You’re absolutely right about that, and if we’re able to build a model that’s as capable as GPT and friends at parsing natural language, without simultaneously training it on everything from poetry to programming, that’s a major win. My current understanding of the field is that in order to build/train the models that are able to robustly parse natural language and “understand” the intent behind a series of instructions well enough to translate them to the correct tool calls, we need a very large and varied training set. I’m using “generalist” as a term to refer to the models that you can interact with in natural language across a wide variety of tasks. Those models are extremely powerful if you can also connect them to tools that solve problems deterministically, so that you get around the problem that they don’t really “understand” anything at all, while taking advantage of the fact that they’re extremely well suited for translating natural language to a selected set of pre-defined actions.

I think a major challenge going forward is that interpreting natural language requires a large set of training data. So training specialised models that can also interact with natural language is by nature difficult.

It shocks me that so many people are just blindly downvoting a comment like this. They make a very testable claim, and even cite a specific, easily searchable person, as their source. If you think the claim is unreasonable, it’s very easy to ask them for more background info or sources, preferably while pointing out why you’re sceptical.

To me, the claim that 16-20 year olds that are full to the brim of hormones, and have had less time to be exposed to various pollution than 30-somethings are more fertile seems reasonable off the bat. I have no doubt that I would have become a parent at 18 if it weren’t for contraceptives, yet I’m now closer to 30 and haven’t become a parent despite trying for a while. One side of that is that at 18 you’re more likely to be constantly pounding like bunnies, another side is that stress, pollutants, and probably a whole host of other factors make you less fertile with age.

My point is that we’ve built our model on top of these “generalist” models. You hook it up to an API and then let Claude, Mistral, etc. (I try to avoid GPT and some other) do the generalist job of translating human language into actionable tasks. You give it tools to parse documentation and actually do the tasks.

The generalist models are fairly good at taking a set of instructions and translating that to the correct tool calls, then our tools enforce correctness on the final output. Building an agent like the one we have would be nearly impossible without having some generalist model to do the “translation” step.

I think we’ll see two major changes going forward in how LLM’s are used: 1) they’ll become much more expensive and less widely used, since today they’re run at a loss. 2) they’ll be integrated into larger systems where they can do what they’re good at (parsing and outputting natural language), while offloading technical tasks to other tools that are actually built for technical tasks where formal correctness is paramount.

I don’t think they will. I’m the first to be massively sceptical of LLMs, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be used to build good tools. The key is recognising that tasks where correctness is vital should not be solved by the LLM directly. At my job, we’ve built an LLM-agent that’s very useful (internal use). What we’ve done is build essentially a Python library that this LLM uses to interact with our data. That way, we ensure that a query like “set up a skeleton for X” will be done correctly, while we save a bunch of time that would have otherwise been spent doing boilerplate work.

Basically: Enforce correctness by constraining how the LLM can interact with your data, and use the LLM to translate short natural-language queries into actions that otherwise would have taken 30 min of click-ops or write-run-toss scripting.

Show ads on the screen -> screen is vandalised -> nobody can buy gas anymore -> people go to the gas station without ads (and thereby functioning screens) -> lose money to the competition-> recognise that you lose money by blaring ads -> stop blaring ads -> … -> profit

This is why people like him hate/fear regulation. Regulating this is the people’s way (in a functioning democracy) to put hard barriers on what these people are permitted to do in order to squeeze out another dime.

I’m not going to remember the exact domain of the survey company we use, what are you crazy?

I agree, and have decided to err on the side of caution, and also put the irritation over on higher-ups. If I get some link I’m required to click that I’m not actively expecting from an unrecognised address, just trash the email. A couple times, I’ve gotten follow-up from a superior asking me why I haven’t responded to <survey>, and I just tell them I haven’t seen it and that it probably got caught in my spam filter. They send me the link in question, and I respond.

I quite quickly realised that most of those surveys they need “everyone” to respond to will just slide quietly by when I do this, so I don’t need to spend time on them. My reasoning is that if it’s actually important, I’ll get it through a reliable channel, and so far that’s worked.

To be fair, I also dump anything that comes from some variant of “noreply” to junk. I figure that if I can’t reply, and I’m not actively expecting the email enough that I check my junk folder, it isn’t important.

In that case, ok I guess?

To be clear, your post reads like a legitimate question, especially considering the community you’ve posted to. I appreciate a good shitpost, but I tend to interpret questions on asklemmy and nostupidquestions as serious.

