Artisian
@Artisian@lemmy.world
- Comment on What should I get my online friend for their birthday? 2 days ago:
If you have a venmo or other money-transfer method, consider cash.
While a thoughtful gift is nice, cash is flexible. Enough small gifts, and one can flee home…
- Comment on The sole purpose of language models is to lower the market value of human skills. 1 week ago:
I do those too! That’s where the ideas for new architectures, datasets, and training tweaks come from! Math is fun, and it’s fascinating that math can talk sometimes.
- Comment on The sole purpose of language models is to lower the market value of human skills. 1 week ago:
I think in a non market economy I would still work on language models. It’s cool that a machine can hold a conversation.
- Comment on Uniciv (open-source android/desktop 4x game) 4.17 release! 2 weeks ago:
I’m going to make a mildly stronger claim. I think this game really is quite moddable by a non-coder. What you need is to implement a different ruleset with new win conditions; everything else can be done with copying existing files into the correct file structure. New win conditions are specified by a pretty boring JSON file, docs here:
github.com/…/5-Miscellaneous-JSON-files.md#victor…
See here for an MVP for a mod of this type (probably replaces/strips away too much, but you should be able to find the vanilla files in the github linked in the OP):
Which is all to say, this is much easier than doing address lookup imo.
- Comment on Uniciv (open-source android/desktop 4x game) 4.17 release! 2 weeks ago:
By testing it out in the app?
I’ve also tried getting AI to program really simple things, like using js to find particular elements in a webpage (which I don’t control and involves far too many lines). It did fine.
It’s not ready for commercial use, but it makes hacking around unfamiliar code more accessible. But hey, I’m too lazy to test this use case, so let’s keep arguing about it instead =) (though, thinking about it, automating the argument would be something the AI could do just as well, eh?)
- Comment on Uniciv (open-source android/desktop 4x game) 4.17 release! 2 weeks ago:
Kozy asked for a different rule set; essentially changing a few numbers related to non-combat victory (shorter research times, lower policy points required, etc). Identifying these numbers in a complicated code base, especially for a non-programmer, could be very difficult. For the non-programmer, understanding how the code works isn’t very important. You just need to know what to change, and perhaps make sure you don’t change more.
I think this is exactly a case where getting a novice programming friend to make a mod would make sense. Equivalently, to vibe code.
- Comment on Uniciv (open-source android/desktop 4x game) 4.17 release! 2 weeks ago:
That sounds like something easily modded; like a couple of integers somewhere. It would be cool to do (and seems vibe-code accessible if a model can hold the full script in context?)
- Comment on Having the ability to lie and manipulate with no remorse will get you much further in this world than having morals and being correct 2 weeks ago:
You can be selective with this power; works well for a lot of folks. Have a smallish in group where you’re always upstanding, enjoy all the benefits that our tribal brain craves, and also enjoy the material benefits.
- Comment on Its likely a very large percentage of people would choose to have been born earlier than they were if given the choice. 2 weeks ago:
Some folks would have easier access to their drugs though. Pre war on drugs might have some benefits
- Comment on Why there are a lot of people migrating from Windows to Linux these days? 2 weeks ago:
Needing to go through and disable all the stuff sounds like managing bloat to me, no?
I’m personally angry that we have ads on the default minesweeper and solitaire. Gross
- Comment on Uniciv (open-source android/desktop 4x game) 4.17 release! 2 weeks ago:
Thank you!
- Comment on PNG has been updated for the first time in 22 years — new spec supports HDR and animation 2 weeks ago:
downvoters: is it wrong?
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to games@lemmy.world | 20 comments
- Comment on Judge backs AI firm over use of copyrighted books 2 weeks ago:
The students read Tolkien, then ‘invent’ Orgreorcs and Dwarvves (with ‘2’ vs, cause they are also vampires). The judge thinks this is similar to how claude works. I, nor I suspect the judge, meant that the students were reusing settings whole cloth.
- Comment on The Death of the Student Essay—and the Future of Cognition 3 weeks ago:
I would love to see the source on this one. It sounds fascinating.
