US Political Discussion: Biden/Harris Edition (Rules in OP)

[TedEH]

I think I'm also just very primed to come at any jargon-y sounding tech thing with massive heaps of salt - because I work in an environment where everyone is always trying to sound clever and describes things in ways that are teeeechnically accurate, but aren't nearly as impressive when you strip the jargon away.

"I holistically combined my domain knowledge of mathematics principles to the need for a stochastic pipeline of enumerables to-"
"You mean you picked a random number?"
".....yes."

 

[narad]

I think I'm also just very primed to come at any jargon-y sounding tech thing with massive heaps of salt - because I work in an environment where everyone is always trying to sound clever and describes things in ways that are teeeechnically accurate, but aren't nearly as impressive when you strip the jargon away.

"I holistically combined my domain knowledge of mathematics principles to the need for a stochastic pipeline of enumerables to-"
"You mean you picked a random number?"
".....yes."

Fair enough, I'm a big fan of dispelling hype (and over hype led to the "AI winter" in the 80s). But here you actually have empirical results, which is a SOTA Minecraft bot with very little hands-on coding time. I imagine the main loop could be something like 500 lines (not counting the prompt templates)? So I don't know what your bar is, but having a non-expert being able to write a SOTA bot in an afternoon sounds like it would have ramifications on some jobs, and this is even a cut above most of the customer service roles that'll be hit hardest.

Regarding planning, planning in the AI domain is simple. Having an agent know to go get a key, then go down the ladder, and back to the door, and unlock the door, is all typically pretty hard stuff. An LLM grasps a lot of this stuff. An LLM grasps that if you were in a totally new Minecraft environment, all the ingredients are going to be swapped for others, but presumably with ones with similar properties. That's an extremely hard level of generality to get into the AI without an LLM. And you don't have to do any domain specific tuning for those sorts of guesses to be reasonable and to get a bit of commonsense into the system, it just falls out from all that internet data pretraining.

 

[MASS DEFECT]

I'm reading the Unsealed Indictment documents. And so far, 10/10. A very entertaining lazy Friday read. Trump really fucked up on this one.

 

[MetalDestroyer]

I'm reading the Unsealed Indictment documents. And so far, 10/10. A very entertaining lazy Friday read. Trump really fucked up on this one.

Yeah I've been hearing that for 7 years now. I truly and completely believe he is actually above the law. I have as much faith in a Trump legal consequence as I do in the US Supreme court upholding precedent.

 

[TimmyPage]

I'm reading the Unsealed Indictment documents. And so far, 10/10. A very entertaining lazy Friday read. Trump really fucked up on this one.

 

[MASS DEFECT]

Yeah I've been hearing that for 7 years now. I truly and completely believe he is actually above the law. I have as much faith in a Trump legal consequence as I do in the US Supreme court upholding precedent.

Oh. I have no doubt that he would just get a slap on the wrist and he will get re-elected. The funniest thing about this is that every US president has probably done the same thing, but his smug lying sleazeball businessman way of doing/hiding things got him in trouble.

 

[MaxOfMetal]

Eh, he's rich, white, famous, and conservative. He'll get, at worst, an ankle monitor until a GOP President pardons him, if he even has to wait.

Welp, not looking good.

The judge, Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, is the same judge who assigned a special master in the original documents discovery, and if convicted gets to decide the sentence.

So what are we thinking? Maybe 100 hours community service? 3 years probation with time served? A big wet kiss?

 

[Randy]

Welp, not looking good.

The judge, Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, is the same judge who assigned a special master in the original documents discovery, and if convicted gets to decide the sentence.

So what are we thinking? Maybe 100 hours community service? 3 years probation with time served? A big wet kiss?

TBD. A lot of trump appointed judges (and other officials) that have gone against him over the last few years.

Trumps MO is to demand absolute loyalty, which most agree to, and then the ask keeps getting larger and larger until eventually it's too much and they say no, and he turns on them. Did it to Sessions, did it to Pence, did it to Cohen, did it to Barr, etc.

A lot of things in the doc case, Trump and his lawyers were given a chance to make their own recommendations and the results still went way against them. I haven't deep dived this judge but the chances are Trump "death by a million paper cuts" of various legal cases and his career over long before this judge leaves the bench. Unless he's being directly bribed, I'm not 100% sure the ask of letting Trump off isn't the "too much" stage, and that he's looking to chain himself to that sinking rock.

I think the argument of the likely pardon from the next Republican president is the bigger concern. That's why I've been more interested in these state and civil cases.

 

[spudmunkey]

TBD. A lot of trump appointed judges (and other officials) that have gone against him over the last few years.

