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Alan Tan Profile
Alan Tan

@alanytan

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AI philosophy. don’t fear AI as in Artificial Intelligence, be afraid of AI in Absence of Intelligence

Toronto, Canada
Joined April 2009
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
4 months
@ShitpostRock You see my car? I spent less on it than you spend on your watch.
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
25 days
@ylecun @elonmusk Good analogy, both ABC and Yann can only fact check one way - “for my opponent, if evidence is not 100%, they are lying; for me if the evidence against me is not 100% I’m the truth.” Sometimes it amazes me how an intelligent person like Yann can be blinded by his own political
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
3 months
@iliekcomputers While I agree with what Stallman said, this incident of Crowdstrike is not really because of Cloud. Cloud could be useful if it's used as a secondary supplement to IT infra, unfortunately, most CIOs were forced to shift to Cloud as primary, which is another ticking bomb.
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
7 months
@ShitpostGate This is a sign from a Canadian airport. It is literally TRUE that Americans are the only one who needs to know their passport is not considered local here. Even today, Americans can still drive over the boarder to Canada without a passport (an enhanced DL is usually sufficient)
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
4 months
@TheAntifaTurtle Considering judges are appointed by politicians not by any kind of superpower, or standard tests, I kinda get what the OP is so offended by.
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
6 months
@wirmgurl Agreed. But further more, I think kids these days are just scared of anything that needs serious focus - I keep telling my daughter, math IS difficult, it requires you to focus and concentrate, you may spend hours before you get the final outcome you were looking for, but it is
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
3 months
@DanRShafer I’m all for high speed trains. But anyone with some basic economic training will know it is impossible to turn a railway project making by money in 11 days. The most common gimmicks used in such title is they hide the cost of building the rail and only show you ticket sales -
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
3 months
@eyeslasho It's the school! I was helping my Gr111 daughter with her ACT, she literally told me "I learned more in two weeks from you than 11 years in school... most stuff school taught us, we could figure out ourselves". I know 99% of her schoolmates won't have parents who can teach them.
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
1 year
@creon @TRHLofficial This is a question long been answered, it has nothing to do with the mirror but your perception. YOU think it is normal to “turn around left-right” wise, so when you think your reflection as “someone in the mirror” YOU attributed “they” should have turned around left-right wise
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
6 months
@lauriewired "Reserve Not Met"...
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
7 months
@IlyaAbyzov @metopsychosis @andrewchen I found it sometimes difficult to have a civil discourse with people who never lived in a former socialist society. They seem to know more about socialism than we who lived there do, and somehow for them, it is completely coherent to say "some earn $1, some earn $1000, that's
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
3 months
@alanytan
Alan Tan
3 months
We as human are more biased against AI than AI is biased against us: LLMs are trained using language corpus, we assign different meanings using same symbols and a decimal can be used in software versioning or a date. Specifically when it comes to 9.11, it is used in way more
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
4 months
@TheEthanDing Well, he is just stating a fact, like an Asian parent - no sugarcoating for the delicate snowflake souls. 😜 I know nyc is traumatized, you can comfort her later.
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
2 months
@ylecun @elonmusk free speech means if someone has the freedom to say things the gov deems NOT OK. if you have all the "freedom" to say things that I consider OK, you don't really have freedom, I do.
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
1 year
@ShitpostGate This is a Canadian airport. In Canadian border control, the US is considered “trans boarder” meaning you cross one boarder you would be in the other country, unlike normal air travel where you leave one country and won’t be entering another country after you land. Americans are
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
3 months
We as human are more biased against AI than AI is biased against us: LLMs are trained using language corpus, we assign different meanings using same symbols and a decimal can be used in software versioning or a date. Specifically when it comes to 9.11, it is used in way more
Tweet media one
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
2 months
@VictorTaelin This is cute! it actually shows an "attitude" towards arbitrarily made-up theorems. Likely this kind of theorem is not common, and it reached a relatively low score of confidence when first trying to guess the result, then after sorting things out, it actually complained about
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
4 months
@deonandan I’m a Canadian who still live in Canada the economic environment has never been this bad in 25 years. And yes I trust my lying eyes more than professional Bloomberg Spiel (BS pun intended)
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
8 months
@tunguz 🤣especially testing with intentionally inserted bugs...
