Hacker News: solarhexes

New comment by solarhexes in "Hallucination is inevitable: An innate limitation of large language models"

solarhexes — Sun, 25 Feb 2024 20:40:01 +0000

You’ve decided that your definition of “understanding” is correct. Ok.

New comment by solarhexes in "Hallucination is inevitable: An innate limitation of large language models"

solarhexes — Sun, 25 Feb 2024 15:38:03 +0000

If by “understand” you mean “can model reasonably accurately much of the time” then maybe you’ll find consensus. But that’s not a universal definition of “understand”.

For example, if I asked you whether you “understand” ballistic flight, and you produced a table that you interpolate from instead of a quadratic, then I would not feel that you understand it, even though you can kinda sorta model it.

And even if you do, if you didn’t produce the universal gravitation formula, I would still wonder how “deeply” you understand. So it’s not like “understand” is a binary I suppose.

New comment by solarhexes in "Google to pause Gemini image generation of people after issues"

solarhexes — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 14:09:17 +0000

I think it’s just that’s the word you’ve been taught to use. It’s divorced from the meaning of its constituent parts, you aren’t saying “an American of African descent” you’re saying “black” but in what was supposed to be some kind of politically correct way.

I cannot imagine even the most daft American using it in the UK and intending that the person is actually American.

New comment by solarhexes in "Things unexpectedly named after people (2020)"

solarhexes — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 13:55:04 +0000

> at no point has it been a street of any particular prominence

It’s a good street, Brent.

(There’s actually good motorcycle parking just off Market I used to use all the time when I worked downtown.)

New comment by solarhexes in "Eclipse viewing at 30k feet: Delta to offer path-of-totality flight"

solarhexes — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 13:34:41 +0000

I wonder how well you’ll be able to see the sun? It seems like you might struggle to look high enough as the flight is midday?