Mary Branscombe

there's a whole bunch of us that get really unpleasant visual aftereffects from dark mode on LCD screens (I get yellow bars across my vision if I read a long article in dark mode)

LLMs are the model; very few people actually interact directly with the LLM, they use a system that calls the LLM. they're as meaningfully AI as anything else in the 70 year old field of AI

t will be fascinating to see if there's an appetite for 'give me a prompt and constitution so I can then have it run with my own policies and metaprompt and guardrails'

prompts can be enormously detailed and you can put a lot of that in the constitution, like 'yes, you have to follow the law, not just copy what the biased humans have been doing'

we're going to be back in Amsterdam soon; spending the weekend there before Kubecon so getting the train across from Paris after a thing on the 18th, if you fancy meeting up

one?! we at least have two bricks for the exterior walls, even if the inner skin isn't actually tied in to the outer skin in any noticeable way and it's mostly the interior plaster holding the whole thing up

do we care about *how* something does the thing as long as it does the thing we want well enough and reliably? output metrics can be more useful than process metrics

the reason so many people use Amazon isn't just the monopsony thing; it's that you can get the same product as from a dodgy web site at much the same price and quality but also get decent customer service if that price and quality turn out not to be worth it

trying to return a thing on Amazon and I need to decide if I
- keep the thing for free and give the seller the good review they're asking for before issuing a refund because not having to bother with shipping it back is a good experience
- dob them in to Amazon for likely the same result

I wish we had stuck with calling these things generative AI because then it might be clearer that they're generating aka manufacturing 'explanations' that look in vector space like the ones they've been trained on

lots of companies are years away from having builds of hand-written code be properly deterministic, so it will be interesting to see where they draw the line

how much Patti Maes have you read?

perhaps he hadn't really thought through why silent majorities are known as 'silent'

absolute 1000% Betteridge here

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Did I ever really stand a chance in the by-election
Matt Goodwin

maybe she should start by asking herself why she cared so little about other people's children

Especially if it flatters your biases you gotta check your enthusiasm long enough to check the source

you have a working shocked face? so jealous - mine hasn't worked in YEARS!

that was 'hope' but the how is always interesting; usually industry bodies and interested parties go make representations so I *hope* the people who have actual unbiased research get involved

it also isn't lying; since it's not a person and doesn't have intent, agency or mens rea. it can be wrong while announcing that it's right, but anthropomorphizing that doesn't help

Todd @ Why are we bothering with the Strait of Hormuz when we could simply do this? Explain it to me like I'm 5. Canal RIOS 508 MOUNTAIN HARD AND BIG, WATER NO UP. MANY MANY DIG DIG.

there is a canonical implementation (option 2), no? i think the benefit is just that you can specify what’s essential to the idea vs what’s incidental to an implementation (eg language choice, some wiggle room with details etc).

sharing the prompt as if you were sharing source code; in both cases someone has to build it (insert giant discussion about whether builds are routinely deterministic HERE)

regulating tech is too hard, let's go shopping

how the expert panel gets some actual experts, not just everyone who has a book about how screens are bad for you

I had a house that was half Victorian half Georgian and despite the walls being rubble infill (lovely bath stone blocks on the outside but they're just a skin between which is, yeah, rubble) in the Georgian bit, that was still better built than the Victorian bit!

listening to a Flanders and Swann song about railway closures and realising where The Divine Comedy got all of their melodies from

It’s like the US has just taken an axe to a tree literally festooned with wasps nests in a chain reaction that ends up with Cyprus mad at the US for having the RAF there to shoot at

So what it's actually telling us is "developing countries have faster population growth"

Feel this in my bones. Specifically my hip bones thst have stopped me sleeping normally for five weeks now

Tbf it's a clickbait headline, deliberately relying on the average rather than the actual country data.

E.g. the figure for the UK kids that agree with the statement is 13%.

It should be 0% obviously. But it's certainly not the "majority" this implies.