alt Hacker NewsAnd yet to this day, in AI threads, so many people act shocked and surprised if you dare follow the obvious implication and claim that understanding is a form of lossy compression.
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kazinator • yesterday at 10:36 PM
Shorter description isn't understanding, let alone of it is lossy.
When you shorten a description in a lossy way, you are deciding a priori that some differences in the object don't matter, and it's not because you understand the object, but because it serves your goal of shortening the description.
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ablob • yesterday at 10:37 PM
If you can predict other things by understanding something, is it truly lossy compression?
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qsera • today at 3:55 AM
>understanding is a form of lossy compression..
No. Teaching is compression. Understanding and application is decompression.
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Of course it is but again "X is just Y" is often used to mislead. A brain is just neurons! A computer is just transistors! An LLM just predicts the next token! It's just like a parrot! It's just like a blurry jpeg of the internet! Kinda yes, but what do you use this for? It's a bad intuition pump is it leads people to conclude demonstrably false things about capabilities.