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
7 months
@CaliforniaFrizz just a reminder, that was not a prediction, it was merely a description of what had happened in Russia in the early 20th century. so, it's not like she saw something no one else saw, it's just she refused to stay quiet about it.
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
5 months
@ylecun @JonHaidt Correlation does not mean causation. Increase in graduates does not mean ppl are better at these fields - lowering standards can explain exactly the same correlation.
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
3 months
@alifarhat79 with everything improving, inflation slowing, you should be able to live 12 minutes by November,
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
6 years
@daumkeziah Chinese culture is not "his". Jeremy Lam does not own Chinese culture which is shared by a billion+ people. like you said, someone somewhere will always find things to be offended, Be yourself, and let them feel offended. There are more Chinese people support you than not.
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
7 months
@daboigbae if you learn C++ first and Pascal second, LISP third you will be able to conquer any programming languages in no time.
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
6 months
@colin_fraser ASI as in Artificial Stupid Imitator?
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
3 months
@growing_daniel Yeah, tech can reach a plateau, then a new generation of "contributors" who came in, did not earn their credit by building, are not able to make things better, yet need to justify their existence. Many abused their unearned position of power for their own interest.
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
3 months
@Andrew_Akbashev today’s academic institutions are large bureaucratic organizations that focus on predicable funding applications - where fundings are approved by non-scientific minded administration using “some kind of formula to predict likelihood of paper worthy” you can’t get breakthrough
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
3 months
@tobias_rees @elonmusk @BillAckman What if, it’s you who got half of the history wrong, esp if you were educated in the West in public schools. Yes it is very similar to Germany in the 1930s but you got who is in power part wrong.
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
1 year
@RichardHanania As an immigrant, I did find it is intriguing that in the west intelligence is a taboo. In most other culture. “He is smarter than me” is as simple as “she is taller than me”, it’s not comfortable to say but seems completely noble to acknowledge. Only in the west this is
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
3 months
@csordoni imagine Hitler asking "should Churchill resign bring back the good old Chamberlain".... because Chamberlain pandered to the Nazis. very reasonable wish if you look at it objectively.
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
4 months
@redsnoopy69 It’s called collusion. Not that it is forbidden, but cooperate to reduce choices so ppl make the right choice so I can be in power seems not as decent as holy democracy as one claim, but of course it is allowed.
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
1 month
@LPNational Indeed. “America is so divided” is because the gov is too big, too powerful, no matter which side wins, half of the country will feel the crushing force of the gov — the only way to unite a diverse population is actually a small gov that can’t crush any side of the civilization
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
1 year
@alanytan
Alan Tan
1 year
Reminds me about an old joke: a shepherd was tending his sheep, and a Range-rover drove right towards them.. down jump a well suited young gentleman, before the shepherd spit out the first word, the nice suite opened his notebook computer and connected to his satellite network
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
2 months
@elonmusk Yeah, but Correlation does not mean causation. It is completely possible that the belief in MSM is causing party affiliation. Lack of ability to question authority is the death to democracy, but "let's call questioning authority threat to democracy to confuse them!" and it works
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
1 year
Reminds me about an old joke: a shepherd was tending his sheep, and a Range-rover drove right towards them.. down jump a well suited young gentleman, before the shepherd spit out the first word, the nice suite opened his notebook computer and connected to his satellite network
@Grady_Booch
Grady Booch
1 year
Ah. This from McKinsey. It’s rubbish.
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
4 months
@RodKahx Because ppl don’t learn in school that Nazi stands for National Socialism anymore. It’s in their name, they named it themselves. Hitler was trying to merge with the socialists party, not the far-right nationalist party. After the merger fell apart due to power struggle, Hitler
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
4 months
@roadguy0513 I think you should leave. does that count?
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
3 months
@Rainmaker1973 Mine is a complete house pet, but she is as smart and as cute as any BC, she herds other dogs in the dog park, and when my dog owner friends call their dogs without a response, my BC will rush to retrieve that dog for them... The Loveliest!
