skybrian's recent activity

  1. Comment on Your AI is not a tool in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    That’s rather ominous, but vague. What would be an example of the sort of thing they’re warning about?

    That’s rather ominous, but vague. What would be an example of the sort of thing they’re warning about?

    2 votes

  2. Comment on Small AI models gain traction around the world in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Small AI is a far cry from wealthy nations’ colossal large language models (LLMs), hyperscale data centers, multibillion-dollar investments, and debates about AI consciousness. But for millions of people around the world, the only AI that matters, and often the only kind available, is small. (According to a World Bank Report issued in November, only 0.7 percent of internet users in the world’s poorest countries have used ChatGPT, compared to a quarter of all internet users in the most developed nations.)

    [...]

    For example, a drone-based system developed by Bala Murugan and colleagues at the Vellore Institute of Technology, in India, takes photos of cashew plants and quickly identifies those with splotches that indicate disease. All the processing takes place on the drone itself, so there’s no need for a computer on-site, nor for a connection to a central server.

    Using small language models trained for a specific problem, and sometimes running on cheap, low-power devices, other small-AI implementations have been developed to identify ant infestations in a Uruguayan vineyard, detect the presence of malaria-carrying mosquitoes in a number of nations, and run electrocardiograms from an Arduino device in parts of Brazil that lack access to more complex equipment.

    [...]

    In 2025, slightly more than a third of all smartphones shipped worldwide were capable of running generative AI, and that figure will reach 45 percent by the end of this year, according to the technology research firm Counterpoint. By the end of next year, slightly more than half of all smartphones will be able to run a small AI model.

    The second reason Rovai cites is the shrinking footprint of language models. Both Google DeepMind’s Gemma 4 (released in April) and Alibaba’s Qwen 3.5 are “fantastic” for small AI, Rovai says. Both models are “open weight,” meaning users can adjust the connections between parameters to suit their needs. This makes it easy, for example, “to take a lot of data from, say, the milk industry and retrain the model specifically on that,” Rovai says.

    Rovai illustrated these reasons on a Zoom call, using one of his most recent experiments. Holding up a device, he says, “This is the new Arduino UNO Q—a US $50 device with a Qualcomm chipset. I’m running a language model here, which collects data from sensors and analyzes that data to detect tiny pools of water where mosquitoes might be breeding. It takes 3 watts to run it.”

    [...]

    Convinced that millions of people are already benefiting from these kinds of applications, the World Bank now actively promotes small AI with grants, mentorship programs, financing, technical advice, and models of government policies that are friendly for small-AI development. For example, in Rwanda, the World Bank is backing a government program to help low-income households get devices that can run AI.

    All that said, no one claims that large language models are going away entirely. To create a generative AI that can run on a phone or other small device requires the architectural insights, data processing, and results of a larger model, Rovai says. “We need the big models to create these smaller models.”

    2 votes

  4. Comment on Cambria, California banned fireworks. Then came the dogs. in ~society

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Why did they do that?

    Why did they do that?

    1 vote

  5. Comment on A global workspace in language models in ~comp

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...]

    From the article:

    In a new paper, we present evidence that a similar distinction has emerged in modern language models like Claude. We find that Claude has developed a small collection of internal neural patterns that, compared to all its other internal processing, play a special role.

    We call the collection of these patterns the J-space—named after the technique we used to find them, involving a mathematical concept called the Jacobian. Each J-space pattern is linked to a particular word. But when one of these patterns lights up, it doesn’t mean the model is saying that word—just that the word is on its mind. If you've heard of language models having a "scratchpad" or “chain of thought”—text they write to themselves while reasoning—the J-space is something different. It operates silently, in the model’s internal neural activations, allowing the model to think about a concept without writing it down. Notably, the J-space wasn’t designed or programmed by us, but instead emerged on its own during Claude’s training process.

    We find that the J-space has a number of unique properties, compared to the rest of Claude's processing:

    • Claude can report on these representations. If you ask Claude what it's thinking about, it will tell you what’s in the J-space. Non-J-space representations are less reportable.

    • It can also modulate them on request. If you ask Claude to think about something, or solve a problem silently in its head, it will light up the appropriate patterns in its J-space. By contrast, it has trouble modulating patterns not in the J-space.

    • Claude uses its J-space for internal reasoning. If you ask Claude to solve a problem that requires multiple steps, the intermediate steps will light up in its J-space, even when it doesn’t say them out loud. These J-space patterns causally mediate its performance in such tasks, despite being smaller in magnitude than other representations.

    • Representations in the J-space can be used flexibly for many tasks—for example, once “France” has lit up in Claude’s J-space, the model can recall its capital, or its national currency, or the continent it belongs to.

    • However, despite its important role, the J-space is not involved in most of what a language model does—speaking fluently, recalling simple facts, using correct grammar, etc. In experiments where we prevented Claude from using its J-space, it still interacted normally, but lost its higher-order cognitive functions.

