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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • So they’ve failed at pushing full return to office and now they’re commissioning unscientific studies to try to make hybrid seem necessary?

    These results really can’t be applied to all jobs. Some jobs obviously require in-person but many white collar jobs can be done entirely remotely saving workers time, money and freeing up infrastructure for those that need/want to go in. Not to mention other benefits to mental health and reduction of emissions involved in commuting.













  • Yep my sentiment entirely.

    I had actually written a couple more paragraphs using weather models as an analogy akin to your quartz crystal example but deleted them to shorten my wall of text…

    We have built up models which can predict what might happen to particular weather patterns over the next few days to a fair degree of accuracy. However, to get a 100% conclusive model we’d have to have information about every molecule in the atmosphere, which is just not practical when we have a good enough models to have an idea what is going on.

    The same is true for any system of sufficient complexity.




  • This article, along with others covering the topic, seem to foster an air of mystery about machine learning which I find quite offputting.

    Known as generalization, this is one of the most fundamental ideas in machine learning—and its greatest puzzle. Models learn to do a task—spot faces, translate sentences, avoid pedestrians—by training with a specific set of examples. Yet they can generalize, learning to do that task with examples they have not seen before.

    Sounds a lot like Category Theory to me which is all about abstracting rules as far as possible to form associations between concepts. This would explain other phenomena discussed in the article.

    Like, why can they learn language? I think this is very mysterious.

    Potentially because language structures can be encoded as categories. Any possible concept including the whole of mathematics can be encoded as relationships between objects in Category Theory. For more info see this excellent video.

    He thinks there could be a hidden mathematical pattern in language that large language models somehow come to exploit: “Pure speculation but why not?”

    Sound familiar?

    models could seemingly fail to learn a task and then all of a sudden just get it, as if a lightbulb had switched on.

    Maybe there is a threshold probability of a positied association being correct and after enough iterations, the model flipped it to “true”.

    I’d prefer articles to discuss the underlying workings, even if speculative like the above, rather than perpetuating the “It’s magic, no one knows.” narrative. Too many people (especially here on Lemmy it has to be said) pick that up and run with it rather than thinking critically about the topic and formulating their own hypotheses.




  • You don’t really have one lol. You’ve read too many pop-sci articles from AI proponents and haven’t understood any of the underlying tech.

    All your retorts boil down to copying my arguments because you seem to be incapable of original thought. Therefore it’s not surprising you believe neural networks are approaching sentience and consider imitation to be the same as intelligence.

    You seem to think there’s something mystical about neural networks but there is not, just layers of complexity that are difficult for humans to unpick.

    You argue like a religious zealot or Trump supporter because at this point it seems you don’t understand basic logic or how the scientific method works.