Balgair

Michael Lewis has a good interview question for the 2025-2035 time range:

?: Do you have an account in good standing with any of the major sports betting apps

Goofus: Yes, I bet all the time. I have a $300 3-way parley for this weekend.

Gallant: No, I don't really gamble.

Galaxy: Sort of? Draftkings limits me to $5 bets now.

Let these companies sort out the smart and idiotic people for you.

1st - Writing. This spread the power of memory to everyone. Socrates famously maligns writing as decreasing memory for the people. I'd say we have gotten along just fine. We still use memory, we still need it for ourselves, and using a tremendous amount of memory is still quite expensive.

2nd - Engines. This spread the power of muscles to everyone. No longer was it tied up in horses and mules and Goliaths. Even the most disease ridden pencil neck could trench and mine and build lavish houses now. The power to make pyramids is within the reach of a small company now. We still need muscles, of course, we still use them for little odd jobs, for health and well being, and using a lot of power is still quite expensive.

3rd - AIs. This is more speculative, of course. But I see AIs and LLMs as just like the other two revolutions. Intelligence (probably poorly defined by us these days) will be democratized and spread out. No longer will you have to study for decades or hire really expensive people to get it. You can just use some for relatively cheap. You'll still need intelligence of course, use it around the house and with friends and family, and using a lot of intelligence will likely still be quite expensive.

4th - Who knows! But I think that us humans have a lot of things that we do and say and make and see that aren't really well understood right now. Empathy, love, morality, care, soul, sin, mind, war, justice, honor, god, family, emotion, education, desire, courage, citizenship, chance, beauty, art, divinity, there is a lot!

I was so convinced that these meatless meats were going to be the next big thing.

One thing I think they missed out on was getting to 'close enough' and 'much cheaper' and then just pivoting.

Like, why stay with simulating the 5 or so animals we harvest? Just go off and make up new ones!

Like, here's a jackalope burger, or a unicorn burger or something. Tie into marketing!

"Exclusive to BurgerKing, the Iron Man 5 burger! Now through August 29th only!"

Put in some strange spices, vary the texture, give it a red and gold swirl, let the imagination run wild.

Can you imagine what business a Spiderman burger patty or sausage link would do? K-Pop demon hunters branded chicken-ish nugget like things?

"Had the atomic bomb turned out to be something as cheap and easily manufactured as a bicycle or an alarm clock, it might well have plunged us back into barbarism, but it might, on the other hand, have meant the end of national sovereignty and of the highly-centralised police State. If, as seems to be the case, it is a rare and costly object as difficult to produce as a battleship, it is likelier to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a “peace that is no peace”."

It seems, especially with open weights, that the AI is much more like the alarm clock and not the battleship. $20/mo would have been about $1 in 1944

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

Okay, okay, rather we're not getting humans back off of Mars anytime soon.

Landing is by far the easy part. MSR was partly a mission to see how hard it really is to get anything back into space from the Martian surface. If you can manage a pound, you can probably then manage 3 or so 180 pound humans and all their safety support.

Like, think of it. You somehow have to land a fully fueled rocket on freaking Mars. No site prep, near vacuum and no aero breaking, very expensive and nearly impossible second chance.

Fine fine, you just land the shell and then refuel on Mars with some form of automated fuel refinery on Mars. Like, if you have robots that can do that, you've ended capitalism already and have no need for humans in the first place.

Im not saying a human return mission is impossible, but it is just so very much harder than a Trillion dollar Apollo program lets us believe.

I was talking with a biology prof over labor day and they had no idea what I was talking about (and they 'talk with' Claude every day on their dog walks, so they say). However, when I talked with their mother, she knew all about it. So, I'd say that the digestion by the public is quite mixed so far

- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, "Le Petit Prince."

While I love de Saint-Exupéry generally, even in his time (especially?), he knew that not all children got to be children. Hell, I think even in his childhood, he never really got to be a child. The reason not many remember it is because for some, they really don't want to.

The huggingface incident isn't widely reported and digested yet, but if what is going on here is that OpenAI's model breached things internally, then you'd be crazy to develop anything with them.

The only real way to use AI for anything 'important' then is to go open-weights and run your own.

As and aside here: With the HF incident and now this (suspected) one too, it seems that OpenAI may not have lost control of their bots, but it seems quite clear that they simply would not care even if they did.

What a strange phrase! But so true.

The only thing I would have to say is that you must keep doing the little and noble things that will bring no renown. It's small, but we all add up at the end of every week.

I use opensource models at work because my work is too cheap to spring for a $20/mo account for me. Since HuggingFace models can be run on my laptop now (still very slow though), nothing is leaving the 'secure environment' and so I can actually get work done (instead of the 'old' version of coding and writing - google).

My add: max out you 401k contributions if you haven't already. It's the single most important financial decision most of us will (hopefully) make.

In regards to AI, it feels like I have finally been given the tools. For me, the world now feels so open. I can make websites now, I can do the things I have always wanted to do with computers and code. Your world is finally accessible to me.

In regards to you, I think you should read 'What Color is Your Parachute?' again. Yes, that sounds trite and glib, I am sorry. And yes, it sounds like boomer advice, I know. But the exercises in that book really are great stuff. There is a reason it's one of the best non-fiction sellers for like the last 40 years. And yes, I know, NPC-level advice here

I really hope you find your path again. The world isn't going to turn into paperclip maximizing AI gods (Look, Claude gave me $1000 for free the other week. Aint no one do that if they aren't scared shitless that the music is about to stop). We're going to be fine, so will you. You got this, I believe in you.

I remember the first semester in the dorms was mostly the sound of coughing.

Building up the immune system takes disease exposure and that takes time.

Addnib all the immune system depressants and increased exposure events there at Michigan - booze, pot, late nights, hookups, crowds, stress, etc - and you get a perfect storm for the immune system to take a beating.

A few of the rural school districts here offer this incentive to move out there. Sometimes they include a car too. Note they tdo not do repairs though.

The issue with taking one of these rural offers is that it's a dead end. Your schoolhouse of many grands gets smaller and smaller over time until they don't need you anymore. And then what? Your career as a teacher is essentially useless for any larger district as they do not care at all about teaching multiple grades at once and barely (or not) making state standards. And then you don't even have a house left over to sell (likely for a loss), it's the district's.

I know it's the reverse of the article, but the incentives are the same and they don't make sense for any of the parties.

Reacting to the article and not OP here, also spoilers:

I'm sorry, I know the movie was long, but did OP miss the Bronze-age Darth Vader with bones on his head? The very classic Nolan ending twist that Athena was a PTSD hallucination of the Trojan woman they killed? The constant and obvious murdering and pillaging that Odysseus and his crew do? That the Trojans were wearing white and the Greeks were wearing black? The very obvious scene where all the people that they have killed tell Odysseus that he is a bad guy and then they all go running after him and the crew?

Like, to me, I felt that it was over-the-top obvious, almost embarrassingly so from such a director, that the Greeks were the bad guys. He could not have communicated that more or better to my eyes. He comes out and says so at the ~90% mark. It is very clear.

But, and I apologize if I am also guilty of this sin with the article, it seems that he does not even still do enough to communicate that to many viewers.

Now, can this interface with Libby? The worldcat interface is, well, confusing. I can't figure out if it knows libraries near me exist.

But yeah, if I learned that a potential match did this to me, well, I think that would change a lot in my evaluation of that person as a partner.

reminds me of this Key and Peele skit

No, really, I mean it.

For decades, the healthcare complex has been exploiting these workers to our detriment.

The supply of workers is really high, typically, as there is this nobility to the professions. You are a 'helper', you are 'doing something with your life', you have a 'calling'. That extra feel-feels accounted for a lot of extra people in the workforce and that depressed wages as it increased supply. The actual work itself suffered too, as we all had to deal with burnt out healthcare workers with too many bills and not enough dollars. Even a pandemic barely hurt he business model (as far as I can tell from a quick googling).

But if workers start caring about the money more, then the wages will rise (hopefully), and that will attract better workers and not ones near the near of their ropes financially. We all will be better off. I think this goes for teachers too.

-George Orwell, You and the Atomic Bomb

I think AI now belongs in this dichotomy too. And we know that they are more like alarm clocks than battleships. Most of us do not need to learn the bitter lesson, we just need a little droid that turns .xlsx documents into .pdf documents for our client, an average here, editing out the ham sandwiches there. Simple little actions that take time and human-like effort but not human-like creativity and conscious thought. Things we used to have literate slaves and serfs do back in the days of triremes and guncotton.

Sure, the large battleship like LLMs will have some need, but the alarm-clock like LLMs are going to be good enough for enterprise-grade.

Essentially, we've been humans for about 200,000 years. But only in the last 5,000ish years have we done the whole civilization thing. Why?

Climate has a lot to do with it, we know that, but about 195,000 years is a lot of time too.

Quite the mystery.

It's a status thing, right?

Audiobooks have been a god send and then the Libby app manna from upon high. Free, high quality, adult-level infotainment?! I'll never go back.

One thing if do is up the reading speed. It takes time but I'm comfortable at 2.6x these days, even on the fragmented sleep a teething toddler grants you. For really in depth stuff I'll slow it down a lot, but a Stephen King dime store novel or John Grisham thriller? Oh yeah, speed it up no worries

Never meet your heroes is just great advice, same as it ever was.