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
25 days
@VictorTaelin It might not need that much human - just go through high starred open source github repos… select high rank accepted stackoverflow answers…
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
1 year
@Jay_revs55 @creon @TRHLofficial They do. The image in the mirror is “mirror” all the way. If you point your finger towards the mirror’s surface, the reflection will point the finger towards the mirror surface; which to some, if “flipping” the inside out. But if you think about the mirror surface as the “center”
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
6 months
@cremieuxrecueil This is like if an alien analyze American made machines vs European made ones and found Americans seem to favour English measurements while Europeans favour metric systems. So we can conclude English measurements is positively correlated to economic advancements. You can always
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
1 month
@fightwithmemes I think the problem is not ppl unable to understand that, the real problem is most ppl are ok, or even happy if the organized crime is benefiting them, even if it’s short term.
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
1 year
@superinducting You work for Mechanical Turk?
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
4 months
@mcsquared34 Unfortunately for you, he likely voted politicians who sold the story that they are the only one who can make your live better, true economists would say gov can’t do much good but can sure do lots of harm - like “borrow” $ from future generations who had yet to be born so they
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
8 months
@Dev_AbdulHaseeb Good dev use Windows Better dev use Mac Best dev use Linux
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
2 months
@anpaure 30min then look at answers? that's not how you approach leetcode. it can easily take you a full day for a difficult leetcode challenge. if you expect you should know how to solve one of those in 30 min, most likely your expectations are incorrect for working in tech
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
1 year
@yacineMTB Sorry.. but we had this technology a long time ago and we decided it is not ethical to sell it for this purpose, because the skewed “insights”, being at desk is far from doing work and the privacy concerns are insurmountable. Don’t do evil.
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
28 days
@0ddette this is actually very true. it was commonly known 20% ppl produce 80% of the work and the other 80% of the ppl produce 20% of the work. the sad truth is the 20% of those who produiced valuable work is more likely become more productive working from home due to lack of
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
1 year
@jamesmh_dev micro services is not for all software, so is monolith. Experienced architects and developers chose the appropriate tools for the software they are designing. If one chooses architecture before looking at the nature of the software they are developing, at best, it’s a 50:50
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
8 months
@IsomorphicPhi since you arbitrarily excluded 0 and 1, I'll just arbitrarily though in another one (10+0)^2=100
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
3 months
@kittypurrzog uh... I don't think ppl should be fired from their jobs for making job-irrelevant comments in their personal capacity no matter how distasteful to other ppl's standard, but if you consider "I'll take what I can get (referring to someone died" and "like him even more(referring to
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
1 year
@maximilianhils Wow… it’s seems that the concept of open source still not clear to many people. It’s about intellectual humility, not don’t-need-to-pay software with support. The source is open, so one can fix it themselves if it’s urgent… we do that often, and you can also contribute your fix
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
3 months
@David_Moscrop Jasper is a National Park. fire prevention is managed by Park Canada. a federal agency. find some other more propable excuses to spread your hatrade towards Smith would serve you better.
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
8 months
@hannahsox12 great question. Actually, in the 80s some Chinese researchers tried to create a programming language in Chinese. The rationale was it might make it easier for the Chinese students to learn a "native" programming language. It turned out a bit flop. The researchers found the
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
8 years
#MLBumpireFailures Umpire eager to show power, but failed to control game - Inability ruins #MLB #BlueJays via @mlb
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
2 months
@lemechantneolib Libertarianism is simple: I don’t claim I know everything, and I’m ready to face the consequences of my own stupidity. Those who attack libertarianism are like “ I’m always right and you need to listen to me! If I’m wrong, you will bare the consequences”. Other than self
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
6 months
@wirmgurl It’s not like we have Shakespeare(s) walking on campus all the time. Math clearly built on to of previous works and has relatively objective measurements of correctness, literature is easier to manipulate to lower standards to claim “ok you are good at English” while English
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
4 months
@ProfBrianCox I was raised in China where evolution was taught as THE doctrine which can explain this perfectly - once human ability increased to the point the exceeds basic survival necessity- evolution’s selection mechanism no longer apply to human, and you would expect the traits that used
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
4 months
@Rothmus @sfliberty But there is no one complaining about communism, millions or billions complain about capitalism. Why?
