olladecarne

The pitchforks are out because even without that part, it's still a scumbag move to try to frontrun the mathematicians who were working on this for years after OpenAI heard that they were close to releasing their results. Just identifying that one of these problems is solvable takes a lot of work. The only reason OpenAI got this result is because the mathematician shared with colleagues that he had made significant progress and was close to solving it, and OpenAI could not accept that so they decided to throw tens of millions to make sure it doesn't happen without them getting all the glory. Notice that their paper doesn't even have an author since they're probably all aware of how awful that would look, and no one wanted to take on the shame. They probably also knew that the paper was trash and no one involved could understand it, and didn't even cite many of the people who contributed to all of that knowledge. It's just a disgusting act any way you slice it, even without training on the prompts or the nasty communication by the OpenAI leaders.

Same in someone I know, shifted between bipolar and schitzoaffective and schitzophrenia. Bipolar during manic episode, later schizoaffective. A lot of paranoia and also delusions, but also refused medication due to side effects (and probably the disorder itself).

I used to use Airbnb all the time but a single experience dealing with their customer service and a bad host was enough for me to never use them again. The lows of using Airbnb are 100x lower than the lows of hotels, and the highs are higher but not nearly enough to justify the risk.

I dropped out of high school, moved countries, finished high school, dropped out of college, went back to a different one. I wasn't dumb, I always had >99th percentile test scores, but I couldn't concentrate. Now I work at Big Tech since I'm good at interviews. However I did study algorithms VERY intensely. As in I read every textbook and did every exercise. Easily >1000 hours.

Why should the 99% accept a governance structure where they get only 1% of the power/wealth? I think the core issue is wealth inequality, and although I initially liked UBI, it doesn't really solve that issue. If we don't solve it, I wouldn't be surprised to see a situation where we end up with another failed attempt at communism/revolution and everyone loses.

It was much better 5+ years ago. It's impossible to maintain high code standards when a company grows as fast as Google has. Eventually the law of large numbers applies. It's probably still better due to starting from a stronger base, but they are all converging.

My experience has been similar at other large companies (MSFT, Google). My advice is to look for founder-led teams (not companies). If there are plenty of founders still on the team, they will likely care a lot about the product and code and hold everyone to high standards which make the work easier in the long run. On the other hand when I've been on teams where all the original founders left, it's been a constant struggle to make anyone care about anything. At that point there is no ownership and most people are there for a paycheck. Lots of sloppy code gets shipped, everyone approves anything that looks like code, and eventually adding a single line anywhere feels like playing Russian roulette. Extreme short term thinking takes hold and no one cares that in 2-3 years the code will be unmaintainable because they don't plan to be on the team by then.

Pension funds take money from poor people and give it to rich people, just like everything else. When the economy is doing well, rich people make billions by managing them, and when it's not doing well rich people still make billions until the funds become insolvent. Here's a PBS documentary on the state of pensions in the US: https://youtu.be/_r0htm5uHPQ

Is there any difference in performance?

Lack of high end tech will be the least of your problems if China and the US get into a hot war.

One thing I noticed is that on GCP if you create a a2-ultragpu (Nvidia a100 80gb) and you select a spot instance, the price estimate goes down to $0.33 hourly ($240/m) which sounds really good if it's not a mistake. I was wondering if you could then turn a single A100 into 7 GPUs using Multi-instance GPUs. So on an 80gb one you get 7 10GB GPUs (can't have 8 due to yield issues on those cards). I'm pretty sure that will run much slower than on the full instance, but not 7x slower so if you're running a larger service at scale this could be an option to parallelize things. If someone is able to get that running please let me know how it performs.

The next thing I considered was just buying up a ton of 3060 12gb cards (saw a few new ones for $330) and just hosting a server from my house. This might be a good option if you don't care about speed but care about throughput.

RTX 3090s are also decent in terms of price per iteration of Stable Diffusion. If you want to build a fast service like Dreamstudio I think it's the only option to be able to do it at a reasonable price. If you want to host these in the cloud using consumer RTX cards, you'll have to go with less reputable hosts since Nvidia doesn't allow it. I don't want to name any since I can't vouch for them, but there are some if you search. The cheapest option will be to buy them and host it yourself.

I'm still researching what the best price/performance is for hosting this so if you have any findings please share.

ML revolutionized translation a long time ago and the demand and pay for translators went down. It also used the works of thousands of humans who translated text and they never saw a dime. Copyright applies to translations so we've already gone through something similar. The same will happen with art and every other medium that ML touches. I have a love/hate relationship with ML because of this. It seems that there will be a painful transition period as many humans are displaced, probably even average coders like me. In a way, it's no different than what a human does but humans can't scale like computers. I hope someone can engineer a new economic system that works for what's coming.

