16,009 karma · joined April 25, 2013
Oh and deal with dates before 1900.
Excel is a gift from God if you stay in its lane. If you ever so slightly deviate, not even the Devil can help you.
But maybe, juuuuust maybe, AI can?
I have 2 files. One is a .pdf . The other is a .doc . One file has a list of prices and colors in 2 columns. The other file has a list of colors and media in 2 columns. There are incomplete lists here and many to one matching.
To me, if I can verbally tell the AI to give me a list of prices and media from those two files, in a .csv file, and it'll ask back some simple questions and issues that it needs cleaned up to accomplish this, then that is AGI to me.
It is an incredibly simple thing for just about any middle school graduate.
And yet! I have worked with PhDs that cannot do this. No joke!
Something this simple, just dead running numbers, dumb accounting, is mostly beyond us.
(0) The only thing that matters is the budget.
(1) Beauraracies only grow, never shrink. You can only control the growth rate.
Much safer to make friends or coinvestors, slaves at the very least. Get them all to buy in and police themselves. Better yet, you take that one rare thing, life, intelligence, and put it to work for you. Make the aliens you've just contacted be a part of the pyramid scheme
I dunno, it just reeks of the culture of suspicion in communist China. A product of that place and time.
My own idea is the 'used car salesman' idea of the universe. (Reeking of my own mind and place and time). To me, economics will rule in the galactic community. In that water, metals, energy, it's all cheap and everywhere. No need to have any competition over it. No, the only scarce thing is life and then even more it's intelligence. Any other civilization will be desperate to get rights over us and our history.
So, to me, the aliens will come to us loud and proud. Balloons and banners.
And of course, a contract as long as a the rings of Saturn, with print as small as the atoms.
We shouldn't be wary of the weapons, but the lawyers
The brain 'stores' data without using power. Under classical synapse structure, it modifies the butons to modulate the charges and neurotransmitters passing and being received. This is memristance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor
It's very low energy to do this and it keeps for decades (probably). It's not a quantum effect.
Be aware though, this is a 'classical' synapse understanding. The neurons are doing all kinds of other things too, they are alive after all. And the glia, the glia and astrocytes affect memory too, but we're still trying to understand how.
Look, don't jump to quantum stuff with the brain.
It's just really hard to get data, low sample sizes, and desperate need of grant funding.
It's not quantum.
Why have installations or stores at all? Just have a self driving and self making burrito trucks. You order one up, and on the way to you, it's being made in the back. Little hatch on the side, shoots out onto your doorstep or through your window.
Then, of course, you've now got an arms race of self making burrito trucks roaming about. Chipotle has one, Taco bell too. And, of course, if a Taco Bell truck knows that a Chipotle truck is next to it on the freeway, well, I mean, there's no one inside it of course. How could you prove that those nails came out of the bottom of the truck anyways?
Pretty soon, we've got burrito trucks duking it out, battle bots style, on the freeways and streets. And then you gotta deploy countermeasures, armor, etc. Just to get your burrito to you. Order up two from different companies and you've got dinner and a show.
And, honestly, is this not the future we all really want? Giant junk food filled mech-cars blasting each other at high speeds from the comfort of our couches.
Granted not a lot of the deceased are going to get these autopsys though.
Still, a good control group
These young women don't have the money to hire security and are especially vulnerable as a result
The quitting caffeine is tough. It's 3 days of really bad headaches that no pain killer will touch, because those painkillers act on a different biochemistry. But, after I did that, my anxiety went way down and I was able to sleep a lot better.
Exercise is a bit harder, as it's a schedule problem. Even just a little bit will help though and increase the sleep 'pressure' or so I have found with myself.
Again, not trying to be a jerk here, just trying to help out however I can. My bad if this is not the place.
Best of luck in the struggle!
https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-an...
It's not done yet, and I am eagerly awaiting the end results. That said, from what I can tell from his writings, jcrammer is mostly correct. The peasant life - the modal life - was just awful hard work for many decades. It was not nice and it was not better than the factories most of the time. Yes there were bad factories, a lot of them, but they lasted a brief time. The Factory Act in Britian was in 1833, only a few decades after the factories were even a thing.
Aside: We really need better education in labor laws overall.
Ahh yes, the 'pre-med'ification of CS.
We desperately need programmers with any sort of skills.
The pay is not as good, but the companies are more stable (generally) and the benefits are fine. Mostly remote work for programming. You'll have to deal with bio people too. Family friendly.
1) $$$
2) data
The second (data) also isn't cheap. As it seems we've already gotten through all the 'cheap' data out there. So much so that synthetic data (fart huffing) is a big thing now. People tell it's real and useful and passes the glenn-horf theore... blah blah blah.
So it really more so comes down to just:
1) $$$^2 (but really pick any exponent)
In that, I'm not sure this thing is a true sigmoid curve (see: biology all the time). I think it's more a logarithmic cost here. In that, it never really goes away, but it gets really expensive to carry out for large N.
[To be clear, lots of great shit happens out there in large N. An AI god still may lurk in the long slow slope of $N, the cure for boredom too, or knowing why we yawn, etc.]
- How many golf ball fit in a school bus?
Or the like that dominated Google hiring for nearly a decade. No the hot new interview question will be:
- Do you have an account with any of the major sports bettors in good standing?
