Moonchild's recent activity

  2. Comment on The McDonald's theory of why everyone thinks the economy sucks in ~finance

    Moonchild
    Link Parent
    It is? I do not eat out much, so maybe things have changed and I haven't noticed, but I always thought of a 20% tip as average, and 15% as low.

    An 18% tip is already quite a lot

    It is? I do not eat out much, so maybe things have changed and I haven't noticed, but I always thought of a 20% tip as average, and 15% as low.

    1 vote

  3. Comment on Sarah Silverman hits stumbling block in AI copyright infringement lawsuit against Meta in ~tech

    Moonchild
    Link Parent
    Artifacts have politics.

    Artifacts have politics.

    1 vote

  4. Comment on Sarah Silverman hits stumbling block in AI copyright infringement lawsuit against Meta in ~tech

    Moonchild
    Link Parent
    Kant says this is a bullshit argument. (Moral argument, that is; as a game-theoretic argument, it seems fine.)

    Kant says this is a bullshit argument. (Moral argument, that is; as a game-theoretic argument, it seems fine.)

    7 votes

  6. Comment on Do you have or know of fun domain names? Do you think it's worth having them? in ~tech

  7. Comment on OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO in ~tech

    Moonchild
    Link Parent
    Perhaps that is why you do not work for openai.

    Perhaps that is why you do not work for openai.

    2 votes

  8. Comment on Do you have or know of fun domain names? Do you think it's worth having them? in ~tech

    Moonchild
    Link
    I briefly owned thwack.me (also: please.dont.thwack.me etc.) and whack.us. Then lost interest and let them expire. Last I checked, they were free and available—but I just checked again, and...

    I briefly owned thwack.me (also: please.dont.thwack.me etc.) and whack.us. Then lost interest and let them expire.

    Last I checked, they were free and available—but I just checked again, and they've both been squatted. Ugh. Guess I should have held onto them...

    5 votes

  9. Comment on How do you feel about AI and the future? in ~tech

    Moonchild
    Link Parent
    The name 'AI' has been used thus by the academic literature for decades.

    The name 'AI' has been used thus by the academic literature for decades.

    7 votes

  10. Comment on How do you feel about AI and the future? in ~tech

    Moonchild
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    I do compilers research. There are very similar applications to the analysis and optimisation of code (application of ml had been demonstrated long before tab9/copilot/chatgpt*, though only as...

    I do compilers research. There are very similar applications to the analysis and optimisation of code (application of ml had been demonstrated long before tab9/copilot/chatgpt*, though only as research; not really practice yet). Broadly speaking there are a lot of cases where we have an optimisation problem which is a very large state-space search—too large to explore exhaustively—and ml can be helpful in deciding what to look at. But this all really has nothing to do with the present 'ai craze'.

    4 votes

  11. Comment on How do you feel about AI and the future? in ~tech

    Moonchild
    Link
    No. No point whatsoever. Not for the things I'm interested in doing. A friend was doing research into garbage collection and asked it about some of the things she was working on, on a lark; the...

    interacted with anything knowingly

    No. No point whatsoever. Not for the things I'm interested in doing. A friend was doing research into garbage collection and asked it about some of the things she was working on, on a lark; the results were laughably bad. Somebody else asked it to explain a famous piece of obscure code; the result was riddled with errors (to its credit, it contained a surprising number of true statements). Somebody else uses it for prose generation when worldbuilding; I'll link my previously expressed thoughts on that.

    I have no doubt that it improves the productivity of people who do useless things like writing advertising copy and boilerplate code. But wouldn't it be much better if nobody did those things?

    The fashion in which they are produced is also extremely rude.

    6 votes

  12. Comment on What are the best intro books for different science fields? in ~books

    Moonchild
    Link Parent
    Not introductory: The garbage collection handbook The art of the metaobject protocol

    Fields I would love to have recommendations for:

    Computer Science

    Not introductory:

    The garbage collection handbook

    The art of the metaobject protocol

  13. Comment on I skipped to the ending in ~life

    Moonchild
    Link Parent
    I know somebody who worked for google. He started on ads, but then switched to chromebook graphics drivers. Then, when he found out what google was doing with chromebooks (I assume he started...

    I know somebody who worked for google. He started on ads, but then switched to chromebook graphics drivers. Then, when he found out what google was doing with chromebooks (I assume he started before the strategy was obvious), he quit.

    1 vote

  14. Comment on Why do so many developers provide only 64-bit or x64 builds of their software these days? in ~comp

    Moonchild
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    You have opened up a surprisingly deep and girthy can of worms. AMD calls its architecture AMD64. If you ask Intel, it'll say its 32-bit architecture is called IA-32 (Intel Architecture 32...

    You have opened up a surprisingly deep and girthy can of worms.

    AMD calls its architecture AMD64. If you ask Intel, it'll say its 32-bit architecture is called IA-32 (Intel Architecture 32 [bits]), while the 64-bit version is EM64T (Extended Memory 64 Technology) or Intel® 64 (but never IA-64—that's Itanium). And sometimes IA-32e, for reasons that are never fully explained. The name 'x86-64' (give or take a _) seems to have originated with Linux and been adopted by macOS as well; the BSDs use 'amd64', and Windows, somewhat infelicitously, uses 'x64'.

    x32 is in fact a real thing, and refers to the use of 32-bit pointers together with the 64-bit instruction set.

    Somehow, no mainstream architecture seems to be safe from naming shenanigans—don't even ask about AArch64/Aarch64/A64/ARM64/ARMv8-... or riscv-alphabetsoup.