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
1 month
@tsoding actually most programmers don't say that, lots of ppl saying that are PMs
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
6 months
@CFDevelop When financial engineering takes over from software engineering… you will see share surge.. then it will be Boeing 2.0
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
8 months
@p1xelHer0 It's a question about scale-up .vs. scale-out, the sad truth is you only have 24 hours, there is a cap to how much you can scale up the hours available for you to code. Once a project exceeds that "smartest person 24h/day" in size, the only option available to an organization is
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
2 months
@maxfawcett Holy cow... this is the quality of Canadian "journalism": I mean at least the American ones know to hide the original quotes of the people they try to lie about, not so smart for the Canadian ones. try reading PP's words in quotation marks in the attached screenshot, try to find
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
2 months
@RebeccaYChan Just to clarify, 1) in China "conservative" means pro-communist, 2) the communist party wants people to marry early and have more kids now; 3) yes, the brightest Chinese kids actually go to Tsinghua, PKU, etc. second tier will consider the ivy leagues...
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
1 year
@rowancheung Well, I said it before… we had this technology 5 years ago and it was good enough for this use case (90%+ confidence). We shelved it because ethical and privacy concerns… let’s not do it, not because we can’t but because we dont.
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
8 months
@ChShersh Unix time. seconds from EPOCH. not only integer sort, but also equal distance between two time, given 3 dates can easily tell which 2 are closer, date diff is a single deduction, days between 2 days is just (B-A)/86400
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
5 months
@GergelyOrosz My wild “conspiracy theory” about the GPT-4o announcement today - it was not developed as a consumer product, it was OpenAI’s effort in securing the Apple deal - they announced it to force Apple’s hand and to make sure anything Apple releases would underwhelm if it does not sign
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
2 months
@Sargon_of_Akkad It does take some reasoning to understand in a single payer system, the gov decides who gets treatment, it also means the gov decides who is NOT getting treatment. Let that sink in…
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
3 months
@ztisdale that's only based on absolute standards. if you compare to India and China look at their city's progress during this period, the relative regression of Canada is astonishing. most large Canadian cities can rank at best second tier cities in India and China.
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
7 months
@tsarnick this is actually true. but lawyers have much bigger influence to laws than engineers. there is a saying by Confucius "those who worry about law rules others, those who labouring to create things are ruled". so it's just the same old same old.
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
6 months
@d_feldman It only catches kids paste into ChatGPT without looking. Tech savvy kids would have noticed the selection for copy is too long 🤣
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
5 months
@bindureddy Agreed about plateau… I believe LLM needs an “Aristotle moment” - an innovation at the scale of embedding and/or attention. The common sense reasoning is as good as it gets now - to go beyond this, AI needs an other layer of abstraction of logical axioms which is above the level
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
7 months
@francoisfleuret Yes counter intuitive. But reasonable for Python. Lots of ppl asked me “how object reference assignment is different?” Well, here it is
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
21 days
@ronawang Asian privilege. I was asked to show id to by liquor in my 40s 😂😂😂
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
8 months
@eyeslasho I see this as a significant risk to the future of the society. there aren't many people who are really interested in computers, and the trend seems indicating a significant devaluing of CS degree. considering the progress of AI, the demand for CS talent is unlikely to have a
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
1 month
@JaneotN Canadian here we don't have 2A. we have tyrannical government ignore bill of Rights by declaring "emergency" as they will and people's bank account were frozen for no due process. people loss their jobs be sue they donated $5 to a dissenting political organization. no Canada is
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
2 years
@HamedMamdoohii @AstraKernel Agreed. We use Python, ts-node, and Rust. At least for B2B SaaS like ours, different in throughput between Python and ts-node is very obvious, but the performance advantage of Rust over ts-node wasn’t really meaningful to our case (~1000x req per hour, most heavy ML calc). TS
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
4 months
@ylecun It’s because the Chinese data is not included. If including China, the differences between the U.S. and EU are just rounding errors.
