Ironically, like "notepad". I always find it odd how infringers feel ownership and get defensive about their infringement. Like release groups getting pissy about people reposting/renaming their releases.
Windows Notepad isn't a standalone product, but a Windows feature that has its title localized into every language as part of Windows, none of which are registered as a trademark.
And should it be considered a commercial product, Notepad alone is too generic so the trademark would probably be Windows/Microsoft Notepad, just like products named Something-Office both predate and followed Microsoft Office.
>Have they cured 1 disease? Let alone ~all~ disease? No.
I mean, curing all disease isn't something where progress is linear. A large portion of the work is done upfront before you see any result. Then when your knowledge base and methodology is sufficiently robust, many disease can then be cured in quick succession. The fact that they have no visible success after 10 years says little about the viability of their goal.
Looking at the history of modern medicine, the cure rate of diseases was not exponential, it was gradual over the course of hundreds of years.
Sure there were a few big jumps- water sanitation and antibiotics come to mind- but if you look at cured cardiovascular diseases, cancers, GI diseases etc., they all started with bad treatments that indeed slowly improved over decades.
If CZI is looking to eliminate all disease in a lifetime (say 100 years) I would expect some progress.
You're talking about curing diseases where each disease is a largely independent effort, which is distinct from an enterprise aimed at curing all disease. The former will be much more linear in appearance than the latter.
Why? Presumably so they can go to college and get a high paying job that may not exist in 10 years? The direction we give kids coming up always seems to lag behind reality by 10 or 20 years. Perhaps we shouldn't stand in the way of the new generation figuring things out for themselves in this brave new world. The old playbooks to a solid middle class life are increasingly outdated.
> Why? Presumably so they can go to college and get a high paying job that may not exist in 10 years?
Also so they don't end up stupid and useless like a potted plant. People with too little education are easy to manipulate and dim. They're perfect fodder for the propaganda machines.
It would be nice if we could just let kids loose like wild animals and they'd, somehow, figure everything out. But no, we actually have to try. Otherwise they end up illiterate and eating so much candy they throw up. Because they're kids.
None of your concerns are relevant. We're not talking about 6 year olds here but presumably 12-16 year olds. And the issue isn't whether they drop out of school, but whether school must be their sole focus.
12-16 year olds still do not have the restraint to be essentially self educating. I'm sorry, but this is a bad bad idea. The primary focus of children should be education.
They have their whole entire lives to be a cog in the capitalist machine. We don't need to speedrun children getting a soul crushing office job. They can spend time learning how to critically analyze text or how to learn choreography for a musical.
> They can spend time learning how to critically analyze text or how to learn choreography for a musical.
But to what end? There is zero value to many of these kids in learning to do these things. Again, we're pulling from a playbook on how to live a successful life that is decades out of date. A kid who has a potentially successful side hustle should be encouraged to follow it. And besides, we're only talking about a small number of kids here. Those that have shown aptitude and initiative for some alternate path. In many cases opportunity is fleeting and must be grasped when it appears. On the other hand, school will always be there.
How many skilled high school aged programmers in the late 90s were encouraged by their parents to stay in school and missed out on a decade head start on their careers? How many potential founders missed out on the golden era for computer startups? (Imagine if Bill Gates had followed his parents advice!) How many kids wasted years in college only to be saddled with a crushing debt burden and no relevant jobs to show for it? Those who have suffered for following the standard advice never seem to get a mention in these discussions. Not everyone must or should follow the same path. We as a society need to be more tolerant to experimentation and outliers.
There is a lot of value, it's just that children are very bad at estimating value. That's why they'd rather spend all their time eating candy and going to the skate park - they're children. Apparently some adults see it that way, too, which is shocking to me.
Again, kids do not need to speedrun being cogs in the machines. Could SOME of them hypothetically become millionaires like 5 years earlier?
I mean... I guess? But that's frankly one of the stupidest justifications for anything ever that I have ever heard. The reality is 99.9999% of people are destined for the same thing: a normal career, with a normal salary. Most people are not going to be "entrepreneurs", and most "entrepreneurs" that I have met are not even entrepreneurs, they're scam artists. Which is a different thing, although you could say technically they're both self-made.
