I think your confidence is likely misplaced, but I vouched for your comment to revive it from the dead because you expressed your opinion clearly and with examples.
To the flaggers: flag comments that you think violate the rules, but don't flag something just because you strongly disagree with the claim it makes.
It was [flagged] very quickly, too. I checked my screen capture just now, and it happened between 4 and 14 seconds after posting. Either I tripped something automated, or someone with incredible flagging powers was sitting there waiting to immediately suppress my reply. Was a little disheartening to see my supporting evidence hidden for so long.
I didn't vote, but my guess would be that it's because "aphantasia" (the inability to visualize images) is a popular topic on this site: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia. Some people see images in their head, and others (possibly overrepresented here) simply don't. My guess would be that a comment that starts by assuming everyone sees images in their heads was considered misleading and simplistic.
My confusion was slightly different. The parent comment was the top ranked comment yet grayed and continued to remain gray after I upvoter.
About your comment, I am very because I am not sure where I myself fall.
My mental imagery is certainly not so strong that I can claim with any confidence that I have one. My wife, on the otherhand claims strongly that she can see things in her minds eye and I have ample evidence to believe it.
Can those with aphantasia do rough sketches of some familiar object from memory of the object ?
There is a loophole in the task though. One can translate the visual imagery into words and remember them. Then one can sketch using the remembered words, not that different from the workings of a deep autoencoder.
It really comes down to the nature and geometry of the latent space. Is it a topological space with a topology less boring than a discrete topology. Is it spatial/geometric or symbolic.
No memory, but searching says it was Lewis Carroll in Photography Extraordinary, published in 1885:
The Milk-and-Water School
Alas! she would not hear my prayer!
Yet it were rash to tear my hair;
Disfigured, I should be less fair.
She was unwise, I may say blind;
Once she was lovingly inclined;
Some circumstance has changed her mind.
The Strong-Minded or Matter-of-Fact School
Well! so my offer was no go!
She might do worse, I told her so;
She was a fool to answer "No".
However, things are as they stood;
Nor would I have her if I could,
For there are plenty more as good.
The Spasmodic or German School
Firebrands and Daggers! hope hath fled!
To atoms dash the doubly dead!
My brain is fire--my heart is lead!
Her soul is flint, and what am I?
Scorch'd by her fierce, relentless eye,
Nothingness is my destiny!
I liked your piece, and agree with almost all of it, but I'm surprised by your faith in the accuracy of Pangram at detecting AI writing. Is your faith based on testing it with lots of writing of known origins, or are you just saying that it reaches the same conclusion that you do as a talented human?
In particular, I wondered if you have tried running all of your own writings through it to verify that it thinks you are human. I was struck by Freddie deBoer's recent piece where he did this and said it often failed: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/i-wouldnt-say-pangram-i...
What percentage of false positive rejections would you find acceptable? Would you accept this even if it forced you to change the way you write?
My experience is using Pangram quite often with lots of writing of all flavors (including a bunch of known origin).
As for my own writing, I didn't do this experiment, but one of my co-workers did -- and over 176 posts spanning 22 years, all 176 (well, 177 now with my latest) are 100% human. This is not hugely surprising in that (in addition to me having actually written them!) my voice is very... distinctive. What would be more entertaining would be to try to get an LLM to write like me and fool Pangram that way. I still think that this would be difficult based on the experiences that I've heard, but it wouldn't surprise me if you could pull it off (and I would assuredly find the result entertaining!).
In the dimensions that we use Pangram in the most actionable sense (namely, to audit our own public writing), I am unconcerned about false positives, and leave it to Oxide authors to rework/recast as needed. (Though it sounds like Freddie didn't even need to do that -- he just needed to provide a longer sample.)
Now that you’ve seen it can be brittle (e.g. if a small sample is provided, per this single case), would it be sensible to add a disclaimer to the post? It’s a great ad for the tool (& I’d love for a perfect tool to exist!), so it’ll sell subscriptions & we wanna make sure that some teacher out there doesn’t falsely accuse a kid, or engineer doesn’t think worse of their colleague unfairly, etc.
False negatives are mentioned, but the false positive is what could hurt people.
>I wondered if you have tried running all of your own writings through it to verify that it thinks you are human. I was struck by Freddie deBoer's recent piece where he did this
Maybe I'm taking the "all" too literally here, but I read the article, and I'm not seeing anywhere the author ran a substantial portion of his corpus through Pangram to determine the false positive rate. That would be really interesting to see.
He does
* give an example of a piece of his writing that was, when ran in segments, flagged as generated (which he disputes)
* multiply the size of his corpus by pangram's published false positive rate and estimate that a few of his pieces would be flagged
* get the pangram model to label a piece "100% AI" when it only has 3 generated sentences
* demonstrate the ability to intentionally trigger a false positive
I just typed 233 words into Pangram, I'm trying to synthesize an idea from Aristotle to an experience I am having at work. It's not an original thought, specifically, but the application to this thing at work does appear to be novel. I'm still trying to work out my thoughts. Anyway it concluded that it's 100% AI. Even with a couple of random typos and missing grammar that I added. Smells like horse shit to me. I also don't like the idea that I have to shove a corpus of text into this thing to get it to process that it's incorrect. That expectation is wrong headed and places the burden on the wrong entity.
