Hi Mike, how recently was it you’ve last tried to find products on ChatGPT? We’ve been making many updates recently, so wanted to pinpoint what it might be to improve on things.
157 karma · joined February 14, 2017
First, you can trust in the wisdom of those who came before you, i.e. scripture. Second, you could trust in tradition, which may say such things. Third, you can use reason yourself. Fourth, you could rely on personal experience.
Even if the external outcome is the same, the direction towards which the person evolves is vastly different. And when lifted out of a narrow thought experiment, in real life, who you are does determine all the great and small ways you behave, and the methods you are willing to employ.
That’s why in the Sermon on the Mount, Christ says “It was said to those of old, you shall not murder, and whoever murders will be liable to judgement. But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgement.”
You will find similar principles expressed in Buddhist teachings, or the Bhagavad Gita, or Confucian ethical philosophy. In this instance, anger on its own is merely a seed. But if left to grow, and it grows by you watering it, then eventually it expresses itself in a much more destructive way.
> The gap isn’t just quantitative—it’s qualitative.
> LLMs don’t have memory—they engage in elaborate methods to fake it...
> This isn’t just database persistence—it’s building memory systems that evolve the way human memory does...
> The future isn’t one model to rule them all—it’s hundreds or thousands of specialized models working together in orchestrated workflows...
> The future of AGI is architectural, not algorithmic.
> November 2022 didn’t just mark the launch of ChatGPT—it kicked off the AI talent race. We analyzed retention across top AI labs, and one clear leader emerged: Anthropic. An impressive 80% of employees hired at least 2 years ago at Anthropic were still at the company at the end of their second year—a figure that stands out in an industry known for high turnover. DeepMind follows closely at 78%, while OpenAI’s retention trails at 67% but remains on par with large FAANG companies like Meta (64%).
> Talent poaching with precision: Anthropic is siphoning top talent from two of its biggest rivals: OpenAI and DeepMind. Engineers are 8 times more likely to leave OpenAI for Anthropic than the reverse. From DeepMind, the ratio is nearly 11:1 in Anthropic’s favor. Some of that’s expected—Anthropic is the hot new startup, while DeepMind’s larger, tenured team is ripe for movement. But the scale of the shift is striking.
No bugs, no configuration errors, no nothing. It all just worked. So I think you guys deserve more recognition and credit for what is clearly a very well-engineered product that I intend to use for some of my personal projects.
I think it's important you choose what affects you most. I was deeply moved reading this when I was atheist, so who am I to say what will and will not move others?
“Don’t be afraid of anything, ever. And do not grieve. As long as your repentance does not weaken, God will forgive everything. There is not—there cannot be—a sin on earth that God will not forgive the truly repentant. Why, a man cannot commit a sin so great as to exhaust the infinite love of God. How could there be a sin that would surpass the love of God?
Think only of repentance, all the time, and drive away all fear. Have faith that God loves you more than you can ever imagine. He loves you, sinful as you are and, indeed, because of your sin. It was said long ago that there is more joy in heaven over one repentant sinner than over ten righteous men. Go now, and fear nothing. Do not be offended if people treat you badly. Do not hold it against them. And forgive your departed husband all the harm he did you. Become truly reconciled with him. For if you repent, you love, and if you love, you are with God. Love redeems and saves everything.
If I, a sinner like yourself, am moved and feel compassion for you, how infinitely much more will God! Love is such an infinite treasure it can buy the whole world and can redeem not only your sins, but the sins of all people. So go and fear no more.”
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov (pp. 64-65). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
It is wisdom and self-mastery: the ability to know what is right and wrong, the control to continually transform yourself, bit by bit, something that makes everything around you better.
These things she talks about are fine, but in the best lived life, they merely follow from the first.
It's much longer, and definitely not meant to be read in one sitting. Instead, I read it a little bit every morning, a little bit every night. To me, living a good life is hard and requires constant effort—the wisdom in these texts can't possibly sink in after just a single reading. Sustained reading and re-reading grooves the text into the brain, and over time changes our thoughts, which over time changes our actions, which changes the whole world.
It turns out this question—how do we contend with the question of death?—is one of the most, if not the most, studied questions in human history, second perhaps only to why we came to exist. The collective answer by each of the world's cultures is encoded in myth, poetry, and spiritual and religious traditions. I would recommend the Bhagavad Gita, translated and commentated by Eknath Easwaran (https://www.amazon.com/Bhagavad-Gita-2nd-Eknath-Easwaran/dp/...). It's not necessary to practice or believe in any particular religion to gain something valuable from these books, nor is it incompatible with science to delve spiritually.