Look, it's a game of average. Are there SOME people out there who could benefit from less education? Sure. For the majority of people, education leads to higher lifetime income, and it's not even close. We have the statistics on this. We don't know ahead of time which one someone will be. So, we should optimize for the best odds.
> hose who have suffered for following the standard advice never seem to get a mention in these discussions.
No no, those people get WAY too much mention. What actually doesn't get enough mention are the people who are forced into lifetime poverty because they never graduated high school and are therefore essentially unemployable. Which is about 10,000x more common than the Bill Gates types. So, give me fucking break.
I know some people who didn't graduate high school, and I know a lot of people who opted to go straight into the workforce post highschool instead of getting a degree. None of those people are doing good.
>Again, kids do not need to speedrun being cogs in the machines. Could SOME of them hypothetically become millionaires like 5 years earlier?
It's not about speedrunning being cogs in the machine, its about finding their place in a world where nothing is guaranteed and there is no longer a "golden path" to a happy middle class life. Forcing everyone down the golden path that is guaranteed to not work for some sizeable percentage of kids is moral disaster. But it makes some of us adults feel good, so we encourage it regardless of the outcome.
>The reality is 99.9999% of people are destined for the same thing: a normal career, with a normal salary.
Of course. My argument is not that some small number of people will miss out on being millionaires. The argument is that parents don't know what the future looks like, yet they insist on forcing their children down paths that resemble their own success stories regardless of how much society has changed in the intervening decades. It's asinine.
>Sure. For the majority of people, education leads to higher lifetime income, and it's not even close. We have the statistics on this. We don't know ahead of time which one someone will be. So, we should optimize for the best odds.
It is exactly this thinking that has so utterly distorted the education market that it's now mostly worthless as a signal. Yes, high school education correlates with some amount of success. College education correlates with a lot more success. But it's not about having the piece of paper, it's about what the piece of paper signals about the person. But degrees now have little value as such signals because we've engineered society so that far more people go to college and get a degree, or graduate high school than are suited to it. To accomplish this we've had to dumb down both college and high school. We've created an education arms race where we need increasing years of education just to signal the same quality that many fewer years signaled in the past. We've done large scale damage to students and society with the kind of thinking you're exhibiting here.
>What actually doesn't get enough mention are the people who are forced into lifetime poverty because they never graduated high school and are therefore essentially unemployable.
Are they unemployable because they didn't graduate high school, or are they unemployable because they don't have the traits of someone who graduated high school? What's stopping them from getting a GED? The high school degree has little causal relevance here.
>Do you think grokking is consistent with implicit regularization as compression
Pretty sure it's been shown that grokking requires L1 regularization which pushes model parameters towards zero. This can be viewed as compression in the sense of encoding the distribution in the fewest bits possible, which happens to correspond to better generalization.
Couldn't have said it better, although this is only for grokking with the modular addition task on networks with suitable architectures. L1 regularization is absolutely a clear form of compression. The modular addition example is one of the best cases to see the phenomenon in action.
It's interesting how much some of you expect us to ignore gut feelings and statistics to avoid the appearance of bigotry. We should at the very least be able to acknowledge statistical reality then we can debate what is an appropriate response. Hell, I don't even need to know the backgrounds of the immigrants. We know that males engage in almost all the violent/forcible sexual assaults. We know that a lack of community engagement increases the chance for anti-social behavior. We know that access is a prerequisite for interpersonal crime. That itself is enough to warrant heightened concern.
The breathless fearmongering over an age field on account set up is just completely over-the-top. This is probably the least bad out of all possible ways to implement age checking. The benefit of this is that it can short-circuit support for more onerous age verification. The writing has been on the wall for some time now: the era of completely unrestricted internet is coming to an end. The question is how awful will the new normal be? Legislation like this is a win all around, a complete nothingburger. We should be celebrating it, not fighting it tooth and nail.
The tech crowds utter derangement over this minor mandate is truly a sight to behold.
Let's try to be a little bit sensible here. Presumably the requirement to check depends on the nature of the application. A completely offline app for example has no use for an age check and thus wouldn't need to read it.
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(b) (1) A developer shall request a signal with respect to a particular user from an operating system provider or a covered application store when the application is downloaded and launched.
