birb_cromble
No bio...
User ID: 3236
birb_cromble
13hr ago
I'm not going to go into detail, but the basic gist of it is that exchange ticker symbols tend to be short strings with a lot of overlap. Despite the textual overlap, each one has a distinct identity and they are not interchangeable. While some LLMs deal with that kind of thing better than others, they all tend to have problems that get worse as the context window fills up, and compaction tends to cause problems as well.
As a toy example that isn't much of a problem anymore, BND and BNDW are not the same thing. They have different holdings, different rates of return, and different tax implications. That little W at the end means a lot, but next token prediction can have a hard time with it.
birb_cromble
1d ago
I was always fond of The Secret World.
birb_cromble
1d ago
Successful assassins use sniper rifles
Most successful ones seem to be in conversational distance.
- Sirhan Sirhan: within arm's reach
- Charles Guiteau: inside a subway stop
- John Wilkes Booth: inside a theater box
- Jack Ruby: about six feet away
- Dan White: inside an office
- Gavrilo Princip: inside a car
- Mark Chapman: on the same sidewalk
- Vance Boelter: inside a house
- Carl Weiss: less than six feet away
- Luigi Mangione: on the same sidewalk
birb_cromble
1d ago
It's been a while, but my recollection is that only really happens for characters who are disillusioned by the culture and want to leave it.
birb_cromble
1d ago
I have only read two novels by Atwood, but the thing that seems to run through both of them is that she combines the subtlety of a pulp writer with the pretentions of a literary fiction author. It's a bizarre combination.
birb_cromble
1d ago
Opus 4.7 seems to handle the stock ticker tests I do better than 4.6. I assume it's the new tokenizer. Otherwise the only difference I notice is that it's more expensive to run on the same thinking level
birb_cromble
1d ago
You mean other than changing the core premise?
If forced to work in the framework as it stands, I'd probably need to see a mix of human agency (possibly by resurrecting the early and largely abandoned concept of Referrers), and introducing more AI entities that are less... smarmily dickish? The only AI character who seems to genuinely care about biologicals on a personal and moral level is Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints, who other AI consider to be psychotic.
birb_cromble
1d ago
What are the laws on what constitutes a firearm? I've seen that some Scandinavian countries consider the barrel to be the primary serialized part, because it's pressure bearing and harder to manufacture than a receiver.
birb_cromble
1d ago
The best way I can explain it is that it feels like I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream with better PR.
You have vast inscrutable non-human intelligences that run every aspect of society. It's ok though - they're really looking out for you (as long as you weren't one of the 851.4 billion). Don't worry about the fact that your body was manipulated before your birth to alter things as fundamental as your sexual preferences (which has frequently been a horror trope), or that it wil change your emotions by reflexively pumping drugs into your bloodstream. It's all for your own good. Trust us. You live in a perfectly free society. Agents of the inscrutable beings would never do things like engage in naked blackmail. That would be gauche. Even if they did do it, it's really for the best. Nothing to worry about.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. --CS Lewis
birb_cromble
1d ago
The amount of money they pay for the privilege is eye-watering, so it works out.
birb_cromble
1d ago
When in Rome, do as the Romans do. When attempting to judge the political fallout of an American assassin's attempt on an American president's American life on American soil, do as the Americans do.
birb_cromble
1d ago
At $1.99 before Valve takes its cut, that's not going to pay for many billable hours from a lawyer.
birb_cromble
1d ago
For those of you who have read the culture novels - do you consider them to be utopian or dystopian?
I was discussing them with a friend recently and he views them as profoundly utopian. On the other hand, I view them as one of the best examples of a soft dystopia that I've ever read.
birb_cromble
2d ago
I think we recently had to have a stern-yet-loving talk with a customer who was still resisting an upgrade after eleven years.
I deal with this shit all the time. My day job involves maintaining a very old application that has seen continuous upgrades and maintenance over a two decade timeline, but some vestigial bits haven't been touched since the application's inception due to manpower constraints. We all assumed ai would help us deal with the backlog of "not quite important enough to move forward to the top of the stack" items that cause a drag on developer productivity, but always get sidelined by more pressing concerns.
Unfortunately, our codebase takes every AI product we've tried and sends it spiraling down a garden path of schizophrenic recursion.
Before I continue, let me get the usual reflexive responses out of the way:
- We have tried multiple times, with multiple LLMs, including whatever the zeitgeist considered to the SotA at the time. No, I am not going to go back and retest because Opus-4.8-thinking-xhigh-ultra-planner-with-cheese is truly a revolutionary improvement.
- If you claim we are Prompting It Wrong, I will personally figure out how to send you to at least four of the eighteen Chinese hells. Seven different people on my team have tried, all with varying backgrounds and writing styles. Two of us are published authors. One is literally a technical writer who writes concise, complete, and detailed prose for a living.
- No, I'm not going to take a two million line, twenty year old application that runs in regulated environments and rewrite it in Go-lang, even if Claude is really good at it.
The problem is that one single fix or feature can easily involve traveling through over a decade of code-strata, and the LLMs invariably over index on the idioms that they encounter first. The end result is that even a detailed plan on how to replace a deprecated method from a library with a documented replacement tends to make it imagine that it has to do things it doesn't.
