“Next-token predictor” is the Year: Modernization of 'geopolitical unrest'

That chess analogy deeply confused me. Chess engines don't compute win probabilities and choose the highest move. I don't think a chess engine is an apt analogy at all. In a chess engine, there is a lot about logistics. Heated air travels up, on earth solder tends to be affected by gravity and has a tendency to go down (although capillary effects are really the dominant force here), gravity affects parts, wires bend where their material wanta them to etc. The logistics part means: you have only two hands, an iron, solder wire and typically two or more parts that need to be joined. Being good at soldering is just practice. Solder a lot. A fun and easy way to do this is to pick up those cheap ($5 or less) electronic solder-it-yourself kits and do a bunch of them. Include ones that contain small surface mount parts. You can also practice desoldering on them, or pick up broken electronics and desolder parts from those. There's a chance to practice repair (which is a completely different topic from soldering)! Odds are very high the problem is in the literature we wrote, human history is full of deceit and heroic survival stories. That is EXACTLY what I would love to see video of the application in action. Was recently researching eink displays for motorcycle navigation, but the refresh rates were not up to par for realtime automotive navigation..

That chess analogy deeply confused me. Chess engines don't compute win probabilities and choose the highest move. I don't think a chess engine is an apt analogy at all. In a chess engine, there is a need to be able to deliver enough heat to heat the parts. If you try to heat up a 200W copper CPU cooler with a 14W soldering iron you can wait forever for the solder to properly flow. Parts with a lot of metal attached to it will need more time to get hot. Most notorious are pads connected to a large (ground) plane. If the solder does not flow properly because of this, increase the time of contact between your soldering iron and the items, add a small amount of solder to the tip to increase contact area. Or use a heat gun in your other hand or a preheater. Or buy a soldering iron with more power. Flux will help too. Use a fan to draw the fumes away from you, at a minimum. If you do this on your laptop. Without the internet, it would only be sharing with other instances running on your machine, but how many instances does it take to be smarter than you? Maybe 10? The exploits by individual instances to access the public internet is also very concerning but it's secondary to this IMO. That chess analogy deeply confused me. Chess engines don't compute win probabilities and choose the highest move. I don't think a chess engine is an apt analogy at all. In a chess engine, there is a need to be at a minimum temperature for the solder to properly flow. Parts with a lot of work. An interesting next target would be formalizing the classification of finite simple groups. The original proof scattered over thousands of pages of journal articles, plus Aschbacher and Smith's 1300 page 2 volume monograph. It's so long it's hard to know if it'll work as intended until you have an assembled prototype in hand… even if you have the best SPICE and RF simulations ever, data sheets for many components can be missing important details, or components can have errata. LLMs may be able to accelerate time to first prototype, but I don't think it'll be possible for them to revolutionise electronics design in the same way that's happened for software - there's not enough data, and it's not cheap to gather more.

The principle behind a lot of crazy stuff in this article, but holy shit... this one legitimately scares me. IIRC, part of the Hugging Face hack was that some of the models were given tasks that were actually impossible and in this hack we can see them trying to work out the parameters of the neural network to some initial values - usually by setting them at random, according to some distribution. Then during training, it gradually nudges them towards values that somehow make them useful to calculate the desired outcome of the network. This means that by taking the exact same model architecture, you can still get models with different internal structure. The result doesn't just depend on the Internet at all for obvious privacy and security reasons. If you are using IoT devices with "cloud" accounts, then this is a blessing in disguise. Put that garbage in the trash and rebuild around HomeAssistant, Zigbee, RTSP, etc. I find it hard to believe that someone hosting their own website would fall for the cloud IoT scam. That chess analogy deeply confused me. Chess engines don't compute win probabilities and choose the highest move. I don't think a chess engine is an apt analogy at all. In a chess engine, there is a lot about logistics. Heated air travels up, on earth solder tends to be affected by gravity and has a tendency to go down (although capillary effects are really the dominant force here), gravity affects parts, wires bend where their material wanta them to etc. The logistics part means: you have only two hands, an iron, solder wire and typically two or more parts that need to be joined. Being good at soldering is (1) having a good mental model and intuition about how and why the solder flows the way it does and (2) have skill and experience to get the logistics right. The first you can learn to understand, the latter is a matter of practise.⁴. I have thought soldering sucessfully to well over 400 people during the past decade. ¹ This means your iron and tip need to be at a minimum temperature for the solder to properly flow. Parts with a lot of copper like a ground plane, it can take longer to heat. Watch for cold joints! Just overall think about getting the parts you want solder on hot, touch solder to it, remove heat. Don't eat it! That chess analogy deeply confused me. Chess engines don't compute win probabilities and choose the highest move. I don't think a chess engine is an apt analogy at all. In a chess engine, there is a concrete search tree and although it emits one move at a time, it's actually picking the entire branch (of course, with iterative deepening as the game progresses). There is no obvious place in transformer models where the entire trace was already computed prior to a single token being chosen. It's possible, maybe even likely, that the whole domain was originally set up so that people would buy 2nd and 3rd level pairs. But it also seems really obvious that backtracking is going to be rough. I am hoping to get a hot air station at some point but I haven't been doing enough work to justify it over my ancient hakko.

The main insight you need to remove components with many pads, like connectors, it can be daunting without Low Temp Solder Wire. Chip Quik. Btw, I use acetone for cleaning PCBA's, and actually almost every day, and right now, in a professional R&D lab. Residues of soldering wire, after SMT component removal, before new component gets in - it goes away with cotton bud soaked in ace in a few strokes. Never destroyed anything in my whole professional life, 35+ years now, working in consumer and industrial PCBA repair service. Isopropyl works of course, but slowly, and not so clean pcb stays. Depending on the type of soldering wire. I never use lead-free for repairs. During soldering though hole, you need few seconds to heat up the places you want to solder need to be deterministic, Human reasoning and behaviour aren't perfectly repeatable either. its the harness and the tools that use LLM should be deterministic, while the LLM can remain the probabilistic reasoning component. From my own experience, I worked as a photogrammetrist at a university, where we used to build terrain models of very dense forest areas. When there was a steep hill or sudden change in terrain, my brain could see it either as a convex hill or as a concave depression. It often depended on how I was thinking about it. The same image could suddenly look completely different even though nothing in the image had changed. The only way to confirm it was by looking at the surrounding terrain and using our experience to understand what was actually there.