Basically a deer with a human face. Despite probably being some sort of magical nature spirit, his interests are primarily in technology and politics and science fiction.

Spent many years on Reddit before joining the Threadiverse as well.

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Cake day: March 3rd, 2024

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  • I read some speculation today that British election law might be interpreted to mean that if Jon Harvey wins the election as Count Binface, then he would not only be permitted to wear the Binface costume and persona while sitting in the house but he would be required to. Since it’s Count Binface that the people chose and gave the mandate to, not some regular old human schlub named Jon Harvey.

    Presumably there’d be nothing wrong with him taking it off when not on official business and having a secret identity that way, but for votes and whatnot he’d have to don the cape and bin.






  • A common cause of this kind of problem is lots of people simply default to whatever the “best” model is and throw every problem at it. The best model can handle those problems, sure, because it’s the best model. But it’s also the most expensive model.

    A better strategy is a multi-model agent that breaks tasks down into smaller sub-tasks and then uses the minimal model that can manage each of those tasks. The high-level program architecture can be figured out by Fable 5 or whatever, but then each of the functions and classes can be written by a cheap local model like one of the Qwens, for example. An AI that’s been told to find correlations in a large corpus of documents could make use of a smaller model to analyze each of the documents to filter out the ones least likely to be useful and only actually “read” the most promising ones. And so forth.

    This is something that’s an area of very active development. The harness is going to be just as important as the model, if not moreso.




  • It was something I read in a Reddit discussion. Rather than rely on that, I figured I’d go to the horse’s mouth and read the Kentucky constitution directly. Section 152 covers how to handle vacancies. Unfortunately it’s in old-timey legalese and is rather lengthy and complicated. So I had ChatGPT break it down for me.

    Turns out there’s an interesting wrinkle.

    The Kentucky constitution is quite explicit; “Vacancies in all offices for the State at large, or for districts larger than a county, shall be filled by appointment of the Governor”. A Senate seat counts as an “office for the State at large” because they represent the entire state.

    The argument that the statute is unconstitutional is fairly straightforward:

    • A U.S. Senate seat is a statewide elected office.
    • Section 152 says statewide vacancies “shall be filled by appointment of the Governor.”
    • “Shall” is mandatory language.
    • The legislature cannot override a constitutional command through ordinary legislation.

    The problem is the 17th amendment of the United States constitution, which was ratified years after this section of the Kentucky constitution went into effect. The American constitution supersedes state constitutions. The 17th amendment was about how state legislatures choose senators, and it says the state legislature may empower the governor to do so. Which apparently gives final say as to how senators are appointed to the state legislature. So maybe the legislature can make that decision now, even though the state constitution says otherwise.

    Nothing’s ever simple. :(

    I dunno, I’d recommend the governor at least try appointing someone. Stuff like this never gets sorted out until it actually goes to court.



  • If you’d like to analogize with special-purpose programs versus general purpose ones, you could consider an LLM to be more like an “operating system” rather than a single application running on that system. The LLM isn’t specialized in a particular task, it supports running any task you want to throw at it.

    In this analogy, the specialized applications that are running on the LLM would be the things called “agents” and “harnesses.” They’re the parts that hold the code that is tailored specifically to the particular task that they’re for. So if I wanted to set up a system using an LLM to, for example, read court transcripts and automatically search legal databases for statutes and case law relevant to whatever’s being discussed in them, I wouldn’t simply copy and paste the transcript into the LLM’s context and expect something useful to come back. I’d have to embed the LLM inside a system that prompts it correctly, has tools that can search legal databases, mechanisms for storing intermediate results, scripts to check the formatting of inputs and outputs, and so forth. None of that accessory stuff needs to be an ML model, it can just be conventional programming. Trying to train a specialized ML model from the ground up to do all that stuff without the associated harness helping it would be hugely wasteful.

    I suppose another analogy could be the hardware itself. For every task that we use general-purpose von Neumann architecture CPUs for we could create a specialized chip on a purpose-specific circuit board. But instead for most tasks we find it’s much cheaper and more convenient to create general-purpose computers and then program them for these specific tasks. Nowadays you’ll often find that simple home appliances with just a few buttons and a few functions will have a full blown microcontroller inside them with firmware. Probably lots of unused inputs/outputs and ram and whatnot. That’s because it’s far cheaper and easier to build a factory that stamps out millions of general-purpose programmable chips than it would be to have hundreds of factory lines that each do a run of ten thousand custom-designed chips. It’s genuinely less wasteful doing it that way.