PokerPirate
1d ago
sûre
I could tolerate your accents on thé as a weird quirk, but now I have to ask: are all of these extra glyphs typos? do they have meaning to you? is it an experiment to see how long mottizens will go without mentioning it?
PokerPirate
9d ago
I basically learned Spanish by reading Harry Potter this way. I then tried to use Harry Potter to learn Korean (after >2000hr learning the language in other ways), and I totally failed. I took me more than an hour of looking up grammar points in the dictionary to make it through the first page. This was my sign that learning Korean was too much for me and so I decided to give up that dream :(
I've got the books in Attic Greek and Latin, and I'm toying with the idea of reading them in those languages, but maybe I should just re-read in Spanish.
PokerPirate
12d ago
This seems like a much better prompt for a philosopher.
My answer fits in a paragraph: I work with a lot of undergrad philosophy (and other humanities) majors at a top-5 liberal arts college known for humanities. Without exception, they suck using AI. They all think it is magical pixie dusk that can be waved on any problem to solve it. Philosophy professors aren't any better. A number of phil profs have commented to me about the decline in student quality due to students using AI as a crutch for their writing assignments, but it's not clear to me how much this is AI vs the secular trend of more sucky students vs just old professors being crotchety.
Okay, I lied, here's another paragraph: For philosophers to actually be able to make use of AI, or to provide insights into how humans work based on metaphors from AI, they need to understand the basics of computability. Scott Aaronson made a valiant attempt getting philosophers to recognize computability problems with his papers NP-Complete problems and physical reality and Why philosophers should care about computational complexity, but AFAIK the only people who have read these papers are computer scientists with a passing interest in philosophy. I have tried to start conversations on this topic with about 20 philosophers (both continental and analytic) and their eyes all instantly glaze over.
Damn it, I'm writing a 3rd paragraph. Way back in grad school (~10 years ago) I took a bunch of philosophy grad classes because I was interested in the problem of "what made people different from computers/AI". The most interesting result of this was me writing a paper What if Aristotle had been a Robot? that (roughly) tries to show how a robot could implement a virtue ethics system as an optimization problem (which is normally how people think of consequentialism). It's basically a badly written less-wrong article, and exactly 0 academics are interested in anything like this because it won't get you tenure because existing philosophers don't recognize it as philosophy.
Okay, fine, here's a 4th paragraph conclusion: There's been enough interesting stuff for the past 50 years in AI research for philosophers to get excited about, and they haven't. So I predict the LLM trend will not change anything.
Damn it again, here's a 5th paragraph: I'm just remembering my philosopher friend at a different university who has made the prediction that as writing "gets cheaper", more writing will be expected, and so tenure in the philosophy world will require much more output. This push for quantity will drive quality down, make tenure much harder to get, and make philosophers even more siloed/specialized than they already are. I agree with all this, but I think it applies across the board in all of academia, and these trends have been going on for so long that I don't think they can be attributed more than like 20% to AI.
There you go. You tricked me into an effort-ish post :)
PokerPirate
13d ago
This is just obviously false. There are tons of Catholic schools. If that's not "enclave" enough for you, there are tons of Amish schools as well. You probably haven't heard of the Bruderhof communities (they're basically Amish without the name recognition), but they run this school which I've been to (not as a student): https://www.mountacademy.org/. I can attest that their lives are as enclave as you could possibly get and that they are doing just fine.
PokerPirate
13d ago
TED talks on Sundays
Haha... this is the best description of an evangelical church service I've ever heard. Did you make this up just now or is this a meme floating around Catholic circles that I haven't heard before?
PokerPirate
13d ago
We get pretty regular effort posts about AI research around here. If there's something specific that you'd like that's not been covered then I'll consider it.
Maybe something we could do is a series that's a little bit more structured about specific careers people are in around here. Something like the user focus series that people were doing a while back. A structured set of questions might be less intimidating to get started on and might help people write about things this community would actually find interesting... maybe I'll start thinking about what those questions could look like at least for myself.
