educaysean

You're curious about the non-western perspective? I can tell you that social changes are arriving at a much faster pace in Asia than what we're experiencing in the west. This isn't because the Asian countries are more progressive, but because the baseline was simply lower. The west is indeed in the lead, but most countries are following closely behind, and more importantly, they're all headed in the same direction.

Think about it. Everyone is now consuming the same Tiktok, reddit, Netflix, music, video games globally. Twitter isn't some hidden cove only westerners have access to. The world is following along as George Floyd is brutally murdered in the street. Have you seen Parasite or Squid Game? They deal directly with topics like class struggle / racism and they resonated with people all over the earth. The fact that South Korean media is even producing media such as these would've been unthinkable just 20 years ago. Annual gay parade have started take place in Seoul since 2015, and interracial marriage numbers have never been higher.

I'm sure there are outlier nations who have faced regression in their cultural maturity since, but they're anything but the representative sample and claiming otherwise would be disingenuous. So no, this isn't something cooked up by the bored progressives of the U.S. This is not some obscure domain reserved for the western elites. This is where the world is headed towards - the westerners simply got there before the rest of us.

This is pretty damn cool. I love pitting the AI against itself and watch it debate back and forth.

Prompt:

Write a dialogue between a starving artist and an old school railroad tycoon debating whether or not we should be taxing billionaires more, with both sides liberally quoting Karl Marx to make their point

Generation:

Starving artist: "As Karl Marx famously said, 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.' Clearly, the billionaires have the ability to pay more in taxes, and it is our collective need as a society to ensure that we have the resources to provide for the less fortunate."

Old school railroad tycoon: "But as Marx also stated, 'The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors", and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment".' In other words, the market should determine what is fair, not the government."

Starving artist: "But the market has been rigged to favor the wealthy for far too long. It's time for the government to step in and correct this imbalance. As Marx said, 'The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.' It's time for the government to act in the interests of the working class, not just the wealthy elite."

Old school railroad tycoon: "But Marx also said, 'The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.' If we start taxing the wealthy more, we will stifle innovation and entrepreneurship. It's better to let the market determine what is fair, rather than the heavy hand of government."

Starving artist: "But the market has failed the working class for far too long. It's time for the government to step in and redistribute wealth in a more equitable way. As Marx said, 'The bourgeoisie has created enormous cities...and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.' It's time for the government to use its power to create a more equitable society for all."

Old school railroad tycoon: "But Marx also said, 'The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization.' If we start taxing the wealthy more, we will stifle the very engine of progress and prosperity. It's better to let the market determine what is fair, rather than the government trying to fix what isn't broken."

We're fully in the territory of conspiracy theories now

I should've clarified: the prompt I provided was for ChatGPT to respond in the style of a "snarky hacker news comment" casting aspersions on the current state of AI. So both the tone and the opinion expressed by the ChatGPT in this case was heavily guided.

Here's another:

The AI community needs to take a long, hard look in the mirror. All this talk about "machine learning" and "artificial intelligence" is just a bunch of hot air. The technology is nowhere near advanced enough to deliver on the wild claims being made by its proponents. In reality, these systems are little more than elaborate glorified pattern-matching algorithms. Let's stop pretending like we're on the verge of creating a sentient machine and get back to the basics.

The AI community needs to get real. All this talk about "large language model based AIs" is just smoke and mirrors. The technology is nowhere near advanced enough to convince the majority of people that it can provide genuine value in our lives. Stop pretending like these systems are capable of doing anything more than parroting back pre-programmed responses. The hype is out of control.

(The above comment was generated using ChatGPT)

Thanks for your premature concern, but we'll be fine. Despite how it may appear to a layperson such as yourself, the value of human creativity is in no way diminished by the release of this tool or others like it.

I'm not too familiar with the game CICERO. Is it the type of game in which adopting a "psychopath" mindset gives you tactical advantage over others?

Q: Difference between indica and sativa

A: Rice is an important staple food crop that has been cultivated for thousands of years. There are two main types of rice: Indica and Japonica

Thanks Meta. Very scientific.

> Without networking, your chances of landing the kind of job you _really_ want are vanishingly close to zero

Just to offer an anecdotal counterpoint: I switched companies 3 times in the last 4-5 years. Went from enterprise -> local start up -> big tech -> bay area start up. None of those jobs, including the enterprise gig where I got my start, required me to leverage my network.

I don't doubt it's much easier when you have people that can vouch for you, but "vanishingly close to zero" is not the experience I've had. And no, I didn't have to send out 200+ resumes.

But white people will?

> without putting in effort or sustained, deliberate sacrifice

Ah, the hubris of 21st century software engineers

I think this is a backwards take. The social stigma against those not conforming to the assigned gender norms has been entrenched in our culture. We've been getting better in recent years - the number of fathers who beat their boys for picking out a pink shirt is dwindling, and as a society more of us are willing to entertain the idea that gender is a social construct that has no innate definition.

It's very natural that in an environment more accepting of transgenderism, that more people will feel empowered to explore the idea and question what it could potentially mean for themselves. The appearance that a group that has accepted a single transgender person will somehow "begat" more transgender people seems pretty natural through this view, and seems much more scientific than the idea that transgenderism has some mysterious power to corrupt an otherwise cis-oriented person.

