Balgair

> You are allowed to like yourself.

Yes, of course, but how?! I don't right now, how do I go about doing that? Play more golf/chess/adult-tag/leetcode/etc? Talk to chaGPT/therapist? I ... I just don't even know where to start.

> You will never have enough IQ, nor money, nor time, nor energy. It's no excuse. You are enough -- no, no, you are plenty.

What the hell does this mean? Is this not a contradiction? What, probably obvious, thing am I missing here?

> But this is still about you. There exist no certificates nor trophies nor titles that can quench your thirst for permanence. If you worship human intelligence, 210 IQ is not enough. It is only plenty if you let it be.

I am so confused here! I'm not permanent! Only my works will survive me, and even then only the really good ones, and even then only the ones that the flukes of history deem passable.

What does plenty even mean here?

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Man alive! This is hitting hard to me and I don;t even know why it does. Is this some sort of Escher-AI-scissor-statement thingy?

Montessori Method schools, my friend. Or Waldorf. There's likely a school near you that is public and uses these methods. If not, there are scholarships too. It's not for everyone, but for all the Calvins it's a godsend.

So one question is who owns the IP then?

I know at the UCs, anything you do on campus is the UCs copyright. There's even little brass plaques they put in the ground when you walk on campus delineating that line.

But when these PIs are sending all the student's data up to OpenAI (presumably via the free version), then OpenAI has that data and it's copyrights.

Likely, yet another essay on the causes of the French Revolution is not ever going to be cared about. But there is a chance that something a student does in an upper division class may be worth something.

Anecdata:

I've never seen so many Christmas lights go up this early in my little neck of the wood

They started doing heavy Black Friday sales ads almost immediately after Halloween this year, more so than I remember from even covid (but that's just my memory)

The Christmas radio station started a full 3 weeks early this year. Typically it's after 6pm on Thanksgiving day that they start.

Overall, people are worried right now. Religion slots right in there too.

The Bible is meant to conflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, as the saying goes.

Ah, yes, you got me there. I typed that out well before my first cup this morning. Thank you for the correction!

It's very state dependent.

For example, by law in California, auto mechanics make double minimum wage if they don't own their tools (so they can go buy some). That works out to about $68k/yr these days.

$120k/yr is not suuuuuper crazy in some areas for some auto work (think restoration). But generally, yes, Ford is not adding up here

> OpenAI, Anthropic, and others will be bought for cents on the dollar.

And just like 23andme, so will all that data be sold for dimes.

Nah, same type. The tank was about half the size of a normal one. The water didn't get cold, just not as hot as I'd liked it to be.

I had one of these types of water heaters in an old apartment. Thing worked kinda okay-ish? The main issue was that it was electric and if you used the hot water for really any time at all (bath, dishwasher) then it would pop the fuse from current draws and overheating. Likely this was some issue with the water heater and the electrical system of the apartment.

Still, really annoying when half way through your bath, the fuse would pop, colder water now coming out, and you'd have to completely dry yourself to reset it and wait for whatever got too hot to cool down enough to get the other half of the bath going again.

I'd assume that means the servers are 'air-gapped' somehow. In that, the enterprise servers and the 'free' servers aren't on the same hardware.

Now, there is about a 0% chance that is true, and exactly a 0% chance that it even matters at all. They both use the same internet in the end.

So, then I'd have to imagine that they don't train the 'free' models on enterprise data, and that's what they mean.

But again, there is about a 5% chance that is true and remains so forever. Baring dumb interns and mistakes, eventually one day someone on the team will look at all the enterprise data, filled with all those high utility scores (or whatever they use to say data is good or not), and then they'll say to themselves 'No one will ever know, right? How could they? The obfuscation function works perfectly.' And blammo, all your trade secrets are just a few dozen prompts away.

Either that or they go bankrupt (like 23 and me) and just straight sell all that data to anyone for pennies (RIP).

The image machine for him really is something.