You're too humble... or more likely probably too much of an expert to realize how little all of us know about the process... c.f. https://xkcd.com/2501/.
I have a couple of undergrad students who want to be "AI patent lawyers". That seems like an obviously farcial job to me and not something anyone should aspire to (for many reassons, but the simplest is because as an AI-researcher patents have not affected any of the work I do and I don't see how patents will ever have a material effect on anything remotely related to AI). I would love it if your effort post could either change my mind or was a resource I could point them to explain why they career choice is stupid.
PokerPirate
23d ago
I won't say I look down on someone based on their email... but certain domains make very good fist impressions. An email that is firstname@lastname.com is an easy way to signal good tech talent.
PokerPirate
28d ago
Thank you especially for the link about the Apportionment Act of 1842. That's exactly the type of reference I was looking for!
PokerPirate
29d ago
Thank you! Reading through the article was very informative. At the end of the article there is a quote from a law professor that this was the "best Supreme Court decision since 1960". I would love a follow on detailed analysis about legal opinions on this court case and the extent to which conservatives/liberals have different opinions.
PokerPirate
29d ago
I really don't understand how we got into this mess of congressional redistricting. We don't "redistrict" state lines every few years to make senate seats "fairer" in any sense. Why didn't congressional districts just follow this obviously parallel pattern using (e.g.) counties? For that matter, why didn't this get left up to a state-by-state basis to determine how congressional seats are apportioned so that some states could gerrymander if they wanted and others could have a fixed-for-forever set of districts? I don't know if this would result in better outcomes, but it would certainly be more transparent and consistent.
I would love it if anyone could provide a detailed history of this whole mess that starts from the articles of confederation until now.
PokerPirate
29d ago
Thanks. I still have lots of questions, but I appreciate the response :)
I didn't know that deacons would work in hospitals; I've only ever met priests there before.
PokerPirate
29d ago
simonw's llm command line tool: https://github.com/simonw/llm and the related tools like ttok and files-to-prompt.
Combined with decent knowledge of the shell, it's very easy to ask very detailed questions about a code base. Here's an example I just pulled up from my ~/.bash_history that I did last night.
$ llm <<EOF
Modify the json schema so that art_characters is a list of strings and identify other areas where this may cause problems.
$(files-to-prompt schemas/*.json_schema)
EOF
The token usage is also trivial. The query above cost <1 cent. I do dozens of these types of queries daily using the most expensive llm apis, and my total usage this year is under $20. Tools like claude code pack a lot more into the context which makes them more expensive and the additional context confuses them.
The only downside to this approach is that you actually have to understand bash syntax to craft good prompts using heredocs/variable substitution/loops/etc. It's about 10 minutes of work to learn the basics, and 10 hours to learn the subtleties.
PokerPirate
29d ago
I understand the importance of sacraments and that's partly the cause of my confusion. I'm just curious about the mechanical details of "on call" and if it's the same level of rigor as other on call professions like doctors. Can an on call priest not go to the movies? Maybe a priest wouldn't go to the movies anyways, but can they be "on call" while they are doing other priestly duties? (What if someone calls them while they are delivering the Eucharist? I assume they wouldn't interrupt a sacrament to take a phone call. But what if they are performing non-sacramental priestly duties like leading an AA meeting? Do they interrupt the AA meeting to take a phone call?) My understanding was always that places that were likely to need sacraments (like a hospital) had dedicated Catholic priests working at the hospital to provide them, and not that the local parish priest was on call in his bed and would be summoned if needed.
An in particular, cell phones did not exist 50 years ago, and the Catholic church survived 2000 years without them. So how did the idea of "on call" actually develop? It just seems like the sort of modernism that an ancient, slow moving tradition would be hesitant to adopt.
