It's among the most useful piece of advice I've ever had.
The vast majority of what is offered as 'news' isn't news at all, it's gossip, schadenfreude, arbitrary drama, and frivolous feel-good stories.
'News' has a ring of plausible importance. I wish we had a more accurate name reflecting its mostly unimportant, worthless, and destructive nature.
In my book, even the supposedly important news are pure poison for the individual, and at the end of the day, unimportant as well.
People that need to push a new or current narrative will likely disagree, but that is predictable. They dont want their hate-channel to be closed down.
To a degree, that's what journalists should do: They are not writing a history book. They can't wait until all the facts are out or we'd never know if someone was arrested or accused until the trial was over.
It's philosophical theory that human judgment could be just completely arbitrary and that all these arbitrary opinions have equal weight. But it's cheap theory - not good enough for the first day of philosophy class - and transparently wrong, and has nothing to do with reality. We (you included) make imperfect but not random judgments all day every day, using many skills and inputs.
> that was a freudian slip, right?
Your assertion isn't about Freudian slips.
But reading your text, it is probably useless to talk to you about humorous viewpoints...
Propaganda.
Today I've gotten much bigger value for my time when reading about various CLI tools that process and ingest / export data (recent thread about `miller`) than all of the above, combined.
HN, I feel, became more popular, and that has hurt its quality. So yes, I started reducing my consumption of it as well. I treat it like all other news sites 99% of the time, and I am right to do so at least 90% of them. I barely find 2-3 good articles per week these days.
Soon I might start checking HN biweekly because the value proposition is just not there.
1. I'll actually take you up on this, because I'm interested to re-visit the discourse around launch, 5 years from now :)
2. I do agree it's overhyped to a degree. I think it will revolutionize _some_ things but it could turn out like VR. I do use it every day and I don't see a reason not to... I guess we'll see what the future holds!
The practitioners of the area of course have a vested interest to argue until the end of days that ACTUALLY AI does equal ML/DL and stuff but I am like "I see no Skynet so get off my back, we have no AI and that's that". :D
But, I guess in 5 years we could argue whether certain progresses are indeed attributed to ChatGPT or is it something else entirely!
The days of understanding our own code are rapidly coming to an end. As developers, we now have the same problem that the mathematical community has had to deal with for some time, as proofs become complex enough to demand large chunks of peoples' careers to comprehend and evaluate.
Prompts may or may not be the next revolution in the graphic arts, but they will be the next revolution in programming languages. I've seen more than enough to conclude that.
That's one possible development of events, yes. The other one is inventing DSLs on top of popular languages so we're spared tons of boilerplate; but then we'll need experts on the actual underlying languages (say C++, Rust, Lua, Erlang or anything with a good VM and/or statically strongly typed and compiled to native code) when sh1t hits the fan, which... actually can work just fine.
Whether humans are able to create strong AI is a philosophical question: While some argue that's not possible (can we be Gods?), others argue that this is the next logical evolutionary step.
Let's see if we can at least mimic strong AI when we let LLMs connect to external systems (internet, money, more energy, etc) and specifically allow themselves to fine-tune or train new NNs in general.
Time will tell.
> This is why I prefer the term "weak AI". Weak AI is specifically trained to solve tasks whereas strong AI can teach itself to solve new tasks.
Yes, we can call it a spectrum, though I'd think it's more like a multi-dimensional space. Wouldn't contest your definition though, it's as valid as all the others really.
And yeah I agree/think that the ultimate general AI is the one that can teach itself new tasks, utilize past experience even if the patterns don't match perfectly, and have some sort of sentience. And let's not forget that it must have actual goals and motivation (otherwise it'll just conclude that the best course of action is to not expend any effort and just put itself in an infinite idle loop).
> Whether humans are able to create strong AI is a philosophical question: While some argue that's not possible (can we be Gods?), others argue that this is the next logical evolutionary step.
IMO people romanticize these topics too much. The true AI will be "born" as a hyper-optimizing recursive machine (and collection of algorithms) and it will eventually get limited by the physical reality it inhabits so it'll self-balance quite fine. It's strange how much spiritual value people put into these things, though I somewhat understand; that'll be the second truly intelligent and sentient "life form" that we will know beside ourselves so some metaphysical hand-waving seems unavoidable and maybe even desirable (in terms of moral correction mechanism, maybe).
> Let's see if we can at least mimic strong AI when we let LLMs connect to external systems (internet, money, more energy, etc) and specifically allow themselves to fine-tune or train new NNs in general.
I have no doubt we'll eventually get there but my feeling is that the current "AI" area is in a local maxima and it won't crawl out of it easily.
It's a fact that somebody somewhere thought of making better bearings for their horse-pulled carriages centuries ago. That person does not get credit for modern cars' suspension systems however.
I'm autistic and vehemently ignore and reject most pieces of news, especially political, and that causes tons of terrible things to happen whenever some sort of spoiler gets out and I happen to see it.
It's like I'm proud of my great ignorance and having that threatened with mere knowledge sends me into a panic of some sort.
It's not just news. If I say "I don't know what that is lol" to someone, 9 times out of 10 their default response to tell me what it is (if it is some cultural/media thing) is the complete opposite of what I want, which is usually just for the other person to move on without telling.
Knowing things can't be undone, so I strive not to know most things, apparently.
You’re likely to come across not entirely socially acceptable in either case, but that’s probably impossible to counter.
This is something that I understand, but unfortunately can't really perform for some reason. I always have to be... "honest", for lack of a better word. I will always say something that makes things worse for me because it's... just how I feel.
I used to be a pathological liar, and from a young age I had this one friend who was a living lie detector, and they trained it out of me so hard that I now obsessively tell the truth in all situations even when it would be detrimental. ;-;
In other words, even if I know just saying "ok" would probably work, I feel the need to somehow "brag" or otherwise disclose my proud ignorance, even if that only results in the literal opposite of what I want.