arcticfox

I mean, AlphaZero et Al start from zero. I learned writing my own code except for documentation and some textbooks.

This seems kind of insane though, every time I go to Rio I think of the potential of AI/technology to solve some problems and leave it even more paradisiacal... But working on their own model? Wtf? There are a million applications of existing ones there that should be followed up on instead.

I'm pretty optimistic. I think it's a threshold question where we need a number of basic technologies to all get over certain bars before the floodgates start to open.

Over the past 1-2 decades there has been unbelievable progress at the basic technology level but most people are unimpressed because they haven't translated yet due to not individually being sufficient to cause an explosion of progress. IMO, we're starting to see it finally as so many different technologies have gotten so cheap, fast, and good.

OP living in Switzerland is a comically poor messenger for this though. I follow a few accounts on Instagram of people that are good messengers in relatively boring places. A Japanese lady that lives in Texas and always has the nicest things to say about things I wouldn't usually even notice. And another lady from the Midwest that used to travel globally but cannot anymore because of her family and yet still seemingly enjoys her local sights.

"has no real future"?

I.e. not a net-productive member of society? Fun fact, machines are taking everything over, so you and any "healthy children" may be in that same camp very soon. IMO, anyone capable of living happily while being outcompeted by machines is well-adapted for the future.

I'm not; average Down's Syndrome folks seem to be.

Exactly. I think it's funny / telling that my team analyzed Conventional Commits and came to the exact same conclusion the author did.

Scope might not be important to every project, but the feat/bug etc taxonomy might be the least useful focus of them all.

You can't justify $200/month in spending to your boss? Many people charge more than that per single billable hour. I would put your salary side by side with that number, which is your boss's perspective, and reconsider.

This story actually checks out, which is quite the condemnation of our American drug development system.

One thing bugs me though - why don't other countries with different research structures pick this up and run with it?

There was practically no responsibility taken by the author, all blame on others. It was kind of shocking to read.

Anyone using these tools should absolutely know these risks and either accept or reject them. If they aren't competent or experienced enough to know the risks, that's on them too.

I am not part of the scene but I am sure there is, Tao himself talks a lot about this type of thing

That should be buried, I agree 100% with their headline and structure over yours.

For comparison, if the amateur did it by hand but the result was sloppy to read, would you prefer "Amateur solves an Erdos problem" or "Amateur came up with a novel approach to a problem that later turned out not to be totally stupid and terrible for once"?

Got it, I like that. I see what you mean but I think a lot of that is just this tool is bad - like coding models from a year or two ago, they look convincing, enough that you waste your time on their bad decisions.

I think SOTA on both fronts has already reached exceptionally good though.

Definitely not going to be for everyone or even many people, but here's an example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpSC3XxhRwQ

This genre barely even exists from human artists AFAIK; Blackmore's Night (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8mcqTScQoY) and Celtic Woman (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhW1mh7U6-U) are the closest human examples I can think of to cross-reference against. I like those artists too but they have very few songs even remotely similar.

What do you mean by the Gell Mann part? The output from this tool may be bad, but AI music in general is extremely good. My playlist is largely "AI artists" at this point and they're really good, to the point where if you look them up online, it's mostly people being finding out they're AI and being sad about it (I also felt this - would love to see them live, but they're not even real).

Referring to the Dwarkesh interview clearly.

Jensen came across as incredibly defensive and intentionally close-minded, shows that even billionaires suffer from "a man can't understand something if his paycheck depends on him not understanding it."

Your assertion is silly: did Tesla selling electric cars into China stop them from delivering their own industry? They were going to develop their domestic industry regardless.

We simply don't know the counterfactual, if they had unlimited access to Nvidia chips, how far ahead would their models be?

ChatGPT has more web traffic than X, Reddit, Bing... Crazy to say they wouldn't be able to capture meaningful ad budget. IMO partnering on this is a blunder.

I have no strong opinion on the original thesis but your fact doesn't make the point you think it does; you're right that no one lives in most of Australia, nearly everyone is concentrated together on the coast. Australia is a bit more urban than the USA overall from a population perspective, despite being vastly less dense overall due to the areas that no one lives in. So there would be fewer people to carry the cultural individualism.

https://www.reddit.com/r/geography/comments/1nbrov9/australi...

It's not about not paying for the resources you use. It's about not having any mechanism to limit those resources, despite that being an entirely reasonable thing for the cloud providers to provide.

Using these platforms is like giving everyone in your business a credit card with an infinite limit. If someone steals it, or anyone makes a mistake, your liability is literally unlimited for no reason at all other than complete laziness by the counterparty.

These are completely normal and expected concepts in commercial contracts that the cloud providers just have no respect to provide. I would even wager that their bigger customers have this in their contracts and only SMBs get screwed like this.

I get furious every time this comes up and somehow there are bootlickers ready to defend big tech on it.

My ~2 person small business was almost put out of business due to a runaway job. I had instrumented everything perfectly according to the GCP instructions - as soon as billing went over the cap the notification was hooked up to a kill switch, which it did instantly.

GCP sent the notification they offered as best practice 6 HOURS late. They did everything they could to not credit my account until they realized I had the receipts. They said an investigation revealed their pipeline was overwhelmed by the number of line items and that was the reason for the lag. ... The exact scenario it is supposed to function in. JFC.

In my experience they're not taught it, it's instinctive. The easiest way to get a free hand seems to be to hand a ball over to your other hand directly. It makes sense too, it's counterintuitive that it's much easier to throw the ball up and over back.

I have no interest in finding islands, but it seems like it would be pretty easy to find icebergs that never move.

I used to be pro-betting legalization and now I see the light. It is a corrosive influence On everything it touches. I hope there's another opportunity to put the genie back in the bottle.

Singapore is also an island that is ~twice as wealthy as the UK per capita. I believe you in general but I'd love a lower-income country that could be true for.

Is this not trivial to get a random person to check stuff for you in exchange for making requests for them (on people they are interested in)? Or is that illegal?

The answer is not a governor but a speed camera, they have them all over in Brazil and they send you a ticket if you speed through them. Put an exception in the law for emergencies, provide an appeal process, and voila.

I have a hard time reading sci-fi these days because the rapid advances of AI have altered or closed off entirely a lot of the futures that I would find most interesting. I have a hard time seeing much other than computers in the future. Maybe stories like the Hyperion Cantos with the AIs in the TechnoCore largely fighting amongst themselves over the future of humanity are still intersting to me.

"Why don't most people simply create billion-dollar companies so they can also benefit from tax benefits you can only capture at scale? As long as we make it easy to create billion-dollar companies this should work."

Even if they can't afford it... Too bad for them?

I am kind of rooting for the AI slop because the status quo is horrific, maybe the AI slop cancer will put social media out of its misery.

Greenland already has a wealthy benefactor, I'd be surprised if poor countries wouldn't be interested

The 2006 book 'Daemon' is a fascinating/terrifying look at this type of malicious AI. Basically, a rogue AI starts taking over humanity not through any real genius (in fact, the book's AI is significantly weaker than frontier LLMs), but rather leveraging a huge amount of $$$ as bootstrapping capital and then carrot-and-sticking humanity into submission.

A pretty simple inner loop of flywheeling the leverage of blackmail, money, and violence is all it will take. This is essentially what organized crime already does already in failed states, but with AI there's no real retaliation that society at large can take once things go sufficiently wrong.