Buffet is a bigamist. By all intents and purposes he lived with two wives. The legal status was not that of bigamy, to be clear. He married his other wife after his first wife died.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Buffett

The personal section here is not exactly false, but is a great example of how one should not trust Wikipedia outright. A careful reading of it shows his lifelong relationships/marriage with two women at the same time.

Look, I'm not going to yuck his yum. Do whatever you want man. But the homely aww shucks image is very intentional. And very much against his actual life choices. Homespun he ain't.

I guess it depends on what you mean by edited.

Like, there are trials underway right now for organ specific editing for genetic diseases. In that, they just do some CRIPSR injection in the liver or the affected organ to regain lost function.

The trick is what we decide 'lost function' means. So, for issues with lost enzymatic function or the like, sure, yeah, that's totally a disease, no worries. But what about Vitamin-C function? We could easily edit someone to produce that again, I mean, most mammals have this function.

And, yadda yadda yadda, the slippery slope slips, and you get people that have gills or some such nonsense.

I think most people's worry is in germ-line editing, where you 'rob' children of choices.

Look, this is ethically difficult stuff. We don't have a lot of history to draw on here, and the actual implementation is technically difficult to do and to understand for most people (that would include these children, they would not really know what was done to them). Add in economic fears and issues with progeny really being your progeny (oh hey, a A2160F Thermo-Fisher gene editor is actually my father, when you think about it), and ignore all the Star Trek nonsense. This stuff is terribly fast and terribly unfair and terribly long lasting.

Top talent is also going to these lesser leagues. Mason Cox was a top NCAA basketball player and got recruited to play AFL in Australia. There's quite a pipeline now because that. Same goes for Australia to US football kickers and punters.

Most of these sports are so variable that they qualify as 'unkind' learning environments, per David Epstein's work. Meaning that a large variety of other education is preferable. Patrick Mahomes is a great example. His baseball training has made him a great quarterback.

Point is, if the sport is sufficiently 'unkind' then any player from other sports should be just fine transferring over

The composition of the universe is:

~5% matter and energy. The stuff you and I, dollhouses, dogs, and sugarcubes are made up of. Of that about 99.9% of it is very hot stars.

~20% dark matter. This is currently under investigation, but really all we know about it is that it is incredibly sparse and falls down.

~75% dark energy. We know nearly nothing about it except that it falls up (?!)

Point is, if there are other civilizations out there, and they have been existing for even a few thousand years longer than our has, a cosmic eyeblink, they are probably not just using matter and energy anymore. Heck, their understanding of physics is so much more than ours, even comparing us to Plato and them to Devoret is an insult.

One of the 'fun' areas on the net to hang out on is the 'baby-o-sphere' here where everyone is fretting about these demographic collapses. 'Fun' in the way the old net was, as everyone in this area would never talk with each other otherwise.

You get hardcore communists, evangelical christians, muslim scholars, boring census interpreters, etc. It's a whole lot of people out on the fringes of some bell curve that are all worried about this one little thing. I imagine climate change people were like this in the early days. It's a bit heartening as people who normally are enemies ideologically will share tips and news of studies. A little preview of a better future. And so a nicer place to hang out than the regular doomer internet.

Thing is with the 'baby-o-sphere', it's a lot like the plot of TNG's The Chase ( https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_Chase_(episode)), in that, you know once the little key or recipe that is discovered that will reliably change birthrates, then everyone is going to scatter and start hating each other again. C'est la vie.

> 4. Even if the society collapses, a better one will emerge. Black Death killed half of Europe's population, and some historians say that this contributed to Renaissanace, which was a major postive turning point. Labor shortages led to much better position of common workers, and the last time I checked, common workers bitched about being exploited.

Nit-Pick:

The Renaissance is more of the exception that proves the rule than anything. If you look at other plagues history they typically don't result in any large scale changes in society, just misery usually. Unfortunately (?) the data is a bit sparse here, as large scale deaths like this are a bit rare in history, so there really aren't that many plagues to study. But, I think my point still stands, the Renaissance was an outlier, not an expected result.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics_and_pandemic...

