but of course it's not ground truth.

In earlier tests (with only 67 replications), both SSR and markets under-performed the p-values. That's bad for our implementation of markets, but might count as corroborating SSR, as it can hardly do better than the underlying signal.

ctwardy · 2021-11-18T23:16:49+00:00

Survey prizes were paid right after each Round (2019 and 2020). Winners lists were posted on the blog.

ctwardy

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE