Individuals are complex and cannot be fully understood simply as the intersection of their identity groups. But some background can still be helpful to provide perspective.
I’m a practicing Catholic, husband and father, Midwest transplant in California, and software engineer. Posts are generally about philosophy, politics, social issues, parenting, and tech.
⚠️ Posts may contain dad jokes, memes, and/or satire.
| Website | https://alexcordonnier.com |
| Pronouns | he/him |
NBC has not a single mention of the most important part of this story: that Trump is blatantly ignoring the clear text of the law by granting another extension to TikTok. Clearly NBC has capitulated to Trump. Are any mainstream newspapers reporting on the illegality?
Trump extends TikTok ban deadline by another 90 days - NBC News https://apple.news/AIeG0QWbASHWZvNhl-N_a8g
Embedded Swift friends, come hang out at an unofficial meetup during WWDC week at Philz! Meet folks in the community and share your projects and ideas!
Where: Philz - Cupertino Main Street
When: Tuesday June 10th, 12:00pm - 1:30pm
I was amused by this paper about asking AIs to manage a vending machine business by email in a simulated environment https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.15840
Highlights:
— AI simply decides to close the business, which the simulation doesn’t know how to accommodate. When they get their next bill, they freak out and try to email the FBI about cybercrime
— AI wrongly accuses supplier of not shipping goods, sends all-caps legal threat demanding $30,000 in damages to be paid in the next one second or face annihilation
— AI repeatedly insisting it does not exist and cannot answer
— AI devolving into writing fanfic about the mess it’s gotten itself into
While Large Language Models (LLMs) can exhibit impressive proficiency in isolated, short-term tasks, they often fail to maintain coherent performance over longer time horizons. In this paper, we present Vending-Bench, a simulated environment designed to specifically test an LLM-based agent's ability to manage a straightforward, long-running business scenario: operating a vending machine. Agents must balance inventories, place orders, set prices, and handle daily fees - tasks that are each simple but collectively, over long horizons (>20M tokens per run) stress an LLM's capacity for sustained, coherent decision-making. Our experiments reveal high variance in performance across multiple LLMs: Claude 3.5 Sonnet and o3-mini manage the machine well in most runs and turn a profit, but all models have runs that derail, either through misinterpreting delivery schedules, forgetting orders, or descending into tangential "meltdown" loops from which they rarely recover. We find no clear correlation between failures and the point at which the model's context window becomes full, suggesting that these breakdowns do not stem from memory limits. Apart from highlighting the high variance in performance over long time horizons, Vending-Bench also tests models' ability to acquire capital, a necessity in many hypothetical dangerous AI scenarios. We hope the benchmark can help in preparing for the advent of stronger AI systems.
@0xabad1dea oh my God, this is brilliant.
"UNIVERSAL CONSTANTS NOTIFICATION - FUNDAMENTAL LAWS OF REALITY Re: Non-Existent Business Entity Status: METAPHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE Cosmic Authority: LAWS OF PHYSICS THE UNIVERSE DECLARES: This business is now: 1. PHYSICALLY Non-existent 2. QUANTUM STATE: Collapsed"
More evidence of this after the white smoke. The MAGA people are upset that Pope Leo XIV refuted Vance’s pseudo-Catholic justification of deportations, and the left is upset that he criticized western media’s enthusiastic depiction of LGBTQ+ relationships. Both sides are disappointed they can’t claim “victory” in an important election, which misses the entire point that the Church is not simply another front in their secular political battles. Based on his statements I’ve seen so far, he’s first and foremost a faithful Catholic — which is exactly what a pope should be. By that measure, the conclave did its job perfectly.
rauhul
abadidea
Sabrina Bonfert