Boulder homeowners are not representative of the population of the city.

Like, a lot of the town is just kids at CU. Also, a lot of the younger families are in what little apartments or condos there are in the city and aren't homeowners. Also, like, you probably should only look at adults anyways as under 18s are very unlikely to have their own houses.

Granted a lot of 80+ year olds are in care facilities.

And like, maybe we can relax this to 60+ years olds, in which case based on the raw data there, that's about 18% of the population.

I mean, just looking around Boulder, the homeowners are old people, that's pretty clear.

One I'll (badly) remember about English is:

English is the result of Norman soldiers trying to woo Anglo-Saxon barmaids, and for that task was, evidently, effective enough.

In parts for now, not wholesale yet. And more than just RnD, it's other sectors of the corpo too.

It will not.

One (of many) issue is that this has no bearing on other regulatory regimes. So, sure, the FDA approves of the drug/device/thingy because the AI got lost and no one is checking what it's saying. But Canada's CFIA doesn't because they are still using real people or centaurs ( people + AI, but I'm not 100% sure so don't quote me on that ).

That makes it so that you can only sell the drug/device/thingy in the US and some other countries that blindly follow US FDA (mostly poorer nations with very small markets and a lack of legal recourse, they'll just turn to the EFSA/EMA).

Which fine, but that is not the bet that these large companies made about a decade ago when it came to whether or not this drug/device/thingy would be worth it to pursue. These big drugs need to pay off all the failed research with international sales. Same is somewhat true with devices (mostly internal these days). These big drug makers want stability. Profits are fine, but revenue is just as important as these pipelines are sooooo long and soooo fraught. The human body is just too variable.

The tariffs and all the monkey business with this admin is very much not good for the US when it comes to these large drug/device/thingy makers. Chaos is not good for business. They have all learned that Donny and his ilk (per the article here) do not keep their words when it comes to corruption. They do not stay bought, they are not stable.

We're already shedding jobs here in favor of moving to the EU. Yes, not India or China, but the Baltics mostly (inside Schengen zone). We lost 10 people with jobs opening up there (same day) just this last week. The EU is stable in the eyes of my very own bosses.

Aside: Inheritance laws are one of those little thought of things that end up making huge differences in a society.

The classic one is the changes in Sparta’s inheritance system that essentially caused their downfall.

Originally every citizen had an equal plot of land, the economic base that allowed him to be a hoplite (Sparta help ~80% of their population as slaves, helots, as state property). But as Spartan men died in wars, inheritance laws were forced to let daughters inherit and merge estates through marriage, wealth, and land, and thus it all concentrated fast. By Aristotle’s time, nearly half the land was owned by women outright, and the number of citizens had then fallen to a few hundred as citizenship was tied to these land plots. The result was that the city that once fielded the most formidable army in Greece simply ran out of Spartiates to fill the ranks. Perversely, they all kept this going instead of breaking up the consolidated plots, as citizenship was tied to freedom and voting power. So, the less of them there were the better off the rich were, as they had more voting power and wealth at home (wealth was land, as Sparta forbid money in it's borders, well, sorta). So, power domestically was inverse to foreign power. And we all know when countries get into these situations they always go towards domestic power over national security.

Two use cases with my corpo are:

1) Enhanced User guides/manuals.

We sell some very complicated and expensive instruments. As such, making them work is quite hard. One of our biggest expenses is our engineers that go out, physically, to help customers. Company policy is that the first visit is always free. These customers can be very remote (Deep sea oil platforms, Australian outback, quite nice ski country ;) , etc). Often their issue is simple but they can also be very complex. We have phone trees, email, texts, iridium phones, etc. to talk customers through things to avoid these first visits and then hep them afterwards. So adding in AI chatbots is a natural way to help out. People don't feel quite the same 'shame' in asking really dumb questions to a chatbot that they do to a real person. So, to make these chatbots smarter, we use some of this AI mumbo-jumbo (RAG), to help them out. So far, it seems successful and the customer and engineers like the enhanced/AI manuals.

