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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • One of the first things they teach you in Experimental Physics is that you can’t derive a curve from just 2 data points.

    You can just as easilly fit an exponential growth curve to 2 points like that one 20% above the other, as you can a a sinusoidal curve, a linear one, an inverse square curve (that actually grows to a peak and then eventually goes down again) and any of the many curves were growth has ever diminishing returns and can’t go beyond a certain point (literally “with a limit”)

    I think the point that many are making is that LLM growth in precision is the latter kind of curve: growing but ever slower and tending to a limit which is much less than 100%. It might even be like more like the inverse square one (in that it might actually go down) if the output of LLM models ends up poluting the training sets of the models, which is a real risk.

    You showing that there was some growth between two versions of GPT (so, 2 data points, a before and an after) doesn’t disprove this hypotesis. I doesn’t prove it either: as I said, 2 data points aren’t enough to derive a curve.

    If you do look at the past growth of precision for LLMs, whilst improvement is still happening, the rate of improvement has been going down, which does support the idea that there is a limit to how good they can get.


  • Having lived in the UK and even participated in a politics there (as a member of the Greenparty, FYI) it seems to me that both the English’s power elites’ support of an ethno-Fascist regime abroad even while it activelly commits Genocide (reminiscent of Thatcher’s support of Apartheid South Africa and of Pinochet in Chile) and their authoritarian solutions to Environmentalism as a “problem” of people demonstrating rather than the Environment being destroyed, are all part of a broader pattern of Rightwing Authroritarianism were also fit things like the extreme Civil Society Surveillance denounced by Snowden (which, curiously, whilst in the US some was deemed unconstitutionally and walked back, in the UK laws were passed to make it all retroactively legal and the Press was shut up using D-Notices) and other general trends in the exercise of power in the country (remember how the Tories passed a law that de facto created minimum £1000 penalties in all criminal cases).

    This is not even new - Environmentalist organisations were infiltrated by undercover police back in the 80s/90s who even left some women there carrying their children and things like kettling were used against demonstrators back in the big anti-Finance and anti-Austerity demonstrations in London after the 2008 Crash were even an unarmed and non-violent person got killed by a police officer (a case were the officer in question ultimatelly got out with no meaningful penalty).

    Brexit wasn’t born in a vacuum and compared with the rest of Europe the UK has been further Right and more Authoritarian, copying the worst bits of the American system rather than the best and mixing them with a heavily and well entrenched classism and the idea that people should know their place, with no tradition of rule by consensus and an electoral system - First Past The Post - that generally results in Winner Takes All outcomes were a mere 35% of votes is enough for absolute majorities which are pretty much all powerful since Britain foesn’t have a written Constitution.

    Having lived in a few countries in Europe, I came out of over a decade in the UK with the idea that it was the country in Europe most likely to turn Fascist. A posh style of Fascism but Fascism none the less.

    Sadly New Labour, who ideologically are something else altogether than (old) Labour, seem just as prone to Authoritarianism as the Tories, which actually makes sense given that it was during New Labour’s last period in Government that the most extreme civil society surveillance apparatus in the West was built in Britain.

    TL;DR in summary, Britain even under New Labour is very rightwing and riddled with authoritarianism and their unwavering support (once again) for violent Fascism abroad fits the pattern and is a nice reminder of how its power elites think.



  • Well, that’s the funny bit: the government in the UK aren’t the Conservatives, they’re New Labour who are Neoliberals, by the standards of the rest of Europe they’re even Hard Neoliberals.

    Nowadays the difference between Conservatives and Liberals is really just the subset of Morality that’s used in Identity Politics. They’re certainly not different on Economics, not on Quality Of Life for the many, not on a good Future for our Children (which provides a Selfishness-driven reason be an Environmentalist, which is better than nothing) and certainly not on Environmentalism as a Moral posture.

    We get some loud confrontational bullshit from both around various “-isms” all the while they’re both doing what’s best for the most wealthy of society and screw the rest (both present and future) and definitely screw anybody or anything that has no money and no capability for action, such as Nature.

    You see that exact same shit in the US, by they way, as well as (in not quite as extreme form) in most of Europe.












