I've been reading these comments and finally read the "Nuts" blog post. I guess I understand the butthurt, but I really appreciate this style of writing. Curt, forceful, to the point, fronting any internal conflict the reader may hold. This is clearly painful for conflicted readers. For the unconflicted, it is satisfying to merely agree or disagree.

This seems nonsensical. Care to elaborate?

If Google determines you're an undesirable user, doing the captcha is just an exercise to waste your time.

I certainly experienced this (the vicious try-again cycle) but curious if you have any sources for this?

A person's testimony is a source. I can add mine: you can tell when you're truly blocked because if you click for the accessibility audio-based captcha it will actually tell you you're blocked (but, if you did the visual captcha, would simply loop forever while telling you you did it wrong).

I don't think you'll find an article by Google saying "yes, we sometimes completely block users while making it look like they're not blocked and wasting their time".

That explains why I can never get past Google's captchas! I don't even automate Google searches, I wonder why they don't like me.

Depending on the IP reputation as well as the kind of IP address you have, this can happen.

Google also prefers if you have a Google account logged in.

The captcha itself (matching pictures to text) is mostly for ML training data. I think pass/fail is mostly based on heuristics like how you moved your mouse which could get analyzed before you complete the captcha. https://www.techradar.com/news/captcha-if-you-can-how-youve-...

reason why is 1. Google and others really needed the training data, and 2. it probably helped justify the cost of providing the captcha service for free worldwide (old free tier was 1M/mo)

That was Louis von Ahn’s stated goal when he announced it - i think it was his NIPS (now NeurIPS) talk where he basically outlined the training data paying for the infrastructure as a fair exchange.

Do you outsource all of your thinking and argumentation to LLMs and other people?

Yep, when there is no point to answer insincere questions.

What is an enterprise workload?

Aside from this just being standard corporate speak copy, there is an element of truth there - the granite models are likely to give you more plain toneless responses rather than a rainbow of emojiis. Which in corporate setting can be useful

That actually sounds nice in theory. A model for getting work done and nothing else, which doesn't have to account or be trained for any type of user engagement. Like how chatgpt/claude are wasting their capacity on social niceties and glazing the user. I don't know if granite is one such but I'd bet that many of the other popular models can't be since they are consumer facing.

Existing models from OpenAI etc never return emojis when using the raw APIs unless you ask for it

Pragmatically enterprise tends to mean less refined, designed by committee and expensive.

In this case i would guess it is mostly a justification for taking a part of the LLM pie.

OCR'ing tables into spreadsheets, apparently

"This approach presents a significant opportunity for optimization and strategic realignment to better meet our core objectives."

And the deal is worse than what we already had before he blew up the entire situation for no reason.

"everything Trump touches dies" (the title of a Republican Strategist's book) seems more appropriate.

Apart from literal deaths, this has torched American military and diplomatic credibility across the globe. It was basically guaranteed to, with the only potential slim upside for America being a demonstration that their military might when applied ruthlessly might dramatically punish their victims as a warning to others. And it has so far failed at that.

This was well described during his first term, https://soylentnews.org/politics/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=..., quoting TFA:

As far as I can tell, the process for playing the president like a fiddle goes like this:

1. Start a conflict where he feels like he can't just bully his way out of it with his usual combination of threats and childish insults.

2. Get him emotionally invested in getting a deal. He won't care whether the deal is any good, just that there is one.

3. In the negotiations, tell him what you want in a way that it sounds like you're making concessions. In fact, you're getting exactly what you want.

4. Let him announce it as a big win for himself. Let him think that he got what he wanted and is the greatest negotiator ever.

5. Periodically send him notes or phone calls telling him how awesome you think he is.

Kim Jong Un did exactly this. So did Xi Jinping. So probably did Vladimir Putin. And I suspect other world leaders have taken note.

^^ This ^^ was in 2020. You can now add the IRGC to the list at the end.

TASTWDYCPI: Trump always seeks the worst deal you can possibly imagine

No, pure TACO.

Glad that even right-wing US policy commentators now use that word, I thought only Europeans used for him. The right direction

He’s objectively terrible at making deals, though. He’s apparently incapable of win-win scenarios. His ego demands that he win while the other party loses, where “winning” is defined as “personally stroking his own ego” and “lining his pockets.” His only negotiation tactic is threats and bullying.