I love ASOIAF, and honestly think GRRM is one of the (if not the) greatest fantasy writers of all time. He owes us nothing. He has created this fantastic universe, and a fantastic story. If anyone wants him to finish his life’s work, his epos, it’s him.

This kind of mentality that he somehow owes you to finish this story, and isn’t doing it because he “can’t be assed” is just so egocentric I don’t have words to describe it. Yes, I want him to finish it, probably just as much or more than you do. I also recognise that the man owes me nothing at all. He’s already given most of his life to this, and I’m enormously thankful for the universe, stories, and characters he’s already given us.

Sir

“America!”

Yup. I started the next book once (Heretics?), but even from the start it just felt like Frank Herbert had locked himself in with these characters and this universe, and no longer had any idea what he wanted to do with it, the story just had to go on regardless.

I think a lot of what makes the first book so good is that there’s this whole new and mysterious universe, and he keeps it rather mysterious throughout. You don’t really know what the Bene Geserit are, what a Mentat is, or even really understand what spice is. You’re stuck on a strange planet in a strange universe, learning how things work as you go. That puts you in Paul’s shoes, and makes the book great.

Once all these concepts are established and have lost their novelty, I honestly don’t feel like there’s much appeal to the storytelling. Throughout God Emperor and the first chapters of Heretics it started feeling like a slog, just based on the same established concepts and characters, with very little real development.

They don’t exist in my country, and to be frank, I’m shocked the ones in the US aren’t vandalised to hell and back by masked vigilantes at night.

I enjoyed the first book a lot it went very quickly downhill from there, and I stopped after “God Emperor”, though I have the next book and some people telling me it gets better.

Depending on how heavy simulations you want, it’s surprising how light hardware you can get away with in OpenFOAM. I used it for some university courses on a 2012 MacBook Pro (dual booted with Ubuntu) around 2021, and I could run 2D, two-phase simulations just fine.

Of course, if you want to run 3D stuff with large shear forces or turbulence and high time resolution you’re gonna have to grab a veeeery big coffee while you wait. However, the ability to stop and restart the simulation is really nice, and lets you see what’s been simulated so far.

Do it! It’s great fun to play around with!

There’s like a 90% chance you’re right, but aerodynamics gets especially messy with stuff like this that has a more or less flat wall at the back. A significant portion of the drag comes from the turbulence behind the vehicle, rather than cutting (more “plowing” in this case) through the air in front. When you change the geometry of the back, you change that drag.

So, if I were to bet, I would bet that turning the boat around would help. But I wouldn’t bet my life on it. Some wacky interaction with the geometry of the rear could somehow cause it to get worse.

This is exactly the kind of thing I was thinking about. I’m sorry for the crap you experienced, and I think it’s good of you to be able to recognise the naive and/or positively loaded presuppositions people have for what they are. Honestly, I think it’s way too common that people will interpret others in the worst possible way, and see slights where none was intended. It looks like you’ve been able to do the opposite, and interpret others in the best possible way, and I think that makes the world a far better place!

First of all, to be perfectly clear, I have no intention of defending this person. As far as I can tell from your description, they’re probably a raging racist.

Regardless, I think the discussion around where the line between stupidity and racism goes is an interesting one. In my mind, racism requires malice: It requires that you actually see some group as less worth than others, or otherwise dislike or hate them. The counter-example (which I’ve actually met in the wild once) is a person that genuinely believes that some group is less adept in some way, but that still argues that they have the same inherent worth as others.

To put it bluntly, it’s not controversial to say that some people are smarter/taller/stronger/faster etc. than others, while still acknowledging that all human life has the same inherent value. Does it make someone a racist if they hold that stance, combined with a belief that <insert group> is less adept at <insert skill/property>? I would argue not, because (as previously stated) in my mind racism implies that you believe some people are inherently worth more than others, and that belief is not really tied to any measurable property. Basically, I think a true racist uses “they don’t have a soul/ are less intelligent / etc.” as a post-hoc justification for a hatred they already hold.

On one hand, I think what makes it so deeply racist is how genuine it is. It doesn’t sound like he’s saying it with an explicit intention to hurt, but just as a “matter of fact” that he thinks this.

On the other hand, that could also be a bit redeeming: If he honestly believes what he said (I can’t even make myself repeat it), but doesn’t hate black people for it, is he then truly racist or just deeply misinformed? To be fair, there’s a decent overlap between the two. I’m arguing from a “don’t attribute to malice what can accurately be explained by stupidity” standpoint.