This reads like the author is mad about imprecision in the discourse which is real but to be quite frank more rampant amongst detractors than promoters, who often have to deal with the flaws and limitations on a day to day basis.
The conclusion that everything around LLMs is magical thinking seems to be fairly hubristic to me given that in the last 5 years a set of previously borderline intractable problems have become completely or near completely solved, translation, transcription, and code generation (up to some scale), for instance.
> but to be quite frank more rampant amongst detractors than promoters, who often have to deal with the flaws and limitations on a day to day basis.
"detractors" usually point to actual flaws. "promoters" usually uncritically hail LLMs as miracles capable of solving any problem in one go, without giving any specific details.
Google Translate just spits out nonsense for distant language pairs (English<->Korean etc) and doesn't compare to Sota LLMs, Whisper is a Transformer (Architecture used for LLMs) and Code Generators have nothing on LLMs.
Very impressive the top comment on this nonsense hit piece is someone vaguely implying extrajudicial ‘retribution’ is the appropriate solution to a problem which doesn’t actually exist.
The razor to use to determine whether something is actually evidenced based under uncertainty is whether you would follow the same policy if it was your own child.
There are many things that are simply uncertain and “untrue until proven otherwise” isn’t an exclusively optimal policy.
> The razor to use to determine whether something is actually evidenced based under uncertainty is whether you would follow the same policy if it was your own child.
What? This makes no sense. How do you explain anti-vaxxer parents with this perspective? Parents may feel they know best, but feeling and fact have nothing to do with each other.
It's ok, the strongest defenders of EBM are never going to discover anything worthwhile as they get caught in a loop of "no evidence enough to test" and "no evidence for this because nobody tests it"
The opposite approach exposes people to a lot of unnecessary and dangerous medical treatment. The evidence based approach has uncovered that stenting doesn't work[1], yet a lot of do something proponents are still installing them at great risk to patients and at great cost to medical systems.
Counterpoints: the detractors of this purported loop would likely neither fund the vast amounts of research they’d demand be done nor believe the results if they conflicted with their anecdata. I have yet to see a good faith argument against evidence based method that provides an effective and realistic alternative. Because that would take evidence.
I think this is actually not as obvious as it seems as equity is also power-law distributed. An executive founder may have 10-50x the equity of a founding junior employee, who themselves might have 10-20x the equity of a key early employee.
The power laws actually cut both ways. I think the optimal path is not entirely obvious without some particular understanding of whether or not you are a stronger player as a leader or a follower.
Frankly, I think Tesla is going to win this. The new self-driving is remarkably good. Based on this alone, I estimate (actual) level 5 self driving in 2-3 years. I'm convinced that the lidar sensors are essentially unnecessary and the vision-only strategy is basically going to work and be much cheaper in the process.
How about we wait till they have given a single public ride before crowning them winners? At the moment Tesla's effort is nothing more than a marketing campaign.
Tesla FSD version 13 (new version) videos are starting to trickle out on YouTube and while they could be edited, it does seem to handle some crazy stuff fairly well.
If Tesla can do level 5 in 2-3 years as you say (and that might be a pretty big “if”), that places them 5+ years behind Waymo.
What leads to the win here, then? Waymo constrained by the cost of LIDAR? Is it truly such a massive % of build cost that they can’t succeed? Is it that Tesla is vertically integrated?
Apparently they have been surprised at how few photons are required to see for these sensors. They are skipping the image computer vision step and going from photons to car control in as few layers as possible.
It's not an event camera, so it's very much taking images, which are then being processed by computer vision algorithms.
Event cameras seem more viable than CMOS sensors for autonomous vehicle applications in the absence of LIDAR. CMOS dynamic range and response isn't as good as the human eye. LIDAR+CMOS is considerably better in many ways.
Next time you’re facing blinding direct sunlight, pull out your iPhone and take a picture/video. It’s a piece of cake for it. And it has to do far more post processing to make a compelling jpeg/heic for humans. Tesla can just dump the data from the sensor from short&long exposures straight into the neural net.
Humans can also decide they want to get a better look at something and move their head (or block out the sun with their hands) which cameras generally don't do.
I think this is a perfectly humane solution. Especially considering it in the context of their cultural embedding, in which animal welfare in general are not the greatest. And also considering that the alternative is that feral cats starve to death.
Given that the goal was for no more cats to be born (so that the cat population eventually drops to 0) and this was apparently accomplished, it seems like a fair term.
"Driving into extinction" is an awfully loaded and hyperbolic phrase for "neutering a single colony of feral domestic cats." It makes it sound like an atrocity. Maybe that's not what you intended.
Preventing unwanted and uncared-for kittens is a good thing. It's a major goal of animal welfare groups all over the world.
Toyota’s costs don’t determine the prices Toyota can charge, and if the expected costs of adding a widget exceed the benefits you can be fairly sure they won’t add the widget.
Do parents not expect other parents to act with consideration to other members of society? I believe the fundamental principle remains the same in either instance.
Whether or not I have a disability does not change my mind about whether people in a wheelchair should board a plane first.
My kids get to be the absolute center of my world, but I’m careful not to expect them to be the center of anyone else’s.
I don’t think anyone is advocating intolerance towards children, but rather trying to define what is reasonable. A loud child in a restaurant might be ok, but a child screaming and throwing food less so. After reading both accounts, I get the feeling the founder with a baby has an expectation that is miscalibrated to what most people consider would be reasonable.
being a parent changes your perception about the challenges other parents face. it is one thing for me as a parent to realize that my kid is disruptive and step outside unprompted, but quite another for someone to ask me to leave. the latter would make me very uncomfortable, and needs to be handled with extreme tact and consideration.
Genuine question, but why would this make you feel uncomfortable?
>needs to be handled with extreme tact and consideration.
Did you think they acted without tact? By the authors own account, they seemed very polite and even sent a follow-up email. The founders account of the interaction made it seem even more polite (asking her if she needed help, offering to hold the baby, offering other areas where she could still hear the talk but not be as much of a distraction etc.)
being asked to leave implies that i am either oblivious towards the disruption my kids cause, or that i simply misjudge the situation and thought my kids are not as disruptive as the person asking me felt about it. both imply a judgement of my behavior, and that alone will make me uncomfortable. i do admit that i am biased by my experience in china where something like that would never happen as i explain here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41438834
not having experienced the situation i can't judge, but the fact that it prompted the person to write an article about it to me suggests that on some level it did make her feel uncomfortable. if it hadn't it wouldn't have been worth mentioning.
Sure. After reading both accounts, it came across to me that the founder with the baby was being overly sensitive and chose to steer into the least favorable interpretation. We should strive to be polite but we shouldn't avoid confrontation just because someone may take it the wrong way, especially when doing so comes at the detriment of other people's experiences.
The conclusion that everything around LLMs is magical thinking seems to be fairly hubristic to me given that in the last 5 years a set of previously borderline intractable problems have become completely or near completely solved, translation, transcription, and code generation (up to some scale), for instance.