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Yeah, it's a bit obscure and "meta"...

Y Combinator is named after a computer science concept - the "combinator," and more specifically, the "Y combinator" function. Paul Graham and Robert Morris (co-founders of the Y combinator company), both computer scientists themselves, likely chose the name as a nod to their background and the company's focus on technology startups. The Y combinator function is a higher-order function used in functional programming languages that allows for the creation of anonymous functions, which can be useful for creating new functions from existing ones. This aligns with the company's mission of helping startups to iterate quickly and efficiently.

Also see: https://www.ycombinator.com/faq under `Why did you choose the name “Y Combinator?`


Thank you!


Catchy name. He should also make another social media company called Truth Social. Oh wait..


X-Truth


You can use their online tool to see how it tokenizes words: https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer


It's worth noting that this only for GPT-3. If you're using ChatGPT or GPT-4, both use a different tokenizer that's more robust and uses/generates about 10% fewer tokens. (unclear how well it performs for non-English languages)

You can test it offline using tiktoken: https://github.com/openai/tiktoken


Here's online version: https://tiktokenizer.vercel.app/


10% smaller vocab size, or 10% fewer tokens on average? I assume the latter, but total vocab size is also an interesting metric.

The tokenization speedups in that repo are very impressive. It was the most annoying part about processing 190,000 books. I think it took a few days on a server with 96 cores.

Surprisingly hard to figure out the vocab size from that repo.


10% fewer tokens on average.

The vocab size itself is doubled. (~50k for GPT-2/3, ~100k for ChatGPT)


Wow. Does that help to double the vocab size?

It certainly makes training more expensive. One clever trick to get some memory savings is to freeze the vocab embedding layer when fine tuning. It makes a noticeable improvement, both in speed and in mem required.

Surprised they went the larger vocab route. LLaMA is only 30k. I wonder what the reason is...

Thanks!


A larger vocab takes longer to train but has no (practical) impact at inference time as an Embeddings index is just a key-value store, which is very helpful as GPT starts hitting scaling laws.


Depends on person to person. For me it's on the order of ~20-30 minutes.


Terrible idea. Any form of biometrics are effectively passwords that can not be changed/rotated. If the data is compromised/leaked even once, it's useless.

Edit: That said, one of the other commented this: "Eyeballs are usernames not passwords". I think that's ok-ish...


I switched in the other direction (Mac to Linux).

I grew up with Windows PC's + laptops and Mac's keyboard and general way of doing things was just always really unintuitive (maybe infuriating?) for me.

I also didn't like Mac's prescriptive attitude toward me as a user. It's MY machine. I bought it, it belongs to ME. I should be able to do whatever I want to the deepest parts of the configs if I feel inclined to do so. (Like "right to repair" I would like something similar to "right to full control of my own hardware")


I think I once got it to get out of "buy" mode by lying to it and telling it I'm in a sanctioned country. Maybe it's a trick that could work for you :)


Isn't that a good thing though? I.e. promote the production of more training material for the immune system for longer?

(Please correct me in the thread if my understanding is incorrect)


The more worrying thing here is the "circulate" part. Meaning that the lipid packages containing the mRNA sequences are traveling throughout the body, instead of staying at the injection site.


> instead of staying at the injection site.

We've known that forever. There's been studies done with luciferase to see where the mRNA triggers protein production in small animals.

We know that a big portion of the activity is in the liver, distant from the IM injection site (a lot of the activity is at the site, too).

e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4624045/

"When mRNA-LNPs were injected intramuscularly and intratracheally, similar to intravenous and intraperitoneal deliveries, a large portion of the luciferase activity was detectable in the liver, demonstrating systemic spread of the nanoparticles."


Yes, and people like Bret Weinstein say this is a massive problem and why there’s heart inflammation, if the mrna enters heart muscle your immune system might well attack it, the problem is - heart muscle does not get remade.


The problem with this is that there's simpler explanations. Myocarditis is more frequent with C19 infection than vaccination, so it seems spike protein circulating is "enough".

Also this study didn't find significant uptake of mRNA in the heart (though it did find notable uptake in the lungs).


The Mycocarditis line is not true - it highly depends on gender and age. Repeating that its more frequent for infection outright is wrong, it is only in certain sub-populations (female, older).


https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA....

See tables 3 and 4.

