Nathaniel Daw

@yoavgo I think many seminar courses esp in technical areas benefit from a bit of introductory lecturing to frame the questions and introduce the formalisms. I usually do a touch of this every week to set up next week's paper but a longer framing lecture at the start can be useful

cs/ml/ai profs: do you have tips for not wasting the first class of a seminar course on purely logistics ("these are the topics, these are the papers, here is how the course works, who will present next week and what")? (this year we were graced by end of class being interrupted by incoming missile alert from Iran, but hopefully future years will be different)

@yoavgo @mmitchell_ai I also love the piece tbc: the point about conclusory terminology (attention, reasoning) is crucial and very widely applicable

@yoavgo @mmitchell_ai Isn't a good parrot stochastic (as training objective) just bc target function is probabilistic? What I don't get is once the definition is refined to this it seems false-even old llms were instruction tuned, rlhf'd etc: not just parrots and not just due to other "ai" wrappers

"AI" is not a stochastic parrot.🦜 I wrote this piece a couple weeks ago, but it was hard for me to finish up given AI's role in society and war over the past few weeks. I should share it at some point though. Not perfect, but here it is. @margarmitchell/no-ai-is-not-a-stochastic-parrot-a99e57766bed" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">medium.com/@margarmitchel…

@TheEbonyMaw I was eating spicy noodles and my toddler toddled up and begged for a bite and I couldn't resist him and I took a tiny piece of noodle and scraped off the sauce. he put it in his mouth and gave me this soul shattering look of total shock and betrayal. Now he's 16.

Sitting down. Drinking iced black coffee. 2yr old daughter (Twin A) walks over to me for a sip. She does this many times. I always say no. You know what? Just give her a sip. She’ll hate it, and then she’ll never ask again. I give her a sip. She likes it. Asks for another.

@eigenrobot It's a fair cop.

few to no professors on twitter drop bons mots under their own names and i think that speaks awfully of the profession. utterly degraded. you used to stand for learning and achievement

@AndrewDarovich @ultimadragons @encyclopath @CapsicumOleo @SandyofCthulhu Xeen didn't work for me, at the time. Felt like Bards Tale, not a proto open world. But I won't deny the criticisms of U7 except by comparison to what else was around then.

@nathanieldaw @ultimadragons @encyclopath @CapsicumOleo @SandyofCthulhu Gonna disagree there. The combat was nonsensical, MT32 had orchestral sfx, and the plot was just you stopping more things LB doesnt like lol. Plus, the character leveling was mostly pointless. Id go with Xeen over U7

We've all played video games. So we all know how keys work. ANY key will open ANY door. The key is destroyed upon opening the door, and that door can never be locked again. Some doors must be fed several keys before they can open. I have never had a player argue with this description. It is accepted as truth. I've used it in several of my games.

@encyclopath @CapsicumOleo @SandyofCthulhu Ultima 7 was the pinnacle of computer gaming. Everything since, disappointment.

@nathanieldaw @CapsicumOleo @SandyofCthulhu It absolutely did! I love how it was incorporated as an artifact that must be earned instead of just happening with a QoL patch.

Thrilled that my paper is out in the @Nature . We explored how the brain builds complex tasks by compositionally combining simpler sub-task representations. nature.com/articles/s4158…

@encyclopath @CapsicumOleo @SandyofCthulhu I think a later expansion added a keychain as a quality of life improvement on this point.

@CapsicumOleo @SandyofCthulhu Yes. Ultima VII. It was an emergent gameplay mechanic.

Arrest everyone involved with this article right now

@polynoamial this oped so reminded me of the chomsky one about how LLMs couldnt possibly intuit the universal grammar.

1987: AI can't win at chess—planning is uniquely human 1997: AI can't win at Go—intuition is uniquely human 2016: AI can't win at poker—bluffing is uniquely human 2023: AI can't get IMO gold—reasoning is uniquely human 2026: AI can't make wise decisions—judgment is uniquely human

@yipopov @tomfgoodwin All this makes sense to me apart from the first two words.

@nathanieldaw @tomfgoodwin No, because their whole restaurant industry runs on exactly those packaged ready-to-heat meals from a company called Sysco. All they have to do is cut out the middle man who punches the buttons on the microwave and sell them as is.

I'll never understand why the US doesn't really do ready made sandwiches. Around 5 times a week I want to eat something vaguely healthy, portable, immediate, and there's nothing. Slice of pizza? no thanks Fast food, hell no. Subway, piss off. Where's this sort of thing?

@tomfgoodwin I think it's fair to say that for ready made sandwiches, nothing really touches seven eleven in Japan. The Allies may have beaten the empire, but they have embarrassed us in their mastery of mayonnaise and white bread.

@the_arakihcat @kjgillenwater @tomfgoodwin Ok but in UK supermarkets they have aisle after aisle of this stuff.

@nathanieldaw @kjgillenwater @tomfgoodwin US grocery stores have that. These are all things I can get at my local grocery store that are not frozen that you just need to take home and cook or heat up.

@kjgillenwater @tomfgoodwin Yeah the stuff in UK is different from US deli prepared food. It's facsimiles of different ethnic takeaway dishes, more similar in scope and packaging to what you'd see at Trader Joe's but refrigerated fresh rather than frozen, much tastier. Better supply chain I think.

@nathanieldaw @tomfgoodwin My grocery store has a whole section near the deli for prepackaged meals…everything from salmon to enchiladas to various chicken dishes with sides.

@TrueStoneCold @tomfgoodwin Everything is frozen in trader Joe's. UK supermarkets have a very similar selection of packaged meals but fresh/refrigerated/ eat within a couple days. Much tastier.

@nathanieldaw @tomfgoodwin Someone has never been to Trader Joe’s!

@dr_conehed @mattyglesias america: a plunger in every loo and a chicken in every pie.

@nathanieldaw @mattyglesias Let's start with plungers... "A miracle piece of engineering" to these poor folks

@CharlesOJ @mattyglesias ah but the US shows our dominance by having a much larger gini coefficient!

@nathanieldaw @mattyglesias The median wealth in the UK is higher than the US.