Recent submissions

Comment · 3 years ago
Those are a lot of leaps to make about my motivations!
Comment · 3 years ago
Something solid ahead

To clarify: I mean that, generally speaking, the presence of 'cloudy' water would presumably signify that the seafloor was close. In the open ocean, maybe a sea mount is surrounded by essentially a cloud of particles.

Edit: I think your reply made the thread reach maximum depth, so I'll end it here.. I should do more reading on the topic.

Comment · 3 years ago
Wouldn't the cloudiness itself be a signal?

Presumably it's essentially clear of suspended particles, most of the time.

Comment · 3 years ago
>> Are light, radar, and sonar still not enough to detect obstacles that big?

> Radar is useless underwater, light would also be useless for spotting anything in time to react at speed, and sonar isn’t routinely used because it compromises stealth.

Any people with knowledge in the field care to comment on whether it's feasible for a light (em?)-type, active, near-range detection system to work?

It seems to me the basic problem is:

- enough energy to get a signal at a range sufficient to move around any detected obstacles

- high enough dissipation in water to minimize range at which detection by external sensors is possible

Comment · 3 years ago
I suppose it's a bit of a scotsman argument, but the turing test is to see whether an observer can correctly guess whether the interlocutor is _human_, so by definition the test would pass if the other correspondent was human.

To the point underneath, humans do not answer in as predictable a way as ChatGPT. Your answer, for example, I am confident does not come from ChatGPT.

Edit: if I've horribly mangled the Turing test definition, please let me know

Comment · 3 years ago
This is what I got on ChatGPT today. I assume it used GPT4:

        Prompt            ChatGPT           Actual       Match
  397,356 * 930,547   369,685,207,932   369,758,433,732  FALSE
   36,330 *  26,951       979,458,630       979,129,830  FALSE
    8,681 *   9,330        80,911,430        80,993,730  FALSE
      278 *     903           250,734           251,034  FALSE
       82 *      77             6,314             6,314  TRUE

Edit: # of correct digits (counting from leftmost) only exceeds 3 on the smallest pair. It drops to two, as well, on the 3x3 set.
Comment · 3 years ago
The problem seems to be with defining good tests for intelligence. FWIW, because GPT4 answers have a detectable pattern, they should presumably fail the Turing test.

At some level, intelligence requires logic, rationality, and conceptualization, all of which are topics which have evaded clear definition despite millennia of philosophy directly addressing the issues.

Comment · 3 years ago
Since LLMs can't do arithmetic, one has to think there's more going on, at least in the arithmetic part of the brain, than is going on in LLMs.
Comment · 3 years ago
And a roommate of Richard Stallman at one point, AFAIR.

  the easiest way to mismanage a technology is to misunderstand it
Indeed.

His idea of attaching provenance to source of information used in models is a good one, and one that already has rumblings of legal weight behind it (see the various articles about copyright claims in response to GPT/Copilot).

I worry a bit that his argument is too centred on digital information creation. Though I suppose that's the novelty of the most recent pieces of technology called AI - they affect information workers, people who already use a computer interface for some large percentage of their work. Still, the topic of /physical work/ : fieldwork, factorywork, servicework, seems one or more steps removed from LLMs. The management of that work may be affected, but the work itself has already (it seems to me) gone through its first computer-revolution shock.

Edit: I'll add that the whole article has a 90s-Wired feel to it, which is refreshing to see. There's been something of a slowdown in tech-revolutions for the past decade, and it's not original to say that we may be at the start of a new one.

Comment · 3 years ago
From the given link:

  As of April 2023, the average rent for a 1-bedroom apartment in Cleveland, OH is $1,136. This is a 7% decrease compared to the previous year.
Comment · 3 years ago
Comment · 3 years ago
Very cool. Reminds me of the retroreflectors on GLONASS.
Comment · 3 years ago
They've got 0.3m on World View 3, more than enough for what was shown in the gif

Edit: you're probably right, actually.. the silver square on the lower section of landsat 8 is ~1.5m high (guessing from the image on wikipedia), so there should only be ~5-6 pixels for it, but there are clearly more.

Comment · 3 years ago
The distance to the earth might have been coincidentally the same as the distance to the other satellite. LEO isn't that far up, the one that took the photo was only ~600km AGL.

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