You say "...because you actually need massive amounts of data to capture the nuance that language requires..." but humans don't require that! So why do LLMs?
How many books did you read in your education? Far fewer that what LLMs read, no doubt. Of course we "have a life" and so we interact with hundreds of people, which is also a form of learning.
But in any case there's are fundamental differences here between these two systems (LLMs and humans) that we have not yet discerned clearly.
Far fewer than an LLM but then I “know” far less than an LLM. Sam Altman talked about a PhD level expert on any topic; if we expect a SOTA model to answer any question on any topic in a library, presumably that requires a library worth of books go into it?
Say I ask it who are the most beloved Indian cricketers and why, it might not be correct but it will have the right vocabulary - cricket terms and gameplay I’ve not heard of, player names and styles I don’t recognise, things critics and commentators like and dislike about game strategies. And it is like that for almost any topic.
If they hallucinate a Python function, it will look like a plausible function e.g. “hn.create_user_account()”. They don’t hallucinate like
# create HN user account
# requires eye of newt and frog leg
“Oh great spirit of the internet I request and command you make a new account…”
It’s a terrific amount of facts to be able to write even plausibly about tons of topics.
We don't need LLMs that can "answer any question on any topic in a library"!
We don't even need machines that can answer any question in a specific topic area. But we could use machines that can answer "I don't know." when they cannot compute the answer.
Consider the possibility of much-smaller LLMs that answer questions only in limited domains (physics, chemistry, math, medicine, etc.)?
Could not such LLMs exist? If not, why not? Would they not likely be more useful and far, far easier and cheaper to create and run (possibly even with far less hardware) than the current "know-all" LLMs? Also might they possibly avoid certain problems ( e.g., hallucinations, deceit, apparently undesirable behavior, etc.) associated with the "know-all" LLMs we now have?
I do wonder if a medical LLM needs to know anything about popstars or films or classic literature. But your particular examples make me wonder how you could train an LLM to talk medically about "blood pressure" without knowing any physics about what pressure is, or any of the other ways the STEM subjects overlap and blend into each other without clear boundaries - chemistry of drugs, math of dose calculations, language of drug and disease naming etymology, etc.
If a patient with high blood pressure asks "will my face look like Dizzy Gillespie?" isn't it better to answer "No, that was air pressure and cheek damage" than to answer "I don't know who that is, call your doctor"?
I feel the intuition leads us astray here because the combined text of every science book ever written is much less than the size of a complete description of the human brain. To the hamburger of reason the library is a sesame seed.
We need to up the ante, we all know it's the Mumbai Indians. ;)
One can train a decent model at home, for a specific task but you are absolutely correct that in order to have a model that's an expert in any topic it requires training and data on all topics.
I nearly spit out coffee reading this. Amazing use of vocabulary; especially "... oh great spirit of the internet".
I sometimes jokingly explain to certain people not immersed in tech that sometimes saying the "magic words" (commands) from the "codex" (script) in the right sequence with a lot of hand waving allow "magic" (applications/web apps/etc.) to happen.
It generally brightens a patients day and makes things relatable to those non-technical, children, the elderly, or the like.
Humans don’t need that? How many words have you taken in from all possible sources by the time you’re 18? And many of those words came with additional data due to tone of voice, inflection and context. And then some of those (in-person, filmed art) came with incredibly subtle data from body language and facial expressions. I think we take in a massive corpus of data every year. Think just of any book you re-read: why did you do it? Did you glean additional insight?
We experience tons of data, but it's still much less than the pretraining step of LLMs
I think it's clear that LLMs are massively less intelligent than they could be, based on the amount of training data and compute they consume. Or rather, humans are orders of magnitude more efficient on training, and we don't know why
The answer is probably in the DNA. We are born highly intelligent and our brain is still growing. The DNA itself was optimized for billions of years
I think it's more accurate to say that the fundamental differences (between LLM's and humans) are abundantly clear and what we haven't really got a handle on are the similarities. Why is it that an LLM's can so convincingly mimic some things that humans do? Of course the fact that we don't really understand how humans do it in the first place is a real barrier. Perhaps looking at the intersection will shed some light on how humans work.
We have DNA though. It was subject to "pretraining" for billions of years. Alongside some epigenetic stuff
Maybe in the future we will have fewer robots interacting in the environment with continuous learning, to mimic the human experience, rather than a massive fleet of stateless, inference-only models
I question the "like learning a purely functional style programming language" part of this but Latin did have its advantages. Many English words are derived from Latin roots (but I didn't study Greek and that is the second great source!8-(()
I likely would have been better off taking Spanish but I avoided that b/c half my class were fluent in Spanish already and I had to maintain a decent grade.