I'm going to be vague here, but I'm going to share a personal story from work.
Due to our support contracts, we occasionally have to release security patches for very old releases of our product. We recently had an issue where one of our very old releases was using library $FOO on version N. Version N of $FOO had a very hard to exploit but potentially real security issue that could cause an information disclosure. Normally we'd just tell people to upgrade, but one of our clients operates in a regulated environment and can't do a major upgrade in less than 12 months for anything short of a nuclear bomb going off. Given that, we'd normally upgrade the library and move on with our lives. However $FOO has officially EOLed version N, so no more updates.
We had to do a manual mitigation, and I'm the guy who catches that kind of work, so I got started. A co-worker said "hey, this is high priority, and I think I can get it done in 15 minutes if I use AI". Since it was high priority, the boss told us both to get to work and whatever made it through all our automated tests and reviews first would go in.
I did my fix by integrating with some functionality provided by $FOO that allowed me to catch invalid data before it made it to the offending code. I missed an edge case that got caught by the automated tests, but either way, the PR landed in the codebase with half an hour to spare before the end of the day.
I decided to see where my coworker was, and the answer was "nowhere close to a working solution ". I could only see his draft PRs and not the prompts, but it looked like the LLM tried two different approaches and shit the bed both times. The first time, it looks like he/the LLM tried to catch invalid data at every single entry point into the system - the top of the funnel, rather than the bottom. The problem is, we have thousands of entry points. The code got completely out of control and eventually the LLM started over fitting and trying to apply the mitigation to things that didn't even make sense. Thr second approach involved manipulating JVM bytecode to try and hot-patch the offending class. That didn't even compile, but it looks suspiciously like an old stack overflow post about a different problem with the library.
The other guy is pretty sharp, and in some areas I think he's genuinely more talented than I am. But looking at the work he did that day, you'd assume he was fresh out of a boot camp and in way over his head.
I'm not really sure what to make of it.
birb_cromble
4d ago
Does anyone have any pointers for getting a smooth, even finish with nitrocellulose lacquer?
I'm doing test coats and keep getting tiny bubbles.
birb_cromble
5d ago
Read a book that you've already read before. You already know where the plot leads, so your mind can relax a little and take the body with it.
birb_cromble
5d ago
fallen into the cluster B trap
Been there. Learned my lesson. Never again.
birb_cromble
5d ago
My contractor for last week's home maintenance surprise cashed the deposit, so spending is $1,214.28 higher than the same day last year. If I'm careful and frugal for the next nine days, I should be able to stay cash flow positive for the month and start getting back on track.
birb_cromble
6d ago
Somebody's gotta hang out in East Kentucky and treat the Black Lung.
birb_cromble
7d ago
If we use Bitcoin as a reference, they tended to crap out after about 3 years because of blown capacitors.
Maybe things have improved?
birb_cromble
7d ago
Did he mean it as "increase growth from 2% to 4%", or "increase growth from 2% to 2.04%"?
birb_cromble
7d ago
The comparisons to the dot com and railroad bubbles concern me sometimes.
A railroad line can last centuries if properly maintained. Fiber has a 20 - 50 year lifespan. They were both totally usable by the time everyone finally got over the mania. I'm not sure the same is going to be true about GPUs. The data center physical structures will exist, and maybe the power infrastructure, but even the (IMHO optimistic) projections on GPUs show a 6 year depreciation schedule.
birb_cromble
8d ago
I’m not convinced it’s a bubble
My current layman's opinion is that the current environment is a bubble, but that bubble is entirely independent of the technology itself.
It's clear that at least some people, in some circumstances, are getting value out of the technology. It's not like NFTs, where even the best use cases are better served by simpler, pre-existing tech.
That said, the current economic environment is baffling to me. Every big provider is acting like this is a zero sum game where one company winning will give them a monopoly forever. They're also acting like the progress curve will produce exponentially increasing capabilities forever while operating costs approach zero.
I'm not sure if the market as it stands can achieve profitability that justifies the current AI company valuations if there are 3-4 winners instead of one. They're all priced with the assumption that one of them will utterly own the most transformative technology since the steam engine. If that's not true, people are going to start asking why they're not getting a 10% return on a company that has a 20x P/S ratio. Once people start asking that question, it's going to get uncomfortable for anybody that's not a monopoly already.
They're taking on significant debt, too. Take meta, for example. If just one of their data centers has a twelve month delay, that's a ~3% hit to free cash flow to service debt on an asset that isn't making any money. When was the last time that you saw a construction project more complex than a doghouse finish on time and on budget? Even if they finish construction, there are significant delays getting them powered, and gas turbines aren't a permanent solution. There's pretty enormous systemic risk there. Some companies are better equipped to handle it than others, but none of them are immune. Oracle, in particular, appears to be laundering questionable debt through their investment grade credit rating, which is unlikely to end well for them.
That said, even if Anthropic and OpenAI shit the bed and contagion through the bond market causes a market crash, and Google puts their research back on the shelf, LLMs don't go away. Local models exist. China is still plugging along with much more reasonable objectives.
I don't know exactly what the future holds, but either way, it'll have LLMs in it.
That's fascinating. Can you elaborate on how and why that's the case?
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