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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: March 19th, 2024

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  • After 2 years it’s quite clear that LLMs still don’t have any killer feature. The industry marketing was already talking about skyrocketing productivity, but in reality very few jobs have changed in any noticeable way, and LLM are mostly used for boring or bureaucratic tasks, which usually makes them even more boring or useless.

    Personally I have subscribed to kagi Ultimate which gives access to an assistant based on various LLMs, and I use it to generate snippets of code that I use for doing labs (training) - like AWS policies, or to build commands based on CLI flags, small things like that. For code it gets it wrong very quickly and anyway I find it much harder to re-read and unpack verbose code generated by others compared to simply writing my own. I don’t use it for anything that has to do communication, I find it unnecessary and disrespectful, since it’s quite clear when the output is from a LLM.

    For these reasons, I generally think it’s a potentially useful nice-to-have tool, nothing revolutionary at all. Considering the environmental harm it causes, I am really skeptical the value is worth the damage. I am categorically against those people in my company who want to introduce “AI” (currently banned) for anything other than documentation lookup and similar tasks. In particular, I really don’t understand how obtuse people can be thinking that email and presentations are good use cases for LLMs. The last thing we need is to have useless communication longer and LLMs on both sides that produce or summarize bullshit. I can totally see though that some people can more easily envision shortcutting bullshit processes via LLMs than simply changing or removing them.


  • Many encryption algorithms rely on the assumption that the factorizations of numbers in prime numbers has an exponential cost and not a polynomial cost (I.e. is a NP problem and not P, and we don’t know if P != NP although many would bet on it). Whether there are infinite prime numbers or not is really irrelevant in the context you are mentioning, because encryption relies on factorizing finite numbers of relatively fixed sizes.

    The problem is that for big numbers like n=p*q (where p and q are both prime) it’s expensive to recover p and q given n.

    Note that actually more modern ciphers don’t rely on this (like elliptic curve crypto).






  • None of those, really. Just that downplaying successful women doesn’t happen as much in sport, and when it does it’s not by stating they are men.

    If %10 of successful women have ever been downplayed because of their gender (due to unconscious biases for example) vs %1 of successful men, then this is still a handful of examples which nevertheless points to a significant bias.

    1. Ok, but where is the data?
    2. Sure, it point to the fact that women’s success are downplayed. Not that when women are successful they are called men.

  • when a man breaks a record he is a super human, when a woman breaks a record she is a man.

    How did I miss the point? To me it seems clear that what you were saying that women can’t be successful, if they are, they are considered men (because men have success).

    I am not fixating on the example, sorry, it’s the whole thesis you condensed into this sentence that I am fixated on. Women’s success can be downplayed in many ways. Either way, in sports in 2024 I don’t think this is as much of a problem as it is - say - in business. Most importantly, I think this case had not much to do with downplaying Imane’s success (the whole case started waaaay earlier she won the medal), but simply with other factors.


  • You can take any other boxer, I specifically chose black and “masculine” athletes as examples to show that even race/body type alone was not the determining factor. In these Olympic games you have just Imane’s example: how can you call this a trend or make general statements with one case (not even the Taiwanese boxer got attention)?

    What do you mean? Comparing the rate at which women are subject to such effects vs men is a worse statistic than saying “but many successful women are not subject to such effects”? If there is a systematic bias towards women’s success being downplayed, you cannot call this an isolated incident of stereotypical bias.

    Men don’t have a category to which they are wrongfully assigned when they win sports. This is also because men are the higher category in most sports (i.e., higher performers), so it is a parallel that simply doesn’t make sense. So yes. It is a worse statistics because men who are victim of gender stereotypes are generally not the ones who excel at sports (men who are called women in general break the masculine stereotype of the muscular and competitive guy - and these unsurprisingly are not characteristics common in elite athletes).

    If there is a systematic bias towards women’s success being downplayed

    But this was not your claim either. Your claim is that downplaying is done by specifically saying those women are men. The whole point here is on the cause, not the existence of the phenomenon in general.


  • To be honest I don’t consider something being Russian as automatically 100% false. This case from the IBA seems likely made up, or at least it is until they provide further proof, which they didn’t so far.

    That said, this is irrelevant in this particular conversation. Real or not, that precedent is in my opinion partly responsible for why people decided to attack this particular athletes. I agree with you on the next country also playing a role.

    Basically my whole argument is that there are multiple factors that made this a case. The fact that she “broke records” or “had success” is generally very low in the list, imho.


  • but there are other very successful women who have not been treated that way

    What I am actually saying is that the vast majority of successful women athletes didn’t suffer from this at this time at all. If this argument works only for Imane Khelif (not even the Taiwanese boxer, who has been mostly ignored), out of the hundreds of women who just won medals, maybe it is not an argument that can be generalized to “women of success”, and other causes have to be searched.

    This to me is basic common sense: if a thesis works only on a handful of examples and there are hundreds of counter examples, maybe the thesis is wrong. A tendency would require also more examples.


  • Those look nothing like “tools” to me.

    I will make it simpler: In this very thread a person talked about “high testosterone”. Why they didn’t say the same about the 99% of the women who won competitions? Probably because of a combination of factors:

    • The masculine aspect of this particular boxer, that doesn’t fit the image that many people have of women
    • The media reporting the immediately pushed to a polarization of opinions -> you had to take a side
    • The previous IBA debacle that planted the seed of the doubt

    To me the combination of the above is a much better explanation of the causes for which people attacked this particular boxer, and not the many other women of success, including black and including masculine (e.g., Simone Biles, or Grace Bullen).

    historically of women whose success has been deliberately downplayed because she does not fit the stereotypical women in their head vs men who suffered from the same

    I really don’t see how this measurement can lead to any conclusion. How can you not measure the amount of women who don’t fit the stereotypical woman aspect and yet whose success has not been downplayed due to their aspect (i.e., people called them men)?