- how to cook breakfast: boil oatmeal, fry and poach eggs, make toast w/butter,
- how to wash dishes w/o a dishwasher (the value of soaking dirty dishes),
- how to sweep an inside floor, how to sweep large outside areas (e.g.,driveway),
- how to mop a floor and with what (e.g., don't mix stuff!),
- how to change/patch a tire on a bicycle, car, scooter, et al,
- how to use a fire extinguisher,
- when he gets older: how to mow and garden a lawn safely (safety glasses, heavy shoes, keep hands away, proper tool for the job, etc.) and
- the weak points of the body (with an intention of self-defense),
- How to sand and paint,
- the perils of household fluids, e.g., chlorine bleach, alcohol, gasoline, powdered cleaners, etc. and their mixing,
- My least favorite: how to dig and fashion soil with spade, shovel, hoe and rake.
- How to throw balls, rocks, a handful of dirt, etc. Spear/bow/arrow is fantastic but probably best left to organized instruction. Emphasize safety (for the balls and rocks too!8-))
By then he should be old enough to set his own path.
It is GOOD that HOAs can bring foreclosure suits. Suits are the only way to get maintenance fees from some owners. Without maintenance fees HOAs decline and their owners' values decrease. Foreclosure also has the side-effect of removing a badly-acting owner from the association and replacing them with one who WILL pay their bills promptly.
I think that property taxes and similars (e.g. HOA dues) should accrue as a lien against a property but not be foreclosable during the original owner's life. Then you create a state-backed entity that provides guarantees on loans against those liens for the municipalities and HOA subject to certain rules. (They could still factor those liens privately sans limitation.)
Really? In fifty years of home owning, not once with the "benefit" of a HOA, I've yet to see an owned house value decline.
Some countries just bypassed this entire US obsession with redlining and keeping the others out. Maybe try working more on community and less on uniformity.
HoA is not meant for access to a park. HoA is supposed to be for maintaining public spaces inside a community - a pool, community center, landscaping around common areas, enforce basic rules so people can coexist in tight spaces.
HoA might be pointless if everyone lives on 5 acre lots where the stuff your neighbor does won’t really affect you but if you have homes squeezed into tiny 8k sq ft lots, we absolutely need some basic rules to live together in such close proximity. The rules can just be common sense rules that everyone can agree on but something needs to exist so one person can’t ruin it for everyone else. In a condo, you can’t just blast music during the quiet hours so others can sleep and go to work. In a neighborhood street, you don’t get to permanently park your giant RV and a boat and inconvenience others because you bought too large of an RV to fit in your own lot or are too cheap to pay for storage somewhere else and so now you have decided it to make it be everyone’s problem. This is just common sense which a typical considerate person would follow even without rules on the books but there are always a few that think they can just do whatever they want.
That's what national laws and the city government do in Germany, and I presume a lot of the rest of the world. I live in a neighborhood where the average lot size is something around 250 square meters (2800 sq ft) for the single-family houses, and we're fine.
Someone is making racket after 10pm or before 7am, or at all on Sunday? If they won't quiet down after being asked nicely, or you can't reach them, call the city - that's against national law. Someone decides to park something too wide for the street or over a certain size and weight? Call the non-emergency number, and a very eager tow-truck driver will show up with a quickness you wish ADAC (German AAA) would. Something has been parked on the street and not moved within a certain period (that I don't know off the top of my head) - tell the city that there's an abandoned vehicle and they'll put a sticker on it alerting the owner that they have 48 hours to move it. If parking is really tight in a neighborhood, the city will create a parking permit zone if you and your neighbors campaign for it. Someone doesn't mow their yard by July (before that, it's for the sake of wildlife) or won't get their tree that is growing over your fence trimmed? The city will make them if social pressure doesn't do it first.
Don’t confuse yourself. HOAs are in addition to state/county/city regulations. A lot of local governments allow HOAs to enforce additional quiet hours or other things.
I’ve never lived in a HOA that had to maintain roads, sewers, or street lights. All the infrastructure is covered by the county or city. Neighborhood pools, playgrounds, and common areas are HOA. That’s in addition to local parks, aquatic centers, and all the other local public service stuff the county and cities provide.
I am president of our HOA board here in so cal and our biggest line item to maintain is our asphalt roads. They are technically private streets so we can set whatever rules we want (within the bounds of the law and needing a board approval) but we are definitely owners of the streets and have to pay to maintain them (which is absurdly expensive if you weren't aware how much asphalt work costs).
If HOAs stopped there, these points could be reasonably argued. But those I’ve worked with are as much, or more preoccupied with enforcing petty aesthetic consistency standards and pursuing perceived deviations with a zeal that would make one believe that the issues actually mattered.
I am conflating HOA with condo maintenance, but to add an anecdote re: Florida - my dad's condo was reassessed twice over the last 3 years. The first time, the balcony was cordoned off for about 5 months. This time, his balcony has been inaccessible for 4 months and ongoing. His maintenance fees jumped 80% to almost $2K for over this period. This is on top of mortgage. He paid for the view which he gets no access to. Somebody on that management board is laughing hard on their way to the bank.