It's the odd North American English "abbreviation" for a "prescription medicine". Where a "prescription medicine" is one that cannot be bought directly by a consumer and instead requires a medical professional to prescribe it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_prescription
It would be nice if this article defined a "ethernet patch cable". I think he's just using "patch" as a slang term for a short cable and it actually works with any length of standard cable, but I'm not certain.
Traditionally (pre-2000?), one had to use a special "crossover cable" to do direct connections like this, but apparently modern Gigabit ethernet adapters are able to detect this situation automatically?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium-dependent_interface#Aut... is what allowed the switchover to happen automatically, and it got folded into the 1000BASE-T standard. So yes, crossover cables are no longer required because the two Ethernet adapters at either end can negotiate between them to have one of them "flip" the meaning of its Receive (RX) and Transmit (TX) pins.
They are all just twisted pair cables, probably Cat5e or Cat6 etc. The solid ones are usually used for structured cabling, inside walls and trunking, that doesn't often move. Structured cabling is terminated into keystones or patch panels, the "female" end.
Patch cables are outside of walls and designed to be moved around and plugged and replugged. They are terminated with 8p8c "male" connectors, commonly called rj45. Stranded cable is used because it's much more flexible.
No, traditionally a patch cable is a cable that you would use in a networking rack to connect (to "patch") from say a network switch to the desk outlets or to another switch. A patch cable would explicitly be NOT a crossover.
The main difference between patch and "normal" is that the former is using stranded conductors and the latter solid conductors.
That makes the patch cable more flexible (physically)
I have a feeling this is some re-invention of the definitions happening.
It's just a holdover from the telephone networks, where you used a short cable to actually phsyically connect - patch[0] - two lines. Therefore - patch-panel and patch-cord or patch-cable.
I am not sure that I know of any Ethernet (IEEE 802.3) standard cabling which uses solid-core wires rather than twisted-pair stranded wires. I can understand and see that many people consider "structured cabling" to consist of the former, but this article does not seem to mandate that construction, and indeed includes many types of twisted-pair and "patch" cables in the list of acceptable "structured cabling solutions."
Yeah, it's not patch vs structured. Patch cables are part of structured cabling. But you won't generally find solid core wires outside of structured cabling, because they are inflexible, unwieldly and in many cases can't even be terminated with RJ45 plugs anyway (they are often too thick).
To regular people it's probably enough just to say Ethernet cable. Outside of structured cabling you don't really need to care and probably don't have a choice anyway. If someone says patch cable they probably know a bit about structured cabling and couldn't help themselves.
Within structured cabling the rabbit hole is quite deep. Even within a single standard like Cat6 there are many possible cable constructions with different types of shielding and wire gauge etc. It becomes important when you need the network to certify as Cat6 and support PoE in a high noise industrial environment, for example. And, of course, Ethernet can run over other cable types anyway, like fibre.
Actually, switch to switch would be a crossover cable (pre auto MDI-X, of course). The rule was a crossover would connect devices of the same type, e.g. computer to computer, hub to hub, switch to switch; and patch for devices of different type, like switch to computer. So if you wanted to just plug a hub into the wall you would use a crossover cable, for example.
A patch cable is just a terminated cable with multi strand leads (as opposed to solid leads in installation cable), it could be straight patch or crossover.
Is the cable connected from say desktop computer to wall socket a patch cable? Or does that only apply to those used in server rooms or switch cabinets?
Patch cables are differentiated from bulk/structured cabling which is installed into a building unterminated, and is most commonly terminated after installation into patch panels or keystone jacks.
There doesn't seem to be agreement as to exactly what one is, with several definitions already appearing in the comments here. Do you agree with one of them and think everyone else is wrong? Or do you have yet another standard definition that we should all be using?
My problem with the article was that "patch" doesn't seem to add any useful information. Unless he was using a restrictive definition intending to exclude things like crossover cables (which still work), he could have just as well said "transfer files over a blue Ethernet cable" with equal precision.
If he meant to say that at this point in time "you can use _any_ ethernet cable to transfer files directly between two computers", I think it would have been better to say that rather than appearing to add a restriction on the type of cable required.
> You can interrogate the LLM. You can ask it all sorts of things. Tell it to justify its decisions. Tell it to give you supporting evidence. Tell it to give you options. Tell it to explain things in detail.
Hopefully you realize that it's not actually introspecting into its previous thought process, and instead it is just making up a plausible after-the-fact explanation that matches the format of similar explanations found in its training set?
I too often find these explanations enlightening, but please don't forget that you need to read all such responses as those of a pathologically lying psychopath desparate to trick you, not as a trusted expert who actually understands its internals.
Of course. But again this all comes down to how you use it.
If you start blindly accepting everything it says, good luck to you.
But you can do things like get one agent to do something. Spin up another agent to review and critique. Use different LLMs to critique. I’ve had the same agent write piece of code and then come back and say “there are bugs x, y and z”.
For most code, it’s going to do a fairly good job and tell you best practices, give you things to research by yourself.
To the flaggers: flag comments that you think violate the rules, but don't flag something just because you strongly disagree with the claim it makes.
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