the python cookbook is good. and fluent python is more from principles rather than application (obvs both python specific). I also like philosophy of software design. tiny little book that uses simple example (class that makes a text editor) to talk about complexity, not actually about making a text editor at all.
For people unfamiliar wanting an easier comparison, Evangelion is Japans star wars. It'd be like learning of tornadoes from someone with Empire insignia
Which is funny to say because Star Wars is actually the Western version of samurai movies (especially but not exclusively Akira Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress).
That's the movie that Lucas is pretty open about heavily drawing "inspiration" from (all the way down to specific characters and plot beats) but Hidden Fortress is itself part of a larger genre of similar stories.
I suppose on the surface, but also that analysis would also put akira and serial experiments lain in the same "for teenagers" category in a way that really doesn't fit any of these shows. The broader implications about the psyche is probably lost on most teenagers (I say this as someone who first watched these as teenagers, and I only picked up on some of the finer details because I knew they were there already. It's why I wanted to watch them)
wouldn't it be more accurate to say its their star trek? admittedly not a gundam fan but I don't see it talked about or merchandised nearly as often as evangelion.
Maybe not in Western countries, but Gundam is HUGE in Japan and neighboring countries like Taiwan. A big part of it is that the merchandise is heavily focused on model kits, like Warhammer on steroids.
Oh yeah, I forgot about gunpla. I think the reason I'm so unfamiliar with that side of the mecha world is that it's so fractured if that makes sense. I have friends into it that I could ask but I don't need another expensive hobby haha
Evangelion is so mega overrated of an anime im experiencing second hand embarrassment on behalf of Japan for letting its national personaification be exlempified by shinji.
Lain is 10/10. Akira/Ghost in the Shell are great too. Evangelion is a weak 7/10 in comparison to them in every aspect imaginable. I also realized that Evangelion is Japan's version of assigning weird mysticism to religions they don't understand (much how westerners depict shinto/daoism/buddhism with tons of mysticism).
Evangelion is a disgusting anime to consider part of your national personification. Drop it and pick up Ghibli films more please Japan.
Evangelion is not “Japan’s version” of anything in terms of western religions. It’s one guy who was making a TV show. It’s not Japan’s “national personification.”
If you want to go down the rabbit hole you’ll find a lot of quotes from Anno and others on it.
A lot of it boils down to “we did this because it’s cool and we have no idea what Christianity is” down to Anno going “Yeah I could do this because no one in Japan is really going to care and I don’t really care about the Western world anyway.”
It’s fine to not like it but it’s quite a step to go “this is how Japan thinks.” It’s akin to saying America is personified by the Simpsons every time they go to Japan.
It is a show about depression, which is why people love it.
The "weird mysticism" is just the reification (pun intended) of the urge to self-harm. i.e. Literally turning into a puddle of emotion, or allowing oneself to be crucified.
It's visceral in a way I've never seen before or since. Going all in on a surface-level understanding paid off in my mind.
It's an unpopular opinion for sure. Evangelion had great potential, a mysterious world, but it never reached it. I kept waiting for it to get good and then it just abruptly ended. I couldn't stand Shinji either. His situational paralysis was so frustrating. If he'd been a coward it would at least be understandable. But no, he sits there frozen half the show.
the emotions of the story are the point, not the story itself. Also, shinji is a coward. That's literally the whole point of the show, showing a cowards reaction to being forced into a situation that isn't avoidable in the most drastic way possible
Luckily, the show does a good enough job at explaining itself to those who care to learn the message. I watched it in my teens but only now in my 40s on my fourth view through does it actually finally make sense the way it should. Sometimes things take a while to click.
I feel like the easiest way to distinguish between those that get it and those that don't are asking their thoughts on the ending. If they prefer the original, they get it, and if they prefer the end of evangelion movie they don't totally get it. If they prefer the rebuild films they're in it for the yaoi and mecha which tbf I don't blame them kaworu is hot
I actually really like all of the above, is the thing; the idea that there are multiple ways the story goes broadens things. The Congratulations ending is still pretty brilliant though. You're making me want to go watch it again.
Anno Hideaki and his followers are just not capable of actually doing stories with much depth. It's all just shallow dopamine-maxxed mecha-tronic fetish paired with brutalist architecture and rushed out barely meeting deadlines. But pointing that out is like pointing out that ramen is just a single bowl meal with barely tolerable PFC balancing. Who cares. Uh half noodle garlic vegs sauce please. Yes half.
That's true, but I think the difference lies in the fact that the company using the NERV name for their product is a public disadter alert service, and doesn't seek to do or emulate anything it's named after.
That's not the same for a surveillance company or a defence contractor named after the big bad of a media franchise.
If (probably bad example) FEMA started referring to its aid workers as storm troopers I'd find it a bit unsettling (actually I kind of wish they'd do that because dad jokes are the best). Similarly, while I find the reference amusing the NERV moniker doesn't exactly inspire confidence. I suppose an important difference is that they're a mixed bag rather than a purely evil organization but still.
A private organization delivering critical infrastructure and emergency services. Just no. Not even if it has a cutesy anime external shell. It always ends up being a race to the bottom by the nature of it.
