variaga

Not making any claims about a specific model's capabilities, but all these "can interpret model weights" posts brings to mind the line in Shakespeare's Henry IV

GLENDOWE: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

HOTSPUR: Why, so can I, or so can any man, but will they come when you do call for them?

I can interpret weights too, but will that interpretation be correct?

In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.

"What are you doing?", asked Minsky.

"I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe" Sussman replied.

"Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky.

"I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play", Sussman said.

Minsky then shut his eyes.

"Why do you close your eyes?", Sussman asked his teacher.

"So that the room will be empty."

At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

***

Just because you don't know how it is aligned, that doesn't mean it has no alignment.

The about page says Valen is a successor to the Vale programming language, so I doubt it.

Indeed. Some of the worst software interfaces I've ever dealt with were fully "dogfooded" and that was the cause; the people writing the software did use it every day but (a) in a very idiosyncratic way and (b) in a specific, very constrained environment.

The devs did use the software, but used it in such a different way from everyone else that when the devs optimized for their own case, it made the software actively worse for everyone else.

A tiny thing about Asimov's laws of robotics is, most of his stories involve cases where they don't actually work.

Spoilers for a 73 year old novel, but for instance the plot of Caves of Steel is centered on a robot with a perfectly functional 1st law abetting a murder.

"Runaround" (spoilers, 86 years) involved a robot getting stuck in a loop bouncing between the 2nd and 3rd laws, and a human having to risk their life to unstick the robot.

Et cetera.

What is harm? What is an order? How do you trade off between different kinds of harm, or deal with conflicting orders? The 3 laws are simple to state, but hard to apply consistently in real life.

It's a little less dramatic than that. They did send a demand letter to automatic.css saying that since 'automatic' and 'automattic' differ by only one letter, are pronounced the same, and are marketed to similar groups the name is likely to cause confusion, hence automatic.css should change its name.

Which is not the same thing as claiming the word automatic generally.

Personally it sounds like a loser if they took it to court since (a) automatic is a common word and (b) they already asked automatic.css to add a "not affiliated with word press" disclaimer (which automatic.css did add). IANAL.

Directly telling someone that you have a problem with something they did and why you think it's a problem is not "passive aggressive" by any stretch of the definition.

"God was knocking, and he wanted in bad"

I did the same (4-bit cpu, 11 instructions) in my Microprocessors class, out of 74-series logic, one GAL20V8 to handle the SLE instruction and an EPROM (not an EEPROM - one with the clear window you exposed to UV light to erase.

That was also where I learned about ground-bounce & dynamic IR-drop effects due to those long looping wires between breadboards.

That was a fun class.

One hypothetical outcome if FTX had not been shut down when it was might have been "there was never a mass withdrawl of funds from FTX that would trigger an FTX liquidity crisis and Alemeda switched its strategy to 100% HODL, waited until exactly now before selling, thus making all the Alameda investors rich and covering the funds 'invested' by FTX so no harm, no foul".

Amother hypothetical outcome might have been "Alameda continued to make risky, over-leveraged investments, immediately rolling any gains into other over-leversged investments and using FTX's customer's money to cover losses until disaster struck".

I find the second hypothetical a bit more plausible than the first, but I probably just don't understand finance.

Ugh. Sudden flashbacks to having to switch analog output between Japanese NTSC (no pedestal) and US NTSC (with pedestal) without getting weird noise in the black regions.

But IIRC the MPEG-2 standard had luma==235 -> 100IRE for all of the analog formats (pal/ntsc-j/ntsc/secam) so I'm not sure why you say that would violate the broadcast limits?

Nit: a gourmand is the opposite of a gourmet

Permanently block this number? [yes] [no]

Companies with poor quality mobile websites also usually have poor quality apps.

The website can be objectively bad, but still better than the app experience.