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It’s the NY Post, barrel scraping is their business model.

I think there’s a huge assumption here that more LLM will lead to AGI.

Nothing I’ve seen or learned about LLMs leads me to believe that LLMs are in fact a pathway to AGI.

LLMs trained on more data with more efficient algorithms will make for more interesting tools built with LLMs, but I don’t see this technology as a foundation for AGI.

LLMs don’t “reason” in any sense of the word that I understand and I think the ability to reason is table stakes for AGI.

This will be an interesting inflection point for humanity.

Though, call me jaded, but I can’t help but doubt that the _actual_ content creators, the writers themselves, will see any of the money should The Times win or settle the case.

Those massive Computer Shopper catazines were a great way to spend an afternoon or 12. So much killer hardware to drool over.

“Success Theater” is what I’ve heard it called. I’ve seen it in action, billions of dollars up in smoke, but everything is awesome!

Bah! I knew it! :)

I will, but I need to dig it out of my archives. It was from a time before repos. :)

Sounds like the Amtrak quiet car for early morning routes. I loved the quiet car.

I wrote a super simple flame simulation a long time ago as a toy in C after reading an article somewhere.

You just set each pixel’s brightness to be the average brightness of the immediately adjacent pixels. Calculate from bottom to top.

Add a few “hot” pixels moving back and forth along the bottom and boom, instant fire.

Looks very cool for a tiny amount of code and no calculus. :)

But we barely know anything about how life on our own works, much less came about. We barely know anything concrete about anything.

We’re just hairless (mostly) apes running amok having discovered how to trap fire inside little bits of copper and sand.

We’ll look as primitive to our descendants in 10,000 years as our ancestors of 10,000 years look to us.

I guess I’m saying that, I think, our views on the universe and life are only very slightly more accurate than they were when those ancestors were painting what they saw in caves.

I think our hubris tells us we understand far more than we do. I think if you take that into account, the possibility for life existing elsewhere in the universe is an absolute fact.

I surmise, that for us to think that we’re the only sentient life in the unimaginably vast universe is the ultimate manifestation of our drive for self-preservation.

We want to survive and propagate our DNA above all else, therefor we must be vigilant against all threats, therefor if we consider ourselves at the center of the universe, we can be sure to never neglect anything that might indeed be a threat.

The problem with this instinct is that it clouds our conscious judgement into thinking that the universe does indeed revolve around us and then we make conclusions according to that fallacy.

I think life in the universe is as ubiquitous as rocks. It’s everywhere in all manner of forms and sophistication. We just won’t have the tools to see or hear it for maybe a couple hundred years or so. But once we do, we’ll have a chuckle at how we could be so arrogant as a species to ever think we were alone.

Congratulations Mitchell! You’ve inspired and influenced the careers of many, many developers, including me.

I always look to HashiCorp first when searching for tooling. Always something interesting coming out of that shop.

I have to disagree. I think language will be emergent from AGI, not the other way round.

LLMs are neat, but likely wont have a place in an AGI.

I was going to ask about this. So these open models are uncensored and unconstrained?

The immediacy of analog is so nice compared to the constant lag of software.

Audio effects and synthesizers all have software driven versions that sound effectively identical to analog and are typically cheaper. Yet, analog has been hanging on due to the simplicity and immediacy.

I think part of the problem is there aren’t really any “good guys” in most cases.

With regulatory capture and the revolving door between .com and .gov, those who run the corporations and those who are supposed to respond to the whistle are often hanging out in the same back rooms.

The general response seems to be a slap on the wrist and a hardy “Don’t get caught doing that again!”

I’d encourage you to temper the hyperbole.

It’s easy to dismiss these types of articles as straight sales pitches when the problem is presented as “…a fate worse than death.” and the solution so easy and painless, you’d be a fool not to dismiss any other approach! Thats the MO of snake oil sellers.

Instead, I think a more objective comparison with much less editorializing would be less of a turn off for folks curious about a better approach to solve a problem that you did well in outlining at the beginning of the article.

Hopefully you take this as constructive feedback! I think the substance of the article is interesting, I was just turned off by the presentation.

That’s actually been my experience with Google for a while.

If I don’t explicitly specify “site:xyz” I get pages of garbage spam sites with no answers.

Somehow ChatGPT seems easier to extract information from as I can just converse, test and repeat vs reading paragraphs of nonsense or skipping through a 14 minute YouTube video to get to incorrect or outdated answers.

As I get more proficient with ChatGPT, it becomes more useful. It has bad habits I can recognize and work around to get what I need. It just feels far more efficient than using a web search tool ever was.

Were the illustrations AI generated I wonder? They look very interesting and abstract, but still made to fit the narrative.

I don’t think that’s necessarily true. I don’t think privacy is an abstraction, but rather a very real and visceral concern.

Regardless of the outcome, I’m entitled to my privacy and my privacy is important to me simply for the sake of my autonomy.

Simply having my privacy violated is a bad outcome in and of itself.

Relinquishing privacy in order to participate in modern society in a meaningful way is one of the great frustrations of modern times… for some.

That takes a lot of cash and a lot of stupid.

Same. 12+ years of using AWS and there’s been 1 instance of a server (RDS) going down due to something outside of our control.

Restoring a snapshot got us back running quickly. If we were multi-az, we probably wouldn’t have noticed.

Mine is due to hearing damage from being stupid.

I can modulate it as well using my jaw muscles.

What I’ve always found interesting is that I can’t describe the sound. It’s high pitched, but I’ve never found a frequency of tone that matches or even comes close to the tinnitus.

I would imagine the signals my brain receives from the damaged nerves is very complex. Not white noise, but probably the equivalent of a tone with lots of specific harmonics.

As for my experience, it’s been an issue for so long it doesn’t generally affect me. It’s always there and I can’t ignore it, but it doesn’t disrupt my life, other than having generally not great hearing.

It’s true that we’ve come a long way as a society (in many places), but just because we’re better off, doesn’t mean we’re in a good place.

I hope we can look back 100 years from today and reflect on how bad things were in these times.

Global society is a zero sum game until we get to a place of over abundance. With such limited (often artificially limited) resources, when the rich are winning, the poor in fact are losing.

I think the feeling that this imbalance is accelerating is real. The ever widening technology gap enables the wealthy to leverage powerful tools that simply aren’t available to much of the world population. It’s far easier to game the system than it has ever been.

Finishing my album!

In the software industry, M&A stories are written about winners and users.

Right, I think that’s part of what makes these types of monopolies particularly bad; efficiency no longer matters.

When everyone else is locked out of competing, the market owners lose incentive to do anything but maintain status quo.

There’s an interesting psychology here. We think of business leaders as hyper competitive, but they often seem to try to get to a place where they not only beat their competitors, but try to lock them out of the playing field.

Once there’s little or no threat from competition, doesn’t that get boring?

Athletes are competitive, but I think in a different way. I don’t think an athlete would find much enjoyment if they figured out a way to always be the only ones on the track, slowly meandering around by themselves.

Craigslist needs to be added to the list of national historical sites and should _never ever_ be allowed to change.

Give BSOD new meaning.

Maybe much longer. The mass of infrastructure and data housed at OpenAI will be difficult to reproduce from scratch.

Especially considering OpenAI has boosted the value of the masses of data floating around the internet. Getting access to all that juicy data is going to come at a high cost for data hungry LLM manufacturers from here on out.