I made the same gut assumption, and it points to either poor writing, or deliberately misreading writing that they mix units like that in the same paragraph, where presumably the idea is that we get a feel for growth in both?
Its probably nitpick correct, because the 12GW is planned capacity, while the solar might be measured use? but simple assumptins or conversions, as another comment points out, get you comparable numbers. taking the title into account, the whole article is a little bit smoke and mirrors on clear communication, despite having plenty of numbers. Thats a shame because it sounds like even unvarnished its good results!
Id guess by your smile there is an element of humor in your response, so this isn't a rebuttal, but rather i identified a lot with your point, and I was thinking that this is such a human response to vulnerability.
If it was guaranteed that it will not be abused or that I would regret it, it would not _be_ vulnerable. Just like its not bravery if I am not afraid or I am assured of my safety. Such a paradox. Being vulnerable for me is acknowledging that it might have an increased probability of a more negative outcome, but still trying to be vulnerable because of the huge connection unlocks that (often) occur in my experience.
On balance intellectually i am coming to see the expected value from being vulnerable in communications is high, but my little lizard brain keeps saying to me "what if you get hurt though" and being closed off haha. its an exercise to shut it up.
I've had the privilege to have been more than half a century on this planet and my experience has not been super great regarding being vulnerable. It takes great skill to not have it mentally affect you. Even if you get ten thousand positive results, a mere two bad results will affect you even more. Nevertheless i agreee it is always better to start with empathy.
> At the Financial Times, Jill Shah and Eric Platt report:
>JPMorgan Chase ... informed private credit lenders that it had marked down the value of certain loans in their portfolios, which serve as the collateral the funds use to borrow from the bank, according to people familiar with the matter. >...
>The loans that have been devalued are to software companies, which are seen as particularly vulnerable to the onset of AI. ...
From what i can tell the problem isn't that an individual who had cash to invest in a private (tech in this case) company goes down
the problem is that a company "private credit firms run retail-focused funds (“business development companies” or BDCs)" which took out a bunch of loans to invest in private tech companies is now having the underlying assets that they got those loans against (long term investments in private tech companies) valued lower.
the link im missing is what happens when people who also invested in BDCs want their money back, where their actual money is locked up in long term investments made to private tech companies, and their ability to get loans is now valued lower. I think this is called a "run" where if someone starts pulling money out, and ultimately you cant, then its a race to get your money out before others do, which applies to both the individuals and the institutional loans.
Note: my quotes are from the bloomberg newsletter i mention, which helped me, not the OP article. And i am writing as much to clarify my own thinking as from a place of understanding. I welcome clarification.
Only to prompt thought on this exact question, im interested in answers:
I just ran a benchmark against haiku of a very simple document classification task that at the moment we farm out to haiku in parallel. very naive same prompt system via same api AWS bedrock, and can see that the a few of the 4b models are pretty good match, and could be easily run locally or just for cheap via a hosted provider. The "how much data and how much improvement" is a question i dont have a good intuition for anymore. I dont even have an order of magnitude guess on those two axis.
Heres raw numbers to spark discussion:
| Model | DocType% | Year% | Subject% | In $/MTok |
percents are doc type (categorical), year, and subject name match against haiku. just uses the first 4 pages.
in the old world where these were my own in house models, id be interested in seeing if i could uplift those nubmers with traingin, but i haven't done that with the new LLMs in a while. keen to get even a finger to the air if possible.
Can easily generate tens of thousands of examples.
You can fine tune a small LLM with a few thousand examples in just a few hours for a few dollars. It can be a bit tricky to host, but if you share a rough idea of the volume and whether this needs to be real-time or batched, I could list some of the tradeoffs you'd think about.
Source: Consulted for a few companies to help them finetune a bunch of LLMs. Typical categorical / data extraction use cases would have ~10x fewer errors at 100x lower inference cost than using the OpenAI models at the time.
ok, even that "few thousand examples" heuristic is useful. the usecase would be to run this task over id say somewhere in the order of magnitude of 100k extractions in a run, batched not real time, and we'd be interested in (and already do) reruns regularly with minor tweaks to the extracted blob (1-10 simple fields, nothing complex).
My interest in fine tuning at all is based on an adjacent interest in self hosting small models, although i tested this on aws bedrock for ease of comparison, so my hope is that given we are self hosting, then fine tuning and hosting our tuned model shouldn't be terribly difficult, at least compared to managed finetuning solutions on cloud providers which im generally wary of. Happy for those assumptions to be challenged.
Labeling or categorization tasks like this are the bread and butter of small fine tuned models. Especially if you need outputs in a specific json format or whatever.
I did an experiment where I did very simple SFT on Mistral 7b and it was extremely good at converting receipt images into structured json outputs and I only used 1,000 examples. The difficulty is trying to get a diverse enough set of examples, evaling, etc.
If you have great data with simple input output pairs, you should really give it a shot.
i think the culture war point is also super true of the game design industry, not just the consumers, where the already ultra competitive nature of the work means that the creatives and the industry as a whole have taken a veeeery strong stance against genai. Thats a reckon, and i dont know if its good or bad.
