jbotz

As for the OP "not taking a day off"... for some of us ritualization is productive because it's what we need to stick with a difficult program. Maybe for you that's not the case. To each his own.

(I have my own criticisms of Math Academy: The platform should be more flexible in pacing and allow repeating sections. It should have built-in spaced-repetition features. And the company is uncommunicative and aloof. I'd be willing to overlook most of these faults at a lower price-tag, but for what they charge it really rubs me the wrong way.)

Obviously the cetaceans will never have that benefit, even if by some other objective measures they turned out to be as intelligent as humans.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catching_Fire:_How_Cooking_Mad...

GP's first sentence isn't arrogant (at worst displaying a bit of false humility) because it's saying everyone but him doesn't know about a thing he did. Your second quote you apparently mis-parsed because of a minor English error (he should have said "to Python" rather than "in Python"), but to me it was pretty clear what he meant.

As for making the earth less reflective with PV panels... yes, you are right and most of that absorbed solar energy directly contributes to heating the earth because PV panels aren't anywhere near 100% efficient in converting it to electricity, but even the part that is converted to electricity will become heat again in the end, like when it powers AI data centers. (If PV was 100% efficient, then the lack of reflection wouldn't directly do any heating, the heating would all happen when the electricity is used.)

For now that isn't a big concern because the greenhouse gases our civilization is releasing into the atmosphere do so much more heating than all our use of energy, but if we do become 100% renewable and survive that particular danger, then by Jevons' paradox we'll soon be using 10x to 100x more "clean" energy and be heating the earth all the same again.

First of all programs written in curly-brace languages still also have indentation to indicate statement grouping / blocks / scope, even if it's not required, so for a correct program (and that's not deliberately obfuscated), and one that's in the process of being written by an LLM, any advantage there disappears. Furthermore, having both indentation and explicit block markers provides redundancy which could be a significant advantage for an LLM (it being a probabilistic text / program generator). And for an incorrect program that redundancy is a big advantage for the LLM because it should be very easy for it to notice a mismatch of indentation and braces.

The only downside would be a very slightly higher token cost for the redundancy. I realize that Python comes out on or near the top in most of the comparisons in the linked article, but I doubt that's the reason.

[0] https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality

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In fact, this could be one of the most beneficial uses of AI for society yet... private tutors of the level that the mega-rich always had, now for all kids everywhere! This gives me real hope for the future generations of humanity.

But no, I don't think it's AI, I think it's just written in a style that happens to be an attractor for LLMs.

Also, although I also sometimes stop reading something because it seems LLM written and sometimes that in itself makes it a lot less interesting to me, that's context dependent and for some content I don't care if it's LLM-written or not; this is a good example, I'm interested in the topic and want to know how he did it, even if an LLM helped him do it and then wrote the article about it.

But in no case am I going to whine on HN about it, and I'm beginning to be more turned off by the profusion of people who do than by the profusion of LLM-generated content. On HN it seem the former is even greater than the later. If a post has little value to you for any reason, don't upvote it.

Respiratory infections (like tuberculosis) in a population that uses indoor open fires for cooking and heat aren't exactly a big surprise; breathing indoor smoke causes chronic respiratory inflammation, which in turn weakens the immune system and makes the lungs more susceptible to infection.

Coincidentally I just read "Children of Memory", which was published in 2022 and I wonder if the advent of LLMs had any influence on Adrian Tchaikovsky's conception of the Ravens? The Ravens are excellent analysts but they themselves insist that they are not conscious, and then go on to say that we (humans) aren't really either...

Of course humans are conscious, because just about the only thing we can all agree on about consciousness is that it's a thing we have. Nowadays many of us also agree that a lot or all other mammals, and perhaps birds, also have that thing. But they don't have sophisticated abstract language, which LLMs do. So consciousness is something having to do with embodiment and feelings, not language and higher reasoning. Maybe I'm a chimpanzee with an LLM add-on, then?

It seems that by creating LLMs we've already solved the harder problem of making "AGI". Now we just have to give them an embodiment add-on so that they can have an independent will and then Ted Chiang will have to shut up? But therein lies the peril, doesn't it?