justinnk
Joined 2 years ago
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105
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25
Member since
Apr 1
https://justinnk.net
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Comment · 13 days ago
Very cool visual guide! I feel it is appropriate here to recite this little poem about parsers by Fritz Ruehr that stuck with me since my first semester of CS. With this, you will never forget the type signature of a parser.
„A Parser for Things is a function from Strings to Lists of Pairs of Things and Strings!“
Comment · 14 days ago
I found many of the things are clearly defined after the sentence „Here are the terms we’ll use throughout.“ right at the beginning (e.g. M, d_k, d_v).
Comment · 19 days ago
Can you link a reliable source for this? The only thing I could find online was someone claiming this with a chart that does not refer to Afd at all.
Comment · 1 month ago
This one [0] about the Higgs boson is hard to beat. Pages 25-32 are just full of around 5150 „authors“, pages 33-37 are their affilliations.
Comment · 2 months ago
Not sure whether Karpathy meant it like that or thought about this statement being interpreted this way, but I totally agree with you. Creating animated movies and special effects is placing a lot of 3d polygons by hand. Maybe not with JavaScript though. However, people also made things like
telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl
Now, were they „in their right mind“? I don‘t know. The more likely explanation is they found joy in it. Reminds me of what the Suno CEO Mikey Schulman said about making music: „[…] I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of time they spend making music.“ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42688538)
Comment · 3 months ago
I agree, this seems like an important discovery. And it hits a sweetspot of being effective and very simple to implement. Have a look at the pseudocode comparison at the bottom of the accompanying github page: https://explorative-modeling.github.io/
Also, a very well-structured and easy to follow blog post by the author. I very much enjoyed reading it!
Comment · 3 months ago
I once heard a lecture about „learning how to learn“. There are already a lot of well-researched things one can exploit about the way we process information. What you describe is known as retrieval cue. Our minds seem to be associative^1. It also seems a lot of the learning/processing happens after the actual learning process, which is why resting is important. Spaced repitition is a further method well-proven in practice.
^1 In the early days of AI, the concept of Hebbian learning was popular („neurons that fire together, wire together“). Its implementation is even simpler than gradient descent used today, but never caught on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebbian_theory
Comment · 3 months ago
Exactly. If someone works on bioengineering viruses that could start a global pandemic, they have to ensure a highly secure working environment. Nothing must ever escape the lab unintentionally. It’s basically common sense.
Similar standards should be held when doing such experiments with computer programs that are capable of causing global damage. It must physically be impossible to send anything to the internet.
Comment · 4 months ago
Interesting analogy. I believe regarding addictiveness they may be compared.
> a shift of skills away from things that mattered more in the past toward other things that are not measured/perceived by the older generation.
Do you have any ideas what these things might be? As someone in his twenties, I’m sometimes saddened by observing that some of the skills I acquired over a long time (e.g., writing, coding) may become obsolete or won’t be respected anymore just now that I‘m finally getting good at them.
Comment · 5 months ago
Totally agree that it requires struggle and I did not say you should use it to just get the solution. What I think one can do is use it more like a personalized textbook which you can ask any question. It can also provide you with problems just at the right level for you and judge the solution. Now, of course for many students it is tempting to just get the solution if provided with the means but they can be taught to use an LLM in a didactically useful way.
Comment · 5 months ago
I see where you are coming from.
However, in the role of personal teachers they may allow especially our young generations to reach a deeper understanding of maths (and also other topics) much quicker than before. If everyone can have a personal explanation machine to very efficiently satisfy their thirst for knowledge this may well lead to more good mathematicians.
Of course this heavily depends on whether we can get LLMs‘ outputs to be accurate enough.
Comment · 7 months ago
They already had a basic form of this for a while [1]
> arXiv requires that users be endorsed before submitting their first paper to arXiv or a new category.
Comment · 7 months ago
I think it really depends on the how. Engaging with it in a socratic debate-style argument [1] if no fellow human is available might very much support your thought process. On the other hand, just obtaining the solution to one‘s homework/problem/task/… won‘t be very beneficial for one’s development. The latter is sadly much more convenient and probably accounts for most of the usage. I remember a saying about the mind being a muscle: in order to keep it in good shape, you have to use it actively.
Comment · 8 months ago
Thank you for the good laugh! This whole thread is peak satire.
Although, be careful. It reminds me of the foreword to a shortstory someone shared on HN recently: „[…] Read it and laugh, because it is very funny, and at the moment it is satire. If you’re still around forty years from now, do the existing societal equivalent of reading it again, and you may find yourself laughing out of the other side of your mouth (remember mouths?). It will probably be much too conservative.“ — https://www.baen.com/Chapters/9781618249203/9781618249203___...
Comment · 10 months ago
I believe Enzyme comes close to what you describe. It works on the LLVM IR level.