  • Above a certain level of seniority (in the sense of real breadth and depth of experience rather than merely high count of work years) one’s increased productivity is mainly in making others more productive.

    You can only be so productive at making code, but you can certainly make others more productive with better design of the software, better software architecture, properly designed (for productivity, bug reduction and future extensibility) libraries, adequate and suitably adjusted software development processes for the specifics of the business for which the software is being made, proper technical and requirements analysis well before time has been wasted in coding, mentorship, use of experience to foresee future needs and potential pitfalls at all levels (from requirements all the way through systems design and down to code making), and so on.

    Don’t pay for that and then be surprised of just how much work turns out to have been wasted in doing the wrong things, how much trouble people have with integration, how many “unexpected” things delay the deliveries, how fast your code base ages and how brittle it seems, how often whole applications and systems have to be rewritten, how much the software made mismatches the needs of the users, how mistrusting and even adversarial the developer-user relationship ends up being and so on.

    From the outside it’s actually pretty easy to deduce (and also from having known people on the inside) how plenty of Tech companies (Google being a prime example) haven’t learned the lesson that there are more forms of value in the software development process than merely “works 14h/day, is young and intelligent (but clearly not wise)”



  • That’s because his talk doesn’t match his walk.

    You know how Trump just shamelessly lies as easily as he breaths? Well Biden also massively lies, he’s just far more sophisticated at it than Trump (hardly a tall barrier, lets be honest) hence less obvious at it yet in the end you still see his the actual actions or the end result of them (when the deceit technique is to pass know impossible measures or just half of what’s needed and not the other requires half so those measures don’t actually do what it says on the tin) not matching his words.

    Let’s hope Kamala is much less of a liar.


  • New Labour politicians have a massive debt to Israeli-linked Jewish Groups in the UK for the Anti-Semitism slander campaign against Corbyn and the Labour Party during his leadership that lost Labour an election and brought him down as leader of the party to be replaced by a New Labour leader (who promptly started a pogrom against Leftwingers in the party).

    Of course, as is tradition in England (and because in the recent elections they lost 10 Parliament seats to people who campaigned as independents exactly because of New Labour’s pro-Zionist “No Genocide is too great” policies), they’re doing a bit public opinion management with a loudly announced measure that de facto does nothing.

    If there’s one thing that over a decade of living in Britain has taught me was to always look behind the curtain when it comes to grand very public gestures by the local politicians, the more the noise they make about their “great measure” the more the need to dig out the part of the story they’re not telling people about.


  • Your whole post that started this thread is:

    absolutely love how tankies in here are somehow turning this around to be Israels fault

    So just now you outright lied when your wrote:

    I just stated neutrally that “Hamas killing civillians is Bad and none other than Hamas’ fault.”

    Further, a person with a bunch of flags on their profile (for the record and in case you change it the flags are of Ukranie, EU, Taiwan and Israel) claiming they’re not about “teams” is either a ridiculously self-deluded person or a shameless liar. People don’t go around parading their favorite nations or blocks of nations when they’re not into supporting “teams”.


  • I’m pretty sure there will be some who will refuse to vote or vote for an independent, hence not voting for Israel to commit Genocide. It’s likely that some of those have come to believe that China too is commiting a Genocide.

    I doubt it be a majority or even a significant minority, but there really is no physical or psychological reason that out of 240 million or so Americans of voting age there aren’t some who fullfil all of those criteria you claim to be impossible to find together.

    I think you’re seeing some louder individuals commenting on political comments sections on the internet who talk about the “Chinese Genocide” and who talk about people having a duty to “vote Democrat to stop Trump” (hence de facto voting for Israel to commit genocide) and you think “they’re all like data” whilst not noticing that lots of people make one kind of comment or the other kind of comment but not both.

    (This is actual quite a common perceptual flaw for humans and why Science has such strict rules when conducting experiments: people tend to notice that which confirms what they already believe also tend to notice when something happens but NOT notice when something does not happen).

    Mind you, if you had said “most people” I would tend to agree with you, but you instead used a word which means 100% of people (“anyone”) and claims about people are almost never true for 100% or 0% of individuals in a large enough group.