- Comment on The Death of the Student Essay—and the Future of Cognition 3 weeks ago:
I agree. It really doesn’t look like AI is the thing that broke. More like the education system, or something about social media.
- Comment on Judge backs AI firm over use of copyrighted books 3 weeks ago:
As a civil matter, the publishing houses are more likely to get the full money if anthropic stays in business (and does well). So it might be bad, but I’m really skeptical about bankruptcy (and I’m not hearing anyone seriously floating it?)
- Comment on Judge backs AI firm over use of copyrighted books 3 weeks ago:
Plantifs made that argument and the judge shoots it down pretty hard. That competition isn’t what copyright protects from. Would love to hear your thoughts on the ruling (it’s linked by reuters).
- Comment on Judge backs AI firm over use of copyrighted books 3 weeks ago:
I also read through the judgement, and I think it’s better for anthropic than you describe. He distinguishes three issues: A) Use any written material they get their hands on to train the model (and the resulting model doesn’t just reproduce the works).
B) Buy a single copy of a print book, scan it, and retain the digital copy for a company library (for all sorts of future purposes).
C) Pirate a book and retain that copy for a company library (for all sorts of future purposes).
A and B were fair use by summary judgement. Manning this judge thinks it’s clear cut in anthropics favor. C will go to trial.
- Comment on The Death of the Student Essay—and the Future of Cognition 3 weeks ago:
I’m still looking for a good reason to believe critical thinking and intelligence are taking a dive. It’s so very easy to claim the kids aren’t all right. But I wish someone would check. An interview with the gpt cheaters? A survey checking that those brilliant essays aren’t from people using better prompts? Let’s hear from the kids! Everyone knows nobody asked us when we were being turned into ungrammatical zombies by spell check/grammar check/texting/video content/ipads/the calculator.
- Comment on In a world first, Brazilians will soon be able to sell their digital data 1 month ago:
Idk how much this is dystopian. Once your data is explicitly your property, we have a much better dialog about data brokers. Imagine the class action lawsuits against data breaches.
- Comment on There's a noticable influx of trans kids in my job. Are there any topics I should avoid or considerations I should take into account when training them? 1 month ago:
If you wanna go the extra mile, skimming an ally guide for 10 minutes, looking up some terminology and concepts, would reduce awkwardness by a fair bit. I certainly would have avoided a half dozen missteps if I did some reading.
- Comment on Are there any initiatives aimed at training generative AI using 100% public domain works and works authorized by the creator? 1 month ago:
As I understand it, there are many many such models. Especially those made for academic use. Some common training corpus’s are listed here: www.tensorflow.org/datasets
Examples include wikipedia edits and discussions, and open source scientific articles.
Almost all research models are going to be trained on stuff like this. Many of them have demos, open code, and local installation instructions. They generally don’t have a marketing budget. Some of the models listed here certainly qualify: github.com/eugeneyan/open-llms?tab=readme-ov-file
Both of these are lists that are not so difficult to get on; so I imagine some of these have trouble with falsification or mislabeling, as you point out. But there’s little reason for people to do so (beyond improving a papers results I guess?).
Art generation seems to have had a harder time, but there are stable diffusion equivalents that used only CC work. A few minutes of search found: Common Canvas, claims to have been competitive.
- Comment on It's Breathtaking How Fast AI Is Screwing Up the Education System 1 month ago:
I think it’s fine for this to be poorly defined; what I want is something aligned with reality beyond op-eds. Qualitative evidence isn’t bad; but I think it needs to be aggregated instead of anecdoted. Humans are real bad at judging how the kids are doing (complaints like the OP are older than liberal education, no?); I don’t want to continue the pattern. A bunch of old people worrying too much about students not reading shakespear in classes is how we got the cancel culture moral panic - I’d rather learn from that mistake.
A handful of thoughts: There are longitudinal studies that interview kids at intervals; are any of these getting real weird swings? Some kids have AI earlier; are they much different from similar peers without? Where’s the broad interviews/story collection from the kids? Are they worried? How would they describe their use and their peers use of AI?
