AnyOldName3

It’s not just skills not being passed down, but also that as technology has moved on, things have got more complicated, and then the skills needed to figure out why something isn’t working, and what needs doing to fix it plus actually carry out the fix, have got more and more technical, to the point that anyone who could do a repair could also probably get a much better-paying career than repairing things.

That’s not an inherent problem, as a good service manual from the manufacturer could bypass the need to understand all the details of how a device works to identify a root cause, but it’s not in most companies’ interests to provide one that good when regulation doesn’t force them to, so for the most part, things need repairing without help from the manufacturer.

Depends on whether you’re in a country that washes eggs before sale too get rid of the cloaca residue or one that keeps it on so eggs can be kept safely at room temperature. Unwashed eggs will have faeces on their shells, and you might not want to cook noodles in faeces.

Technically it was the Free Software movement that was a form of Leftism, and Open Source was Capitalism’s attempt to subsume it once it became apparent that it was capable of producing better software.

You need to know how to carry out a cyberattack before you can devise a way to stop it, so CS students need to be taught how to do cyberattacks to learn about cybersecurity.

I did see an angle in the BBC coverage either after the game had finished or in the break before extra time where it did indeed look like a foot got stepped on, but the commentators said that even then, it shouldn’t have been a foul as it was clearly accidental and the ball clearly was touched. If Argentina were held to the same standards, they’d have been down to two men by half time.

If you’re using antiperspirant that boasts that it lasts all day, it works by encasing the aluminium salts that make it antiperspirant in microscopic wax beads that are supposed to break open over the day as you move around. This leaves waxy stains behind that are a pain to wash out as the aluminium salts and wax protect each other from detergent and water.

What works is something acidic that will react with the aluminium salts and ideally the wax, too. I’ve had great success soaking t-shirts in water with some sulfamic acid (also available as coffee machine descaler) for a day or two. Vinegar might work, but it’ll be less effective and so take longer and need more, so will be smelly and more expensive.

If we’re going to pull up other people’s pithy phrases that aren’t intended to be taken entirely literally, then the relevant one here is machine learning is the second best solution to any problem. In the (approximately, depending on how you define it) century people have been thinking about computers, we’ve already found better solutions to lots of problems. If a transformer-based neural network can get 99% accuracy in sixty seconds on 92 billion transistors of GPU and billions more for its VRAM, that’s pretty useless if we can also do it with 100% accuracy in sixty microseconds on a $1 microcontroller, or even faster on a less constrained device.

The attention is all you need phrase is specifically in the context of sequence transduction models, and specifically referring to the discovery that they don’t need a combination of attention, recurrence and convolution, but actually only need attention if it’s used in the novel way introduced by the paper. If you don’t need to transduce any sequences, then this isn’t necessarily relevant, and it’s critically not a claim that you can do everything by transducing sequences. It was a surprise that applying it to generating new text instead of just converting it worked as well as it did, and a surprise that it kept getting better with larger models instead of plateauing around the GPT-1 and GPT-2 era, and a surprise that the text generation could be used to do other things, even ones as basic as addition. These things weren’t predicted by the Attention Is All You Need paper.

It’s not damn near anything. There’s loads of stuff that computers can do much more quickly and more accurately without it just by virtue of computers already being fast and effective at maths and obeying logic. With or without the transformer architecture, a neural network is never going to be as fast or reliable at, for example, summing a collection of numbers as just adding them would be, and loads of real-world tasks are like this, hence why we’ve built billions of computers even before the transformer architecture was invented.

Also, in particular, I didn’t say that the transformer architecture wasn’t useful for things that aren’t LLMs, I said that most of the work done specifically to improve LLMs has no applications outside LLMs, so the next big leap towards making computers intelligent isn’t helped more by working on LLMs than it would be by working on any other kind of AI.

It’s actually just a lot of pretty simple maths from decades ago, but it’s a lot of it. The big changes in those decades have been the feasibility of doing enough of that simple maths to achieve anything useful, and domain-specific network architecture stuff that’s rarely transferable, e.g. LLMs are possible because of the invention of the transformer architecture in 2017, and that’s also turned out to be useful for a few things like image generation and protein folding simulation, but not for all neural network based techniques, and then most of the things that have made successive LLMs better haven’t also been useful for the few other transformer-architecture-based neural networks. Most not-LLM AI isn’t going to be meaningfully easier to create than it would have been had the world got bored after GPT-2 and we’d only focussed on doing image and video generation.

Fun fact: if you’re self employed in the UK, you’ve been able to do your taxes online via a simple (ish) form on the HMRC website, but they’re in the process of phasing it out in favour of third-party proprietary software, so some people aren’t allowed to use the free web form anymore, and within two or three years, it’ll become totally unavailable. Everyone always loves it when the government finds things that Americans complain about and copies it here so we get to complain about it, too.

Lots of shops have gone out of business because, by having a premises, their operating expenses were more than an online retailer, so places like Amazon could undercut them, and their customers were willing to wait for delivery to save some money. It doesn’t take that many customers leaving before you’ve got to put up prices to cover your overheads, and that just makes more customers leave, and after a couple of decades of online retail being common, you’re left with far fewer physical shops.

In lots of the world, that’s how all pills that do anything always are. It’s only ones where it’s safe to accidentally eat the whole bottle at once that are allowed to be in bottles.

https://xkcd.com/979/

They only need space for the ones temporarily removed for maintenance. Once they’re deployed, they’re free to leave the room.

In Britain, no one would think roommates slept in the same room. The possible words for that would be ones like spouse or sibling and anyone else sharing a bedroom outside of an army barracks or youth hostel would be super weird.

Someone sent me a link to a file through Limewire today. That had its heyday so long ago that I think this is actually the first time I’ve ever used it.

You need to explicitly grant the script admin access or have totally disabled UAC, which already punches a large hole through Windows’ security model. Malware that’s in that situation doesn’t need to block Defender to do harm.

It’s as if people don’t know you can just say no homo right after the classic nice cock, bro.

To refer back to the original post, you are taking things too literally, and in doing so, missing meaning that is present in the symbols. As a rough analogy, DXT1 GPU texture compression has two modes. Both start by storing two colours, then they diverge. They both store a number from zero to three per pixel, but in one mode, zero to three all mean interpolating between the two endpoint colours, and in the other mode, zero to two are for interpolation, and three means that the pixel is transparent. There’s no bit explicitly storing which mode’s being used, but the information is there. The two stored colours should also be interpreted as two numbers, and if the higher one is first, then you use the first mode, and if the higher one is second, then you use the second mode. If the colours were interpreted too literally, they’d only be seen as colours, but an implementation can see that there was a choice to put the colours in a particular order, and read into that. There’s no abiguity, people just need to know about the rule and apply it.

For communicating with the public, there are enough people that are barely literate that asking the simplest version of a question is going to cover more of the population than one that adds all the necessary qualification to ensure someone that takes everything literally knows it’s a hypothetical.

• it wasn’t my argument
• the question has an implicit in a hypothetical scenario where you were having a conversation where it would be relevant aspect that most people would recognise even though the words don’t literally include it, and if you did literally want to ask them whether they’d start such a conversation out of the blue, you’d have to add extra words to say so. The literal interpretation would be an absurd thing to ask about, and people subconsciously recognise that, so don’t consider it.