I've been thinking about this and I think this is a problem all companies face. The best employees are confident and know they can get a job anywhere anytime so they leave. The worst are less confident and never leave. How do you keep the former and get rid of the latter?

When Airbnb is bad, it's really bad. You're gambling with the possibility of completely ruining whatever trip you had in mind. I've had both cases where a host cancelled last minute and also where I tried to cancel months in advance and was denied. Both of those experiences cost me more than I'll ever save by using Airbnb in my lifetime. I'm never using Airbnb again if I can help it. The last time I booked a hotel I felt so much less stressed and I realized whatever premium they charge is 100% worth it.

There's so many things we invent with good intentions but in the end go terribly wrong and I think this is one of those things. I think it's ok to mourn and remember the past, but moving on and accepting reality is important to a healthy life.

Let's be real though, the startup that makes this but appeals to our worst instincts make bank. I can't imagine how much more messed up future generations will be as we keep making more dangerous technology that appeals to our primal instincts.

Why is the financial media so obsessed with Gamestop? It's a relatively tiny company and if it truly was the case that it is over they would have stopped talking about it. Instead they publish fear-mongering articles and hit pieces on people like Keith Gill who was just a normal person seeing a value investment and got lucky. hint: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Thanks, I didn't know about those statistics. Every time I read about ADHD I definitely think I have it given a bunch of problems I've had throughout my life. Luckily I've managed to get a really good job as a software engineer that is pretty flexible time-wise which has been a life saver since one of the biggest issues is my inability to sleep on a schedule. That led to me dropping out of high school once as well as college once even though I was acing all the tests. I've also found ways to organize my life in a way that makes things more manageable.

The main thing that keeps me from getting treatment is that I don't want to become dependent on a controlled substance. I tend to move around and travel a lot and depending on medication makes me feel very uneasy. I'm also worried about side effects or worse withdrawal problems compared to caffeine. I already know very well how caffeine affects me and I know I can quit and be ok other than the lack of focus. From what I've read, the dependence that can be formed with ADHD drugs can be much more serious.

I also recommend switching from coffee to tea if you consume a lot of it. I used to drink gallons of coffee a day. Basically from late highschool to a few years into my career (so like 10 years), I didn't drink anything but coffee (with milk). No water, even at night I was drinking coffee. I quit cold turkey a few times and I basically passed out for a few days from the headaches and feeling dizzy. When I quit I would sleep like 16 hours a day for a couple of days and in a weird way it felt great because I wouldn't be conscious for the worst of the withdrawal symptoms.

As I got older it became clear that this was probably both unhealthy and unsustainable so I switched to drinking black tea (with milk) all day instead. I make a giant batch every few days. I feel much better now and the headaches are not nearly as bad in the morning, I just feel slightly tired if I don't drink tea. I may have undiagnosed ADHD or something because I basically can't concentrate without a stimulant (this was true even before I started drinking coffee), but once I take it I find it much easier to focus. I also drink matcha sometimes, but don't like the taste as much. There's something about the bitter taste of strong tea or coffee plus milk to smooth it out that is irresistible to my brain.

Quick disclaimer as someone who lived in Costa Rica for many years: Costa Rica's prices for many things are comparable to the US. If it's imported stuff like cars or tech, then expect to pay 2-3x as much. The internet can be fast, but it's also expensive. Basically, expect costs to be closer to vacationing in the US than SE Asia. Other than that, it is a very nice country although driving there can be like an extreme sport. Also, make sure you have a remote job before going there because you can't work without a permit and even if you could the salaries are very low compared to the US.

The CEO of a social media company going and personally making political edits to user messages to push their agenda sounds about as bad of a thing as I can imagine. I have a hard time imagining something more wrong for a social network to do. Imagine the CEO of YC editing posts and comments with no way to prove it, people would be rightfully furious. I guess promoting child pornography is worse, but that's also something Reddit and their admins did in the early days. People can say all they want about Facebook and Zuckerberg, but if he had done any of dozens of things Reddit has done and continues to do, he may have literally been crucified. Reddit gets away with way too much crap just because there is no alternative. Reddit is one of the most toxic social networks with the most corrupt leadership but it generally gets ignored because of their political leanings.

I still think the "holistic" approach is flawed. The "holistic" criteria benefits upper-class students because lower and middle class kids are rarely trained from a young age to be involved in extra-curricular activities the way upper-class kids are. I experienced this first hand growing up, many future Ivy league students almost seemed to have been trained for it from the moment they were born. The parents had connections all over the place and their kids could study/work on all sorts of interesting hobbies. On the other hand the lower class people had no idea that this world existed and at best spent some time studying for the standardized exams if their parents were really invested in their future.

Basically, whatever thing you choose as the metric, people with more resources and information will be able to optimize for it better. However, the more difficult the metric becomes to achieve, the more it benefits those who already benefit from the resource and information asymmetry.