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That should be read as "when the application is (downloaded and launched)".
If it were meant as "when the application is downloaded and every time the application is launched" it would probably have been written as "when the application is downloaded or launched".
Also, there would be no point in mentioning downloads if that was a separate check because the app developer cannot request the signal upon download because their app is not running then.
The most reasonable conclusion is that the app must check the first time it is launched.
This needs to be simply fought because it's a measure that is supposed to fight the reluctance of the society, not actual problem. For the actual problem it's ineffective. This will be met by surprise once it's fully implemented and new, worse measures will be proposed. Hence, it needs to be cut off as early as possible to spare everyone the trouble.
This bill requires actual verification and leaves it up to the politically controlled FTC to determine how this should happen. It’s a disaster.
> The Parents Decide Act solves the self-reported-birthday problem by demanding something verifiable, which in practice means a government ID, a credit card, a biometric scan, or some combination.
> However, Gottheimer has not specified which. The bill does not either. It’s up to the FTC to decide.
The article's analysis doesn't appear to be accurate. From the bill:
(a) Requirements.—An operating system provider, with respect to any operating system of such provider, shall carry out the following:
(1) Require any user of the operating system to provide the date of birth of the user in order to—
(A) set up an account on the operating system; and
(B) use the operating system.
(2) If the relevant user of the operating system is under 18 years of age, require a parent or legal guardian of the user to verify the date of birth of the user.
(3) Develop a system to allow an app developer to access any information as is necessary, collected by the operating system to carry out this section and any regulation promulgated under this section, to verify the date of birth of a user of an app of the app developer.
The only requirement for "verification" is to enter a birthdate on account set up, and underage accounts have the parent "verify" the birthdate. There is certainly some ambiguity in the bill which is not good, but efforts should be towards resolving the ambiguity in favor of a lack of intrusiveness.
(1) IN GENERAL.—Not later than 180 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Commission shall promulgate, under section 553 of title 5, United States Code, regulations to carry out this section, including regulations relating to the following:
(A) How an operating system provider can—
(i) verify the date of birth of a parent or legal guardian described in subsection (a)(2); and
(ii) carry out the requirements described in subsection (a) with respect to an operating system of such provider that may be shared by individuals of varying ages.
(B) Data protection standards related to how an operating system provider shall ensure a date of birth collected by the operating system provider from a user, or the parent or legal guardian of the user, to carry out this section and any regulation promulgated under this section—
(i) is collected in a secure manner to maintain the privacy of the user or the parent or legal guardian of the user; and
No, derangement is declaring "The writing has been on the wall for some time now: the era of completely unrestricted internet is coming to an end." without fighting it at all and just mindlessly accepting it because you were told it was going to happen.
It should be really easy to get your bank account information then. You're just going to give it to me, right? What is this? You're fighting me tooth and nail instead of celebrating giving me your banking info?
Well, perhaps your mental model of the actual objections to it are incomplete. There are a few problems and I'm curious what you have to say about them. First, "The benefit of this is that it can short-circuit support for more onerous age verification". Do you think that it "can" or that it "will"? Big difference. It could also go the other way, right? Opening the door to a more onerous version? Why do you think that isn't worth considering? Secondly, "This is probably the least bad out of all possible ways to implement age checking". What about parental controls that exist already? Someone seriously tried to tell me last time that parental controls "suck", but that's irrelevant, they don't have to suck, and in fact anything can suck. That's just happenstance. So, assuming parental controls were correctly implemented, why do you think this is "least bad" including parental controls? Thirdly, this "age verification" doesn't actually verify anything, because underage people can just choose "adult" anyway. What do you have to say to that? In that case, parental controls actually give you more power, and make this new age check completely obsolete. Thoughts? Lastly, maybe you're not from the USA, but we have a concept of "free speech" which includes the idea that people cannot be "compelled" to certain speech. If people were required to add a "sign here to confirm you're an adult" in every romance novel, that would be fine right? It's also a nothingburger, right? But then, you've compelled people to put something in every published book. Actually, that's a bad analogy. We should say that ALL BOOKS require this signature field on the first page. After all, we don't know what kinds of expletives and horrible things people might have written in the margins of the book (assuming it's being sold second-hand). That would be okay with you, right? Nothingburger? But it compels people to write something, and that's a door most legal scholars know not to open.