    [...]

    This post is a short summary of a much more extensive research paper, where you can find more detail on our experiments. We’ve also released a code repository with an open-source implementation of the core methods, and have partnered with Neuronpedia to provide an interactive demo of our methods on open-weights models. To provide additional perspectives on the broader implications of this work, we also invited commentary from several experts in neuroscience, philosophy, and LLM interpretability, which can be viewed here.

    1 vote

  7. Comment on Agentic test processes, LLM benchmarks, and other notes on agentic coding in ~comp

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I switched to GPT-5.5 recently, because I can connect the $20/month ChatGPT subscription that I already had to the coding agent I'm using, with the result that there's no extra charge for me. It...

    I switched to GPT-5.5 recently, because I can connect the $20/month ChatGPT subscription that I already had to the coding agent I'm using, with the result that there's no extra charge for me. It seems okay and is a lot more no-nonsense. One thing that takes a bit of getting used to is that it's somewhat more careful to follow whatever instructions you give it.

  8. Comment on Cambria, California banned fireworks. Then came the dogs. in ~society

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Apparently the dog owners check on this and a small, isolated community is a good spot in practice?

    Apparently the dog owners check on this and a small, isolated community is a good spot in practice?

    Karen Cartwright, director of hospitality at the nearby Cambria Shores Inn, said that pet owners even call asking if fireworks can be heard in Cambria from Cayucos, about 15 miles away (they cannot).

    1 vote

  9. Comment on Fines doubled as teens outsmart Australia's world-first social media ban in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I think a reasonable approach would be to identify devices rather than people. That is, there should be an easy way for a website to check whether the device used to access the website is...

    I think a reasonable approach would be to identify devices rather than people. That is, there should be an easy way for a website to check whether the device used to access the website is child-locked. Then it’s up to parents to make sure that the devices they let their children use have child locking turned on. Also, vendors shouldn’t sell devices to kids that aren’t child-locked.

    This is unlikely to work against determined teenagers, but it would help to change the culture so that most children don’t usually have access to websites that don’t allow child-locked devices.

    3 votes

  10. Comment on Modern, abstract art makes me angry in ~arts

    skybrian
    Link
    The prices are often silly but I think you have to put it aside. Yes, the art market is a racket, but it’s someone else’s money and it probably comes from a rich donor. They can afford it. The...

    Thinking that a museum spent hundreds of thousands or even millions on a bunch of material that has no depth or meaning

    The prices are often silly but I think you have to put it aside. Yes, the art market is a racket, but it’s someone else’s money and it probably comes from a rich donor. They can afford it. The artist’s cost of materials was probably not that high.

    If you compare with the amount of money that goes into making bad or mediocre movies, there is plenty of “waste” there too, but usually we don’t think about the cost.

    1 vote

  11. Comment on Strange creatures cast ashore: salps in ~enviro

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Some of the gelatinous creatures that wash onto Oregon’s beaches are salps. Though salps resemble jellyfish without tentacles, they belong to a group of animals known as tunicates, commonly called sea squirts. In their larval phase, tunicates possess a primitive backbone structure, making salps more closely related to people than to jellyfish. Stranger yet, we are closer kin to a salp with its rudimentary spinal column than we are to an octopus, an invertebrate mollusk that seems almost humanlike with its playful personality and its remarkable memory, curiosity, and problem-solving skills. Sometimes I stare at a blob of salp goo on the sand and let the bizarre fact that we are cousins in the same phylum bubble in my brain.

    [...]

    As these gelatinous rocket scientists pilot their way through the sea sucking in water and expelling it, they filter the water for the tiny phytoplankton they eat. Salps are also considered plankton. Even though they are much larger than the microscopic organisms they consume, salps are carried by currents stronger than their jet-powered motion. The word plankton comes from the Greek planktos, meaning wandering. As salps wander the sea grazing on algae, they provide a gelatinous feast for fish, seabirds, sea turtles, and siphonophores like the Portuguese man o’ war.

    The salps we see on the beach represent one part of a strange lifecycle that involves both solitary salps and salp aggregations. A solitary salp reproduces asexually by budding a chain of clones that create light. The individual salps in a luminous chain remain attached as they swim; these strands of glowing strangeness can stretch more than fifty feet. The chains of some species form complex shapes such as giant wheels, and even a double helix. Salps that are linked together communicate through electrical signals to synchronize their movements, and a chain of harmonized beings pulses brightly as it snakes or spins its way through the sea.

    [...]

    When food is abundant, salps clone themselves extraordinarily fast. Their populations explode to take full advantage of the bounty; staggering numbers of salps gobble up vast blooms of algae. A single swarm of salp clones can cover hundreds, or even thousands, of square miles. And because of the constant gene shuffling that comes with the sexual reproduction of salps, when the environment changes, some individuals have the genetics necessary to deal with the shifting conditions.

