Recent submissions

Comment · 8 days ago
I live in a counter-example. The only water and electric utility available is city-owned and I pay triple the amount of my sister and her family that lives in another city yet has 4+ private utility companies all competing with each other. And she has a house more than twice the size of mine!

Bring on the competition!

Comment · 26 days ago
Yes thanks. Much more clear that way. Edit: The talk was given by a geeky grad student, so perhaps very forward-thinking. Was quite a departure from the usual topics like Perceptron, MiniMax, Bayesian techniques...
Comment · 26 days ago
The gist of Roger Penrose's "The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds and The Laws of Physics" (1989) is that no algorithm, no breakthrough line of code/instruction, no pattern of on/off transistor states on silicon will magically make the thing genuinely conscious. At least not in an intuitive or classical sense. Reduced to absurdity like "Oops, forgot to add +1. Now it's a real mind!"
Comment · 26 days ago
Around year 2000 I attended an AI lecture at the University entitled "The ethics of engineering a slave race". Seems to be more relevant now.
Comment · 1 month ago
Starflight 2 here I come!
Comment · 1 month ago
My late father was a child during the depression era and so he grew up to be very resourceful/thrifty, hard working, and epitomized the "waste not, want not" slogan. So yes it can come off as hoarding and it was a lot to go through after he passed. Yet after a lifetime of scrimping, saving, reusing, and repurposing, he ended up with quite a lot to show for it. He never paid for storage, didn't clutter any open spaces, but every closet or spare room of his home was packed.

If you have the storage then by all means keep whatever you value. If it would require paying a recurring fee to keep it, then it better be worth it.

Comment · 1 month ago
Lol their page finally loaded. They added an example scenario of "Filling in Form 1040" - which made me laugh out loud. That is indeed something most US citizens cannot accurately do even with expensive proprietary tax software services. Kind of a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy meme but where the tax code is so complicated we're implementing powerful AIs to be able to do it (hopefully) right.
Comment · 2 months ago
Back in the day, the sentiment was the MySQL was more-performant but the criticized tradeoff of having "cut corners". I still remember when their transaction support InnoDB table engine came out. Anyway Postgres was viewed as slower but more standards compliant - so mature architects preferred that. MySQL, in my opinion, fell into default usage among LAMP stacks and PHP-using kiddies. Postgres took the crown over time.
Comment · 2 months ago
"There's no such thing as public opinion, merely published opinion". While on the one hand we should never discount the impact of incompetence, gross negligence, or deliberate mismanagement there's a reason this story is circulating. For the most-dominant military power in the world to "whoopsy" run out of weapons because of a low-stakes engagement isn't readily believable.

Suspicious me likens it to the supposed "water shortage deception" at Midway in WW2 https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2024/december/bat...

Slightly concerned that there could be an unreported tit-for-tat. China "allegedly" arming/equipping Iran to perhaps the USA coverty planting unbalancing arms and equipment to Taiwan. The Ukraine (and Iran?) theater has shown how drone warfare has changed the game. A nation without a navy can now inexpensively counter a nation with one (ongoing 2-for-2 at the moment).

Comment · 3 months ago
Comment · 3 months ago
This just in: fallible Humans (un)knowingly produce unreliable data. LLM training on unreliable data impacts accuracy. Some sources of Human-produced data are measurably more reliable than others.

"Trust the science!"

Comment · 3 months ago
National pride aside, we must decide if competition is good or is it bad. In the west we've been conditioned that competition is good and expect consequences and tradeoffs. In this case we're seeing incumbents trying to lobby government to secure their market share.

People rightfully question if these business models were ever feasible or sustainable to begin with. But isn't that the risk they took? We can certainly recognize that being displaced before realizing profit from your work is like a kick in the pants, but isn't that always supposed to be a possible outcome? I realize that is part of why we have intellectual property rights to reward innovators - but that isn't a universal concept in this global economy.

Which, some might argue, may be the point on the global stage. It is an ideological competition as well.

Comment · 3 months ago
As with many others among these threads I don't see how the timing works out for K3 to have trained on distilled Fable usage. There should be at least a tacit academic acknowledgment of Kimi's own design efforts.

Distillation itself, however, is still clearly valuable - else competitors wouldn't pay so much to their rival on distillation campaigns or try to circumvent anti-distillation defenses.

As for the morality of it, if you paid for the tokens they're yours. It is already understood that you own the output. Seems to me like a variation of ordinary business arbitrage. Providers might object to certain use-cases or intention and try to craft terms around that, but that's hard to enforce at scale.

Comment · 3 months ago
There's this https://github.com/code-yeongyu/oh-my-openagent which implements the OP article's oracle pattern across 11 roles. Each role has a whole ranking of recommended LLMs across many providers. For example "Sisyphus (claude-opus-4-8 / kimi-k3 / glm-5 ) is your main orchestrator."

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