It does feel a little counter to the march of progress, but in a medium where high effort can be enjoyed by many, im personally cool with artisinal handmade games.
Rather than an affinity for artisanal stuff or there being some bias against AI itself, I think it's simply that most stuff that's going to be made with AI is going to be very derivative. Even before AI you'd read posts from people, including on here, like 'I made a highly competent knockoff of [popular indie game] but got no sales. Woe is me.' But games aren't commodities. If people like a game, that doesn't mean they want to play, let alone buy, a complete knockoff of it.
The biggest barrier to success has always been having a good idea and AI is just going to make that ever more apparent, because you'll be able to cook up knockoffs ever more rapidly.
Only because it is something i find fascinating:
> There are those Orcs in that one Lord of the Rings game who hold grudges against you.
Is referring to the nemesis system in Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War, and its an amazing set of interlocking procedural systems that do genuinely feel like its AI, but is really AI in the sense its always been used by games (the rules the games follow to govern NPCs+world) and not AI in the sense of modern LLMs or even other generative systems. This video is a great look at what it is and why its great IMO https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lm_AzK27mZY
I think a system like this could really work well with some modern LLM stuff, but it certainly feels magic without it.
The patent was filed in 2016 and granted in 2021. If the system was so useful we would’ve seen it in another game before then, or a very similar system after.
I was aware of the patent, and agree i think its overly narrow and you could get around it easily. I think the reason we haven't seen it or something like it in another game (or i haven't but someone pleeeease id love to hear systems like it), is less because its not useful, or maybe its not useful as a plug and play because the only reason it works is because of the super exhaustive care taken on tuning its parameters and giving it enough variety to make it interesting to play.
Kinda like the dialogue/story paths in something like hades, where IIRC they made a whole system to manage it, but the reality is that system only matters when the tree is suuuuuuuuper complex. or maybe it was disco elysium, or both ...
Ah. Well, maybe we could improve the patent system instead? If most property is going digital, and we agree as a society that idea generators and executors deserve compensation for their effort, I think the answer would be better more evolved compensation systems and I agree stopping patents that are clearly a troll though would be better to be fucked.
is that still true in an age where intelligence is accessible via AI models and we can all file patents? (not saying we are there today, though maybe that may be a reality in 1-2 years)
We've spent the last three years making climate finance data at a fraction of the time and cost using AI. We started pre GPT and have continued to evolve and rebuild our stack with the times. These days we are fully agentic, powered by opus/haiku using python/js as best fits the job, but we ride the wave and aren't attached to the past. We are a small, focused, in-person, and technically capable team with deep industry connections.
We are looking for an early career builder to take ownership of end to end data creation, and who can stay on their toes with rapidly changing tech stack and ways of working as the models continue to evolve.
Reach out to our CEO aleksi[at]climatealigned[dot]co to discuss, or drop me a line (founding engineer)
Check some of our past work at https://climatealigned.co or touch base with any of the team with questions on LI
This whole comment thread here is really echoing and adding to some thoughts ive had lately on the shift from considering LLMs replacing engineering to make software (much of which is about integration, longevity and customization of a general system), vs LLMs replacing buying software.
If most software is just used by me to do a specific task, then being able to make software for me to do that task will become the norm. Following that thought, we are going to see a drastic reduction in SASS solutions, as many people who were buying a flexible-toolbox for one usecase to use occasionally, just get an llm to make them the script/software to do that task as and when they need it, without any concern for things like security, longevity, ease of use by others (for better or for worse).
I guess what im circling around is that if we define engineering as building the complex tools that have to interact with many other systems, persist, be generally useful and understandable to many people, and we consider that many people actually dont need that complexity for their use of the system, the complexity arises from it needing to serve its purpose at huge scale over time. then maybe there will be less need for enginners, but perhaps first and foremost because the problems that engineering is required to solve are much less if much more focused and bespoke solutions to peoples problems are available on demand.
As an engineer i have often felt threatened by LLMs and agents of late, but i find that if i reframe it from Agents replacing me, to Agents causing the type of problems that are even valuable to solve to shift, it feels less threatening for some reason. Ill have to mull more.
Taking it further, imagine a traditional desktop OS but it generates your programs on the fly.
Google's weird AI browser project is kind of a step in this direction. Instead of starting with a list of programs and services and customizing your work to that workflow, you start with the task you need accomplished and the operating system creates an optimized UI flow specifically for that task.
but bringing it back, you 1° need to pitch this idea to investors liberate money to cover the Sahara desert with a huge server to suffice these sci-fi needs /s
It's hard to swallow. I'm a 14 YOE software engineer working in an office of about 40 people, with five on the software team. We could cut our software team to 3 people and then maybe 2 after a couple years. The rest of the office could be skimmed to maybe 5 or 10 people. The engineers would babysit the systems and the other personnel would handle the face to face. With these systems developing in the OS the last year or so, it seems as though everything can be automated... Everyone has an X on their back, not just engineers.
Luckily my org has a bit of a pushback attitude towards AI systems, but it will only be a matter of time before we have to compete and adapt. It's kind of depressing, and only the strong will survive.
reply