Moderna does seem to have an effect in the direction you name; the Pfizer vaccine seems to have a lower risk than infection in all categories. Overall, the myocarditis risk is lower with vaccination than infection with both Moderna and Pfizer, but it may not be in some subpopulations with Moderna.


It’s such a dumb topic too - because when you focus solely on the myocarditis risk stratification between Covid and the vaccine, you lose sight of all of the other morbidities that come with Covid. It’s like that video making the rounds right now where Bill Maher is trumpeting that the infection provides as strong protection against severe disease compared to the vaccine. Cool! Not actually surprising but kind of misses the obvious point that it involves you getting Covid, a serious, highly transmissible disease, when you could get the same protection without the illness.. I guess you could use the evidence to adjust guidance on vaccine schedule but protection still wanes over time so..


It's dumb to dismiss it.

Finland, Denmark and Sweden recommend against getting vaccination for young men as they have almost no risk with Covid outside of extreme co-morbidities.


They didn't actually do that - and you should change your media diet if you sincerely believe that they did.

Denmark is probably the most stark -- after they had >80% uptake in their initial vaccination drive and then Omicron proved to be less dangerous, they no longer recommend boosters for under 50s unless you have risk factors.

Sweden still recommends 3 doses for everyone over the age of 18 (https://www.krisinformation.se/en/hazards-and-risks/disaster....) They no longer recommend that all children receive the vaccine but that's a much more neutral stance than "recommend against getting it".

And Finland still recommends the vaccine for everyone, almost regardless of age (https://thl.fi/en/web/infectious-diseases-and-vaccinations/w...)

You may be confusing their recommendations with their preference of the Pfizer over the Moderna vaccine in men?


So they did stop recommending it? Tbh I’m not tracking every countries exact status and don’t need to to make the point, in fact your citations only strengthen it.

There’s are a whole list of countries that have backed off recommending vaccines for the young and that alone is enough to disprove your attempt to dismiss a very, very important topic.

By doing so you potentially have moral responsibility to men who may be missing out on critical info that could save their lives. The data supports it and the fact that many very pro vaccine countries are now stepping back their recommendation is a massive positive indicator that it’s worth discussing.

I don’t have to prove beyond a doubt it’s unsafe, just that there’s gray area. You meanwhile called any gray area dumb, and therefore need to prove beyond a doubt that it has clear benefit to young men. It doesn’t.

And yes the banning of Moderna is a huge, massive piece data because we know it’s much worse re: Myocarditis. So we basically know for a fact it’s a bad trade off for young men. Pfizer would require your own research but again it’s not clear it’s even neutral. So why argue it’s dumb to even discus? This is the sort of weird argumentation I’ve seen throughout the pandemic where it’s like a religion that can’t ever admit faults lest it all come apart. You can admit there were mistakes and are flaws, it’s ok, it doesn’t ruin your belief system at all.


Denmark suggests 2 doses for all over 18.

Finland and Sweden suggest 3 doses for everybody over 18; Finland recommends vaccine for everyone.

None recommend against vaccine in children.

This is very, very, very far from "recommend against getting vaccination for young men" which is simply wrong (uninformed or bad faith?) They all recommend young men get vaccinated.


First off, over 18 isn't really youth anymore so changing goalposts.

Why are you saying false things? They categorically don't recommend young anyone to be vaccinated.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/finland-limit-childrens...

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/sweden-decides-against-...

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...

I was very careful to say they withdrew recommending it, which is true.

Now the interesting convo is why they did that, which you seem to be keen to avoid.

---

Not to mention its easy to bring in tons more data to show it's worth a discussion. Whether countries recommend for/against is weak, but still here a strong signal because these countries have been very pro-vaccine and naturally will avoid admitting things to protect themselves, so any admission is big.

https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19vaccin...

---

The realest question here is why? Why try and cordon this scientific discussion away as off-limits when it's clearly an evolving and unsettled story. I'm so curious to figure out exactly what's going on and follow the research. Just feels strange to come in blasting saying you know the truth and this topic is settled when it clearly isn't. Why?


> I was very careful to say they withdrew recommending it, which is true.

You know we can all see the chain of comments here, right?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34886149

> Finland, Denmark and Sweden recommend against getting vaccination for young men

"Withdrew recommending" is them reverting to a neutral stance -- "recommended against" is very much not neutral - and it's still wrong in either case because 2/3 countries you listed still recommend for vaccinating all young men.

