SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
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User ID: 84
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
12d ago
why don't people smile in their selfies? Even I learned to do that
It can be surprisingly hard to force a smile when 1) you can't see yourself and 2) you need to look towards a specific unnatural spot.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
12d ago
Even I, with a 7 years old second hand laptop can run surprisingly decent models. Any gamer with midrange GPU can run Qwen 35B A3B models at a decent speed (~20t/s or better) without having to have any particular technical skill beyond knowing the magic word "heretic" and doing a huggingface search for it. Anyone with a 24 GB GPU can run uncensored Qwen 3.8 even without any "dangerous company".
Anyone "dangerous" already has full access to those models right now if they only so desire.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
12d ago
soon the worst scum of the world will have very powerful and uncensored, non-refusing models running on cheap hardware
What do you mean soon? You can already run completely uncensored, non-refusing models on regular consumer hardware. Huggingface is chock full of heretic uncensored model weights.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
12d ago
The left has already won.
There is an important point that is being left out: The left that "won" is the US influenced left. Not the traditional "workers rights"-left but the "We must always consider the feelings of BIPOC LBGTQ people"-left.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
14d ago
Yes. Building stuff without human hand and finger dexterity is absolutely magic.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
15d ago
Pray tell how they are going to magically get manufacturing capabilities when even the best lab robots are not even remotely a match for run of the mill humans in most manufacturing tasks.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
15d ago
I assume there's a reason for the very common assumption that the vast majority of OpenAI's and Anthropic's homegrown software is vibe coded.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
15d ago
They and what manufacturing base?
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
22d ago
Are you sure any places using per-house / apartment heat pumps don't already use them for cooling during summer?
Certainly here in Finland "cool your house during modern hot summers" is why 99% of customers buy a heat pump in the first place.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
23d ago
What is the AfD position on German Irredentism?
With AfD the problem is less their policy on German Irredentism than what their policy on Russian Irredentism is.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
24d ago
NVidia's moat is Cuda and having a large number of models in use around helps support that moat since any competitors will have to implement enough of Cuda to support most of them instead of higher level layer that only works for major closed AI providers. It's not so much that HF has much moat (which they only do by being the default in most software) but that ensuring HF's existence NVidia helps support their own moat.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
26d ago
Same here in Finland. And I'm not talking about some multimillion euro inheritances but just the casual "your parents were middle class and left a house / apartment to you and your sister"-level inheritance.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
26d ago
Stress hurts. I mechanically know the rules, but in high-stakes or in front of especially skeptical it's easy to ramble or try to add too many humanizing details that weren't in the original plan.
This is fairly easy to notice when it happens and totally understandable but not really what I mean.
I'm talking specifically about the things anyone can do that almost inherently will make their presentation / talk better simply by applying an almost mechanistic set of rules: Do X. Don't do Y. If you do those and "fail" due to stress, it'll come off as a one time failure instead of "man, this guy sucks as a presenter".
We train them wrong. From 2000-2005, it was common for introductory communications technology courses to emphasize animations, and forget to talk about why you should never fucking use them. I've seen college courses that encouraged people to make sure their slides had enough detail that they wouldn't need notes.
This might be it. Probably 80% - 90% of my teachers failed those basic things in slide design. Ie. never put too much on one slide and keep visual distractions to absolute minimum. Also whoever suggested adding animations to slides should be shot and their family cursed to the seventh generation.
A lot of people just seem to struggle fully modeling the extent other people might not share information they have, even if the know it at an intellectual level.
Aka "people are goddamned idiots". That would be the only thing that explained why people in the university kept repeating the same mistakes they were explicitly taught to avoid in a very easy to understand way on that course that every single student had to take.
Why are most people so godawful at presenting and demonstrating things when even the tiniest bit of knowledge and effort would make them 10x better?
This was inspired by a recent demonstration video I saw that took ages to get to the point while clearly not being about engagement or view time farming, but I see the same issue over and over again whenever people present things on stage or in videos. Even many professionals seem to be really bad at it.
A long time ago in a university far away we had a mandatory "Introduction to speech communication"-course that concentrated on the basics, including how to give actually good presentations. In retrospect, that course was by far the most bang for buck of any university course I ever took. After I took it, people started somehow thinking I'm a natural presenter by just remembering a few key points and applying them to my presentations without having any particular natural talent at it (and my presentations weren't much good either before the course).
It really isn't rocket science. Most of it could be summarized by "Get to the point. Less is more. Hook the listener by starting with the key idea briefly and only then cover any background and details. Repeat the key points at the end. Keep slides to max 3-4 points per slide and reserve anything else to auxiliary materials. Always show the entire slide at once so the viewer pays attention to what you say instead of wondering when the next point will be revealed. Show brief examples if applicable."
Really basic things, super easy to learn, super easy to apply with the tiniest bit of practise (if I can do it with my "Ackshually that's a very interesting detail, let's totally get sidetracked by it"-ADHD diagnosed brain, there's no reason most other people can't). Enough to easily get me into the top 10-20% of presenters and that includes people whose entire job it is to present and market things (like a marketing director at an old job saying "Skooma, why don't you present this since you're so good at it?" - in a group where half the people were from the marketing dept). Following those rules also makes presenting much easier as you have to do so much less (by leaving out pointless details and fluff and realizing nobody is going to remember most of it anyway so it doesn't matter if you leave out some tiny detail).
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
29d ago
Yud has been wrong about a lot. IIRC he originally thought there would be a fast takeoff Foom event from some solo researcher or small team working on AI with limited access to compute. There’s a page out there with all his wrong predictions of which there are many.
This keeps happening to all the people (including many here on The Motte) who are all about theoretical computation and don't have the slightest clue about just how intricate and deep reaching the required manufacturing and design ecosystem is for all the required hardware. Nvidia and other such AI specific IC makers are just the small visible top of the iceberg. An AI "reaching recursive self improvement" won't do jack shit when it can't control the millions of people who are handling everything else. Likewise absolutely massive part of AI improvement is the training on real world data instead of just some abstract compute and without that data (provided directly or indirectly by humans), there is no improvement, because the AI is just playing in the tiny sandbox.
Not to mention the fact that incorporating new data into the models is a pipeline that takes three to six months as soon as it goes beyond trivial database lookup.
She's EA and rationalist adjacent so IMO it's fairly safe to say that she is.
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