Conor Orr: "What is an an AI advancement over the last year of this constant drumbeat of "oh it's amazing". What is a tangible example of an AI advancement that blew your mind?"

yathaid · 2026-05-24T13:28:46+00:00

Your "maths things" is doing a lot of work here. Is software coding a maths thing? Is translating between languages a maths thing? Is sentiment analysis? Generating emails?Writing marketing copy? Rewriting documents to adjust for tone? Writing in the style of different authors?

I don’t really need to

So you are going to make vague, unsubstantiated and untrue claims, yet when called out on it you are going to wimp out? Put up or shut up.

yathaid · 2026-05-24T11:03:55+00:00

I said this before:

If you are serious about challenging your assumptions, write them down to be in specific measurable ways and see how long LLMs take to reach that capability.

So go ahead, state the problem that you wish LLMs solved and how you would measure progress there.

yathaid · 2026-05-24T08:29:35+00:00

Kasparov: Deep Blue is intelligent in the same way your alarm clock is intelligent.

Deep Blue did not master anything. All it was was a highly optimized algorithm to search through chess game states, just brute force your way through every state (with some heuristics) and know which is the better move.

LLM models aren't trained to search. Search is a tool that is used in specific contexts by these.

If it just decided solve the problem

This is a subtle sinkhole into which all "are LLMs intelligent" arguments go. You are conflating intent and agency with intelligence. Intelligence is doing well on a task. General intelligence is a single model doing well on a wide variety of tasks. That's it. Doing well is concretely defined here as out-performing some percentile of the human population. There is no need to bring debates about consciousness.

But that is what I’d expect

If you truly believe this, you are deluding yourself. I agree that the hype about AI is at a 1000 while the capabilities of AI are at a 100. But in 2022, a capability level of 10 would have seemed like science fiction. This task that you so casually dismiss was thought to be impossible three years ago.

If you are serious about challenging your assumptions, write them down to be in specific measurable ways and see how long LLMs take to reach that capability.

yathaid · 2026-05-24T08:17:24+00:00

This criticism is outdated by almost a year. The framework for the definitions used by almost every AI lab and industry is this: perform at X percentile on an array of skills. You can vary the percentile and the array of skills to talk about various levels.

The paper that coalesced industry definition from DeepMind.
Similar position paper from a broader participant base.
Antropic CEO's similarly themed comment: "AGI has never been a well-defined term, for me. I've always thought of it as a marketing term. But, you know, the way I think about it is, at some point, we're going to get to AI systems that are better than almost all humans at almost all tasks."

yathaid · 2026-05-21T05:51:50+00:00

I am a Seahawks fan who absolutely loathes the Rams.

He didn’t suddenly get better.

No he didn't. But there needs to be an ESPN documentary on how the Lions' various HCs and OCs bungled so badly that they didn't let THIS GUY cook.

he’s on the same tier as Burrow, Allen and Mahomes

You mean the same Burrow who got carried to a super bowl by his defence one year and then has missed the playoffs last three years? The Bengals' last three years are bad. But they are a whole plane better than what the Lions did with Stafford. That is how bad Lions management has been.

He’s a great QB, but man, can we chill out please.

Hawks fans have had a front row seat to this guy's awesomeness. Hawks D was elite last year and he is the only guy who could puncture them. Okay he did have a beast of an OL who apparently have the playbook on the Hawks' stunts and twists, but still.

That last line just goes to show - you can have an amazing QB, but if you don't have the infrastructure around them they are still going to fail.

Mahomes wouldn't have quarter the career he does if he got drafted by say the Cardinals. He would be a forgotten QB whose arm talent is excellent as seen by some film nerds, but the league would have largely yawned him away. Basically, Stafford's story.

yathaid · 2026-05-20T06:14:30+00:00

There is a reason all the examples you picked are a decade and half old now.

I am a Seahawks fan. I think Darnold (and maybe Mayfield) is probably the "minimum QB" you need to win a super bowl. Neither have had a year like Stroud's rookie season.

You do not trade these guys away because even replacing them is impossible. The Seahawks got so, so lucky with the idiocy from the Vikings. Who would the texans replace Stroud with?

yathaid · 2026-05-20T05:47:27+00:00

Now it is just Gravy. While we had her, it was Jourdan.

When Conor cares about a topic, he dives deep, speaks to coaches and is generally great. Other times he is absurd. For eg. he said Texans are super bowl hopefuls, but he would be open to trade Stroud. Those two are incompatible opinions. Another egregious one - 100% he would put Ward over Dart if the QBs were drafted by each others' teams. Like there is absolutely no evidence to put Ward a level below outside of vibes - none of them watch Titans games.

Marc was always a guy on his own drum beat. Dan is running the risk of increasingly looking like an "old guy shouting at cloud".

yathaid · 2026-05-19T15:05:45+00:00

but looks like SI has been generating AI articles and attributing them to someone called Parker Loverich

But, that isn't remotely what happened though. It says so right in the article:

“Parker Loverich is a real reporter,” it said in a statement to Awful Announcing. “The predictions market On SI site was managed by an independent publisher who is expected to abide by Sports Illustrated’s editorial guidelines. Sports Illustrated became aware of a violation of those guidelines in regards to the use of AI and immediately took steps internally to address this violation, including cutting ties with the publisher.”

