Thoughts

to tell you what to care about.

Congrats Smith, Myers, Goodman-Strauss, and Kaplan.

I saw a post that used “American Pie” as example of an artist creating something that communicated a feeling that the listener wouldn’t otherwise have ever experienced. Every emotion that I feel thinking when I think about that plane crash was communicated to me by Don McLean. Reading the Wikipedia page communicates nothing.

I’m hoping it pays off for them.

Smiley-face emoticon in the LLVM documentation.

immediately stands out to me is the AMC 10. The AMC is the American Math Contest (10th grade and below). GTP-4 got a 30/150 on the test, which is the 10th percentile. This is much worse than its performance on other tests. (For example, it's in the 89th percentile on the SAT Math subject test.) To try to understand what's going on here, I'm going to quote part of the grading description on for the test. > This is a 25-question, multiple choice test. Each question is followed by answers marked A, B, C, D and E. Only one of these is correct. > You will receive 6 points for each correct answer, ... 1.5 points for each problem left unanswered ... and 0 points for each incorrect answer. The AMC is supposed to be hard. You are not supposed to be able to answer every question on the AMC, which is why you get points for leaving questions blank. If you left every question blank, you would get a 37.5, and do better than GTP-4! But GTP isn't designed to leave questions blank. It's going to generate a BS, plausible sounding, answer for every single question. Now, if you guessed randomly on every question, with 5 correct answers, you'd get a 30, which also happens to be the score GTP got. The type of problem solving that you have to do on the AMC is the exactly the type of stuff that GTP has a bad time with. I remember geometry problems that require you to be able to visualize spacial objects in a novel way. As a language model, GTP has no spacial reasoning ability. I think GTP is guessing randomly here, hurting its score. I'm calling this the AMC-effect. Text generation models would rather hallucinate than not-answer, leading to worse performance in some cases. I think it could be used by teachers trying to detect cheating. They could include a nonsensical, honeypot, question, and instruct students that they don't have to answer every question. Any student who generated BS for this honeypot question is likely to not understand the concepts, or be cheating. Another weird note: GTP does better when it doesn't have visual input on the AMC 10. Some of these questions are only possible to answer correctly with the diagram. OpenAI says that they replace the image with "IMAGE: with a non-meaningful filename wherever an image would be missing" (Appendix A.4). I think what's happening is that the text-only GTP is opting not to answer these questions, since it knows it's missing information, and leaving the question blank, leading to more points than otherwise. But here's the weirdest part. GTP-4 does better on the AMC 12, landing in the 50th percentile with a 60/150. Why? This should be a harder test. It covers more concepts. I have no idea why it performs respectably on this test. It kind of throws a wrench in my whole theory. I'm really curious if/how their prompt for these tests explained that the test taker can leave the questions blank, I think that's an important peice of information. => https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.08774 The GTP-4 paper (click PDF in the upper right) => https://artofproblemsolving.com/wiki/index.php/2022_AMC_10A_Problems The 2022 AMC 10

that components work as a way to re-use rendering, and not as a way to re-use logic. This is the problem that functional-style react and hooks were supposed to address, because you were supposed to be better about writing functional components. In reality, it made the problem worse, because JS developers aren't Haskell developers. They think of functions as a way to re-use business logic. So when React said "components are just functions" people started putting *more* business logic into components, not less.

They can just, on command, spontaneously improve a duet of an original song. I don't know how they do it.

want from me sometimes what is going on

And then going "I can't believe this computer has a DVD drive lol"

started with "N..." And I just had to smile and nod but I wanted to be like 'um acktually, Myer's-Briggs types start with E for extroverted or I for introverted, that's not a valid type.'

is that all of the characters are treated like adults, in that they have backstories and are fully independent at the start of the book.

-AJR, No Grass Today

"Monday," Imagine Dragons "Blur," Imagine Dragons "Charlie Vouchers," Wilderness Survival "Turn the Lights Off," Tally Hall "Pager," Lyn Lapid "Ana Ng," They Might Be Giants

array spontaneously generates a null value in between the bottom of the while loop and checking the while-loop condition. Also I haven't eaten anything in like 24 hours. I am having a wonderful day.

Original content was "I think I got banned from HN for posting meta-commentary lol we're rolling boys." I'm paranoid about being shadow-banned from websites in general, after my experiences on Khan Academy. And I have show-dead on HN on, and there are a lot of people there shadow banned. (If you only post links to your own blog, and never do anything else, you get auto-banned pretty quickly. And those people keep posting links to their own blog, ignorant.) Anyways, what happened above was that I checked in a private tab if my most recent comment existed pretty quickly after I posted it, and it didn't and I freaked out. It can't have been flagged or downvoted, since I checked quickly. But if you access HN and you're not logged in, you hit a CDN with a cached version of the page. (If you're logged it, it can't cache since it has to put in your username in the top right.) So when I checked again just now my comments showed up, so I think I just needed to give the CDN a minute.

Edit a minute later, it's flagged again. The post was actually submitted once before with the original title, and it was flagged because "Urgent: Sign the petition now" is a clickbait title, so someone resubmitted with the title "YC is asking for a bailout." But then the title of the second submission got changed to "Urgent: Sign the petition now" since HN hates "editorializing titles" and then the second one got flagged away because that's a clickbait title. It will be a miracle if HN discussion quality can withstand this event.

the bank' "The crypto people haven't been getting bailouts and it doesn't seem to be hurting the ecosystem" "Don't ask taxpayers to fix your mistakes for you." The communists are also having a field day. 'the guillotines will be brought out eventually.'

(For the record, the issue in question is that in the following case Chrome *always* picks the ico favicon. I skimmed the Chromium source and can't tell why this is the case, but if there's an ico available I don't think it's possible to get Chrome to use the SVG. ``` <link rel="icon" href="/static/images/favicon.ico"> <link rel="icon" type="image/svg+xml" href="/static/images/favicon.svg"> ``` ) I'm going to address it by not shipping a .ico. Sorry IE 8 or whatever.

Some jokes never get old.

For the 13th consecutive time. The GOAT.

sources of entertainment in my mind. And mediums are completely different, sure, but the standards are completely different as well. Can you judge a speedrunning clip compilation as a narrative arc of man vs. nature (in the game)? Can you judge a book by as the average quality of a number of individual action moments? Sure, why not.

"better"; or perhaps, more Literature-y than many other types of media. People argue *a lot* about the quality of books, but on the whole, the worst published children's book imaginable has more themes, more character development, more moral than any meme or Tweet or Youtube video or TikTok clip. But that's not an insult to Youtube videos or Tweets. On the contrary, I think it's weird how arbitrary our criteria for judging stories is, because we don't, universally judge any other media by the same standards.

of that, then it would allow books to occupy a space in our society more like that of Youtube videos or social media. At the same time, there's a lot of quality forced into the medium because of people conflating every book with Literature. And maybe if we built an algorithmic feed of stories to maximize engagement, the quality of those stories would decrease.

genre, (assuming that I don't already know who is going to clickbait and who is not). Clickbaiting hurts not only your reputation, but the reputation of the whole category that you're in.

fail on me before.

projects.

No one watches but you. This isn’t right. This isn’t my fight. There is no light.

*I say that like there's a reason. We lost Gemini support because I removed it because I didn't want it any more.

A house sits abandoned in a forest surrounded by trees and leaves and by dark things unspeakable. A shadow looming over the left side of the world, stealing, never freeing. Is importune instant impertinent death a murder? Merely because the innocent were killed in cold blood? Outside inside together for warmth and safety of others. Fears and tears.