TheBruceHimself

God, I really want him crushed. It stopped being funny a long time ago. Thanks for your contributions to industry, Elon, but I don’t need a walking meme dominating a strangely large part of the news cycle every single day ..

Divvy meant dividend! The thing the co-op used to give you for shopping there and old ladies used to obsess over. Come to think it, they were a right bunch of fucking divs.

There was a similar controversy recently in the UK where a radio show was produced with an AI host (with the AI’s voice based on a now-dead famous interviewer). It was a complete novelty. Regardless, there were outcries, but when you looked closer, they were outcries from people in the industry feeling insulted that they could have dome interviewed and made a name for themselves in the radio interview circuit. An AI, particularly of someone who is dead and already had their time in the sun, felt like quite the insult. The territory they were all fighting over was already pretty tiny, and then it shrinks into almost nothing with them left thinking, “Would it really hurt so , much if I could just manually do this thing you’ve automated away?”.

we’re going to see a lot more of this. I can almost guarantee there’s going to be a movie made at some point that just doesn’t have any actors or very limited input from actors. Perhaps an animation with the voices done by very amateur people put through some sort of “acting filter” that makes them sound just as good. Actors will definitely have a lot to say about that. Don’t even get started on AI-generated scripts: the screenwriter guild is already putting things in their contracts to try and limit this.

Who is this “we”? The rest of the world? I don’t think the rest of the world is being asked by America to care. It is Americans caring about Americans or Californians caring for Californians at the very least.

At the end of the day, having your house burned to the ground, having to escape a deadly fire, have you seen everyone go a bit mad and crazy, fearing for your life? These people can be the richest people in the world, and I’d think it’s inhuman not to sympathize with them somewhat. It is a situation every person could find potentially life-destroying and traumatic.

Public debates are swamped with characters who want to make a name for themselves by holding views, having a particular style, or catering to certain demographics. At this point, the debate ceases to ne a way of discussing ideas and opinions. It’s just a way to sell the participants. Likewise, there are many people who want the opposite. They hold opinions but really don’t want to be part of the wider social debate . They don’t want to be public figures defending a particular point. They just want to contribute in some way.

Personally, I’ve also found that stating your opinion, and having it recorded and known to everyone, makes it very hard for you to change your mind. We’re very harsh to people who do change their mind in such circumstances because the first thing we see is a record of them saying the opposite, and then we ask them to explain themselves and judge them like it’s some kind of fault in their character. There are opinions I had when I was 18 years old that I think abhorrent. I don’t want to be associated with them. I’m very happy there’s no record of me having these opinions. I don’t want to have to explain my past like that just to hold the opinions I have in the present. I have found that process never really ends — i’m regularly changing my opinions on beliefs overtime . I wonder what opinions I have now I will look back on with shame. so I try to make sure that I don’t have anything recorded for the end of times under my name just in case I want to distance myself.

I want this software to produce an infinite scroll of content that is tailored towards my tastes, with the algorithm constantly trying to refine the feed by suggesting new things and observing my reaction. It should be available offline running on my own hardware if I choose to do it that way but also available as a paid-for service.

I should be able to favorite and save certain content and share it with other users of the software easily.

I’m sure there are many tricks you could do with this such as caching content in advance to view as to not overload machines at view time or for people with similar interests to share content, though these are all implementation details.

I will say that Copilot is sometimes embarrassingly wrong. It’s strange how brilliant it can be at times and how incredibly dumb it can be other times. I think that just comes as part of the technology right now, but I have made it write quite complex code using the above approach. This approach does, however, require you to understand how the problem should be solved as to have Copilot understand enough to take over.

The wider article focuses on trade deficits and almost assumes they are inherently bad. Though, honestly, are they? Essentially, America gets away with giving smaller amounts of its output to other countries than these countries give America. If someone gives me $2 worth of goods for every $1 worth of goods I give them, I’m not complaining. Why should America?

It’s also not like this is a new thing. America has run a trade deficit every single year since 1975 (and plenty of years prior to 1975 were deficit years). Now isn’t even the highest it’s been; the highest was in 2005. Taking the last 20 years as a timetable, the deficit is pretty normal right now.

Also, do people actually look up what the deficit is? Because it’s 3.77% of GDP. The way people talk about it, you’d think it was in the 10s of percentage points, but it’s not… it’s honestly pretty minor.

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Tennibot

Funding to date: $200k

What the startup does: Makes a robot that picks up tennis balls

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It's truly both exhilarating and terrifying to contemplate the profound impact this will have on our lives. It will likely alter our way of life in ways few of us, if any, of can even begin to fathom

It must be unsustainable on some level but what’s going to need to happen for people to stop thinking this way? I used to think it wouldn’t take much but now I think it might take a lot. It wouldn’t surprise me if this lasts another decade or more and all this looks like the Japanese economy of the 70s and 80s when it was the future, its corporations were taking over the world, and all its investments made the returns you couldn’t get elsewhere. The one day, suddenly, all that started to sound silly.

Or it could all just pop tomorrow because some CEO sends a bad tweet. Heck, it’s all soothsaying.

