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Comment Re:Really? (Score 2) 58

automated image pattern matching has been around for decades

The problem is that the LLM only does one trick. When you start integrating other software with it, the other software's input has to be fed in the same way as your other tokens. As the last paragraph of TFS says, "every clock check consumes space in the model's context window" and that's because it's just more data being fed in. But the model doesn't actually ever know what time it is, even for a second; the current time is just mixed into the stew and cooked with everything else. It doesn't have a concept of the current time because it doesn't have a concept of anything.

You could have a traditional system interpreting the time, and checking the LLM's output to determine whether what it said made sense. But now that system has to be complicated enough to determine that, and since the LLM is capable of so much complexity of output it can never really be reliable either. You can check the LLM with another LLM, and that's better than not checking its output at all, but the output checking is subject to the same kinds of failures as the initial processing.

So yeah, we can do that, but it won't eliminate the [class of] problem.

Comment Re:Big, BIG companies should know better (Score 1) 49

(Shuffles off and mutters something about how does a greybeard get Vulture Capitalist funding to setup cross continental niche cloud for people that value stability over shiny, with Open Source ... Open Stack ... Cloudified LibreOffice, Ceph, my lawn)

Every tech company needs at least three things to start with: The business guy, the brain, and the lawyer. Ideally there should also be a marketing guy, but you can add them in later. Also, none of them have to be male, I just like saying "guy", buddy.

Comment Re:Excel is a platform. (Score 1) 49

Untrained? Excel is a spreadsheet tool within the MS Office suite with 27,000 features. It requires a tad more training than handing a moron a hammer

Yes and no, depending. If you are building an application in Excel, yes, all you said is true. If you are using one, no, none of it is. Spreadsheets can be set up such that the user just stuffs data into them where they are supposed to, then clicks a button to get results. Or maybe they don't even have to hit a button.

For the simplest useful example I can think of, I put together a spreadsheet which produces a table we use for asset valuation. This spreadsheet changes every year. If you load my spreadsheet, it will be correct for the current year. No user has to think about that at all, they just load it and get a correct table. You can extrapolate this to basically any level of complexity because Excel has VBA and you can script everything. The user just follows instructions, and they aren't even allowed to edit any cells which could break anything.

Comment Re: Alibaba (Score 1) 32

In case anyone is going this far down the hole, it turned out great. Even though the item was shipped from the US, because the seller didn't respond I got a refund without having to return it.

So far Aliexpress has been responsive to 100% of my issues and I only have needed to be a little patient and not expect everything to be solved immediately or arrive immediately.

Comment Re:Google? wtf (Score 2) 49

20 million cells? That seems ridiculous. Why aren't they using a database for something that huge?

I agree that a database-backed application is the right way to go for that much data. However, Finance used Excel because they could. We all like to talk about how bad an idea it is to do that, but Excel brought financial computations on large data sets to people who can't write any code. It has enabled thousands upon thousands of businesses to do things they couldn't do before without paying a programmer to develop a solution they cannot maintain. The fact that other spreadsheets regularly crater when handed data that Excel has no trouble with is exactly why we have so much Excel.

I like to use Drupal to rapidly create database applications which can handle a lot of data without writing code. But I wouldn't expect someone in accounting to be able to do that at all, and that just shifts the problem domain. Instead of getting stuck with Excel, now I'm getting stuck with Drupal. All of the logic just winds up in a different system that you can't trivially transfer it out of, so you have the same exact maintainability problem, except more people know how to work with Excel.

Comment I hate this cliche. (Score 1, Offtopic) 18

I suspect that it's more symptom than cause, and probably not at the top of the list of causes; but I cannot overstate how much I loathe the hyperbolic use of the term 'unthinkable' in these sorts of situations. Both because it's false; and because it often acquires a sort of implicitly exculpatory implication that is entirely undeserved.

Not only is it 'thinkable'; having something awful happen when you perform a procedure that requires longterm hardcore immunosuppression and then let them follow through the cracks is trivially predictable. It's the expected behavior. Successfully reconnecting a whole ton of little blood vessels and nerves is fairly exotic medicine; predicting that thing will go poorly without substantial follow-up is trivial even by washout premed standards.

This isn't to say that it isn't ghastly, or that I could imagine being in that position; but 'unthinkable' is closer to being a claim of unpredictability or unknowability; which is wholly unwarranted. None of this was unthinkable; but nobody really cared to check or wanted to know all that much.

Comment Re:People don't get the UK or the UK Labour Party (Score 1) 174

You're ascribing an awful lot of thought and direction to a party which has shown very few signs of either of those.

Seriously your claiming Starmer believes all that shit? Prove it for the love of god please because no one else had figured out what that guy actually believes in.

Comment Re:This whole concept has always bothered me. (Score 1) 70

The Sun, all stars, galaxies, formed by ordinary matter self gravitating into a volume where it's components interact with each other. With ordinary matter that implies a confining pressure produced by gravity, and a resisting pressure from the particles interacting with each other and not being able to share the same volume.

As a "RetiredChemist", you should recognise that situation from deriving the "Ideal Gas Laws" from Newtonian dynamics of particles and Van der Waal's expression for the volume of gas molecules (as opposed to the volume occupied by the gas under NTP, STP or whatever. REmember that lecture.

The thing about normal matter is that it's particles self-interact, leading to them having a consistent distribution of particle energies. And that means a gas of normal matter has a temperature, and it will radiate some of that energy away if it's temperature is greater than the ambient (currently 2.8-odd K ; the CMB temperature). Otherwise, it will collapse in volume under the influence of gravity - as you suggest - until it's internal temperature rises to the point that it starts to radiate it's thermal energy. Yadda, yadda, normal star formation theory, and on a bigger scale the same process for galaxies.

But with dark matter particles not (or very rarely) interacting (DM)particle on (DM)particle (and little from (DM)particle on (NormalM)particle), they just pass through your volume under consideration and out the other side, only responding to the gravitational force very slowly braking them as they ascend from the gravity well and into inter-galactic space. Then they slowly descend back into the middle of the galaxy, picking up speed from the gravitational field ... and pass through the middle of the galaxy without interacting with other DM (or NormalM) particles to shoot out the other side.

According to the -CDM model, DM does clump with matter - at the galaxy or galaxy-cluster scale. But it doesn't stick to other DM as well as "NormalM" does, so it hasn't (yet) condensed into dark galaxies etc.

Re-do your "Ideal gas law" calculations with a much smaller Van der Waals volume and much weaker electrostatic reaction between gas particles, and you too will reproduce the slowness of clustering. You could manage this when you were an undergraduate ; you can do it now.

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