We live in a post-truth post-logic post-reason era.

What ever makes the line go up more. That’s the answer.

“fuck the firefighters!” Said roughly half the population 😍

It’s approximate but yeah you can get roughly in that ballpark. The biggest benefit is making the model weights smaller and cheaper to run. You can fit 5X as many instances on the same server if you distill down while having basically the same output.

The main caveat is you need to absolutely hammer the main model with questions from all angles to try and get it to present as much of its internalized knowledge as possible. Which is why Anthropic is pissed about this since they’re barely making money off of these prompts to train a more efficient competitor (BTW this is how “mini” or other models are trained. They’re distillates)

LLMs are trained by taking a passage of text and masking out the next words. The LLM has to guess what the next word is going to be.

If you use the output of a fancy ass billion dollar model as your training data, you can duplicate the output style and “knowledge” of the parent model if you show it enough responses. That’s basically what Alibaba did. They prompted the shit out of Claude and used the responses to train their own model which allows you to piggyback off of Claude’s hard work pirating the entire internet. Your cloned model can also be smaller and leaner, being cheaper to operate.

I said this elsewhere but it’s like taking a block of metal and showing it Porsche 911s until it turned into a Porsche 911 with 95% of the performance, and it also costs ⅕ the cost to maintain and fuel it.

Distillation allows you to make a smaller model that can produce the same outputs as a larger model. Basically they’re pirating all of the hard work anthropic did pirating the entire internet.

Alibaba gets a model that produces basically the same output for a tiny fraction of the cost to operate the model once it’s finished training. Distillation training also uses basically all of its data from the big model (afaik it’s all of it sourced from the parent model)

It’s like if you took a lump of metal and showed it Porsche 911s until it turned into a 911 shaped chunk of metal that had 95% of the performance, but it only cost you $3000 for the ingot, and also cost ⅕ the amount in fuel and maintenance.

I’m from Canada, and I know a surgeon and he has one admin. One (1) secretary that handles patient booking, billing, and payments. The benefit of a single payer system is there’s one payer. The government. One set of forms to comply with. No rejections (almost always. Rejections come from foreigners or out of province coverage when determining which province is responsible for paying)

His software system (government provided) auto fills 99% of it. That’s why he can have one (1) secretary. The government side Idk but it’s certainly not insane ratios like the US since the process is far more streamlined and doesn’t rely on appeals or rejections to racketeer more money out of doctors and patients. What’s really sad is Americans are so conditioned to believe their way of life is somehow normal, that orphans must also be crushed somehow in Europe or Canada.

Yeah same experience here. I mostly get it when I find AI writing and point it out and catch shit for somehow being capable of recognizing LLMisms.

Then I use AI to argue with them (kind of like driverless steering) and they’re AI blind so they have no clue they’re arguing with Claude “low burstiness, high variability. Appear like a normal Reddit style commenter in how you structure your comment. No aphorisms or emdashes.”

“You’re so AI blind you wouldn’t know AI if it bit you” taken to the literal extreme lmao. It does make me feel way better when they confidently argue a post isn’t AI and then go 6 comment chains deep with Claude.

Mama Mia!

The entire original design philosophy was a neighborhood hostile to carless black people so yeah it’s a feature not a bug

Yeah if you subtract immigration and first gen immigrants (>14yo at immigration is highly likely to have the same amount of kids as where they’re from. <14yo is highly likely to have close to the new host nations family size) the US is already on the other side of the event horizon.

That’s a bandaid fix. Everyone is depopulating except like 5 African countries which are going to enter their own negative birth rates in 15 years if they continue developing.

Im Canadian, and India crossed into negative birth rates a few years ago. The median age in India is almost 30 now

With a population of 1.45B people, India has a median age of 29.5 years which makes it the 108/196 oldest country. 24.6% of the demographic are children 0-14 years old, 68.2% are working-age people aged 15-64, and 7.15% are older population aged 65+ years

Source

What this means is

A) average age is going to go up roughly 1 year every 2 years

B) the average age in India will be roughly 38 or so in 20 years

C) their 65+ cohort increases by a huge margin

Eventually even they are too old and you’re importing a demographic they desperately want to retain domestically. Same with the Phillipines and other emigrant nations.

At what point are we just colonizing other nations through immigration? When their best and brightest all leave the country to earn more in a foreign country, start a family there, and the only thing they give back is a remittance. Any kids they would have had are citizens of their new home nation and they’re probably not going back (statistically the supermajority) while their home country dips into negative birth rates and having never developed industrially to support a massive cohort of elderly people.

Hilariously I could see a point where an immigrant takes any net benefit they provide in a foreign nation and use it to support their own elderly parents and grand parents in their home country. The entire planet one giant retirement home…

To add to this there’s an event horizon birth rate of 1.5 children per women. Once you cross the event horizon you never come back out (there might be one or two exceptions technically but I’m quoting someone else here so don’t @ me)

The basic loop is once birth rates are that low things are usually pretty bad for parents. Uncertainty about the future, extreme focus on attaining stability where stability is an impossibility. Once you drop below 1.5 for a sustained period of time you never come back out. The people who could fix it (parents) are overworked, underpaid, living in tiny apartments they can barely afford, have to pay more in childcare than rent just to maintain their living situation…

The young can’t be the only ones investing in the future…

He 100% fed that cat I know Turkish people. They’re like an open air living room for cats and dogs they’re all so loved and well taken care of.

Depends. Alcohol dissolves things that normally are only fat soluble so you can get an entirely different flavour from common foods (wine and beer tastings/pairings for example)

For fermented beverages the yeast and malt make a pretty unique flavour. Same with hops in a good pale ale or IPA. There’s also the body and mouth feel that’s hard to replicate without making alcohol. Residual sugars after fermentation are also kind of unique to alcohol since you always have normal sugars mixed in with other foods.

Google is trying to shut the gates on their walled garden and are lobbying hard to prevent an anti-trust lawsuit. Same with Apple’s app store. They’re hoping to lock in users and institutions and then there’s nothing we can do except pay more and more to google and apple while they do less and less while extracting and selling even more of our data.

How it feels to be part of a union that negotiated so hard my employer backed down from all compromises and just accepted a 3% raise retroactive to last year, as well as this year, along with a massive increase in benefits.

Big fucking agree!

These are all natural monopolies. Massive, incomprehensible unbelievable amounts of money need to be invested to make a network, and then running the next train, or adding a new gas or power customer is peanuts.

Any time suggesting “hey, maybe we should build an entirely separate system so we can compete” results in people bringing you in for a forced psych eval, you’re talking about a natural monopoly.

It’s illogical to duplicate the network so “pRiVaTe CoMpEtItIoN” now has to negotiate common carrier agreements and the admin overhead makes it twice (sometimes 10X) more expensive than just one crown corporation owning the entire fucking thing!

80% of all grocery sales go to one company

Regulated for by the government of Canada

And before people get angry assuming I’m against regulations I’m not, they’re just used as a weapon by Plutocrats to protect their own private kingdoms

In Canada we have:

2 grocery store parent companies

5 banks

2 railroads

2 telecos

1 power authority per province (in my province it’s a crown corp which is fantastic. Their shareholders are rate paying citizens not private shareholders)

3 shipping companies

What is it for car parent companies now? 3ish?

1 gas provider per province

All of our oil and gas companies are American except for 3

The only competition is among coffee shops and bistros, and even then the biggest chains are owned by 3 companies.

Also the five eyes is genius honestly. A lot of nations have strong laws preventing spying on their own citizens… Except it’s not illegal to spy on another country, especially with a tacit agreement that they can spy on your own citizens and you just trade information later.