PokerPirate
30d ago
Why do priests have on call rotations? Is this like a doctor where a priest can't go to the movies if they are on call because they would have to silence their phone?
At all the protestant churches I've been a member of (some 20 person congregations, some 2000), the pastors are basically always "on call" in the sense that if a member has an emergency they can call the pastor to (e.g.) visit them in the hospital. But the pastors are never expected to walk around with a phone all the time like an on-call doctor would.
I have observed this exact behavior before. Fun story time:
In 2015 I was living in North Korea and teaching computer science over there. Part of my job was to download youtube videos, linux distros, and other big files to give to the students over there. (I basically had full discretion about what to give and never experienced censorship... but that would surely have changed if I had been downloading transgressive material.) I discovered that a single tcp connection could get only about 100 kbps, but if I multiplexed the connection to do the download I could get >1gbps. The school was internally on a 10gps network, and I was effectively maxing out the local network infrastructure. I eventually diagnosed the problem as there was an upstream firewall that was rate limiting my connections. Despite what you might think, the firewall wasn't doing any meaningful filtering of the content (these were https connections, so there wasn't a way to do that beyond just blocking an IP, and basically no IPs were blocked; all content filtering at the time was done via "social" mechanisms). But the firewall did rate limit the connections. The firewall was configured to rate limit on a per connection basis and not on a per user basis, and so by multiplexing my downloads over many connections, I was able to max out the local network hardware. At the time, there was only a single wire that connected all of North Korea to the Chinese internet, and the purpose of the firewall rule was to prevent one user from bringing down the North Korean internet... which I may or may not have done... eventually I started doing my downloads on a wifi connection which provided a natural rate limiting that didn't overwhelm the wired connections.
I suspect that you are observing a similar situation where something in between your source and destination is throttling the network speed on a per connection basis instead of per user basis. My best guess about how this happens is that a device somewhere is allocating a certain amount of resources to individual connections, and by using multiple connections, you are accidentally getting more of the device's resources.
Aside: I am an avid user of LLMs (and do research on them professionally). Non-trivial networking is an area where I would be shocked to find LLMs providing good answers. Stackoverflow is full of basic networking setups, but it doesn't have a lot of really good debugging of non-trivial problems, and so these types of problems just aren't in the training data. The solutions usually require relatively simple debugging steps that build off of basic foundational knowledge, but the LLMs don't have the ability to reason through this foundational knowledge well, and I don't expect the transformer architecture to ever get that reasoning ability.
PokerPirate
2mo ago
FWIW, I appreciate the broad variety of cases you post. I don't think something needs to count as "fun" in a traditional family friendly sense to qualify for the Friday Fun thread.
PokerPirate
2mo ago
We're about to close escrow on a house. What are some fun things you can do with a house you own that you can't do with a house you rent? I'm specifically looking for ideas that small kids (ages 2-7) will find fun.
PokerPirate
2mo ago
Arguing over the definition of "lawyer-brained" is about the most lawyer-brained thing there is. I legitimately can't tell if you're trying to satirize yourself here. Either way, I love it.
PokerPirate
3mo ago
Your classification of honorable/dishonorable is totally foreign to me. Out of all the animals you list, I would have classified dolphins as the most "honorable". Is there really a major culture/ethnicity that thinks eating dolphins is okay but eating octopus is bad? It's hard for me to imagine.
PokerPirate
3mo ago
The Ludditism stems from spending so much time on the computer for work... but here I am on a Friday night replying to a forum post instead of doing luddite things...
PokerPirate
3mo ago
My wife basically arranges all my/our socialization. From my perspective, people just randomly show up and leave. I login to the motte when I'm waiting for the code to compile.
PokerPirate
3mo ago
I thought about it, but then I didn't think the right people would find the PR subthread.
PokerPirate
3mo ago
Thanks. PR submitted at https://github.com/themotte/rDrama/pull/748
Thanks for replying, and sorry if I sounded hostile. I enjoy your posts :)
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