yep. the comments are for folks who have never tried to read cobol before, which is probably 99% of people looking at the project. this way they can understand a familiar idea expressed in a language that is probably wildly different from what theyre used to.
i helped Chris Callison-Burch design a class at upenn, called interactive fiction, which is a similar context to what Simon suggested. the real magic is that it reframes hallucinations as creative story telling. the usecase is SUPER fun if you imagine the LLM as a dungeon master telling a story that gets expanded over time.
the framework he and I built kept track of the game state over time and allowed saving and loading games as json. we could then send the full json to an LLM as part of the prompts to get it to react. the most neat part, imo, was when we realized we could have the LLM generate text for parts of the story, then analyze what it said to detect any items, locations, or characters not jn the game state, and then have it create json representations of the hallucinated objects that could be inserted into the game states. that sealed the deal for using hallucinations as creative story telling inside the context of a game.
i wasnt officially part of upenn at the time, so my name isnt listed on the site, but we wrote a paper about some of the things we did, such as this one, and you'll see me listed there https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~ccb/publications/dagger.pdf
Sounds similar to AI Dungeon which I believe ran on a fine-tuned version of GPT-2 "all the way" back in 2019. And honestly kind of reminded me of the "Mind Game" in the novel, Ender's Game.
The article is about image generators. Image generators specifically work by starting with noise and then refining the noise into an image. That's not how driving software works and this is not a relevant point.
Sorry, I failed to follow your reasoning. My comment had nothing to do with "driving software", it addressed the parent post by posing the question a different way.
Jobs hated ads. You're right that he never wouldve done what Apple is doing now.
Cook needs to stop listening to investors, like Warren Buffett, because he's letting them wreck Apple's integrity for the sake of making a buck. Apple just isnt user focused like they used to be and it's crappy.
he was vocal about his opposition to intrusive ads in particular. he'd say "You’re either the customer or you’re the product." he believed users paid a premium for apple products and that they should not be subjected to compromises with advertising.
iAd was something that happened right at the end of his life because devs were putting ads in apple apps anyway and he wanted to control how that was done.
this is meant to add context to what bluedevilzn said, btw. it is not a refutation.
Jobs disliked anything where Apple wasn't getting a cut. Flash games and Google ads being two of the biggest offenders in his eyes.
He also "hated" the small tablets Samsung were making, saying in a keynote that you'd have to file your finger down to use it. He said this knowing full well Apple were launching the iPad Mini in 12 months' time.
I really hope one day Jobs' marketer-speak soundbites stop being repeated like like biblical pronouncements. The App Store, Apple News, Stocks and other properties are filled with hideous Google-like ads today, and Jobs likely wouldn't bat an eye, because they brought in money.
I think Jobs recognised that ads are intrusions into people’s lives. The advertiser has a responsibility to respect the audience. They don’t have a natural right to that attention, and have to earn it.
Thats why the F1 wallet add is such a bad move. It’s disrespectful and intrusive.
iAD was supposed to be about innovative, informative, well designed high quality adverts. It never really worked out though.
Yeah, “Jobs hated ads” is a such a wild rewriting of the history of one of industry’s greatest marketers and, yes, ad men. (1984 commercial. Mac vs PC.)
I am curious what you attribute that Warren Buffett is asking Tim Cook to do? Warren is notorious for being hands-off with operations. I can't imagine him having ANY commentary on what Tim Cook should be doing with Apple other than with capital allocation.
Cook is an operations person. He makes the logistics work. He's no visionary. Jobs is a visionary, but is not a logistics person. Apple struck lightning when both existed, to provide complimentary ideas and counterbalances.
Same with Ive and Jobs. Ive was a great designer, but no usability expert. Jobs put practical limits on and as soon as Jobs was gone, Ive got total control. The result is some of the least-popular Mac laptops ever.
depending on what you're using the synthetic data for, it is sometimes called distillation. here is a robust example from some upenn students: https://datadreamer.dev/
Prior to LLMs, it was amusing to consider how ML folks and software folks would talk passed each other. It was amusing because both sides were great at what they do, neither side understood the other side, and they had to work together anyway.
After LLMs, we now have lots of ML folks talking about the future of software, so ething previously established to be so outside their expertise that communication with software engineers was an amusing challenge.
So I must ask, are ML folks actually qualified to know the future of software engineering? Shouldnt we be listening to software engineers instead?
> So I must ask, are ML folks actually qualified to know the future of software engineering?
Probably not CRUD apps typical to back office or website software, but don't forget that ML folks come from the stock of people that built Apollo, Mars Landers, etc. Scientific computing shares some significant overlap with SWE, and ML is a subset of that.
IMHO, the average SWE and ML person are different types when it comes to how they cargocult develop, but the top 10% show significant understanding and re speed across domains.
This seems to be overstating the separation. For people doing applied ML, there's often been a dual responsibility that included a significant amount of software engineering. I wouldn't necessarily listen to such declarations from an ML researcher whose primary output is papers, but from ML engineers who have built and shipped products/services/libraries I think it's much more reasonable.
for example IT IS YELLING AT US THE WHOLE TIME