Beware anybody who claims property-law is naturally simple. Triply-so so if they believe other laws should be "simplified" so that every problem is though the lens of ownership rights.
That's how you get Mr. Burns blocking out Springfield's sun.
City services are not as good as the private services I pay for though. The area behind my gate is a lush oasis; the surrounding area is bare minimum. My parks are pristine and have no dog poop. The public parks are not that. My life will not be subject to a large number of neighbor inconveniences; police would not do something about a dog waking me at nights or littering or speeding past my road where my kids play at 50mph. I get no solicitors ever because of the gate. The guards at the gate require salaries that someone has to pay for.
I did state as a fact that they are not required for park management. They're also less common than in the US and, so far at least, far less draconian (seemingly) in comparison to nightmare USofA HOA stories.
HOAs shouldn’t exist. They have no justification for authority. The legal frameworks allowing their existence should be dismantled with extreme prejudice and at the expense of those who benefit from the current system.
> HOAs shouldn’t exist. They have no justification for authority
Freedom of assembly. If my neighbors and I buy stuff, put it in a box and then buy and create rules around how its benefits and costs are divided, and I sell my share in the box, that should be fine.
Yeah but if you sell that box/stuff to another person, they own it now and shouldn't be bound by your rules. If that's not true, I didn't actually buy anything. I just paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to have my name put on someone else's contract without being able to negotiate any terms.
It's like "buying" digital movies. The button says Purchase but you/Amazon still get to dictate terms long after the sale.
> guns and cars kill a lot of americans. we've equipped so many americans with so many guns, they are doing a great job at killing each other in peacetime, it will be a slaughterhouse at wartime.
From 2005 to 2025, 730,000-760,000 Americans died from firearms related injuries, including police shootings, gang violence, and accidents, however suicide alone is between 55-60% of those total deaths.
From 2005 to 2025, in Europe, around 1,400,000 Europeans died from heat related deaths. Between 70-80% of that number could have been prevent by having air condition based on data from the National Bureau of Economic Research.
i don't really know where this air conditioning meme comes from, but if your point is that man made global warming is a greater adversary than any foreign government, and completely impervious to the size of your munitions arsenal, i agree!
Idk why this is relevant, is the air condition going to kill people in a civil war?
But I still get baited into a conversation! Note that if you instead of nr of deaths measured 'nr of life-years lost'(relative to average age of death) the magnitude would be flipped, as most of the heath-deaths were old people who died earlier than expected because of heath. These are still preventable deaths, and should not have their importance scoffed at. But at the same time, these stats does get a bit complicated at end-of-life. Its clear (to me at least) that if e.g. (philosophical thought-experiment incoming!) a single doctor is on duty, and has to choose between saving the life of an infant or prolonging the life of someone on palliative care with a day, the choice is clear. And if the doctor did the obvious choice, did she kill the old person? Should this death today be counted as a 'preventable death' which could be prevented if we just had more doctors?
There are many activities we as a society can do to lengthen life expectancy of old people, like creating social gathering spots, exercise groups, or installing more AC in their homes. In most cases you can't attribute any single death or extra day-of-life to any single cause, but you can see statistical differences in death-rate and attribute causes on a population level.
I have noticed that ACs has become part of some culturewar thingy. In reality it is one of many factors influencing life-expectancy, and in some cases it's the most effective solution to increase life-expectancy, but in many cases other things are far more efficient.
I still don't understand why you compare guns with air conditioning, but this might be a relevant point, depending on where you were going with it :P
Air Condiitioning seems to have come into the picture because Floridians can't imagine why people who live in say Northern France don't have Air conditioning when it was (for a time) very hot in Europe. Unsurprising yes quite a few people who live in stereotypically hot Southern Europe do have Air conditioning.
Which is in the same ballpark as Minnesotans wondering why Cairo doesn't have snowplows. Yes it can snow in Egypt. No it doesn't do so often enough for them have bought fucking snowplows and if as a result of changing climate they do need to buy snowplows that would not be because they're backwards morons who didn't know about this idea until the Americans taught them.
One of the world's most 1EET H4X0R5, who hasn't left his parents' basement in 10 years and is rumored to be the operator of 5chan, told me that you can use archive.is to circumvent most paywalls, including that of The Atlantic.
I see what I did there. I mistook the absence of the CSS grey bar, for the complete text of the article. That's on me. You are right, this does not render the entire content visible to me. Were I an AI I'd say something like "you're absolutely right" but I'm not, so I'm going to add a specious double dash -- and slink away.
(sorry. I really did think I was reading the entire piece. It looks like what I see is their occasional seeding of freemium content which is long form and from their back numbers)
Thank you for figuring it out. It is just one more probably necessary step along the long journey to me finally getting an Atlantic subscription. But like every journey, it is not about the destination but the friends we made along the way, as our mutual acquaintance Abraham Lincoln once famously said.
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