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Comment Recidivism rates (Score 1) 70

US: 66% (Wall Street's numbers aren't those found in official statistics)
UK: 28.9%
Holland: 23%
Norway: 16%
China: 6%

US' conclusion: The rate is a complete mystery, we've no idea how to decrease it, let's do more of what we're currently doing differently to everyone else.

There is a slight possibility this may be flawed.

Comment Re: Cool Cool (Score 1) 83

Necessary? I thought we were talking about what was legal. My mistake.

Appropriateness of the response to the emergency is part of the legal considerations. Congress granted the power for a reason. Taking that and assuming it means arbitrary power is not operating within the law, not for Trump, not for Biden.

And you clearly misremember the legal posture of suspended payments and interest.

In what way? Please correct me.

Comment Re:The standard pro self-driving argument (Score 1) 59

If you want to make it a scientific number, you need to compare like against like. Same driving times, same driving conditions, same driving speeds, same roads (for example, Waymo avoids tricky intersections)

Bah. If a human driver increased their safety and reliability by avoiding certain situations, would you call them a worse driver for it?

Waymo would have to be transparent and open with their data.

They provide full access to the regulators, and they've allowed academic researchers full access. Putting it all online would be more transparent, but they're a business and they have up and coming competitors.

Comment Re: Cool Cool (Score 1) 83

Do you honestly believe that mass debt forgiveness -- after COVID was already over! -- was a necessary emergency response to the pandemic? Suspending payments (and interest) during the pandemic made perfect sense, and that was not struck down. I don't recall that it was even challenged.

No, the debt forgiveness clearly had nothing to do with the (already-ended) emergency, it was just an attempt to skirt the law, and the courts were quite correct to strike it down as executive overreach. If Biden wanted to do that, he should have lobbied Congress to change the law. He didn't do that, of course, because he knew Congress would refuse -- even though his party held both houses.

Comment Re:Cool Cool (Score 1) 83

Your comment mischaracterizes what has happened. The Supreme Court has absolutely bent over backwards to let Trump do what he wants in temporary rulings, including jumping in to to stay lower-court orders that no previous court would even have responded to. But their on-the-merits rulings, when they have to issue a full opinion, have been much less friendly to Trump. There have been some incredibly bad ones (e.g. immunity) but Trump has lost more than he has won in SCOTUS final judgements.

Comment Re:On AI design and also irony (Score 1) 53

It has seemed to me, for a very long time, that modern AI systems would need to be integrated with standard RDBMS systems for reliable persistant storage of raw information, some sort of no-sql database (memcache or some variant) for persistant storage of associations, some sort of document database for blocks of textual information, a SPARQL system for searching semantically-marked information within the document database, and a more old-fashioned back-propogation NN to provide a store of understanding that the user can directly manipulate.

Probabalistic classifiers are all fine and good, but only for a subset of the tasks needed. The above structure is a very loose, wildly-speculative initial framework. It's almost certain that if you actually tried building an integrated multi-model system, that you'd end up making a lot of changes to this basic idea, but that you'd end up having to implement the same core concepts that are identified in it.

Comment Re:"Alan Turing, one of the more famous people" (Score 1) 24

From their careful selection of text, they WANTED it to mean something else so badly that they couldn't handle putting in the full text. It's a common blight on today's Internet, where people want other people's writings to mean something other than what was meant by the writer, so carefully select the words they read.

Comment Re:That's 12-year-old thinking (Score 1) 56

That's the entire point. Trying to solve other people's problems NEVER WORKS. You CANNOT control others into responsible behaviour, but you CAN place them in a position where they will choose to be responsible of their own accord. It is the ONLY way that works. It is the only way that has ever worked. If you look at computer programming, you will see this repeated over and over - well-meaning "hard rules" are ignored, STANDARDS are kept.

You must give them parameters and force them to find their own solution within those.

Comment Re:who will do hard time hitting a worker can be c (Score 1) 59

who will do hard time hitting a worker can be charged as a felony under the state’s “endangerment of a highway worker” or “aggravated endangerment of a highway worker”

You're treating the current law as a standard handed down from on high, incontrovertible and guaranteed-correct, which must be applied verbatim. And, indeed, laws must be applied as written... but that doesn't mean the laws are perfect forever. Laws are written within a context, and when the context changes, the laws have to change.

