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2025-02-03 21:11:20

The short answer here is the very mundane we don't need software, we need humans.

The various tasks along the lines of explain how to do this math problem are solved problems. There are multiple apps that try to do this. We don't need more.

The problems of students don't want to learn are more pressing.

πŸ’‘ or, "students can't learn". if you put two equally-motivated students in the same classroom for 10 hours, they will likely learn different amounts. why? there are no simple answers.


perhaps the useful task is the grunt-work. "Generate a worksheet with 30 multiplication problems. These should be suitable for a 4th grader who struggles with mathematics. Try to have consecutive problems emphasize a theme (such as commutativity) without relying on terms like commutative."

There aren't that many tasks. And but having a binder full of them is probably an improvement over the status quo.

πŸ’‘ there is a divide between building a tool and using an existing tool. explaining that divide (and, where necessary, shifting it) is the goal.

2025-02-03 19:48:29

πŸ’­ in the future, your LLM will talk to my LLM, and neither of us will benefit from the sage information exchanged.

I find myself leaning towards social networks are bad, and I shouldn't work on things opposed to the concept of having less of them these days.


people like engagement. but, there is the iron law of calculus here: the amount of time people spend with your content is equal to the time people spend with your content.

if you want the endorphins of 15 people liked this post, you need 15 people to read and like the post.

πŸ”₯ but, if the machine can score it ...

πŸ’‘ "likes" mean many things. i went to the baseball game. LIKE.


πŸ”₯ i have seen no evidence that a social network with xantham functionality would be useful to anyone.

we live in an age where censorship of social networks, while correct, is also unpopular enough to kill an app.


the LLM-powered social network will not be a social network. not the way you know it.

you talk to it. it remembers. and, nicely, keeps some public information about you available.

the panopticon of you know who knows what will collapse. πŸ’‘( at least for us, this is a good thing.)

the machine can have all your photos, and know when to broadcast one. πŸ”₯( it would be nice to offload the responsibility of knowing whether to share that the pans are cleaner)


if Zuck calls me, I can read him this email. πŸ’‘( it would have to be Zuck. all the other social networks are run by committee, or by ketamine-trip)


I don't see how LLMs can handle given person A (with dossier) and person B (with dossier) and COMM_HISTORY, send a message about the past month.

that feature is the lynchpin for any tool to replace Facebook.

πŸ”₯ it's my newslettr. again.

πŸ’­ the solution is never the newslettr.

2025-02-01 20:14:24

so LONDON needs to have read-receipts, at a distance.

the timing is uncertain.


because, the ambush-reply is a tool best used sparingly.

2025-01-30 18:13:32

https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_ddf_doc_20250128_antiqua-et-nova_en.html

the Catholic Church has come out with a document about LLMs. Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence πŸ”₯( how is an LLM different from a book?)


It is a very foreign look at the space. And a cautious one; it says very little of substance.

Perhaps the most substantive line is: Between a machine and a human being, only the latter is truly a moral agentβ€”a subject of moral responsibility who exercises freedom in his or her decisions and accepts their consequences.

2025-01-30 17:42:15

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHq4EKMg7fIπŸ“Ί

Mr. Rozman doesn't know anything about how to get the best results from LLMs. But he won't let that stop him. In fact, his job is to do everything he can to present the machine as incompetent, in an amusing way.


He can't rely on the machine generating legal moves. βš”οΈ( he probably could, but he doesn't.) βš™οΈ( he defines what a "flank pawn" is. because he assumes there will be a lot of non-regular viewers.)

And he describes the machine explaining the history of the English Opening. Because long-windedness is a feature.


The machine can't (or at least doesn't) generate a list of legal candidate moves. πŸ’‘( it probably should. Human players don't explicitly do that, because they do it subconsciously faster than they can notice.)


I can't watch all of this. His schtick is too aggravating. So I jump ahead ten minutes. The machine is now hallucinating pieces.

Because, there is no "board", and there are no constraints. πŸ”₯( this would be less non-sensical if you couldn't see the board.)

There is more of the logic that isn't logic in its output.


Question: is there motivation for an LLM that can actually analyze chess positions well?

That is: to give an accurate summary of a position? πŸ’‘( by mechanically generating the first two layers of processing, ChatGPT could probably do it now.) βš™οΈ( for example: the white knight on c6 is attacking the (defended) black rook on e7, the (defended) black pawn on b4, and defending the white bishop on d8.) πŸ’‘( of course, it won't be able to go down long lines of calculation without doing the calculation. which, without a lot of fine-tuning, it can't do.)