> The writing has been on the wall for some time now: the era of completely unrestricted internet is coming to an end.
And books..? And the newspaper? What if a child reads about a horrible murder in the newspaper that keeps them up at night? What if the government outlaws books and newspapers because they can contain bad things? We'd better add a "adult/ not adult" checkbox to the first page to "short-circuit support for more onerous age verification".
This was a great comment, you challenged them but in a reasonable way and with really good questions
I wish public discourse were more this way - if someone is arguing in good faith, actually answering what you asked moves the conversation forward, it’s just on the person to give you a serious answer
>It could also go the other way, right? Opening the door to a more onerous version?
I don't see a plausible scenario where the implementation of this mandate makes further mandates more easy to get passed. An age field and an API to access it is as trivial as it gets. More onerous age checking is not something that is an extension to or somehow made more easy given the pre-existence of the age field. No argument against more onerous checking is undermined or rendered less severe due to an age field already existing. There is no slippery slope here.
>So, assuming parental controls were correctly implemented, why do you think this is "least bad" including parental controls?
There is already a pretty significant market for parental controls, so presumably if their quality were a limiting factor in their adoption the market would have responded already. Parents simply aren't interested enough or savvy enough to apply them. Parental controls also just intrinsically suck for a lot of reasons. They are either mostly ineffective or wildly intrusive, like giving total access to children's communications and internet activity to external companies.
>Thirdly, this "age verification" doesn't actually verify anything, because underage people can just choose "adult" anyway. What do you have to say to that?
Presumably an adult is involved in purchasing devices and setting up accounts for their young children. Putting an age of account holder field into the account set up workflow seems pretty effective. It's not 100%, but it doesn't need to be for it to be a major improvement over the status quo. The lack of verification is a feature of this mandate, not a bug.
>we have a concept of "free speech" which includes the idea that people cannot be "compelled" to certain speech. If people were required to add a "sign here to confirm you're an adult" in every romance novel, that would be fine right?
As those pushing this kind of legislation are fond of pointing out, we have age checks for buying alcohol or purchasing adult magazines in shops. Presumably these don't run afoul of the first amendment. This idea that we can't or shouldn't mandate age checking in some form to access content deemed inappropriate to children is just a losing argument. Again, the writing is on the wall here.
>No argument against more onerous checking is undermined or rendered less severe due to an age field already existing
From your point of view.
What I can tell you is that there are definitely people who will argue that this is, by the fact of being written into law, now the spirit of the law.
Then these people will argue that the spirit of the law is being broken, and the implementation needs to be better and tighter. Not that it needs to be repealed! Because clearly this is something that was wanted. And to many, many people, this will be sufficient argument not to complain about further measures.
At this point anything that makes computers less usable is a good thing, time we go back to the real world. It was extremely unpleasant while it lasted.
>We know that they do not reason because we know the algorithm behind the curtain.
In other words, we didn't put the "reasoning algorithm" in LLMs therefore they do not reason. But what is this reasoning algorithm that is a necessary condition for reasoning and how do you know LLMs parameters didn't converge on it in the process of pre-training?
Model parameters are weights, not algorithms. The LLM algorithm is (relatively) fixed: generate the next token according to the existing context, the model weights, and some randomization. That’s it. There is no more algorithm than that. The training parameters can shift the probabilities for predicting a token given the context, but there’s no more to it than that. There is no “reasoning algorithm” in the weights to converge to.
This overly reductive description of LLMs misses the forest for the trees. LLMs are circuit builders, the converged parameters pick out specific paths through the network that define programs. In other words, LLMs are differentiable computers[1]. Analogous to how a CPU is configured by the program state to execute arbitrary programs, the parameters of a converged LLM configure the high level matmul sequences towards a wide range of information dynamics.
Statistics has little relevance to LLM operation. The statistics of the training corpus imparts constraints on the converged circuit dynamics, but otherwise has no representation internally to the LLM.
I see nothing to preclude a foundation model being augmented by a smaller model that serializes particulars about an individuals cumulative interaction with the model and then streamlines it into the execution thread of the foundation model.
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