I feel you should be able to keep the high level idea in your head at once; of course not the details. I don't think I've ever completed a piece of code without having a scheme in my head, and where it should fit in it.
I've seen at least 6 such papers, all being like "<popular architecture> are actually <a bit older concept>". Neural networks are generic enough that you can make them equivalent to almost everything.
Linking the latest generation tech to the previous generations is actually really helpful from my perspective.
All of the terminology for this tech is still emerging, and it can be quite difficult to formulate a reliable mental model for any of it due to how quickly it’s changing.
If hammers were more difficult to understand, I could imagine someone writing about the fact that hammers are in fact, just a piece of steel mounted on a handle made of wood.
> Neural networks are generic enough that you can make them equivalent to almost everything.
Which to me is why papers like this are useful. They help newcomers conceptualize what the latest <popular architecture> is actually made of in terms of <a bit older concept> that the reader may already understand.
It will take some time for this information space to stabilize.
It's also helpful in that you can now take insights from <older concept> and apply it to <popular architecture>. Many things are easier to reason about when framed a little differently.
I can't get a read on this guy. I have strong bullshit feelings, but I'm not 100% sure.
1. He seems to have an awful lot of referral links - $60 for a bottle of olive oil?
2. He has not posted why is his regime like that - e.g. "Here is a paper about iron deficiencies, so I'm taking an iron supplement".
3. 90% of his website is "look at how dense my bones are", "look at how healthy my liver is" - bro I just wanted to see the actual regime, and you can't even post that.
I knoooow, it was exactly my feeling. He has a lot of referral links... but over half of them are out of stock. If he gave a shit about making money he'd have updated the links.
Overall I think he's legit, but also weird. It could be "rich guy weird" or "on the spectrum weird", doesn't really matter. Either way, I'm mostly taking him seriously now, with caveats.
The biggest caveat being, of course, that it's a study with a sample size of 1. A very in-depth study, but the applicability is limited. For example if you look at the list of supplements, there are quite a few which are obviously there because he's a vegan.
This is also related to why his protocol isn't explained in detail - it's ongoing and result-based. He may try something, see if it works, and stick it in the protocol. Supporting studies are useless for this modus operandi - he's not trying to convince you that particular supplement is good for you. All he's doing is risk-benefit calculations for his particular case. Which means that yes, he'll have a bunch of stuff which maybe work for everybody, or maybe work for him, or maybe random noise just made them look like they work for him but are actually useless. Or worse, stuff which can be actively harmful, but he was lucky or just very healthy otherwise and didn't see the damage.
I'd agree with you if it weren't for all the cultish red flags present here.
This is clearly a man who wants a cult-like mentality to form around him.
If he were just going ridiculously in-depth with his self-research and being open and honest about this, I'd actually admire him a lot, but it's all the grandiose talk about "Zeroth principles thinking" and "Aligning with what the 25th century would want" together with implying his detractors must be weak, scared and lacking in self-control that turns me off heavily.
Personally, I have taken few things from his routine and double-checked it with other sources and more importantly found much cheaper products/things locally than the ones that are advertised (even though, most of them are fine anyways such as in Skincare he uses standard Cerave stuff).
Do note that this is -one- guy trying basically everything that seems plausible. It would likely result in frequently switching up things that are not researched well.
The issue is that he never explains why he does particular stuff, what specific results particular stuff he tried had, what worked and especially what didn't.
His website is full of "look at my amazing results!", which makes for good marketing talk but does not good science make and is not good nor helpful for people who are trying to separate what works from what doesn't - but is great for Mr. Johnson' budding supplement business's baseline.
With a very, very short amount of research you'd find he has a pretty seasoned track record, having sold Venmo's parent company to PayPal for $800m in 2013. Not exactly the drop-shipping repackaged olive oil salesman you're painting him to be.
Personally, I try not to throw out accusations about people when I'm this unfamiliar with their background. I'd encourage you to consider a similar habit :)
How does that background translate to any kind of scientific competence? Because his website is heavy on the buzzwords and the Silicon Valley "glorious future"-talk and remarkably light on anything resembling responsible science.