The Goofus answer to this is : Yes, I can bet whatever I like with them (they are an idiot that doesn't understand how money works. Hire appropriately)
The Gallant answer is: No, I don't do sports betting. (This shows they at least know to lie about it)
The Galaxy answer is: No, they banned me (only sharps get banned, meaning they are either very lucky or very good with probabilities and numbers)
There exists now the potential for a small service company that can help interviewees and the spouses of gambling addicts: We'll make you look like a sharp to the sports betting companies. You sign up for the service and a big-time sharp takes over your accounts (or directs you personally) and tells you what to bet and where. They then give you the money to bet, making you effectively a mule for them. It's win-win. Real sharps get a mule, you get to look like a sharp and you have the proof. This also works for the family of addicts (probably the larger market), as their affected loved-one gets banned/downgraded and all the money stops flowing out of their accounts.
I'm trying to write a really large book. I have a lot of material that I'm using RAG to help manage. I put into my prompts the top RAG cosine scores with some summaries of characters and previous chapters and scene sketches. I get scenes out and then work them over. LLMs are really helpful for my disability and have allowed me to make any progress at all on this.
Is your thing something I should look into for helping keep track of my material. I'm using Excel sheets and crappy python code right now.
Im pretty sure your stuff is some super technical backend thingy, but I figured I'd shoot my shot here. Thanks for any and all info, I appreciate it
We don't have the compute to do video on demand right now like we do images or text or audio.
Combining all the modalities together, smoothly, at speed, and for cheap, is going to take a hell of a lot of thinking sand powered by magic rocks.
-How the hell did they do it?
And
- What the hell were they thinking?
I'll echo the frustrations you're having. I have the exact same ones with my own folks
Random question for you in the biz: where can I get a muon detector setup? I just can't find them anywhere and would love to gain access to the extraterrestrial and solar weather particle environment.
Like, if you think that your future is a good place, then you're more likely to want to have kids.
If we want to raise the birthrate, then we've got to listen to the people that can have kids and do what they want.
It's all about perception as no one can predict the future.
It's because we have a dearth of true elders right now.
Not in age, but in temperament and learning.
I got interested in story telling during COVID and managed to find a great author (K.M. Weiland) that went in deep on the archetypes of story.
Her hook was essentially: "What happens after the Hero's Journey/happily ever after?" And then she got real deep on her idea of the 6 phases of life. Her work is properly about how to write a plot, but man does it apply more broadly.
The pertinent one here is the 'Crone' stage of life [0]. You're no longer the 'King' of your little fief, you had to give up the power and make way for the next generation. But now what?
The journey of the Crone is essentially learning that Death is a part of Life, that Death is not Evil, Death is a Friend.
K.M. Weiland admits that less and less people ever make it through the stages as you go along.
But, I think right now in the West, we have a lot of boomers that never really progressed past the Hero stage, let alone the Queen or King stages. There should be more Crone and Mage people around, but the boomers were retarded in their development. Just look at RBG, Feinstein and Pelosi (to name but a few), grappling on to power like the Tyrants or Sorceresses (strong shadow archetypes of the Queen and King) and never letting go, to the classical harm of the kingdom/hearth that such stories tell.
Facing Death is hard, very hard. But is something that we all must do. Realizing that Death is not Evil, but a part of life, and one to be welcomed at times, that is something that very few of us can do.
[0] https://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/archetypal-chara...
If you have not, I would like to introduce you to one of the best pieces of writing on corporate workings that I have ever come across: The Gervais Principle.
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
It is a very good lens, but a very cynical one, to look at the corporation.
In general, shows like The Office, though satire, are close, I feel, to reality than what you are espousing here.
Not that I disagree with you at all. There should be people that are all about hiring. There should be managers that see their paychecks as adequate compensation. There should be consumers that are that reactive to internal staffing decisions.
But in my limited experience, the things that should be there, typically are not.
I'm their day to day, hiring is a pain. They need the extra hands, but they have to go through more work to get that person onboard. The activation energy is high, higher now with AI and automated job applications clogging things up.
Then you have onboarding and the continued costs of management of that person. Honestly, most managers would want the smallest team possible in terms of day to day workload.
This is also why AI is appealing. The promise of no sick days, no HR complaints, no chit chat. Just pure work done in plain language. Work done overnight, right, the first time. A middle managers dream worker.
The thing that is more important is the budget. It's always the budget. Nothing matters but the budget. That's the second iron law of beauraracy, of course.
I agree that it is a very important decision, but that's also unreasonable for a manager to set time aside to look through. You've just set the other projects that you're already behind on (that's why you need to hire in the first place) back another half week or so.
It's like a reverse rocket equation here. You need time to make more time, so you take time, but that time needs time, so ...
The cost isn't really borne by the hiring manager though, it's just their budget (that they argued for) that they need to spend down. The decision makers really don't care that much about the numbers, just that they don't go over.
I've heard that if you read the top 3 books/articles in the subject, that's pretty much enough too.
Pareto principle works too. Aim to learn the 20% of concepts that will give you 80% of the material
The Feynman technique is also great. You try to teach the material back to someone. Chatbots are great for this one if you can manage the prompt well enough.
Decide in advance how much time the topic deserves. No cluse as to how to do this well though, sorry.
Ask yourself: 'will knowing more about this change my decisions?'
In fast-changing fields, it’s more useful to set a rhythm for refreshing your knowledge (quarterly or annually) than to go endlessly deep once.