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eiz | 2 years ago | on: What are transformer models and how do they work?

> Where is the connection between computational details and the model's high-level behavior? Do we even know?

This is an active area of study ("mechanistic interpretability") and it's very early days. For instance here's a paper I read recently that tries to explain how a very simple transformer learns how to do modular arithmetic: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.05217

Curious what interesting results people are aware of in this area.

eiz | 2 years ago | on: What are transformer models and how do they work?

> 4. Describing positional embeddings as multiplicative. They are generally (and very counterintuitively to me, but nevertheless) additive with token embeddings.

Worth noting that rotary position embeddings, used in many recent architectures (LLaMA, GPT-NeoX, ...), are very similar to the original sin/cos position embedding in the transformer paper but using complex multiplication instead of addition

eiz | 3 years ago | on: Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT

I tried this:

> Solve the following word problem step by step:

> "John is in a train moving west at ten miles per hour. Jill is in a train moving north at twenty miles per hour. How fast are John and Jill moving apart from each other?"

To solve this problem, we first need to understand the concept of speed. Speed is a measure of distance traveled over time. In this problem, we are told that John and Jill are traveling at different speeds in different directions.

Since the two trains are moving in different directions, we cannot simply add or subtract their speeds to find the combined speed at which John and Jill are moving apart from each other. Instead, we need to use the Pythagorean theorem to find the combined speed.

The Pythagorean theorem states that in a right triangle, the square of the length of the hypotenuse (the longest side of the triangle) is equal to the sum of the squares of the lengths of the other two sides. In this problem, we can consider the trains to be moving along the two sides of a right triangle, with the distance between them as the hypotenuse.

We can use the Pythagorean theorem to find the distance between John and Jill as follows:

First, we square the speed of each train and add the results:

10 mph * 10 mph + 20 mph * 20 mph = 100 + 400 = 500

Next, we take the square root of the result to find the distance between John and Jill:

sqrt(500) = 22.36 mph

Therefore, the combined speed at which John and Jill are moving apart from each other is approximately 22.36 mph.

---

Results seem pretty inconsistent though. Other attempts have given complete nonsense.

eiz | 3 years ago | on: Pet Airways

I've done this a few times too.

> There’s no way to pre-register the pet.

At least on Delta, you can. You need to call the airline and arrange it.

> Oh, and to go through security, you have to take a nervous and scared cat out of their carry case in the middle of the security line, walk through the metal detector, and then they have to test both of your hands for residue while still carrying the cat.

I always refuse the normal line and get a private screening. So far I haven't had any issues doing that.

Still, it's a huge pain in the ass.

eiz | 4 years ago | on: The K Programming Language

> This means no closures, which K implementers consider a feature (I don't).

having not touched K in about 15 years, when did this change? in k3:

    K 3.2 2004-09-23 Copyright (C) 1993-2004 Kx Systems
    LIN32 16CPU 15985MB ubuntu 0 EVAL  
    
      f:{a:x+1;{a+x}}
      g:f 1
      g
    {a+x}
      g 2
    4
      a
    value error
    a
    ^
    parse error

eiz | 7 years ago | on: Audiophiles in Japan Are Installing Their Own Power Poles

> It's an HDMI cable! The video signal has CRC in it and is packetized, it's either going to make it or it isn't.

I don't disagree with your main point, but this actually isn't quite true. The HDMI signal is split into 3 distinct interleaved periods: video data, data island and control. Video data is not packetized and the only possible error detection it has is from TMDS signaling, but no such error handling is required by the TMDS spec. You can absolutely get imperfect transmission of an HDMI video signal due to cable or other electrical problems. Auxiliary packets in the data island, including audio data, do have an error correction scheme (BCH + TERC4).

Feel free to check out the spec: https://glenwing.github.io/docs/HDMI-1.4b.pdf

eiz | 9 years ago | on: Google Fiber Was Doomed from the Start

The calculator you linked to assumes a maximum TCP window size of 64KB for everything but "replication". TCP window scaling has been on by default in every major OS for 10 years or more, allowing much greater throughput. It's true that latency sets a limit on TCP throughput but it's not nearly as bad as your calculator would indicate.

eiz | 10 years ago | on: libimobiledevice – A cross-platform library to communicate with iOS devices

house_arrest used to allow direct access to the documents and container of any app. It's used by the Xcode "installed applications" list, to allow you to download and upload container contents. In 8.3 they changed it to only allow VendDocuments access to apps which actually have document sharing enabled in their Info.plist (and VendContainer access for ad-hoc provisioned apps, iirc).

Backup is done via a completely separate service.

iOS releases do tend to arbitrarily change the security policy of these services, but it's not clear that "Rootless" is anything more than business as usual. Guess we'll find out Monday.

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