Although, in this case, given recent news about prediction market plays, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the whole farce of a “ceasefire” was just prediction market manipulation. (Well, that and TACO Tuesday so Trump could get out of following through on his threat of genocide. One spot of sanity, if you can call it that, in a shit sandwich of the stupidest US foreign policy blunder since the war in Vietnam.)

> apparently incapable of win-win scenarios

And this is exactly the opposite of how trade works. Trade only happens if both parties have something to gain from it.

Some say the stupidest US foreign policy blunder ever, perhaps even the greatest in all history by any leader, dumber even than invading Russia in winter.

The stupidest US foreign policy blunder... so far. Invading Cuba, invading Greenland and dropping out of NATO are all on deck, so let's not pick a winner just yet.

TIB - Trump is Bullshitting

This reminds me of the various visualizations in WinAmp, and there was no shortage of creativity there! Geiss (sp?) anyone? It really whips the llama's ass!

MilkDrop has been dropping new versions since WinAmp stopped, and it runs without WinAmp (though WinAmp + all of the visualizers also still work on the newest Windows): https://www.milkdrop3.com/

Is there a gentler intro to this topic?

Try the textbook Elements of Information Theory by Cover and Thomas (2006)

I wouldn't say it's gentle but it certainly is a great book. Great exercise problems. Some of the proofs are so elegantly done, especially the way calculus of variations is avoided.

David Mackay's book hand holds a little more than Cover and Thomas, although it's remit is more than just information theory.

Found an excerpt online. Seems like a gem of a book.

See this video, beautiful explanation that doesn't already assume familiarity with entropy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErfnhcEV1O8

I recommend every where I get a chance : mackay's book. https://www.inference.org.uk/mackay/itila/book.html

Which chapters have you found the most enlightening or useful?

(off-topic: here's my own "recommend everywhere" book, "Attacking Faulty Reasoning" by T. Edward Damer, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attacking_Faulty_Reasoning).

Sorry just saw this. The first 50 or so pages are gold, not under a chapter proper. Then most of part IV for non-physicists for exposure to the statistical mechanician's worldview, especially chapters 27-33. I'm not an expert on sections 1-3, so I can't make very high value claims on their relative value. But, everytime I did look into topics covered in those chapters, I found clarity in explanation and the "how" of things by coming back to the book. The entire neural networks section contains tons of nuggets that proved both prescient and (mostly) timeless.

The jargon term, slack, comes to mind, in the concept-cluster of the old Google 20%-time, Slackware Linux, and Church of the SubGenius.

I've never seen it mentioned anywhere in their histories but I always suspected the messaging apps Slack and Discord were references to Church of Subgenius and Discordianism respectively

In general use though slack has an even stronger connotation of e.g. slacking off and not doing anything useful with the time.

Alternatively, ensuring you have enough slack in the schedule is, at least for some tech leads and project managers, an essential tool to enable meeting deadlines.

(So, I suppose using "slack" in a positive sense by project management, while probably still being considered a pejorative thing by non technical management or beancounters...)

yep, having some slack is the only way for someone / something to able to respond to uncertainty. technically having firefighter on standby and policemen on patrol are a form of slacking, and we (should) have no problem with that.

and Bob with his Billard pipe, now as you brought these up!

My father did not smoke, but many of his colleagues did which some did look 60's bit like Bob. For some odd reason I still kind of remember what tobacco and pipe smell felt in room when I begin to think of it, like now in this occasion.

Slackers! You're all slackers! [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEsNiV8e4ko

Very interesting perspective. I will be reviewing in depth. Much appreciated.

I recently (~6 mo ago) made it a goal to understand and implement a useful Kalman filter, but I realized that they are very tightly coupled to their domain and application. I got about half as far as I wanted, and took a pause. I expect your work here will get me to the finish line, so I am psyched! Thank you!

Thanks for your feedback! Actually the KF concept is generic, but as mentioned above: "The state transition and measurement equations belong to the system model. They describe the physics of the system and can vary from one application to another."

So it is right to say that the implementation of the KF is tightly coupled to the system. Getting that part right is usually the hardest step.