AStrangeMorrow

Joined 10 years ago

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264
Submissions
130
Member since
Jun 27
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Comment · 10 days ago
To be fair I also like that them. But many of these themes that used to be “oh this is a nice website” now make me go “oh AI generated!”
Comment · 1 month ago
Basically compared to standard LLM models it is an order of magnitude cheaper and faster. (Note: I didn't get to actually try jev yet, just looked at demos/specs/pricing etc)

You can definitely do similar things with say hosted LLMs + a lib like outlines , or with API models and the proper output validation layer, but again way slower and more expensive.

And on the opposite side you can train dedicated classification models that will be even cheaper and faster to run than jev. But, well, you need to train them (costly, time consuming, and data might be hard to come by depending on target). Here you are a nice zero-short system, that can handle complex/messy data out of the box.

Comment · 1 month ago
I mean now with modern LLMs a lot of good packages and tools get forgotten about. When you have hammer everything looks like a nail. Even if said "old" tools are actually orders of magnitude faster, and sometimes better too for that specific task. (And I remember spacy being basically SOTA for generalist NLP tasks not that long ago, like 2020/2021).
Comment · 2 months ago
I do agree to some extent, but really the overweight threshold for BMI is 25. And 30 for obese.

At 6 feet / 183 cm that it takes 184 lbs / 83 kg to be overweight. From what I could find, for regular gymgoers the typical weight for people around 6feet is 180-190lbs, which put many people around the overweight threshold. I am myself at 24.9, and while not skinny I am definitely in the skinnier half of the people at my local gym.

Comment · 2 months ago
Yes, it is a pretty high level metric with good correlation a bunch of diseases, but really many of these is because it is ALSO correlated to percent of fat, which is often the more relevant metric. But as you said BMI is so much simpler to measure.

Many active gym people have pretty high BMIs but fairly low fat (because muscle is dense), and unsurprisingly have better outcomes than the average person (if you ignore the share that uses/overuses anabolic steroids and co)

Comment · 3 months ago
Same for France and Spain, which is what I am familiar with. I am expecting it to be true all around.

The map of France shows maybe 100 castles? If you include castles, forts and chateaux (which it seems the map aims to do) France has around 45000 of them, including 15k medieval castles (military), an other 15k from the Renaissance period (mix of military and luxury), and 20k more recent ones (some military, many luxury type).

I know if at least 20 medieval castles within 1h of my hometown and not a single one is here.

For Spain maybe 10k to 20k castles and forts. Out of which at least 2500 genuine medieval castles (not just big houses with fortifications)

Comment · 3 months ago
I know, I am in the same range of points and still asking questions has always been a bit scary.

I remember spending 2h writing a question for what I thought was a complex c++/compiler issue. 10s of thousands of lines proprietary codebase, so I couldn’t include everything obviously, but also couldn’t create a “minimal working example” to reproduce the issue. So I included as many things is I could to try to get pointer on how to track that behavior I was seeing. Of course the second I post it I got a -1 plus “can’t reproduce”/“please add minimal example”.

An other time, I had a question that was very similar to an existing one, but different setup and the answer did not solve my problem at all. Mentioned all that, linked the other question and specifically wrote that it was NOT addressing my problem. Posted it, soon after tagged as duplicate with that one answer that did NOT solve the problem.

After that I rarely asked questions again.

Also the points system made it frustrating as a new user: someone 2 years ago asks a basic language question “+50 upvotes”. You asked a similar question, asking extra clarification on an aspect “-2, already answered, read the doc” and so on. And with such a big deal made about reputation it felt like just being born early and being able to be an early adopter meant you got east points. For new users, though luck.

Comment · 3 months ago
The evidence that humans would naturally be designed to sleep “multiple times a day” is quite mixed. “Multiple” does a lot of heavy lifting here, when basically most evidence points to two batches, following either of these patterns:

- a long uninterrupted night cycle and a short (20-60 mins) afternoon nap. Around 2pm. - a night cycle split into two halves. With a 1-2h break (maybe up to 3h) starting around midnight to 2am.

The former is still very common, and imho stretching the definition of multiple cycles. The latter is more historical (more common when there are long winter nights and no electricity).

Also making it a “Western” problem is kinda weird? There are other cultures where single cycle sleep has existed. Even hunter-gatherer groups with little to no contact with the west. And alternatively afternoon naps are still quite common is some western areas. I guess the main thing that prevent it would be the classic work day schedule.

Comment · 3 months ago
Well of course as you pointed out the legitimate one would be copying voices WITH permission (yours, someone you know who gives authorization, through contracts for movies/bots etc). The model can’t differentiate between voices for which you have permission or not.

But more generally while recordings might be copyrighted, the voice itself isn’t so copying a voice isn’t a crime, at least as it currently stands. You cannot however use said voice for deceptive practices. You can however for advertisement (needs permission). And in the US you can for satire, at least in the US, withOUT permission (falls under the 1st amendment).

Comment · 3 months ago
This drives me crazy when dealing with various contractors in my area. They often only answer by text, and can take a little while to do so. Not a big deal.

But If I send a message with more than one question, there is what feels like a 10% change they will answer all my questions and a 90% chance they will either answer one or none and I’ll just get an “ok”. And I am talking about 5 lines messages not 50 lines.

So I have to send my questions one at a time, wait sometimes minutes to hours for an answer, then send the next one.

Of course I can also call, but often can’t reach them. Or can reach the front desk that doesn’t have the answers. I understand people are busy but it turns something that should be one message into a cat and mouse game

Comment · 4 months ago
From looking at how that was done, it seems they (the paper you linked) used an older paper which looked at which names are frequent enough and more biased toward a certain demographic (90% of that name occurrence falls within that demographic).

But they picked 9 family names per group. Which sounds quite low. And combined that with first names to reach 500 first+last names per group.

I wonder how much of the bias we see has to do with the names actually picked versus it being racially motivated (absolutely not denying that this probably is a factor, but might not be the only one).

For example, in France there is the national BAC end of high school exam. If you you at the names X grade distribution, and look at the higher “very good” bracket: some names are heavily under-represented (less than 5% of say “Jordan” get that grade) while some are over-represented (35% of “Josephine” get such a grade). The exam is for the most part anonymous, but some names are definitely heavily correlated with lower/higher income groups. So nothing surprising: Josephines tend to come from richer families, thus in average get better education/support, thus better grades. Same thing is true with family names to a smaller extent.

So I wonder how much of the bias we see, be it from real persons or the AI has more to do with a class thing than a racial thing. Again those are not neatly separate things, but still

Comment · 4 months ago
Yes possible. But really that video of them features the word prominently (even on the thumbnail) AND that vocabulary estimation website. The video/podcast is just slightly over a week old.

Anyway doesn’t really matter, it was more to see if anyone else was a listener of that podcast.

Comment · 4 months ago
Someone watched “The rest is Science” I imagine!
Comment · 4 months ago
Not sure how to understand that. You mean as the best engineers?

Funnily at my company, the few engineer that did the majority of the work before AI still do the majority of the work now. By majority I mean tackling both more issues and better.

However there is a general verboseness and over engineering trend across the board.

Comment · 4 months ago
I have a similar issue. I tend to have a very “structured” type of writing. Say on slack or Reddit for example. Using markdown formatting. Lists with bulletpoints etc. And I tend to write long detailed explanations, sometimes too long if I am being honest.

But now I find myself adding noise and imperfections to my writing (not that it was perfect) to make it more human, which is kinda silly.

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