See Communist China before they re-implemented the Gaokao (their college entrance exam), many schools now in California, and once-prominent public schools like Dunbar High in the D.C. area (successful despite the poverty of the area in which it operated-see https://www.creators.com/read/thomas-sowell/10/16/dunbar-hig...).
Interesting to see if an AI agent given the objective to generate profit would resort to running scams. Encoding moral boundaries becomes important. What if you asked it to raise money for a good cause and it uses “whatever means necessary?”
Every manufacturer offers models in categories from large pickup truck to family roadtripper to mid-size crossovers, each model with trims that could vary the performance and aesthetics and targeted price points that could raise the final price by tens of thousands.
The Internet is filled with car forums, not including Reddit or Facebook groups, jam-packed with users. Forums for individual models, like one for each of the Subaru Forester, Outback, Crosstrek, and Ascent. Forums for auto-detailing, rally racing, off-roading, and countless other activities.
Car financing and used-car sales provide further flexibility for people to buy their cars. The size of the auto financing industry in the U.S. is in the ballpark of ~$1.2 trillion.
YouTube has probably millions of hours of car videos — any random model from any random manufacturer has review videos from countless owners, each one with tens of thousands to millions of views, and these are refreshed every year. There are reviews for different tires, engine mods, accessories, trims, 6-months of use, 12-months of use, snow usage, and off-roading usage.
The automobile, at least, is one of the indisputable triumphs of capitalism and the modern global economy, a testament to its ability to serve every customer at every price point and nearly every use-case. Yes, there are environmental impacts of car usage, and quality of life externalities due to traffic and roads, but, for this post at least, I want to appreciate the automobile and how significant it is to our lives.
There's plenty of room for Apple, and car owners and renters across the world, I'm sure, will benefit from its entrance, whatever way, shape, or form it takes.
The opposite state of this is poverty, a condition in which humanity has lived for 99% of its existence. In the modern day, technology and evolution in economic-political systems have enabled us to produce wealth at a large scale, enough to support hundreds of millions of people living with more material comforts than any medieval king. It took a hell of a lot of work to get here.
To argue that "Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world", then, is to put the cart before the horse. Work is precisely the attempt to alleviate ourselves of poverty. Work, coordinated well and magnified in its output by technology, which itself progressed due to a combination of work and the play of creative-minded individuals, creates the wealth we enjoy today.
I think this essay provides too many fancy words and not enough details about how to achieve this utopian vision of a world of all play and no work, in which economically productive activities are perfectly aligned with our human pursuits so as to produce wealth, leisure, and comfort for all.
For example, this following passage, in which he proposes the abolition of the auto industry:
Next we can take a meat-cleaver to production work itself. No more war production, nuclear power, junk food, feminine hygiene deodorant — and above all, no more auto industry to speak of. An occasional Stanley Steamer or Model-T might be all right, but the auto-eroticism on which such pestholes as Detroit and Los Angeles depend on is out of the question. Already, without even trying, we’ve virtually solved the energy crisis, the environmental crisis and assorted other insoluble social problems.
I am all for being an optimist, and all for evolving culturally so that we can work more happily and efficiently, and all for employing technology to achieve these things, but this essay isn't it. It would make sense if we lived in the Culture of Iain M. Banks, cared for by hyper-intelligent AI, but that's so far away in the future as to be barely worth considering right now.
As of today, work and a culture of work has produced our rich society. It's also produced its share of problems — rich diseases, soulless office cubicles, environmental degradation — but abolishing work culture is not the answer. The problems you mention of distribution and recycling of surplus is going to be solved with — dare I say it? — more work.
Of course, the language can be recast in a more positive light into playing status games vs. wealth slash some other kind of goal-achieving games.
Or recast it again into a personal CBT method to quiet status-related anxieties: is worrying about what Betty thinks of me or my jokes or social gaffes going to make me any happier, richer, or healthier? What would a "sociopath" think? Would they even react to this? Perhaps the answer is "yes", but much more often than not, the answer is "no, it doesn't matter one bit." It's your mind creating demons out of dust.
Perhaps I am missing some perspective.