    25 votes

  15. Comment on Would anyone be interested on a reading/reviewing exchange recurring thread? in ~creative

    Moonchild
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    Editing is of course a process—and I find very intriguing the idea of translating into another language and using the translation to inform the original; would be interested to hear you expand on...

    Editing is of course a process—and I find very intriguing the idea of translating into another language and using the translation to inform the original; would be interested to hear you expand on this or give examples, if you're willing—but I think that if you want to produce a good story in English, you should think about its composition in English from the beginning. Otherwise, you may end up with a story which is less fit to be rendered as English prose. This is quite a subtle thing and I cannot really give overt examples which don't seem contrived—though I do commend you to look at the examples of Tolkien and Gardner that I mention in the linked comment—but I think it is something that is important and valuable to think about. (Similarly, because of the subtlety, it is difficult to suss out in editing; of course it is theoretically possible to, in the process of editing, wind up with any string of words, but that doesn't mean it can actually happen.)

  16. Comment on Would anyone be interested on a reading/reviewing exchange recurring thread? in ~creative

    Moonchild
    Link Parent
    Frankly, this does not seem like a conscionable thing to do when writing for writing's sake. A story in one language is different from a story in another—if you would like to write good English...

    Frankly, this does not seem like a conscionable thing to do when writing for writing's sake. A story in one language is different from a story in another—if you would like to write good English story, it seems like a bad idea to start by writing it in another language. And you will not get better at writing English if you do not practice.

    Edit: I discussed this somewhat previously, but let me now make the point much more concisely. If the prose is not intentional and does not cohere with the rest of the piece, then it could as easily be any other prose, and therefore it does not matter what the prose actually is. So there is no point in having it.

    1 vote

  17. Comment on Fact sheet: US President Joe Biden issues executive order on safe, secure, and trustworthy artificial intelligence in ~tech

    Moonchild
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    In this case, the data set is the entirety of the training data. Which is unreasonably large. All of the training data informs a given response. Some of it perhaps moreso, but it's not clear how...

    You would probably cite your data set

    In this case, the data set is the entirety of the training data. Which is unreasonably large. All of the training data informs a given response. Some of it perhaps moreso, but it's not clear how to quantify that (what if it takes significant stylistic inspiration from one source?).

    A source is where the information came from

    The output is not denotative; it is narrative. And, many of the more interesting putative uses for the AIs are synthetic, not simply replicative, such that there is not necessarily a source at all.

    We have a problem with AI

    I am not disagreeing with this, but...

    I'm saying: It would help mitigate these problems if AI cited its sources. If tech companies can figure that out, great! If not, maybe AI doesn't get to run wild. Maybe its use is heavily restricted.

    ...another great mitigation would be if the AIs simply stopped being unreliable. My point is that you have proposed an amelioration (provenance), but with no clear definition for it and no indication of its feasibility, it doesn't seem like an interesting point to lead with. Maybe the AIs—as they currently exist—should be regulated and restricted—that seems to me like a much more interesting thing to argue about. And if something else appears that in fact works differently, then we can talk about that at that point.

    3 votes

  18. Comment on Fact sheet: US President Joe Biden issues executive order on safe, secure, and trustworthy artificial intelligence in ~tech

    Moonchild
    Link Parent
    What counts as an ai? And what counts as a source? Suppose I take many measurements of some thing, produce a polynomial best-fit approximation using standard techniques, and then use that...

    What counts as an ai? And what counts as a source? Suppose I take many measurements of some thing, produce a polynomial best-fit approximation using standard techniques, and then use that polynomial to make predictions about the thing. Should predictions made using the polynomial be required to cite elements of the original dataset? That seems absurd to me. Which elements would you even cite? The closest ones? Not very helpful if you need to do a lot of interpolation or extrapolation (especially true if you work in a very high-dimensional space, as neural nets do). The ones that the prediction was most sensitive to? But it is hard to produce a useful ranking, there—moving any single point of the input, or even several of them, will not generally affect the curve very much at all.

    More generally, I notice a tendency to assume that technical problems can simply be solved. Sometimes they can be solved. Sometimes they can't. Often, we don't know if it's possible, or how to do it—and sometimes it's not even obvious what it would mean to solve the problem. Previously (N.B. I don't mean to single out this user, and I certainly don't mean to imply anything about their character; but it's a rather pertinent example), somebody suggested that, because apple's choice to disallow third-party browsers on its phones is politically problematic, it should 'just' expend its massive resources to solve the attendant technical problems. Which is nonsense. By the same token, nobody's holding out on us w.r.t. nuclear fusion.

    Provenance is an interesting area of research in ai (at least, I assume it is interesting to the people who find ai interesting). But it is research. It's not clear to what extent it can be done, and it's not entirely clear what it would even mean to do it.

    1 vote

  19. Comment on Can Windows make the jump to ARM like Apple did? in ~comp

    Moonchild
    Link Parent
    So I heard, microsoft did not properly implement the x86 concurrency model (unlike apple), so many applications do not work or spuriously crash. Is my knowledge outdated or incorrect?

    So I heard, microsoft did not properly implement the x86 concurrency model (unlike apple), so many applications do not work or spuriously crash. Is my knowledge outdated or incorrect?

    9 votes

  20. Comment on How did deepfake images of me end up on a porn site? in ~life

    Moonchild
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    Your previous comment was (intentionally) very vague and general, and so was the parent; the slide deck is about something very specific. I guess that is about keeping kids from watching porn....

    Your previous comment was (intentionally) very vague and general, and so was the parent; the slide deck is about something very specific. I guess that is about keeping kids from watching porn. But, aside my opinions on that, it's hardly the most important issue here, and it's not obvious what significance the content of the slide deck has to any other attendant issues.

    6 votes