108cm is squarely within the range of dwarfism so, as a minority, I wouldn’t be surprised if the data the user is searching for is scarce or missing altogether.
Hence the result pictured.
That said, the person searching this could have just made a typo for 180cm, which is much more common.
This doesn’t mean anything. It’s an LLM and it will only give you a valid sounding answer regardless of the truth. “Yes” sounds valid and is probably the one with the most occurrences in the training data.
What? No, the fact that it’s an LLM is pivotal to the reliability of the information. In fact, this isn’t even information per se, just the most likely responses to this question synthesized into one response. I don’t think you’ve fully internalized how LLMs work.
You’re correct, but why are you trusting the output by default? Why ask us to debunk something that is well-known to be easy to lead to the answer you want, and that doesn’t factually understand what it’s saying?
But I’m not trusting it by default and I’m not asking you to debunk anything. I’m simply stating that ad hominem is not a valid counter-argument even in the case of LLMs.
You’re saying ad hominem isn’t valid as a counterargument, which means you think there’s an argument in the first place. But it’s not a counterargument at all, because the LLM’s claim is not an argument.
ETA: And it wouldn’t be ad hominem anyways, since the claim about the reliability of the entity making an argument isn’t unrelated to what’s being discussed. Ad hominem only applies when the insult isn’t valid and related to the argument.
Dismissing something AI has ‘said’ not because of the content, but because it came from LLM is a choice any individual is free to make. However, that doesn’t serve as evidence against the validity of the content itself. To me, all the mental gymnastics about AI outputs being just meaningless nonsense or mere copying of others is a cop-out answer.
Ok, but if you aren’t assuming it’s valid, there doesn’t need to be evidence of invalidity. If you’re demanding evidence of invalidity, you’re claiming it’s valid in the first place, which you said you aren’t doing. In short: there is no need to disprove something which was not proved in the first place. It was claimed without any evidence besides the LLM’s output, so it can be dismissed without any evidence. (For the record, I do think Google engages in monopolistic practices; I just disagree that the LLM’s claim that this is true, is a valid argument).
To me, all the mental gymnastics about AI outputs being just meaningless nonsense or mere copying of others is a cop-out answer.
How much do you know about how LLMs work? Their outputs aren’t nonsense or copying others directly; what they do is emulate the pattern of how we speak. This also results in them emulating the arguments that we make, and the opinions that we hold, etc., because we those are a part of what we say. But they aren’t reasoning. They don’t know they’re making an argument, and they frequently “make mistakes” in doing so. They will easily say something like… I don’t know, A=B, B=C, and D=E, so A=E, without realizing they’ve missed the critical step of C=D. It’s not a cop-out to say they’re unreliable; it’s reality.
A friend of mine whose research group works on high throughout X-ray Crystallography had to learn C++ for his work, and he says that it was like “wrangling an unhappy horse”.
I’m not sure how I feel about someone controlling an X-ray machine with C++ when they haven’t used the language before… At least it’s not for use on humans.
He doesn’t directly control anything with C++ — it’s just the data processing. The gist of X-ray Crystallography is that we can shoot some X-rays at a crystallised protein, that will scatter the X-rays due to diffraction, then we can take the diffraction pattern formed and do some mathemagic to figure out the electron density of the crystallised protein and from there, work out the protein’s structure https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/51ac8404-4e22-486b-b220-efe33f75d69d.png
C++ helps with the mathemagic part of that, especially because by “high throughput”, I mean that the research facility has a particle accelerator that’s over 1km long, which cost multiple billions because it can shoot super bright X-rays at a rate of up to 27,000 per second. It’s the kind of place that’s used by many research groups, and you have to apply for “beam time”. The sample is piped in front of the beam and the result is thousands of diffraction patterns that need to be matched to particular crystals. That’s where the challenge comes in.
I am probably explaining this badly because it’s pretty cutting edge stuff that’s adjacent to what I know, but I know some of the software used is called CrystFEL. My understanding is that learning C++ was necessary for extending or modifying existing software tools, and for troubleshooting anomalous results.
Neat, thanks for sharing. Reminds me of old mainframe computers where students and researchers had to apply for processing time. Large data analysis definitely makes sense for C++, and it’s pretty low risk. Presumably you’d be able to go back and reprocess stuff if something went wrong? Or is more of a live-feed that’s not practical to store?
The data are stored, so it’s not a live-feed problem. It is an inordinate amount of data that’s stored though. I don’t actually understand this well enough to explain it well, so I’m going to quote from a book [1]. Apologies for wall of text.
