← Feed

Posts

• View post

  The worst argument from the pro-LLM crowd has to be the accusation of “shifting goalposts.” It is so obvious that new technologies can clarify positions, reveal deeper commitments, shift perspectives, raise new questions, and answer others. Before LLMs, many uses of (for instance) computer code were coterminous in motivation. Now they are not.

• View post

  I have NEVER wanted an object more

• View post

  I think a lot of people want to draw a distinction between ML and LLMs or “GenAI” the latter of which I don’t think is a scientifically useful category. I must admit I am basically a total skeptic of ML for nearly all applications, because in my mind, such methods mean largely giving up on theory building. Yes these can be useful, certainly as a crutch, but never as much as deterministic theories or at least direct theories of object phenomena because ML models **never** explain anything

• View post

  I’m wondering if anyone would be interested in some kind of network for those in or engaging with academic CS or math who are skeptical/suspicious/or otherwise opposed to LLMs/“AI”? Personally, I feel a great deal of loneliness on this matter at the moment, and would appreciate the camaraderie if nothing else! I’m thinking this could be a Signal group chat if nothing else. If you’re interested, let me know with a response to this post. Would also appreciate boosts for visibility!

• View post

  The Linus Torvalds hero worship is out of control and has been for a long time. He is confidently wrong, not infrequently, even in his supposed area of expertise. For example, he is still repeating falsehoods about microkernel performance that are really just laughable in a world with billions of L4 deployments. Take his pro-LLM tirade as more of the same.

• View post

  My recent talk on computerizing hieroglyphic scripts just got posted online! There’s a demo of my Maya font in the presentation (with of course, a few typos I realized I made—but this is interesting in itself, the world’s first Classical Maya typo?) I hope you find it interesting and please feel free to ask me any questions you might have. https://youtu.be/Vhx-hRyh6BM

• View post

  Confession: I mostly hate command lines and I think the obsession with them in the tech world is basically a cultural signifier and little else. I constantly see obtuse command line interfaces that are worse in every way than simple GUI would be, but are preferred, I guess, on the grounds that that’s what the epic bigshot “coders” use.

• View post

  @whitequark this is awesome! Which daemon are you using?

• View post

  Doing some deep dives on structured text editing. Is anyone aware of any work on *data structures* for editing tree-like data? I’m specifically interested in stuff like multiple cursors, efficient undo/redo, etc. This is directly relevant to my research re: Telecode (which is a tree, or hedge rather), but I’ve not been able to find any papers covering data structures. Sort of unclear to me whether ropes and other usual suspects generalize well to a structured domain

• View post

  Does anyone have experience migrating fediverse instances from one server software to another? I’d like to move mine from mastodon itself to snac2, but I want to keep my followers and so forth intact. Is that actually possible?

• View post

  POV: you are using the "modern" internet on anything less than a 10 gigabit connection