I'm not optimistic in this case.

This judge:

 

[MetalDestroyer]

TBD. A lot of trump appointed judges (and other officials) that have gone against him over the last few years.

Not this one, who has already interfered in this case, and has a picture being spread around of her in a TEAM TRUMP hat and face paint
EDIT: I got got

 

[Randy]

 

[narad]

I'm not optimistic in this case.

This judge:
View attachment 126179

Dude, wtf. You'd dismiss a juror over this, but you can't dismiss a judge?

 

[vilk]

I'm not optimistic in this case.

This judge:
View attachment 126179

How can this be allowed?

 

[MetalDestroyer]

How can this be allowed?

They installed a negligent criminal to the highest office. Said Cheeto stacked the courts and high offices with people who now owe him favor.

They used corruption to generate more corruption. It’s like gerrymandering but with more selling of national security secrets to Saudi Arabia

 

[spudmunkey]

Dude, wtf. You'd dismiss a juror over this, but you can't dismiss a judge?

How can this be allowed?

From what I understand (which is actually probably wrong), she's the primary judge for that district. She could (and the expectation is that she would) recuse herself, to avoid the appearance of a bias of the court...but...yeah. A lot has changed since 2015 regarding "reasonable" behavior.

 

[narad]

From what I understand (which is actually probably wrong), she's the primary judge for that district. She could (and the expectation is that she would) recuse herself, to avoid the appearance of a bias of the court...but...yeah. A lot has changed since 2015 regarding "reasonable" behavior.

If the past few years have shown us anything, these sorts of checks need to be externally imposed. When I think of someone recusing themselves at this point I might as well imagine a guy in a tophat with a handlebar mustache, because it feels like we're pretending we're in that sort of time period full of loud posturing with gentlemanly behaviors, rather than loud posturing of tribal alliances.

 

[TedEH]

very little hands-on coding time

I imagine the main loop could be something like 500 lines

As a person who does software for a living, this isn't how you measure the complexity of a software project. 500 lines could be an hour of boilerplate nonsense, or it could be years of research. A single line can take weeks to figure out the right way to approach something. Lines of code has long been disregarded as a meaningless way to measure software progress.
I also want to point out that Voyager (the Minecraft bot you're talking about) looks to be made by a team or researchers, not one guy bored on an afternoon. I don't see where you got 500 lines and an afternoon from. This looks like a massive undertaking to me.

 

[Randy]

I mean, anyone betting Trump doesn't serve time has the odds on their side based on a lifetime of dodging the law up until now. No matter the specifics, if someone offered me a bet of "will he" or "won't be", I'd almost always take the "won't".

That said, this same judge oversaw the initial document gathering and yes, she was obstructionist but ultimately the right thing was done and you have the 37 counts against him you see today. Unless she really sharpens her corruption further, the most likely course (based on their history to date) is giving him a lot of "benefit of the doubt" deadline increases and access to material etc. But I'm not cynical enough to say she's going to throw away the case and get away with it.

 

[narad]

As a person who does software for a living, this isn't how you measure the complexity of a software project. 500 lines could be an hour of boilerplate nonsense, or it could be years of research. A single line can take weeks to figure out the right way to approach something. Lines of code has long been disregarded as a meaningless way to measure software progress.
I also want to point out that Voyager (the Minecraft bot you're talking about) looks to be made by a team or researchers, not one guy bored on an afternoon. I don't see where you got 500 lines and an afternoon from. This looks like a massive undertaking to me.

I'm guessing it could be written in < 500 lines, since it's basically just (take these prompts from here) (send these prompts there) (iterate until validating) etc etc. As to number of lines as a unit of measure, sure, the lines could be some genious thing, but we know that this is all basically boilerplate that handles all that stuff. That's kind of the point of the paper, that relatively simple mechanisms and well-managed high-level information flow can interact with LLMs to accomplish difficult tasks. That's all that really matters here -- we know the high-level logic is simple, doesn't seem particularly ingenious in any way, and basically just manages information flow. And because of that, you could imagine the burden of implementing this stuff is not high. In fact, so not high that the LLM should be able to handle a lot of this, so in the future, that is what I would expect to see.

Regarding authorship, there are a bunch of authors on the paper but (a) researching how to do things is not the same as doing them. There are plenty of things that take many people to discover, but only one person to quickly reproduce, (b) there's often a lot of authors on research papers that don't do much. Obviously Anima is not down with the first authors coding stuff up, etc.

 

[Furtive Glance]

Nothing will happen to him. Like fucking always. That’s my stance and I would dearly like to be surprised.