It's so tiringly frustrating to discuss any of this with antivaxxers. Your language is so imprecise and sloppy that it's impossible to have anything resembling a productive conversation. I provided links to the actual policies published by the actual countries here and your response is just spamming with vaguely related news articles and insinuations instead of a moment's reflection that maybe, just maybe, your confidence in your understanding of any of this is misplaced.


Avoid using "anti-vaxx" to describe everyone that disagrees with exactly your opinions, it really hurts your argument.

Try defending your point rather than name calling.

I will agree my "against" wording was a bit strong but I corrected it in the last reply anyway, so again this isn't a gotcha. But I'm very much closer to truth than saying they are still recommending it, you changed the denominator to over-18.

Withdrawing a recommendation is recommending against of course - if someone says they recommend to do something, they say they DON'T recommend to do it, and I told you "the government is no longer recommending youth take it based on efficacy and Myocarditis risks" who would you think that statement more supports in this thread? My arguments or yours? It's very clear.

It's also the strongest we could reasonably expect as governments are very conservative and self-interested.

Every article linked is relevant.

Meanwhile you are doing exactly what you want to do - distract from the fact that this is a real issue by trying to bury the conversation behind a bunch of sequiturs about pedantism, language, name calling, exasperation, etc.


“Men” implies age of adulthood, or close, to me. Young men are dudes from, say, 16 to 27.


I'm not sure if you're arguing in bad faith or are simply confused about the facts.


I think the data still supports what I said, even in that article, but also if you want to be really accurate you'd need a meta review of a variety of articles I've read now in detail, and my general intuition is its clear that < ~30yr old men are higher risk.


Bret Weinstein is an obvious grifter


Can you explain why circulation is not ok? Are vaccines designed to not circulate in blood streams?


The mRNA-based covid shots (and the adenovirus-vector covid shots) are a wee bit different in how they operate than pre-covid vaccines.

Modified covid spike proteins are produced by host (i.e. a vaccinee's) cells. The spike proteins are anchored within the cells but "poke out" through the cellular membranes so they're able to elicit an immune system response.

The cells expressing the mod-spike are ultimately destroyed. If you review pop-sci / marketing materials produced by Pfizer and Moderna and government agencies and non-profits who promoted the shots, the fate of these cells will be glossed over, but that's what happens.

This is why it was important that the contents of the jabs stayed in the muscle tissue near the injection site and the process of translating all of the vax mRNA into mod-spike be rapid. If vax mRNA travelled around via the circulatory system and was taken up by cells in, say, the walls of blood vessels throughout the body or cells in the heart or pericardium or in other tissues, then some cells in those locales would be destroyed and, if enough cells in the wrong place at the wrong time were destroyed this way, bad things could happen. Observing vax mRNA persisting or existing weeks and weeks post-administration is not good for this (and additional) reasons.


Now I'm curious, if you get infected by the virus itself, does the same thing not happen?


You speak really confidently on this topic, can you share your background with regards to immunology/bioscience?


Everything he's saying is common knowledge to anyone who has researched this topic. Having a background in bioscience would not help and most likely hurt, because people within those fields are highly incentivized to suppress bad news about their prior actions.


To quote GP

> If vax mRNA travelled around via the circulatory system and was taken up by cells in, say, the walls of blood vessels throughout the body or cells in the heart or pericardium or in other tissues, then some cells in those locales would be destroyed…

This is something that you would consider to be common knowledge?


To anyone who has researched this topic, yes, and many other things. How do you think the mRNA vaccines work? If you got interested in vaccines around the middle of 2021 and started finding and subscribing to the right blogs and people, you know a whole lot of things about this topic that other people don't. These sorts of threads are a bit frustrating because it involves watching people catch up to where we were 12 months ago.


Can you link me to the papers that make that particular paragraph obvious?

Also can you elaborate on why having prior knowledge on this topic disqualifies you from being knowledgeable on this topic?

Wouldn’t the papers you’ve read have been written by people in the field of immunology or bioscience? How are those people not disqualified due to prior knowledge?

edit: Also please elaborate on how I identify the “right” blogs.

Sorry this is frustrating for you. I do not regularly come to HN for biology knowledge from software devs that can’t seem to provide any sources or credentials. What GP is trying to convey comes pretty close to medical advice and “people that have studied this professionally are categorically untrustworthy” seems a bit like some uh, less than germane bullshit, to be frank.


