topherhunt

• topherhuntOct 2, 2024, 8:06 AM

  3 points

  0

  on: The Great Data In­te­gra­tion Schlep

  it takes me longer to ask the LLM repeatedly to edit my file to the appropriate format than to just use regular expressions or other scripting methods myself

  Not surprised. I would expect GPT to be better at helping me identify data cleaning issues, and helping me plan out how to safely fix each, and less good at actually producing cleaned data (which I wouldn’t trust to be hallucination-free anyway).

• topherhuntJul 4, 2022, 9:33 AM

  3 points

  2

  on: What Are You Track­ing In Your Head?

  When programming, I track a mixed bag of things, top of which is readability: Will me-6-months-from-now be able to efficiently reconstruct the intention of this code, track down the inevitable bugs, etc.?

• topherhuntMay 4, 2022, 10:24 AM

  7 points

  on: Ideal gov­er­nance (for com­pa­nies, coun­tries and more)

  I’m surprised that this whole conversation has happened with no mention of the minor but growing trend towards self-management organizational structures, teal organizations, Holacracy, or Sociocracy.

  I have some experience with Holacracy, and while I would never call it a cure-all, I feel strongly about the relevance of its driving principles to the question of what an ideal governance system would look like—eg. a structure of nested units/​teams with high levels of local autonomy, a unique method of making governance decisions on how to change said structure, mechanisms that privilege “moving forward” over “inaction due to conflictual gridlock”, fluid process for defining and appointing power-holding “roles” to individuals, etc.

• topherhuntDec 30, 2020, 1:07 PM

  1 point

  on: Avoid­ing Your Belief’s Real Weak Points

  you can find God killing the first-born male children of Egypt to convince an unelected Pharaoh to release slaves who logically could have been teleported out of the country. An Orthodox Jew is most certainly familiar with this episode

  I’ve seen Yudkowsky make this point in a couple places (why bother inflicting mass infanticide etc. etc. when you’re presumably omnipotent and could teleport everyone to safety) and it makes me blink, something about the argument feels off. Are there cases in the scriptures where God teleports large numbers of people large distances? I get, and vehemently agree with, the point being made here (you can’t deny that in this and many other stories, God had more humane alternatives available, and knowingly opted for a crueler one) but unless there’s a clear precedent for mass teleportation, this specific argument seems to strawman the religious belief a little.

• topherhuntDec 27, 2020, 1:54 PM

  1 point

  on: 0 And 1 Are Not Probabilities

  What are the odds that the face showing is 1? Well, the prior odds are 1:5 (corresponding to the real number ¹⁄₅ = 0.20)

  I’m years late to this party, and probably missing something obvious. But I’m confused by Yudkowsky’s math here. Wouldn’t it be more correct to say that the prior odds of rolling a 1 are 1:5, which corresponds to a probability of 1⁄6 or 0.1666...? If odds of 1:5 correspond to a probability of 1/5 = 0.20, that makes me think there are 5 sides to this six-sided die, each side having equal probability.

  Put differently: when I think of how to convert odds back into a probability number, the formula my brain settles on is not P = o / (1 + o) as stated above, but rather P = L / (L + R), if the odds are expressed as L:R. Am I missing something important about common probability practice /​ jargon here?