    4 votes

  13. Comment on Cambria, California banned fireworks. Then came the dogs. in ~society

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Word has spread among California dog owners that Cambria is an ideal getaway for the Fourth of July. That’s because this small town on the Central California coast, in an attempt to prevent wildfires, has banned fireworks.

    [...]

    Cambria does not widely advertise itself as a refuge for pet owners on July 4, and the abolishment of fireworks here has actually been a source of frustration among some locals.

    [...]

    In the breezy evening before the holiday, restaurants were populated by dogs on leashes and in backpacks. Collars jingled in the hotel lobbies. Dogs lazed on balconies and gazed longingly at their owners down on Moonstone Beach, where they are not allowed. (A line in the sand, if you will.)

    Melissa Larson, the general manager of the Cambria Pines Lodge, which is so dog-friendly it has added a dog park to its roster of amenities, said that starting in June, the hotel gets daily calls from pet owners asking about fireworks. Karen Cartwright, director of hospitality at the nearby Cambria Shores Inn, said that pet owners even call asking if fireworks can be heard in Cambria from Cayucos, about 15 miles away (they cannot).

    9 votes

  15. Comment on Performers claim unsafe conditions at Casa Bonita in ~food

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Since April of last year, Shields and Casa Bonita performers have been locked in negotiations with management. The group is asking for better protections for performers who say they got hypothermia and chlorine toxicity from the diving pool, as well as security for costumed performers who say they’ve been grabbed sexually by patrons. The group is also asking for a raise to bring them more in line with the servers, who they say make more. The union says it’s already made concessions at the bargaining table but with little offered in return to improve current conditions and wages.

    [...]

    When Stone and Parker re-opened Casa Bonita in the summer of 2023, diver Bethel Lindsley was brought in to build a squad of professionals. Lindsley, who both performs at Casa Bonita and oversees the dive team, is a former gymnast and circus performer with live water show experience on cruise lines like Royal Caribbean and The Han Show in China.

    [...]

    She says the divers at Casa Bonita are either division one collegiate divers or have circus and water performance backgrounds.

    Casa Bonita’s dive set up is unique. Performers dive from multiple cliffs as high as 16 feet into a small pool, 12.5 feet deep and 22.5 feet square. They dive solo and in tandem and are required to rock climb to exit the pool.

    According to Lindsley, one diver suffered a concussion underwater after a dive. At one point the pool temperature wasn’t regulated properly, and she claims a diver got hypothermia. The team got chlorine toxicity because the chlorine pool levels weren’t getting checked regularly, she also said.

    9 votes

  17. Comment on Agentic test processes, LLM benchmarks, and other notes on agentic coding in ~comp

    skybrian
    Link
    In my experience, property-based testing usually finds Unicode bugs. String handling is hard to get right for all of Unicode, and parsing is also pretty error-prone. But for a low-stakes personal...

    In my experience, property-based testing usually finds Unicode bugs. String handling is hard to get right for all of Unicode, and parsing is also pretty error-prone.

    But for a low-stakes personal website that's not internationalized, the Unicode bugs are often using characters that I might not ever use, and I haven't found other bugs with fuzz testing.

    2 votes

  18. Comment on Ramp data shows heavy AI adopters hire more in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Firms that are Ramp customers are likely not a representative sample so I don’t entirely trust it, but it does counter the narrative. Also see their previous post on AI spending per employee: [...]

    Firms that are Ramp customers are likely not a representative sample so I don’t entirely trust it, but it does counter the narrative. Also see their previous post on AI spending per employee:

    The top 1% of firms spend $7.45K per employee per month. The top 10% spend $611 per employee per month. The median firm spends just $11.38 – about the cost of a seat on an enterprise ChatGPT or Claude subscription.

    And while several high-profile proclamations have said you should be spending as much on AI as you do on a software engineer’s salary…no one is actually doing that. For the top 1% of spenders, per employee AI spend is still less than half the typical monthly salary for an engineer. Not to say that won’t change – AI spend is still rising – but very few firms, if any, are actually doing that.

    [...]

    The top 1% of firms grew spend per employee 14.1% last month. That said, we previously found evidence firms are increasingly opting for cheaper AI models, including ones from DeepSeek, the Chinese competitor to OpenAI and Anthropic. So while firms are applying cost discipline on the margin, that’s a function of total spend rising, and rising faster than firms’ willingness to switch to cheaper solutions.

    4 votes

  19. Comment on Ramp data shows heavy AI adopters hire more in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article:

    From the article:

    • Firms that adopt AI grow headcount 10.2% over the two years following adoption, but these gains are entirely driven by high-intensity adopters. Low-intensity adopters see no statistically significant change.

    • Entry-level headcount grew even faster. At the companies making the largest AI investments, entry-level headcount grew 12% over the two years following adoption.

    • AI adoption and the associated gains are unevenly distributed. AI adopters are already larger, more engineering-intensive, more likely to be venture-backed, and faster-growing than non-adopters. These firms then grow faster upon adoption.