Mark Amery @XplodingCabbage

Programmer. London Joined December 2018

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Mark Amery @XplodingCabbage

a day ago

@GarrettPetersen @REDavidson3 If you only expect other AIs to read it, though, maybe none of this matters and a 10-paragraph essay about what happens when the first element in your list is null is fine. The reader will be faster and more patient than any of us!

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Mark Amery @XplodingCabbage

a day ago

@GarrettPetersen @REDavidson3 2. the entire rest of the docs for that function is, like, eight words long, and 3. given the length of Claude's output, it would be quicker for anyone who cares to just find out the behaviour by experimenting or even reading the code itself than to wade through the slop

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Mark Amery @XplodingCabbage

a day ago

@REDavidson3 @GarrettPetersen I have not touched Fable yet, nor significantly tried non-Claude models for coding, but certainly my experience of coding with pre-Fable Claudes is they suck balls at docs writing. Very bad judgement about what is worth including vs not, and how many words to spend on each point.

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Mark Amery @XplodingCabbage

2 days ago

@GarrettPetersen Ah.

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Mark Amery @XplodingCabbage

2 days ago

@olivertraldi @cafreiman Paywalled journals that make billions by gatekeeping our ability to read research the public funded and journals contributed nothing to shouldn't exist, but if publishing in them is necessary for an academic career, their existence does not make being an academic impermissible.

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Mark Amery @XplodingCabbage

2 days ago

@olivertraldi @cafreiman Eh... there ARE in fact systems that are unjust and should be dismantled, but which it is morally fine for individuals to engage with (even though this helps entrench & empower those systems!) because unilaterally opting out has large downsides and barely weakens the system.

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Mark Amery @XplodingCabbage

2 days ago

@ciphergoth (But also this dichotomy is not exhaustive; a more charitable reading is that "matrix multiplication" is being used rhetorically as something like a synecdoche, in full understanding that NNs do not literally just use matrix multiplications yet still with no deceptive intent.)

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Mark Amery @XplodingCabbage

2 days ago

@ciphergoth Obviously dishonesty is worse? Most human beings don't even know what matrix multiplication IS, and that's fine.

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Mark Amery @XplodingCabbage

3 days ago

@NABurkinshaw @wallaceme It is irritating how professionals from whom one seeks advice on pregnancy & babies often think their job is primarily to direct you to feel positive feelings and only secondarily to give you any substantive help with the actual thing you're concerned about.

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Mark Amery @XplodingCabbage

4 days ago

@rorymeakin (Though on the other hand the trailing -u doesn't ALWAYS get added, even to ordinary nouns like ಕಂಪ್ಯೂಟರ್ (kampyooter), and I think I CAN imagine a Kannadiga correcting another's pronunciation of my name out of fear of being disrespectful.)

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Mark Amery @XplodingCabbage

4 days ago

@rorymeakin (As for the one culture I know well enough to answer - in Bangalore I of course often become ಮಾರ್ಕು (Maarkoo), just as a car is a ಕಾರು (kaaroo) and a computer is a ಕಂಪ್ಯೂಟರು (kampyooteroo), following the standard Kannada pattern for assimilating English words.)

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Mark Amery @XplodingCabbage

4 days ago

@gadievron It is obviously fine to have such a limit and plausibly somewhat useful (notwithstanding that it can obviously be trivially bypassed by an agent that is willing to intentionally bypass it). My only "WTF" is at your reaction to it.

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Mark Amery @XplodingCabbage

4 days ago

@gadievron Sorry, you have lost all empathy for Anthropic employees and now consider them utterly incompetent at security because... a tool they made for Claude to fetch webpages on the public internet had a limit on the length of the page URLs Claude could pass to it?

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Mark Amery @XplodingCabbage

5 days ago

@webdevMason @NotMaryAnnObv But you are generally not allowed to own a gun for defensive purposes, or even if police suspect you have a secondary defensive purpose, and clearly zookeeper guns are defensive. Yet apparently they're required by law (which I guess is the only reason they're allowed).

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Mark Amery @XplodingCabbage

5 days ago

@webdevMason Is there a level of endangerment of a species at which you change your mind on this? If instead of 5500 surviving tigers in the world there were only 100, or 10, would you think it was worth it to sacrifice a person's life to save one?

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Mark Amery @XplodingCabbage

a week ago

@AndrewNWest @ciphergoth @SarahTheHaider (Both of these things are of course compatible with making the case to the world that Pinker is simply wrong. But when it comes to persuading Pinker himself that he errs vs burying him in shame and dishonour and letting him rot, you probably need to pick one lane or the other.)

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Mark Amery @XplodingCabbage

a week ago

@AndrewNWest @ciphergoth @SarahTheHaider (Not literally incoherent or impossible to attempt both at once. Not QUITE. But, practically speaking, probably doomed.)