He clearly doesn't want to advance knowledge about longevity, he wants to be the world's top longevity marketer and salesman. It's just a business long shot to him. And yes, that is perfectly congruent with his background.
As an entrepreneur myself, I can tell you that "needing the money" stops being a significant motivation after a while, or at least takes a back seat to the thrill of just getting people to buy the thing.
None of those are victimless crimes. If you attempt to shoot someone and your rifle jams, you still exposed him to the risk of dying. This is a ridiculous strawman.
If you don't like that one - how about this: the law in the U.S. criminalizes attempts to do things that are factually impossible. So if you try to poison someone with (what you believe to be) "arsenic" but it turns out to be the regular sugar they normally take in their coffee, you can be convicted of attempted murder in most states.
> Primarily, they are pure functions that accept a sequence of tokens and return the next token. The model itself is stateless, and it doesn't seem right to me to ascribe "intent" to a stateless function. Even if the function is capable of modeling certain aspects of chess.
I have two arguments against. One, you could argue that state is transferred between the layers. It may be inelegant for each chain of state transitions to be the same length, but it seems to work. Two, it may not have "states", but if the end result is the same, does it matter?
That's a great way of looking at it. Comparing model weights to our brains and how we process input, you could imagine model weights as a brain frozen at time t=0. The prompt tokens are the sensory input, and the generation parameters are like twists to how the neurons pass information to each other. The token context window is like the capacity of one's working memory. At the conclusion of the last layer of processing, the output tokens are like one's subjective experience.
At the least it's made me think for a moment about `stateless` and its meaning
Just because you use some intermediate variables to calculate f(x,y) = x^2 + y^2 doesn't make it a non-pure function. At least at the level of abstraction we're talking about (the API boundary).
The more significant application of storage will be long-term storage wrapped in a read-modify-write loop.
Historically in the Arab countries, people mainly rode camels or horses while wearing a dagger in their belt. A pointy scabbard would foible the wearer in the leg and groin. Curving the scabbard solves that problem nicely.
The blades do tend to be fairly short but longer than you would imagine as they too are curved.
>A pointy scabbard would foible the wearer in the leg and groin. Curving the scabbard solves that problem nicely.
This is one of those comically out of touch armchair historian takes.
Curved blades were made back then for the same reason they are still made. They are effective at killing other humans quickly. Aimed at a throat or other vulnerable point the blade is highly likely to drag across an artery on the withdrawal thereby quickly ending your confrontation.
Curved blades don't work as well on animals with fur and thick hides.
>This is one of those comically out of touch armchair historian takes.
Having lived in the Middle East and owned a traditional curved dagger, I can safely say that the type of dagger mentioned in the original article is not used primarily for warfare. They serve as a symbol of manhood and social status. It is seen as highly disrespectful and dishonorable for a man to draw his dagger.
> Curved blades were made back then for the same reason they are still made.
Traditional Arab swords and blades intended for warefare are normally 2+ feet long. Not too sure that a 3" dagger is too effective.
I never said anything about warfare. I said killing other humans.
Same as this blade has no utility purpose due to its curved shape. Other than killing a human. You can find knife combat videos online that will show the optimal stab points to quickly kill a person using this type of knife. I'm guessing people back in the days had this information as well for the similar blades in the article.
I would speculate that simply carrying such a blade openly would indicate to someone that you are familiar with life or death combat and willing to go there if necessary. Open carry has always had the secondary purpose of showing that you are not an easy target.
Many of the scabbards in the article are so curved that it would be impossible to pull a blade of the same shape out of them. I'm sure that's what arthem was referring to.
With the daggers that I have seen and handled, the blade is curved but does not run the full length of the scabbard. It is not unusual for the blade of a L shaped scabbard to be cresent shaped[1], meaning that it is quite easy to pull the blade out.
A bit of the two. The blade isn't the full length of the scabbard, but reaches a good length of it (usually four-fifths of it). But it's also reasonably curved enough.
The only practical use I can think of it is that it makes it easier to ensure that when you pull on the handle, the blade comes out quickly instead of yanking the whole assembly along.
That's a pretty good idea, actually. It'll be a bitch and a half to tune the threshold so it's reliable, and doesn't mark normally generated text though.