- Comment on Stack Overflow seeks rebrand as traffic continues to plummet – which is bad news for developers 1 month ago:
One of the more important knowledge repositories right now… and it’s tied to a corporation. We should probably be supporting alternatives.
Anybody know of data backups? Do we have the whole thing on the internet archive?
- Comment on It's Breathtaking How Fast AI Is Screwing Up the Education System 1 month ago:
As far as I can tell, the strongest data is wrt literacy and numeracy, and both of those are dropping linearly with previous downward trends from before AI, am I wrong? We’re also still seeing kids from lockdown, which seems like a much more obvious ‘oh that’s a problem’ than the AI stuff.
- Comment on It's Breathtaking How Fast AI Is Screwing Up the Education System 1 month ago:
Honest question: how do we measure critical thinking and creativity in students?
If we’re going to claim that education is being destroyed (and show we’re better than our great^n grandparents complaining about the printing press), I think we should try to have actual data instead of these think-pieces and anecdata from teachers. Every other technology that the kids were using had think-pieces and anecdata.
- Comment on What is class field theory? 2 months ago:
Not a number theorist, but the wikipedia reads ok for me, so I’ll give an attempt. Answer based on the AMS’s Translated Math Monographs 240, by Kazuya Kato et. al…
A sample of the questions class field theory wants to address: a) Which primes p are the sum of 2 squares, p=a^2 + b^2? b) What about other formulae, say eg p=a^2 +2b^2? c) Consider a Galois extension. Take a prime ideal P in the smaller ring. For which primes does this ideal factor when we look at the larger ring? d) When is the factorization square free (unramified)? e) What’s the smallest cyclotomic extension that contains sqrt(M) for a given M?
If we look at the integers, you may already know the answers to several of these! And they all have something kinda magic in common. For (a), for example, the primes that are the sum of 2 squares are exactly those with p = 1 mod 4. For example, 5=2^2+1^2, yet 7 cannot be written as a sum of two squares. The answer to question (b) is similar! We can do it exactly when p=1,3 mod 8.
For ©, for concreteness let’s take the extension of the rationals Q to the rationals with a square root of -3, Q(sqrt(-3)). The prime ideal (7) factors as (7, 1-sqrt(-3)) (7, 1+sqrt(-3)) (a product of two distinct prime ideals; unramified), as do the ideals (13), (19), (31), and (37). But (5), (11), (17), (23) and (29) all don’t. Perhaps you notice a pattern: p=1 mod 3 ? factors. p=2 mod 3? doesn’t. There’s also a unique ramified prime, (3) = (sqrt(-3))^2. There will generally only be a finite number of ramified primes. Do a dozen more examples and you’ll notice a spooky pattern: the ramified primes seem to show up in the modulus (in this example, 3 was ramified and the factorization pattern works mod 3. If 7 and 23 are ramified, the factorization cases will work modulo 7*23=161). [Quadratic extensions are not special btw; the factorization of (p) in Q(zeta_5) (Q with a 5th root of 1) depends on p mod 5.]
On the face of it, why would modular arithmetic be the relevant condition? And why does the modulus seem to care about ramification?
A major result of Galois theory is that there’s a correspondence between subgroups of (Z/NZ)^* (integers modulo N under multiplication) and intermediate field extensions between Q and a cyclotomic extension Q(zeta_N). Prime ideal ramification and factoring can be stated in terms of this correspondence. Further, they show that every finite abelian extension of Q lives inside some Q(zeta_N). This result lets us explain all of (a)-(e). Generalizing it is one of the big motivations of class field theory. If we start not with Q, but with say Q(sqrt(-3)), what still holds? What is the right generalization of cyclotomic extensions and (Z/NZ)^*?
My understanding is that this program is quite successful. There’s a replacement for both that’s only somewhat more technical/tedious, and that gives similar results. One of the bigger successes is generalizing ‘reciprocity’ laws (the quadratic case is often taught in undergrad number theory; it’s about the surprising fact that p is a square mod q depends on if q is a square mod p).