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I built non-autoregressive decision models with RL a year ago

1363 points · 319 comments · nandakishor_ml

  1. johnfn · · focus · HN ↗
    It’s a tale as old as time — people don’t understand that marketing and branding are just as important, if not more so, than the product. Jev is exceptionally-well branded. Anyone can look at the webpage and understand it, and the implications, instantly.

    OPs “marketing” is a single post on Reddit titled “ Predicting sales conversion probability from conversations using pure Reinforcement Learning”. Can you understand what that means? I can’t, and I consider myself reasonably technical. Is it obvious it has the same implications as Jev? Again, no idea. And it was just a single post on a subreddit that I don’t even browse! I see people on this thread saying “Jev is just BERT”. Sure, and Dropbox is just a ftp account mounted with curlftpfs!

    I do feel bad for the author for finding something cool and being unable to brand it. But the full definition of “product” INCLUDES being able to coherently communicate it. In some sense the branding is just as much the “breakthrough” as the model.

    1. geuis · · focus · HN ↗
      I don't understand why people continue to use em-dashes. As far I know, the comment system on HN doesn't offer them. And iOS and android don't make them a default. They aren't something normally used by humans because - is a keyboard option that's easier to use.

      The usage of them immediately makes your commentary suspect. Either you aren't using the standard web interface to make a comment, you're using and odd 3rd party client, or its LLM generated.

      1. isityettime · · focus · HN ↗
        I've been using compose keys on desktop operating systems and the default keyboard on Android to write em-dashes for 10 years. I also use LLMs every workday, but I have never once used one to write, review, or edit prose because my voice is important to me.

        I don't give a shit if my Hacker News comments sometimes look "suspect" to some people. The way I use language is deeply personal and I'm not going to let the clankers or reactionaries against them take it away from me.

        1. hbarka · · focus · HN ↗
          Hear, hear! An em-dash is a great stylistic device for structuring sentences. It saddens me that the use of it now has become some sort of scarlet letter. I’m hoping the co-opting can be reversed.
      2. swingboy · · focus · HN ↗
        On a Mac it’s literally just option+dash.
        1. kwinkunks · · focus · HN ↗
          That's an en-dash (eg for number ranges). You need option+shift+dash for an em-dash.
      3. johnfn · · focus · HN ↗
        I just typed dash twice into iPhone. Hardly a “non-standard” web interface. Also, I’d like to think my comment was higher quality than anything an LLM could generate! At least, yet.
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