briancleland's comments

This paper highlights something that should have been obvious: prediction and retrieval are two sides of the same coin. To predict effectively, you must first identify what's relevant. What's remarkable is that a 0.5B parameter model can perform perfect retrieval over 1M tokens when its natural attention patterns are leveraged properly.

It raises an interesting question: what if we designed architectures explicitly around retrieval capabilities? Transformer architectures were designed for prediction, and retrieval emerged as a byproduct. What would an architecture optimized specfically for retrieval look like?

A lot of money has been spent on building out large-scale RAG systems. If the performance improvements promised by the paper are real, the ramifications will be huge. Exciting to see that the authors are promising to release their code - it will be fun to how this model performs on consumer hardware.

Sounds like speculative decoding.

https://huggingface.co/blog/vivien/optimal-lossy-variant-of-...

This is almost completely wrong. When peope who work in AI refer to the "model", they are generally referring to the weights. It is the weights which are the most important determinant of how the model performs, and it is the weights that require the most resources to develop. Associated code and other assets are also important, but they not the core asset. The intuitive sense of open sourcing a model therefore typically means releasing the weights under an open licence (ideally along with the training and inference code, data, training info, etc).

"Thriving" or "wellbeing" are better translations.

While they both might be cited as examples of "virtue ethics" (a modern term and category) Stoicism and Aristotelianism are completely different philosophies.

If you are interested in Newgrange, and ancient Irish history in general, the Mythical Ireland Facebook page is doing nightly video podcasts that may be of interest: https://www.facebook.com/mythicalireland/videos/116891482346...

It is run by Anthony Murphy who lives near Newgrange and is a real font of information on such matters.

> The problem is when people claim that they can lose weight without running a calorie deficit.

Of course people can lose weight without running a calorie deficit. It's a commonplace experience nowadays, and absolutely trivial to demonstrate. You can test if for yourself if you are even slightly interested in checking the validity of your theories.

The death of the ridiculous thermodynamic model of human nutrition can't come soon enough.

I was 7 years old when Star Wars was released, and everyone, including my 5-year-old brother, knew that Han Solo was the real hero.

"He was part of particularly deadly politics"

Haha. Human nature never changes.

That's interesting. How was the pricing structure problem addressed?

As a resident of the UK, I can state that community care is exactly the same ideologically-driven agenda with exactly the same real-world failings that are being ascribed to the US model. The only difference is that there are still remnants of a benefit system that provide some protection for the least fortunate, although the government is in the process of dismantling those as well.

So reducing the cost will reduce demand? I appreciate this is sometimes the case with luxury goods, but it is hard believe that it would apply to public transport.

Do you have any evidence of a reduction in price leading to a reduction in demand for public transport anywhere in the world?

Have you tried Zotero with the Zotfile extension?

> It's nice to say you have to avoid reacting to things outside of your control. But how does one do that ?

The first step is to learn to distinguish between the things that are in your control and those that outside of your control. The second step is to consciously remind yourself that things outside your control are by their nature indifferent - neither good nor bad - and to act accordingly.

Both of these things require constant practice to develop skill. One specific exercise that can help is the "Premeditatio Malorum". Another is to keep a journal of one's successes and failures and to review it daily.

There are other useful resources online with practical advice. One good example is Donald Robertson's Stoic Therapy Toolkit: https://learn.donaldrobertson.name/p/stoic-therapy-toolkit

John Sarno perhaps? I found his method very effective.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JVDj2rEOas

I would humbly suggest you look for historical figures who had a hard-headed and realistic view of the world, but who were also positive and healthy in their outlook. Their approach to life might suggest a way forward. We have a surprising amount of freedom in how we interpret the world around us. "Everything has two handles, the one by which it may be carried, the other by which it cannot."

It's a very old phenomenon indeed. Plato's Republic can be read as a meditation on the centralisation of power, the pros and cons of centralisation vs decentralisation, and how and why the balance shifts over time.

The problem with nail-biting is that it is mostly unconscious. To stop doing it you need to train yourself to be aware of the behaviour. I used this technique to stop nail-biting after 35 years...

Put one finger in your mouth. Bite down. Take the finger out, look at it and say out loud "I will not bite my nails". Repeat for each finger on both hands.

Repeat this process 2-3 times a day. After a day or so you will start to "catch yourself" when you start nail-biting. After a few more days you should find the nail-biting habit diminishes and then disappears altogether. If the habit starts to return after a few months (as can happen) then simply repeat the technique.

Obviously there are degrees of processing, but it's not hard to see that an apple or a carrot or even a steak are fundamentally less processed and more "natural" than a packet of chips, a bar of chocolate or a TV dinner. They are also much healthier.

Storing up fat for hibernation is perfectly natural and has no negative effect on the health of the animal. It has nothing to do with obesity as the term is normally used.