I take the pills that have liquid inside, I think they're referred to as softgels. I asked my doctor about Vitamin K and they told me that it's not really necessary so I don't take it. I agree that taking it with Omega 3 is a good idea if that's already part of your routine. I personally dislike taking pills so I only take Vitamin D because it's one very tiny pill. I would also recommend getting a blood test to make sure you're getting what you need and not taking things you don't need.

To add to the anecdata, I take 5000 IU daily during the winter and about every other day in the summer and my blood tests in the winter showed I had 54 ng/ml, the healthy range is 30-100. I'm not super diligent about it though and take it more often during times I feel tired since I think it helps. Depending on if I go outside in the summer sometimes I don't take it for weeks. However when I got the blood tests I had been taking it regularly, which is why I requested it since I think vitamin D is not measured in the default blood test

> those working for the company get considerably more say and control than outside contributors

As someone who knows little about open source politics, I'm genuinely curious about how people expect this should work. What are the large open source projects that have the gold standard for this that I can learn about?

My initial reaction is that if a company contributes considerably more to a project, shouldn't they have considerable more say? For example if they have 20 full time engineers working on it and have contributed 95% of the code, then if I come along and make a few changes should I have equal say and control over the project?

Low quality information is more profitable to produce than high quality information (thanks to Google and their ads). So all the incentives for people currently are to produce content that is nearly indistinguishable from spam. It is much more profitable to take 1 hour to write generic content than to take weeks to really think through everything. This problem will continue to get worse with AI generated text, and I don't see how Google can fight that. This is why 90% of my time is now spent on Youtube instead, which has the advantage that focusing on quality has a much higher ROI with video than with text. That doesn't mean it's not filled with garbage though, just that it's easier to swift through it. Product search is also something I now do on Amazon because Google results are essentially spam. The results there are also not ideal, but at least I can distinguish the bad results faster.

One way to make search better would be to embrace bias and give people what they want. Just accept that most information is biased and bring it to the forefront. Initially there would be some default domain whitelisting, but users can request sites to add or remove from their bubble. Maybe they can "share" these lists among each other and certain clusters would form, which you can then use to recommend more nodes. Users would also be clearly told that results are biased based on their preferences, and that they can choose to view results from other points of reference. It would also have different "modes" for things like products, information, and news. Maybe some users only want to see results from independent or ad-free sources, and they can choose those clusters. Maybe they want only far-right or far-left sources, and then they can choose those. At least people would be aware of their bias, which I think will help fight it more than acting like it doesn't exist. Essentially there would be an explorable graph so I can see different realities. It would be a combination of search and social media.

"Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome."

This whole ad driven attention economy is probably as dangerous of an invention as nuclear weapons. We're caught in a state of psychosis and individually none of us can do anything to fight the billions of dollars spent on advertising that tries to make us feel inadequate. Targeted ads and recommendation engines need to be banned. I know some people say they like them, and some people also say they like tobacco but we generally agree it's bad for us. Companies will find other ways to innovate. Content curation, organization, and quality will become more valuable and eventually the experience will be better.

I say this because half-hearted measures like the one in the article are not going to make any difference when the entire business model of the internet is clickbait.

I think you've got the causality wrong here. There’s noting inherently expensive about serving http -> makes all of the web practically unusable without filtering -> Google monopolized search with the great product they developed

Serving http is getting cheaper, therefore the filtering problem is getting harder, therefore it's harder for new competitors to emerge.

Either way, I agree that ads are the root of the problem because it makes serving garbage http so cheap or profitable. Force people to make informed decisions about where to spend their time and money. Right now people just click away on anything so garbage clickbait is one of the most profitable models.

Any decision they make can be classified as "influencing political leanings". If they just serve you content that you agree with, that's influencing your political leaning by reinforcing your beliefs (IMO this is what Youtube already does). If they serve you any other content, unless it's random and therefore useless, then anyone can claim they are influencing political leanings. In fact, any company whose business model includes providing information can be claimed to "influence political leanings" since that's as well-defined as saying "adds information". So a library also falls under this, as does Netflix, and Spotify, etc.

I think if you look at the brain as a neural network then it's easy to see how this happens. Not everyone is born to educated parents and receives high quality education. If a lot of the information your brain received growing up was bad, then you can easily reach bad conclusions. The collapse of institutions makes it worse because now no one trusts anything. So to many the information on the internet is as valid as the information in the textbooks. Then if you keep feeding the brain bad information it starts generating bad information. Lately I've been thinking of information as a "substance" that has been diluted by the internet. So the whole "organize and make all information easily accessible" motto of big G and the web in general has had the consequence of diluting the concentration of good information.

I would love to see someone test the difference between a $35 a day vs $1000 a month UBI. The $35 a day approach seems like it would solve a lot of the problems people worry about with regard to misuse.