OK let's work through the claims.

1. The vaccines cause cells to take up the mRNA and express the spike on their surface. This is uncontroversial and covered in any detailed enough intro to how the vaccines work, see the diagram here for an example:

https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/Understand...

2. This results in the cells being destroyed. This is exactly what you'd expect if you've sat through teen-level biology classes: T cells (CD8+) identify other cells that appear to be expressing antigens and destroy them. Bioscience people hate admitting this in plain English, so finding papers stating it clearly is a complete pain in the ass. They normally only talk about "stimulating a cellular response". But this page does at least partly spell it out:

https://www.pri-med.com/blog/2020/the-new-mrna-vaccine-expla...

> In contrast to the older vaccine models, the Moderna and Pfizer research shows that the new mRNA vaccines produce powerful helper and cytotoxic T cell responses

Cytotoxic means "kills cells".

3. If they got into the heart, they'd destroy heart cells. Here's a case study series paper that looks at heart damage caused by vaccines:

https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/23/13/6940/html?s=09

> Importantly, infectious causes have been excluded in all patients. The SARS-CoV-2 spike protein has been detected sparsely on cardiomyocytes of nine patients, and differential analysis of inflammatory markers such as CD4+ and CD8+ T cells suggests that the inflammatory response triggered by the vaccine may be of autoimmunological origin.

i.e. the heart sac becomes inflamed because the immune system attacks it, and the immune system attacks it because of the vaccine.

> edit: Also please elaborate on how I identify the “right” blogs.

They tend to cross-link to each other a lot. Start from the Alex Berenson archives, El Gato Malo, Igor Chudov, Daily Sceptic. None are perfect but they are well network and try to build arguments based on published papers and primary evidence. If you don't like them, branch out from there. Also look on HN with showdead turned on. Many inconvenient stories about the vaccines get flagkilled.

> “people that have studied this professionally are categorically untrustworthy” seems a bit like some uh, less than germane bullshit, to be frank.

Sure, and I guess Google employees are the world's experts on ads and privacy so if they say something about those topics you couldn't possibly disagree right? Also, oil companies are the world's expert in energy, so we should do whatever they say, and so on and so forth.

Hate to break it to you but yes, people who have studied these topics professionally are categorically untrustworthy. If they say or do anything that might reduce people's willingness to take vaccines they get fired and sometimes blacklisted from their entire profession, ending their careers overnight. Any attempt to speak out is systematically suppressed by the media who have all complicit in pressuring people to take the vaccines too. No surprise that the only people who can actually talk honestly are the ones who aren't already fully committed.


How do you supposed "normal" vaccines work?


> not circulate in blood streams?

when you do an intramuscular or subcutaneous injection you don't end up in the blood stream typically


Is that true? I remember my daughter had a severe bacterial infection and they couldn't get an IV in her so they did an intramuscular injection of antibiotics.


It's probably neither a good or a bad thing, it's just a "we found something that may guide our future understanding of how mRNA vaccines work". Sounds like basic research that has no direct implications.


The surprise is why this was never tested before by Pfizer or Moderna themselves. For all drugs you typically evaluate how they are metabolized in the body, and this has never been published before. Very sloppy standards.


You are likely looking for the research done on flu vaccinations.

From 2017 https://www.flagshippioneering.com/press/moderna-announces-p...

And also from 2017 Safety, Reactogenicity, and Immunogenicity of mRNA-1653 in Healthy Adults https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT03392389

The research and testing for mRNA had been a decade in the making and was already present in 2019.


You need to do that for every new drug marketed, you can't just refer to prior art.


In my view, underestimating the platform's capabilities may lead one to assume its imminent shutdown. For instance, I find the platform particularly useful for generating succinct bullet-point summaries of articles, enabling me to consume content in 1 minute instead of, say, 15 minutes.


Likely OK in a relatively basic, factual context.

But the point here is that as the subtlety and abstraction level of the material increases, the value of the statistical brute-forcing tapers off.

But one is less likely to apply such a tool to more challenging texts, in any case.


Because of "Agile" planning practices. Get things barely working (MVP) then move onto the next project to make sure your manager's manager stays happy.


It does seem like software quality declined as these methods rose in adoption. But most software was crap before that, too.


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