Thailand is one example of a society that has had years of history and experience welcoming trans people. I'd be interested to see how your "social contagion" theory would fare there.

I grew up in South Korea where kids are placed under immense academic stress and gaming is an established mainstream culture. In the last two decades or so, the instances of kids and adults suffering from severe gaming addiction have become increasingly common.

The issue is exacerbated by the fact that more gaming companies are embracing loot boxes, pay-to-win schemes, and other parlor tricks to not only keep the players addicted but to also extract as much cash as possible from its captive audience. When hearing the stories of people whose lives were ruined by video games, it's hard not to draw the similarities with gambling addicts who poured their entire life savings into casinos. Except the casinos now exist in the pockets of 14 year olds, accessible at all times.

I'm a long time gamer and a hobby game dev myself. I very much dislike the tendency for media to overstate the harms of gaming, but the reality is that gaming in its current form can be a very dangerous thing to become addicted to.

When I used play soccer regularly, I'd occasionally experience being "in the zone". It's a blissful experience where my body is able to execute incredibly complex set of moves in perfect coordination as my mind enters a state of zen-like calm.

The sensation is almost like a being spectator in my own body. My brain feels like it's been relieved of the task of managing the moment-to-moment decision. Instead I start noticing moves 3, 4 steps ahead as time slows to a crawl around me. I don't know if this type of experience is related in any way to the theory of consciousness, but it feels like the unconscious mind holds a lot of secrets that I'd love to see unlocked in my lifetime.

Known and unknown are relative. I know my first name. I don't know yours. Your theory suggests that the two names will certainly be different. Is that always the case?

The mechanisms of human brain is indeed unknown to us. So how can we say with confidence that its underlying workings are this way or that way with certainty? We can only observe the inputs and outputs and do our best to compare the two. Which is the whole point of AI - to simulate the human brain (or what we can observe about it) to the best of our ability.

You claim "difference", but how can you say such things when we have no idea how human brains mix and match different sources of inspirations? I've definitely composed a succession of melodies only to turn around and realize I'd just copied an entire chunk of a commercial jingle I'd heard in the background a while back. What is the precise definition of inspiration?

This made me wonder: Why do PDFs feel so much slower and bulkier compared to something like viewing HTML over a browser? When it comes to displaying static images and text, shouldn't PDFs outperform HTML pages by miles?

Wait, there are people out there that don't know what you know? Sound the alarms everyone! These new generation of amateurs are going to ruin everything!

The way I see it, input being confined to a "text description" is the next immediate problem that needs to be solved. I don't think we can rely on textual inputs for much longer as the human language is too imprecise and/or verbose. It's hard to imagine what exactly the optimal interface would be, but I'm thinking we'll need ways to dictate attributes for each entity being represented, the backdrop, and the view composition all as separate individual components. Ideally all these components can also be reusable and provide reproducibility guarantees without having to share a global "seed" as well.

You refuse to cite studies because you don't care to get in some debate?

I'm of the opposite opinion. AI assisted art is simply the natural next chapter for "art" as a whole. It will finally kickstart the public discourse about what being an artist means in the perspective of artistic vision vs execution.

Most artists spend their lives not refining their brush stroke, but rather their eyes. The way I see it, the impact of curation and artistic direction will matter more and more in the future.

From my experience there isn't a clear difference in quality between the output produced by Dalle2 and Stable Diffusion. They both suffer from their own unique idiosyncrasies, and the result is that they have differently shaped learning curves.

I do admit that I rate the creativity of Dalle2 higher than that of SD. It can occasionally create really unexpected and exciting compositions, whereas SD will more often lean more conventional.

You are saying two different things here. Are you agreeing with the poster's position that veterinary professionals aren't getting paid what they're worth (aka. cheap labor), or are you refuting it?

One thing that sticks out to me is how so much of the the images in the collection have really terrible labels. I uncovered a large collection of pieces by an illustrator who was unsearchable by name, only via image upload. The reason they were unsearchable: the majority of this particular artist's images had labels that were all in the format of:

{username}'s profile image

My guess is that you consider yourself to be a part of that select group of "aware" individuals. How extremely human of you.

I guess there is no right and no wrong in that worldview. How very convenient.

A dictatorship that disregards the will of the people it governs has only committed wrong in the eyes of these sensitive modern westerners, right? CCP tells the world its subjugates are happy and fulfilled so who are we to judge?

So instead of putting in the work and weighing out the different qualities of an effective educator, you pick out the most arbitrary of criteria out there and want to make that the gold standard for evaluating teachers.

I'm not a betting man, but I'd feel comfortable wagering that you are a STEM grad with solid SAT scores.

I think it's more subtle than that. I personally interpreted the tone of the headline to be hinting at something much more nefarious than "Amazon plans to hire ex-inmates to fight off union influence", and it looks like I wasn't alone. It's a terrible headline that doesn't do a good job of summarizing the key point of the article. A more cynical person than myself might even throw around the term clickbait.

Many public libraries in California do struggle with homeless patrons. Librarians serving those libraries are sometimes required to take specific trainings to be able to provide help for the less amicable homeless crowd, and some are even equipped with narcans for emergencies.