2025-01-27 16:29:00

it would be a competitor to Wikipedia.

instead of the encyclopedia anyone can edit, it is the encyclopedia that only the machine can edit. but, people can give the machine directions on how to edit.


There are about 6 million articles on Wikipedia. But the number of "interesting" articles is under 100k. The rest are in a bunch of "collections". πŸ’‘( the collections need managing, but are less work)

  • geographic locations
  • sports people/statistics
  • politics people/statistics
  • entertainment people/statistics
  • films, songs, books, etc.

... there are probably 10-20 more "collections" of a similar size.


There is also "news". Which is largely an intractable problem.

πŸ’¬ News is the first rough draft of history. --Phil Graham

The barrier is less a "technical" one (although the acrobatics of writing accurate information based on incomplete-and-biased reporting is a technical challenge) and more of a "practical" one. If you have too much news, you cannibalize your sources. 🌎( and, you attract the attention of the people who make the news)

Fortunately, as we can keep editors out, it should be easier to not have those articles.


Some "historical" topics are more contentious than others. Initially, there can be "competing narratives".

πŸ’‘ do we allow Tartaria or Fomenko-ism as a competing narrative? the answer must be the same as do we allow creationism as a competing narrative.

βš™οΈ there is the practical answer of this is how we keep it out of the main article. but, once again, as we can keep editors out, this is not a controlling requirement.


this leaves the question of who is evaluating the content and who is reading the content. πŸ”₯( what if you build it and nobody comes?)

other than sell your soul to some ideological movement, i haven't come up with any plausible answers here. πŸ’‘( there are several new LLM-related ideological movements.) πŸ“£( the Great LDS Encyclopedia sounds more palatable)


πŸ”₯ in the future the machine will know the answers. the encyclopedia will just be routing and caching.

βš™οΈ routing is "knowing which expert to ask about Sammy Sosa or John Culver". caching is "sometimes it does make sense to have a saved version on-hand, rather than asking the machine only after someone asks for the answer"


there is, also, the problem of the machine probably can't write a high-quality article about Pentecost just yet. but that is 2 years out, at most.

2025-01-26 05:03:07

When looking at historical chess matches, it is interesting to note that neither player would have had (or understood) computer analysis of positions.


It is like the "cell phone" problem. We have a media βš™οΈ( "Media" includes Shakespeare and Dante, the Arabian Nights and the Red Mansions. but, also, Andy Griffith and John Wayne.) based around not being available to everyone 24/7 by cell phone.


it is like a religion of old, to have access to Stockfish for chess position analysis. A supernatural knowledge of the situation.

2025-01-25 16:12:33

https://www.chess.com/news/view/being-a-chess-professional-in-europe-sucks-blohberger

While players inside the top 20 or 30 "don't really have that many financial struggles," Blohberger said that grandmasters outside of that do, especially in Europe. The two main problems, as he described, were (1) the high cost of living and (b) the lack of recognition.

In both respects, he compared the conditions of Europeans and Asians. To illustrate one difference, he gave an example: imagine two 2600-rated players, one from Germany and the other from India. "If both of these players have the same rating... and they play the same tournaments... they will, on average, make the same prize money, let's say, and this prize money is of course worth way more in this case in India than in Germany."

He also raised that the prizes and "honorary" (a stipend paid by leagues or clubs) have stayed the same for decades and have not risen with inflation.

The second issue was recognition. While chess has been historically popular in Europe, the popularity boom seems to have transferred to Asia.

The short answer is YES. The iron law of economics is that, in a field such as this πŸ’‘( revenue is generated from "sponsorship", minimal barriers to entry, legible skill differences), the "marginal" professional will only earn subsistence wages. And this guy, at about 500th in the world (2530 ELO), is clearly marginal.

2025-01-22 18:29:35

The question: in Python 3.9, how does one set up inheritance of dataclasses, when the base class contains fields with a default value?

ChatGPT and Claude both try to come up with solutions. They, regularly, fail at this.

Eventually, the "intelligent" approach revealed itself: ask the machine to replace @dataclass with some explicit constructors.

2025-01-21 13:47:59

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsI3pThlmXsπŸ“Ί WATCH: U.S. Naval Academy Glee Club performs β€˜Battle Hymn of the Republic’ | Trump 2025 Inauguration

Possibly the highlight of the inauguration ceremony. πŸ’‘( It is hard to imagine a Democratic president having such a song performed. The extremist cries of "but what about church-and-state" would have been too annoying.)

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, / With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me: / As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, / While God is marching on.

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