2) Making said manuals

We support 35 languages and many regulatory environments. Our instruments are all compliant with whatever version of a government agency you've got (modulo a lot of time, money, ITAR regulations). As such, making all that paper (manuals, compliance docs, contracts, etc) takes a lot of time and effort and has to pass the legal tests too. So AI is really helpful with it. Most of the work for these large stacks of paper is essentially boilerplate, but all subtly different so that literal copy-pasting doesn't get you quite that far. AI systems have been able to, last I checked, get that team about 5x faster, as it cuts out ~85% of the process and drudgery. Since these documents get hauled into courts, they can't just be blindly AI made, and a human always has to go over everything with a sharp eye still, but AI helps out there a bit too. Last lunch I had with them, they were saying that they were actually working on their burn-down charts now and not just going from panic to panic. As in, they could actually do their jobs.

I know this is a bit of a non sequitur but, on my feed just below your comment, some asked for the RSS for this blog. The juxtaposition of the two comments here is just soooo HN

3 weeks!? Man, I'm still figuring out where a decent sandwich joint is by my work at 3 weeks. There is no way that I could be up to speed on a code base in that short of a time.

Look, I know what you're getting at, and I know that you can feel that a hire isn't good in less than a month. But buddy, you got to give them at least a few months here.

Total anecdote here: Watching college ball today and nearly every commercial (80%+) are Christmas commercials in some way. The day after Halloween, not the day after Thanksgiving. I know Christmas creep is a thing, and I may not have been paying attention in past years, but it seems like companies are desperate for black Friday to come this year

Ah, got yah

I mean, in my little part of the world if you go up to any sub 24 year old male and say: " What's the line?" you'll get the betting numbers for the 'largest' local team playing that day.

It's a bit different today in particular though as we're in equinox season (when many major sports leagues play on the same day). So your local college football team is playing today, the world series game 7 is today, and there are NBA and NHL on today, and NFL is tomorrow.

I'll make a bet here:

By the 2040 US presidential election, anti-gambling legislation will be a bigger party platform issue than abortion is for one of the two major US political parties.

We are ruining a generation of men with this, just as we did with alcohol in the era before prohibition. A wiser and more sensible approach is desperately needed today, but will not come for another 15 years until the damage is inescapable to see.

Neuro person here.

Yes, many neurons fire at discrete intervals set by their morphology. In fact, this DFT/FFT/Infinite-FT/whatever-FT is all the hell over neuroscience. Many neurons don't really 'communicate' in just a single action potential. They are mostly firing at each other all the time, and the rate of firing is what communicates information. So neuron A is always popping at neuron B, but that tone/rate of popping is what affects change/information.

Now, this is not nearly true of every single neuron-neuron interaction. Some do use a single action potential (your patella knee reflex), some communicate with hundreds of other neurons (pyramidal cells in your cerebellum), some inhibit the firing of other neurons (gap/dendrite junction/axon interactions), some transmit information in opposite ways. It's a giant mess and the exact sub system is what you have to specify to get a handle on things.

Also, you get whole brain wave activity during different periods of sleep and awake cycles. So all the neurons will sync up their firing rates in certain areas when you're dreaming or taking an SAT of something. And yes, you can influence mass cyclic firing with powerful magnets (TCMS).

For the cochlea here, these hair cells are mostly firing all the time and then when a sound/frequency that they are 'tuned' to is heard, then their firing pattern changes and that information is then transmitted toward the parietal lobes. To be clear too, there are a lot of other brain structures in the way before the info gets to a place where you can be conscious of it. Things like the medial nuclei, the trapezoidal bodies, the caleyx of Held, etc. Most of these areas are for discriminating sounds and the location of sounds in space. So like when your fan is on for a long while and you no longer hear it, that's because of the other structures.

At my org it more that these AI tools finally allow the employees to get through things at all. The deadlines are getting met for the first time, maybe ever. We can at last get to the projects that will make the company money instead of chasing ghosts from 2021. The burn down charts are warm now.