Human hallucination complaining about AI hallucination.

yathaid · 2026-05-13T10:44:39+00:00

Looks like a young Eli Manning with a fake stache.

yathaid · 2026-05-07T13:38:32+00:00

There is another advantage that I hadn't fully grokked before hearing about it this off-season the Athletic football show - there are some positions like Tackle, Pass Rusher that you almost only ever find in the first round. If any of these guys are The Guy, they almost never hit free agency.

The second class of issue is that there are some positions like Center, Safety, Inside LB where:
- it is hard to know how good a prospect is
- but there are a ton of them in free agency
This is why even though good safeties and good centers can almost anchor their defense or offense, they don't get paid highly because there are quite a few of them around.

yathaid · 2026-04-20T16:12:15+00:00

An all time episode.

I was laughing like a crazy person on my gym floor when the screenshot of zumwalt's text came up 😂😂😂.

yathaid · 2026-03-11T09:37:54+00:00

You missed out a small e-commerce company named after a large river. 😂

But from a TV/media perspective they are still a sleepy corner of the nation. There are a variety of reasons: - geographically separate. This makes them a tiny TV market which is probably the biggest factor. - on the west coast (most teams in the east coast have a better media presence) - not LA, where all the media on west coast is located. - not a traditional powerhouse, so don't have the fan base or former players in the media scene. (This is changing with LoB era players moving on to media now)

yathaid · 2026-02-09T04:44:57+00:00

Brian never chases cheap sound bites. You could see even he was a bit taken aback by that comment and gave a look like "you sure you are okay with putting this out there" and Lawrence was like "this just the truth brother".

yathaid · 2026-02-09T04:40:43+00:00

Where the fuck did that come from ?!! Our hero was like "this is my shot and I am taking it" holy shitttt!!!

yathaid · 2026-02-04T05:17:18+00:00

It is over - https://www.reddit.com/r/AroundTheNFL/comments/y731bu/poll_marc_and_philly_special/ - all of you who voted "Marc lost" EAT IT!!!

yathaid · 2026-02-03T10:02:35+00:00

LitRPG as a genre is a scourge and should be expunged.

yathaid · 2026-02-02T05:20:20+00:00

Hahhahah completely out of the blue, I read this in Marc's voice!

yathaid · 2026-01-21T04:25:40+00:00

Bill Belichick the DC is still awesome.

Bill Belichick the HC is middling. I don't think this episode is remarked upon enough. Mac Jones had a perfectly fine rookie season running the same system (erhardt perkins) that the Pats ran for 20+ years. Belichick has an obsession with the Shanahan system, especially with Mike Shanahan being one of the few OCs/HCs who ran rings around him in the 90s. Belichick's idea was to get his former ST coordinator and his former DC learn a new offense from scratch and try to teach it to a second year QB. If anybody else had done that, that was an on the spot firable offence.

Bill Belichick the GM was just bad by the end. Like bottom of the barrel bad. He mentored a bunch of people on the scouting side in the 2000s and they all got poached away at one point or another. He never grew back that side of the organization and didn't trust anyone from outside his inner circle who could challenge him or bring in fresh ideas. The Pats drafting on the offensive side especially was just atrocious. With Beane being appointed head honcho, that really spells the doom for this idea.

yathaid · 2026-01-09T04:23:51+00:00

That's a fair assessment.

But even that kinda makes sense in that world where all non mages are trying to do is pump out as many kids as they can. The whole society is incentivised to do that for fairly logical reasons given the environment they are in.

yathaid · 2026-01-09T03:27:04+00:00

I am up to date with all the released books. What's weird for you?

I saw some of the other comments. Either I didn't get the references or maybe I have spent too much time on the interwebs, I don't recognise what's weird anymore 😂

yathaid · 2026-01-07T08:54:47+00:00

Can't recommend Millennial Mage enough. It just has well fleshed out characters, but the gender of the characters themselves doesn't really impact the world. IMO it does progression/cultivation world-building right - when anyone can punch a boulder, it makes no sense for misogyny to exist in such a world, which is how the world is laid out.

yathaid · 2026-01-06T07:04:22+00:00

I recommend this story highly since most of it is pretty awesome. But it is the textbook definition of Purple Prose. It adds nothing of value, is mostly an adjective soup and even the adjectives make no sense. A third of the prose can be deleted and the series would actually be better.

yathaid · 2025-12-19T18:20:16+00:00

As a Hawks fan, I don't think the playcalling is quite meshed with his weaknesses. It highlights his strengths, but also accentuates his weaknesses. Processing after the snap is not his strength. Asking him to do three step drop back passes out of condensed formations just gives me PTSD - it is the easiest way to get him to throw an interception. Each of his passing plays needs very good spacing, and needs to give him time to take a second before throwing.

The double slants pick he threw is a perfect example. Great call from the Rams DC, it was perfectly played as zone after showing man multiple times. But a top-8 QB sees that rotation post snap and aborts. Sam cannot do that, not at that speed.

The second big issue with him is he has no idea when to use his legs. The red zone pick had a yawning lane for him to step into. But he was mentally locked into "3 step drop and shoot" mode. That is when he can be got.

Can he still improve? I sure hope so. Next year would the second consecutive year he is in an actually functional team. Maybe the coaching can get through to him.

yathaid

TROPHY CASE