montebicyclelo

Yep agree, good details, and this doesn't contradict my point above, about people going "overboard" with the comparison.

I do think when making these comparisons, it is worth emphasising that neural nets are really different. E.g. I used to see people equating LLMs to n-gram models, etc. which is overly simplistic, (especially in the early days when the models weren't as good).

This is fun, but historically people have gone a bit overboard with saying that models like this, or n-gram language models, are anywhere close to large neural network models. There is certainly a connection though.

More fragmented sleep, with people talking in the night, etc. I guess that's different from the low, unnatural, rumbles of cars and aeroplanes the majority of people have to put up with.

worth noting you don't usually read _that_ many books in your lifetime. e.g. 20 a books a year for 40 years is just 800 books

side note: i've noticed people writing with no caps, unusual grammar, splling mistakes, etc. which does differentiate their output from typical llm output - although ofc llms can probably imitate that

I was wondering whether this might have an explanation for why I don't really like major music, preferring minor / modal / non-functional harmony... it does:

> Throughout this derivation of different chords, you will note that a gradual progression or degradation from high-theme/low-complexity (Major Triad, Harmonic Series chords) to low-theme/high-complexity (Minor and Ambiguous chords). This progression is suggested by our measure of interestingness from Section 2.4 "Interestingness: Just Enough Complexity". That is, as we progress, more and more of the theme of the Harmonic Series is lost and more and more complexity is introduced. Notice that this progression seems to mirror that of musical sophistication as well: musically untrained listeners like Major chords while more musically trained listeners are more tolerant to loss of theme and more interested in complexity. (I met a signal processing engineer who had played piano for something like 18 years and who simply did not like Major chords at all.) Other fields seem to progress similarly: white wine is preferred by new wine drinkers, whereas more "complex" red wines are an acquired taste.

Hmm, there's a difference between unnecessary arguments about every tiny detail, and productive arguments.

I've seen many healthy technical disagreements; often leading to new insights coming to light, assumptions being made explicit, everyone leaving with a better understanding, sometimes resulting in one party conceding, sometimes resulting in a compromise. Guess it requires a certain level of maturity / people arguing in good faith.

> Then cite them as blog posts

My point is it's still useful to have a somewhat authoritative place to cite (high quality) blog post level content. arXiv has formatting requirements and doesn't go down like random personal sites.

> a LaTeX PDF can launder epistemic status

True to a certain extent, although something people are aware of and they can judge the content themselves (hopefully).

Well, some blog posts are worth citing.