In a world where all cars are driven by humans, if you want to protect highway workers one way to do it is to attach serious prison time to killing one and to publicize that fact loudly so that all of the drivers know that they should be especially cautious around highway workers, even more than they would around other sorts of pedestrians (let's put aside the moral debate about whether we actually should protect highway workers more than other pedestrians).

In a world where some cars are driven by software systems, that strategy doesn't really work -- as your question correctly points out -- but the right conclusion isn't "Therefore self-driving cars shouldn't be allowed", or "Therefore we must identify some scapegoat human at the company to put in prison". The right conclusion is "Therefore we need a different kind of regulation to keep highway workers safe from self-driving cars". What should that be? I can think of lots of possibilities, both pro-active (e.g. require self-driving vehicles to demonstrate in rigorous testing that their vehicles stay far from highway workers, with whatever minimum distance you want to specify) and reactive (severe penalties, up to heavy fines and/or immediate loss of permission to operate). The point is that the law should choose an approach that works with the new context.

Comment Re:The standard pro self-driving argument (Score 2) 59

So, for example, if self-driving cars today drive 10% better than the average driver, this also means that they all drive worse than 40% of human drivers out there.

And? They still drive 10% better than the average driver. And I realize that number is just an example, not intended to be accurate, but I still feel like I should point out that, statistically, it's too low.

The fact that the self-driving cars will all concentrate their worst behaviors in the same regions of the space of all driving conditions doesn't change the fact that, on average, they're quite a bit safer than human drivers. This wouldn't be true if the roads somehow changed so that the problematic-for-self-driving scenarios predominated, but they don't.

I considers these vehicules, in their current state to be too dangerous to be on public roads.

So you consider most human drivers too dangerous to be on public roads.

But I'm sure the usual binary-thinking simpletons will simply put me in their little "against" box anyway

You're taking a binary position (too dangerous to be on public roads), so you should expect people to evaluate your position in a binary way. Your other position, trying to position Waymo safety within the wide continuum of driver safety, is more nuanced.

My position is that if they're statistically safer than average human drivers, which makes them far safer than the worst human drivers on the road, then replacing human-driven cars with self-driving cars makes the roads safer. This is straightforwardly obvious. It doesn't mean the companies shouldn't be held accountable for their failures, and certainly doesn't mean that we shouldn't expect them to to continue working on improvements.

Comment Might work on the easy problems (Score 1) 53

This might work when there is a simple, easy search that can verify a fact. But that's often not the case. In my experience most cases of hallucination are cases where the LLM needs a fact mid-response, and the fact check requires both a non-trivial query and complex evaluation of the response data, sometimes involving judgement calls. When that happens, the LLM just gets lazy and goes with its guess rather than doing the check.

I'm speaking in the context of advanced models, mind, not the kind of thing that was available in 2022, nor the kind of thing that is available in Google search's limited-capability model, or open source models. Those are far more prone to hallucination. I won't say that, say, Claude Opus never hallucinates, because it does... but the hallucinations are common only when the models is being pushed hard, operating near the limits of its capacity, which makes it prone to taking shortcuts.

Comment Re:Cool Cool (Score 2) 83

Trump could waive student debt and the republicans would stand up with tears in the eyes yelling bravo sir! Biden tried it and was immediately stopped by the courts.

Well, I think Trump would be immediately stopped by the courts, too. Probably faster than they stopped Biden, since they've very reasonably gotten intensely skeptical of almost everything this administration does.

Partisanship aside, presidents really should obey the law. If the law is bad, the solution is to change it, not to break it. Yes, that means we need a functioning Congress, something we haven't had for quite some time, but that's still no reason to break the law.

Comment Re: this sure reminds me of a time (Score 1) 69

I am late to the party and I was just going to read rather than comment, but your comment brought home the whole conversation here. Even when trashing people that have no respect for the truth or for you, it is of importance to you that the trashing is an accurate and fair comment. It so epitomises the difference we are talking about between people here. Sadly the Internet is not kind to people who enforce truth.

Indeed, truth and accuracy is important to me, and I think it should be important to everyone. It baffles me that so many people don't seem to care about whether what they believe or say is true. I recognize that those people who care are often in the minority, but that just makes it harder to understand, not easier.

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