“Serial femtosecond crystallography [(SFX)] experiments produce mountains of data that require [Free Electron Laser (FEL)] facilities to provide many petabytes of storage space and large compute clusters for timely processing of user data. The route to reach the summit of the data mountain requires peak finding, indexing, integration, refinement, and phasing.” […]
“The main reason for [steep increase in data volumes] is simple statistics. Systematic rotation of a single crystal allows all the Bragg peaks, required for structure determination, to be swept through and recorded. Serial collection is a rather inefficient way of measuring all these Bragg peak intensities because each snapshot is from a randomly oriented crystal, and there are no systematic relationships between successive crystal orientations. […]
Consider a game of picking a card from a deck of all 52 cards until all the cards in the deck have been seen. The rotation method could be considered as analogous to picking a card from the top of the deck, looking at it and then throwing it away before picking the next, i.e., sampling without replacement. In this analogy, the faces of the cards represent crystal orientations or Bragg reflections. Only 52 turns are required to see all the cards in this case. Serial collection is akin to randomly picking a card and then putting the card back in the deck before choosing the next card, i.e., sampling with replacement (Fig. 7.1 bottom). How many cards are needed to be drawn before all 52 have been seen? Intuitively, we can see that there is no guarantee that all cards will ever be observed. However, statistically speaking, the expected number of turns to complete the task, c, is given by: https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/0fdbd723-cb7f-49bf-834f-e1fb634ee0bb.jpegwhere n is the total number of cards. For large n, c converges to n*log(n). That is, for n = 52, it can reasonably be expected that all 52 cards will be observed only after about 236 turns! The problem is further exacerbated because a fraction of the images obtained in an SFX experiment will be blank because the X-ray pulse did not hit a crystal. This fraction varies depending on the sample preparation and delivery methods (see Chaps. 3–5), but is often higher than 60%. The random orientation of crystals and the random picking of this orientation on every measurement represent the primary reasons why SFX data volumes are inherently larger than rotation series data.
The second reason why SFX data volumes are so high is the high variability of many experimental parameters. [There is some randomness in the X-ray pulses themselves]. There may also be a wide variability in the crystals: their size, shape, crystalline order, and even their crystal structure. In effect, each frame in an SFX experiment is from a completely separate experiment to the others.”
“The Realities of Experimental Data” "The aim of hit finding in SFX is to determine whether the snapshot contains Bragg spots or not. All the later processing stages are based on Bragg spots, and so frames which do not contain any of them are useless, at least as far as crystallographic data processing is concerned. Conceptually, hit finding seems trivial. However, in practice it can be challenging.
“In an ideal case shown in Fig. 7.5a, the peaks are intense and there is no background noise. In this case, even a simple thresholding algorithm can locate the peaks. Unfortunately, real life is not so simple”
It’s very cool, I wish I knew more about this. A figure I found for approximate data rate is 5GB/s per instrument. I think that’s for the European XFELS.
Citation: [1]: Yoon, C.H., White, T.A. (2018). Climbing the Data Mountain: Processing of SFX Data. In: Boutet, S., Fromme, P., Hunter, M. (eds) X-ray Free Electron Lasers. Springer, Cham. doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00551-1_7
That’s definitely a non-trivial amount of data. Storage fast enough to read/write that isn’t cheap either, so it makes perfect sense you’d want to process it and narrow it down to a smaller subset of data ASAP. The physics of it is way over my head, but I at least understand the challenge of dealing with that much data.
Unfortunately no. I don’t know any research scientists who even make 6 figures. You’re lucky to break even 50k if you’re in academia. Working in industry gets you better pay, but not by too much. This is true even in big pharma, at least on the biochemical/biomedical research front. Perhaps non-research roles are where the big bucks are.
Housing as an investment is the entire goal of capitalism. Billionaires buy your politicians, you will own nothing. You cannot vote for a politician which is not owned by Billionaires.
Giving first time home buyer’s assistance just juices demand which would just lead to further increased housing prices.
The supply side is what needs to be addressed, that’s a lot harder though as builders would prefer to build luxury housing as opposed to starter homes.
Yeah ive seen this happen. After €15k grant was introduced, all house prices went up by that much. At least 1st time buyers are at an advantage in this case, over those who already have a home.
I am of the opinion that most “supply” issues are due to investors. Except in certain geographic areas we do not have a shortage of actual physical housing. What we have is a shortage of available housing at a mixed pricepoints for purchase.
All housing that investors purchase for rentals removes it from the supply.
Traditionally investors have sought out entry level housing for rent. They invest in building rental complexes. They make all cash purchases and then rent it out to people who otherwise would have been first-time homebuyers. Investors used to be the low end offer. Blatant price fixing has increased rent outrageously. Now investors are the high end offer and removing supply constantly.
With AirB&B, the middle and even upper range market that traditionally has had less investor competition is now a major target. This has led to price wars for investment purposes on previously safe segments.
The first solution to the housing supply is simple: taxing income from rent so that selling the property is financially more lucrative. It will have to include a prohibition against rental increases to cover the taxes as well.
The second is to mandate zoning and new construction to match the market needs not the needs of the investors.
Last would be to create a program where builders who focus on entry level housing receive incentives from governments (also include hefty penalty for substandard construction).
Well said, while I think there a probably caveats (that I don’t have the energy to debate since I mostly agree with you anyway) to each of your solutions, it’s definitely a good starting place to address the underlying issues with the housing market for single family homes
Why first time. Why not single property owners to allow that person with the efficiency condo to get a 2 bedroom townhouse and the townhouse person with kids to get a free standing house. If the issue is with multiproperty owners why not assist all no and uni property owners?
Because they need help the most. Once they can move out if rental accommodation, the demand for rentals will fall and so will property prices, and everyone will benefit (maybe except landlords).
Dropping the demand for rentals is supposed to address this. But there is going to be a great big gap between “no one is renting” and “we can’t afford to keep this house that no one is renting” where the prices will skyrocket to try and make up costs, which kind of shoots this plan in the foot unless all the newly emancipated renters plan to pitch a tent for a couple years while the market settles.
its chicken and egg though. the demand for rentals will drop when people can buy but if all first time buyers have more money to buy but supply remains the same then the price of housing will just rise. the real solution is to build. government should build and sell at cost and keep doing it till housing is not something one goes to to make profit.
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