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
3 months
@Python_Dv c), you can't have a space between + and = of the increment operator
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
3 months
@kikiishizawa @eyeslasho Yeah, in Asia, it's not politically incorrect to say "Society advancement relies more on the top performers, maximizing their potential is good for society", in the West, it's now forbidden to admit that.
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
2 months
@EricLevitz When a BIPOC person (me) talks, you sit and listen and learn: you, a white male bullying a woman who questioned the normalcy of another white male is the biggest misogyny elephant in the room. Maybe look for a white male's post to criticize.
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
1 month
@ylecun @Rwill235 You completely misinterpreted Popper’s point. He meant you can’t pursue absolute tolerance — using “you are not tolerant enough” to attack others is incoherent. He did not meant to write a piece so you can justify your intolerance of others by just labeling them as intolerance.
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
5 months
@LukeMiani I think you are the one who missed the point - Apple used to stand for elegance, unique beauty, different but better. This ad at most is just different. Losing the "but better" part is all what triggered backlash, "still different" has been insufficient for Apple.
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
1 year
@ylecun This actually feels intuitive for me. Because the label <=> image relationship will be much more consistent and the difference among human labellers would have already been processed by stable diffusion… and no human errors in labelling
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
6 months
@RichardDawkins @jordanbpeterson Don’t give up rationalist. Our only path to co-exist with other forms of intelligence (wether AI or ET) is through rationalism, it’s the part of intelligence that can be performed by different individuals yet reach the same result, it’s the least self-righteous believe system
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
2 months
@ricwe123 On the same line of thought, governments should be banned because some politicians are corrupt.
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
8 months
@soumithchintala This is such a wrong way of summarizing the AI history and broader concept info intelligence. Early A.I. did not focus on chess or integral because those were old male’s interests. Chess or integral are perfect target for early AI because they were easy for computers!!! Most
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
4 months
@BisnapsDragon @Rothmus @sfliberty Exactly. That’s why political systems will inevitably regress to communism because it’s more efficient in its own self sustaining. There only needs to be one generation of population lower their guard and a system will regress to communism, we see that happening in most countries
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
25 days
@VictorTaelin It may not determine good code quality, but, it usually has working code, and usually have sufficient information of feature description text compare to less used, verified code base. The thing is it does not need 100% perfect code, it just need sufficient good enough code
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
4 months
@e_opore Correct answer was not listed 🤣
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
4 months
@Dudgee76 On one hand I agree. Election is first and foremost holding the in-power accountable. 2 more things are at play: 1) the Liberal was not held accountable for too long and that trauma was still putting ppl off to come out vote again; 2) Liberal and NDP and Green are still stuck
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
4 months
@carmguti Good insight. It’s already a field of hallucination to begin with, so no one would complain LLM hallucinated. 🤣👍
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
1 year
@cremieuxrecueil Good post. IQ is more likely an indicator that is correlated to general intelligence rather than a direct measurement of intelligence. But social interaction is not a good yardstick for human-unique intelligence either. Pet owners all know both the owner and the pet will adopt
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
27 days
@RichardHanania One of the biggest tenants of environmental disaster hypothesis is that past a certain point, the warming will exacerbate itself to the point of a chain-reaction - hence no return. This chart seems to indicate previous experiences of warming did not trigger such runaway heating.
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
8 months
@maybe_riya Try some volunteering work teach kids coding, once you get used to “I’m the most senior person looking at this screen” your main concern of typing goes back to coding instead of being judged by more senior dev, that unlocks coding while being watched mode
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
8 months
@TheJackForge I think the majority of ppl in tech is like “I’m introvert and I don’t give it a damn to pretend that I even like extroverts let alone pretending to be one…”
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
2 years
@jeremyphoward @SebastienBubeck Good topic. Although I would argue there is no single analogy of existing intelligence can be directly applied to AI especially LLM. Language, not the computer might be an underestimated and understudied topic in AI
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@alanytan
Alan Tan
8 months
@tunguz 👍I always remind people Turing test is not testing AI, it is testing our understanding of consciousness, if we can’t tell the difference from observing their interactions with us, what evidence do I have to reject them as not conscious.
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