padolsey
Joined 15 years ago
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593
Member since
Jun 29
Recent submissions
Comment · 9 days ago
I think the nasty truth is that a lot of people starting startups seeking VC-level funds are hoping for unicorn status, ego boosts, huge wealth. And not much else. Meanwhile a lot of everyday businesses are just ... existing, growing gradually, working hard for their customers. Somehow the VC model of startup became the norm. It's odd really. It's one of many methods of funding. But I guess it comes with a feeling of having 'made it' before uhh 'making it'.
Comment · 10 days ago
> When Digit detects an approaching human, the robot will lower itself to the floor and cut power to its motors. Agility believes this is the only near-term approach to verifiably reduce risk when the robot is working near people.
I did not intend for a picture of a robot in a factory environment to make me go awwww :[
Comment · 28 days ago
There's an ugly monoculture running deeply through SF and Silicon Valley. All of these people are friends, hired into the same places, similar beliefs. Lots of the consciousness and doom-ism talk is from the 'EA' crowd, lots of crossover with crypto too. It feels no different to a cult.
Comment · 28 days ago
.. Animals other than humans perhaps, as well?
Comment · 1 month ago
I agree. FWIW I'm trying to build a wordpress-like AGPL 3.0 thing (holdout.com) that lets you import your existing chats, has feature parity with the frontier consumer apps, rich plugin marketplace, and hopefully lets people feel more in-control, and able to sacrifice less of their entire lives to one walled garden.
Comment · 1 month ago
Both cool and worryingly convenient for the botswarms we've been warned of...
Comment · 1 month ago
I think what this shows is how important branding and comms are. They've captured imaginations with their demos and nomenclature, despite the arguably non-novel architecture. One forward pass, read the embedding space, train some regressors on predicate structure, [??]
Comment · 1 month ago
I'd love to know if Jev is still fundamentally LLM-shaped in architecture. Like is it using a single forward pass with a learned readout over the predefined options (i.e. a discriminative head on a transformer, no decoding), or something else? I did similar things for zero-shot criterion-based classification using a 4B Qwen model but could not reach the level of intelligence they've got here. Tho speed/cheapness was similar.
Comment · 1 month ago
Yet they are happy for Claude API endpoints to be used if your product is served to U18s. Don't be mistaken: this is a liability thing for Anthropic, not an ethical stance on model safety.
Comment · 1 month ago
This just seems incredibly incompetent of openai engineers. Why so little attention paid to proper air-gapping/sandboxing. Why so shoddy? I don't believe in the cynical takes, but it's confusing how these ostensibly top-of-their-game engineers and researchers are so utterly incompetent in the basics of cybersecurity white-hat practices.
Comment · 1 month ago
I feel like there are so many cloistered people at these companies that they are left scratching their heads about what normies even want. Like, they literally can't fathom basic stuff that isn't just highly consumer-oriented. I dunno, like applying for government services, paying your gas/elec bill without being confused af, keeping the dr up to date with your dad's illness, or how to get your newborn to sleep at 2am.
Comment · 2 months ago
Yeh but I also mean outside of software engineering. Within the gamut of 'being a programmer' it seems fair to bleed into adjacent areas without too much cheek. We've all done it; it's part of the learning curve. But I was talking more about people in other knowledge work who have to come up with a lot of prose-like material about {insert thing}. Marketing, consultants, PMs, or even domain-specific analysts, .. ya know, the types of office jobs where people basically write emails, attend meetings, discuss reports, and produce mostly text-or-data artefacts all day long.
Comment · 2 months ago
Bit of a humbling/jarring moment when I realized that people are doing real paid work using LLMs that they could not otherwise do. I mean, it's quite obvious I suppose. But up until now I just assumed it was only a (massive) catalyst for things people would already be able to do with enough time. But nope -- it seems people are right now employed in roles that they would not be able to fulfil the tasks within if AI wasn't there telling them what to write/say/produce. Nobody is really going to come out and say that ... it's not something the less-AI-literate superiors would take kindly to.
Comment · 2 months ago
We humans will all be but API conduits for our respective AIs.
Comment · 2 months ago
The smaller these frontier-nearing models get, the more I'm reminded of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lottery_ticket_hypothesis
I'm James. Living between Beijing and London. I like coding. Also plants. Stroke survivor & disability advocate. My dog's a whippet/iggy cross and is called Ducky. He's a beautiful lunatic.
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My work email is my first name at cip dot org.
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