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Cake day: February 14th, 2025

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  • To be honest, I feel like what you describe in the second part (the monkey analogy) is more of a genetic algorithm than a machine learning one, but I get your point.

    Quick side note, I wasn’t at all including a discussion about energy consumption and in that case ML based algorithms, whatever form they take, will mostly consume more energy (assuming not completely inefficient “classical” algorithms). I do admit, I am not sure how much more (especially after training), but at least the LLMs with their large vector/matrix based approaches eat a lot (I mean that in the case for cross-checking tokens in different vectors or such). Non LLM, ML, may be much more power efficient.

    My main point, however, was that people only remember AI from ~2022 and forgot about things from before (e.g. non LLM, ML algorithms) that were actively used in code completion. Obviously, there are things like ruff, clang-tidy (as you rightfully mentioned) and more that can work without and machine learning. Although, I didn’t check if there literally is none, though I assume it.

    On the point of game “AI”, as in AI opponents, I wasn’t talking of that at all (though since deep mind, they did tend to be a bit more ML based also, and better at games, see Starcraft 2, instead of cheating only to get an advantage)


  • How so? A Large Language Model is usually a transformer based approach nowadays, right (correct me if outdated)?

    AI is artificial intelligence, which has been used and abused for many different things, none of which are intelligent right now (among others used for machine learning).

    Machine learning is based on linear algebra like linear regression or other methods depending what you want to do.

    An algorithm is by definition anything that follows a recipe so to say.

    All of these things, bare transformers and newer in development approaches like spiked neural networks or liquid neural networks are fairly basic, no?

    EDIT: typos


  • Sorry, I think we are talking of the same thing. In Germany that is the way it is. Civil union and marriage is equivalent, you dont have to get married at a church, the only important thing is to go to the state for a few minutes and tell them basically.

    I thought that the problem was that the state still has to accept things such as (whatever you call it lets say) unions of things such as same sex partner and so.

    Problem is the civil union is mostly historically influenced often (tends to be less these days)


  • I am not talking about what it does, I am talking about what it is.

    And all tools do tend to replace human labor. For example, tractors replaced many farmhands.

    The thing we face nowadays, and this is by no means limited to things like AI, is that less jobs are created by new tools than old destroyed (in my earlier simile, a tractor needs mechanics and such).

    The definition of something is entirely disconnected from its usage (mainly).

    And just because everyone calls LLMs now AI, there are plenty of scientific literature and things that have been called AI before. As of now, as it boils down all of these are algorithms.

    The thing with machine learning is just that it is an algorithm that fine tunes itself (which is often blackbox-ish btw). And strictly speaking LLMs, commonly refered to as AI, are a subclass of ML with new technology.

    I make and did not make any statement of the values of that technology or my stance on it



  • The state cares insofar as your partner gets certain rights and will be included as family in many things.

    For instance, deciding for you in medical cases, being informed if something happens, getting money from your life insurance whatever.

    No marriage would mean the two are not connected at all in the states eye and thus not family.

    You could say, ok lets just enable putting that into some record without marriage, but the state wants to safeguard itself as you can get things like citizenship and such

    And in most states that is what you define as civil unions (there is no marriage as such often).













  • Sure. Generally, it is a marker for life as we see it being produced by living organisms on Earth (e.g. Algae) and it also should vanish quickly from atmospheres if it is not replenished.

    However, as you correctly put it, there may always be a non-biological explanation as well for any of these markers, which we might not know as of yet. So far as I know, DMS has no non-biological explanation and is seen as a biological marker still.

    Alas, the possibility of it being proven non-biological or even (as happend here) not a real detection makes it even more important to get more data and be very careful about the statements made from it than as otherwise those statements and/or connected papers have to be corrected/retracted. And if these then reach the public (and why wouldn’t they with the possibility of alien life) then this could diminish the trust in science if it turns out to be wrong.

    Edit: I had a look and as you stated for DMS there may indeed be abiotic ways to produce it (scientific works from this year). They found it in comets and could reproduce it in labs as well.

    My main point of the original comment was to add that the detection (paper) itself was flawed. Regardless of DMS being a sign of life.


  • Astronomer here, the “life detection” on K2-18b was dimethyl sulfide (DMS) which may be ̶I̶s̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶r̶e̶m̶a̶i̶n̶s̶ a marker for life. What you get from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is raw data that needs to be treated and calibrated to some extent to be usable in scientific study. This is called data retrieval.

    However, the lead scientist on this paper claiming they found DMS basically used his own very specific way to do it and found very very weak signals in that way. Other scientist tried to both reproduce it in the way he did it and also with their ways to retrieve the data, but couldn’t find anything. So it turns out, it was simply a non-detection.

    Edit: It might be the case that DMS can be produced abiotically (scientific works of this year) as chosensilence pointed out correctly.

    My main point is, that the DMS detection itself was a non-detection in this case