Hum, so they think the future will be all growth with no losses, need significantly more capital, and some clever people to allocate it wisely... surely just a coincidence but it sounds a little like wishful thinking on Blackrock's part. What investment company is going to come to the conclusion the future is boom and bust, requires little capital investment, and the best strategy is just mindless broad market investment strategies that anyone can do without involving middle men?

If you want to argue that people could theoretically discover a lot more gold or bring in an asteroid one day full of it, okay, but then why not just by land then? Even better than gold, there's a potential for some income too. Or why not just go with something that's equally as scarce like vintage wine? You literally can't make anymore wine of a particular year; it's inherently scarce.

LLMs worked way better than people thought they would. Most of the experts in AI were floored by how well they worked. I think of LLMs as more of a discovery than an invention. We didn't really know what we were doing, and some people had some cute ideas about predicting responses based on modeling languages, and this really useful thing kind of just fell out of that endeavor. From that initial shock, we just kept adding more to it to see how far it could go.

What's important to appreciate is we have an extremely poor understanding of how intelligence appear to emerge from these models. Much like our own intelligence, we can explain parts and have ideas of roughly how it fits together, but on the whole, it's a bit of a mystery. We're like early bridge builders having discovered an arch in the design stops them from collapsing. We've gained a useful piece of knowledge which we can share and make things better, but we're missing the value of knowing why it all works as it does, and without that, it's harder to know what else we can do to improve things. We just throw more LLMs tech at the problem to make it better, just like the bridge builders used to throw more arches on a bridge to make them safer.

The other thing is, LLMs just appear to function so much better than almost anything else we've come up with. Nothing really comes close. There doesn't appear to be fruitful new tangential things to jump onto, incorporate, or do anything with. So, basically, if LLMs peak, we're probably just going to go back and try random things in a semi-directionless manner and hope we can discover what the next step up is from this. It's not completely blind as we can make educated guesses, but it's a slow process

Alternatively, though, since we don't understand LLMs we also don't really know what their limits are. There could be a good bit more growth left in them. It could be that putting 10x more resources into these models will end up with a AI that quite simply is human-level. There's nothing really to say that's not possible. There are some distinguist thinkeres that are beginning to argue our own intelligence may be just a biological LLM.

At either rate, Thousands of years of continuous power is interesting but I don’t think we have much applications that could make use of it yet. At best we’d maybe put one in an interstellar probe when we feel like doing that but i cant think of much else

I used to be 205lb and people would refuse to believe I was overweight. I thanked them for the compliment but always reminded them “I know I’m not, im well above what any medical text would call a healthy weight”. I even had one friend who’d call me “skinny”… it’s politeness by some but by a lot of others it’s just a complete shift in standards and expectations.

Everything in the U.S. is geared towards husky folk. Big portions, lots of calories, and the idea of walking even a mile to get somewhere? Forget about it. The new weight loss drugs may help but they are fighting a lot of entrenched “stuff” that just makes being overweight easier and less burdensome.

I also find the "Honorable" thing rather interesting. It's about the only time where I can see the archaic ghost of British pomp and nobility leaking through to the US political conventions. The US did so well getting rid of almost all of it (and good riddance, honestly) yet an elected official still gets to be "The Honorable Mr X". It's not even descriptive of their role, it's just enforced flattery.

A PhD is a waste of time if you're in terms of improving your income. It's just an apprenticeship in research, so it's only good if you want to do that as a career. In terms of enjoyment, I think a PhD is really tied to how much joy you can derive from research, much of which is months and months of work to just prove one or two incredibly minor things (which, honestly, are going to be of little interest to anyone and basically will serve only to show you can do research, not that what you were researching was in any way noteworthy). For me, I loved my time as a PhD student because what I was researching involved learning and using a lot of cool stuff, and I really liked the academic community "feel" and culture (for all its many, many faults).

1. Is it easier to do in a decentralized manner? 2. Does decentralization improve the end-user product?

You need at least one of these questions to have a "yes" answer to have a shot but every time it's "no" "no"

I say this because he was damned right and wish more people would just say master's are not a requirement for pretty much anything. Prior to getting into a program "early," I was going to go do a master's just to be allowed to apply to PhD programs. The courses i was looking at offered me nothing but a badge. I found those who wanted to go do master's were, more often than not, just lost people who thought it was the natural 'next thing to do' after undergraduate study; like they were in a video game and the master's was the next harder level to beat.

The only good thing I've found worth doing a master's for is to retrain and specialize, but I find this is more reflective of having not really utilized your undergraduate degree than anything else. It's a welcome second chance, but gosh, it's a racket far too often. F anyone who thinks you need one to do anything.

How about I just hold the politician I vote for to account? If the argument here is that I’m bad at doing that, then why would holding an interest group account work out any better?

Additionally, it’s nice since I don’t need to find an interest group that represents me sufficiently for the current system to work. I can hold politicians to account completely on my own terms, and if those feelings are common enough, democracy will do its thing. I get to decide what politicians are accountable for. If they fail to meet a promise, I get to decide if that matters to me or not, not an intermediary. Seems like a simpler, finer-grained, and altogether better system to me.

I’ve never had to read a book I didn’t want to, or watch a movie I didn’t care for, so why is it suddenly every right-wing pundit’s right to have an audience with me? Im sick of being forced to listen to these people

Maybe not for everyone but at least for him, and quite possibly others, Google isn’t even a thing.