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passion__desire

634 karma · joined July 17, 2021

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passion__desire··on Our digital lives need data centers. What goes on inside them?
One thing that could explain this dichotomy is that writing such an article for oil refinery would be expensive task. Because data for such research may not be readily available online (not focussing on intentions). Just a guess. You will find more articles about things that are easy to write about. If an article requires lot of field work, on foot research, talking to many people and synthesize and piece together disparate information in a coherent manner, don't expect it to be commissioned.
passion__desire··on The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age
Marcus Aurelis wrote in short snippets format. They were notes to himself which were latter organized into flowing organized essays by historians and writers.
passion__desire··on What Is a Particle? (2020)
In similar vein, the following question is very apt. Please read the question because it captures all of our intuition when we try to understand something.

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/46573/what-are-t...

What are strings made of?

One answer is that it is only meaningful to answer this question if the answer has physical consequences. Popularly speaking, string theory is supposed to be the innermost Russian doll of modern physics, and there are no more dolls inside that we can explain it in terms. However, we may be able to find equivalent formulations.

passion__desire··on The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age
Meme-pages are today's "brevity is the soul of wit". They really distill experience and wisdom in nice consumable package.
passion__desire··on The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age
I could be wrong in this. But wasn't his writings only for himself and was published only later. How many people really referred to his writings? When was printing press invented? How popular was it compared to Bible? Was it possible for people to consume his writings in multimedia formats like video, audio? Were there meme-pages on tiktoks which contextualized his writings in different day-to-day scenarios so that the importance of his general ideas were imprinted on their minds? Did he have debate with others to defend his ideas watched by many, how would he respond to those counter-arguments? Would your mind change considering if his responses weren't that strong or on filmsy grounds?
passion__desire··on The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age
If causality holds, acting externally will have changes to internal assessments assuming good faith dialogue. Plus Marcus Aurelius was helpless in that it would take him lot of time and energy to give personal attention to each individual and clarify their doubts. He didn't have the technology to record his thoughts on a topic and refer people to it.
passion__desire··on The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age
I sometimes think "algorithms" understand me more than other people. Through my actions, they can diagnose me better than any doctor. e.g. meme therapy pages on facebook and tiktoks. I believe a constant stream of "best matched tiktoks/reels" to my situation" would be equivalent in value to going to a 3-star michelin restaurant and having their best dishes. It is available to everyone.
passion__desire··on The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age
I think stoic ideas are from an era where their circumstances made them have those principles. We don't live in that era. It is possible to affect others and the associated cascading effect that can bring about a change in others action which were affecting you negatively. If Naval's idea of "individuals having leverage holds water" directly implies that you can change others, albiet slowly. If your reach becomes big enough that it becomes a threat that "other actors" need to curtail that reach through "algorithms" is another evidence that you were indeed having effects that they didn't like.
passion__desire··on Contextual Retrieval
I used to always wonder how do llms know whether a particular long article or audio transcript was written by say Alan Watts. Basically these kind of metadata annotation would be common while preparing training data for Llama models and so on. This could also be reason for the genesis for the argument that ChatGPT got slower in December. That "date" metadata would "inform" ChatGPT to be unhelpful.
passion__desire··on Contextual Retrieval
Embedding is a transformation which allows us to find semantically relevant chunks from a catalogue given a query. Through some nearness criteria, you would retrieve "semantically relevant" chunks which along with query would be fed to LLMs and ask them to synthesize the best answer. Vespa docs are very great if you are thinking of building in this space. Retrieval part is independent of synthesis, hence it has its separate leaderboard on huggingface.

https://docs.vespa.ai/en/embedding.html

https://huggingface.co/spaces/mteb/leaderboard

passion__desire··on Stop Designing Your Web Application for Millions of Users When You Dont Have 100
The other point is what if your Company's exit strategy is dependent on going big. Then it is pertinent that you plan for that 0.01% chance because there is no other exit.
passion__desire··on Show HN: Selectric – macOS Search for Gmail, Outlook, Drive, Slack
Can you provide a demo output of AI capabilities by using Enron emails dataset and how AI answers those questions asked by lawyers in that case?
passion__desire··on CUNY paid Oracle $600M for its HR software (2013)
With that money, Larry begged Jensen to take it and deliver him the GPUs. Onto the new grift. In yesteryears it was database and now it is AI. Benedict Evans always compared AI to databases. Oracle of AI is THE Oracle of Databases.
passion__desire··on Why wordfreq will not be updated
This idea could also be extended to domains like Art. Create new art styles for AI to learn from. But in future, that will also get automated. AI itself will create art styles and all humans would do is choose whether something is Hot or Not. Sort of like art breeder.
passion__desire··on Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon
Mossad said - "Explain to me why it is more noble to kill 10,000 men in battle than a dozen at dinner."
passion__desire··on Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon
I think this is the case of both sides knew about each other's plan all along and yet Oct 7 happened. What could be the reason for both sides to execute it. Just to find out what happens?
passion__desire··on The centrality of stupidity in mathematics
I think this process of uncovering your stupidity / confusion could be gradual as Scott makes the point below. It need not be a single "Aha" moment.

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=4974

> OK, but why a doofus computer scientist like me? Why not, y’know, an actual expert? I won’t put forward my ignorance as a qualification, although I have often found that the better I learn a topic, the more completely I forget what initially confused me, and so the less able I become to explain things to beginners.

passion__desire··on Why to Not Write a Book
> this is the way to understand maybe

I have this idea. Let's say I want to bring two words (AI and Apocalypse, Yud's thesis ) closer in some semantic space of ideas. How would I do it? I would write thousands of stories bring those two concepts together. Sort of like warping the space of ideas. Like a horseshoe. Subconsciously, if I want to guage the weightage of a particular thesis, my mind does it informally if it can pull many emotionally weighted instances in support of that thesis. The same applies to societies and groups.

passion__desire··on Why to Not Write a Book
There is modern version of Charles Dickens' way of publishing a chapter each week in the newspaper. Artists on tiktok and instagram and youtube shorts are developing characters with backstories and so on.

e.g. https://www.youtube.com/@dsand00

Nowadays, you don't have to write the boring parts, just write the interesting bits.

passion__desire··on Why to Not Write a Book
This was depicted in The Simpsons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_Job

> "The Book Job" is the sixth episode of the twenty-third season of the American animated television series The Simpsons. It originally aired on the Fox network in the United States on November 20, 2011. In the episode, Lisa is shocked to discover that all popular young-adult novels are not each written by a single author with any inspiration, but are conceived by book publishing executives through use of market research and ghostwriters to make money. When Homer hears this, he decides to get rich by starting work on a fantasy novel about trolls together with Bart, Principal Skinner, Patty, Moe, Professor Frink, and author Neil Gaiman.

passion__desire··on Stephen Fry – AI: A Means to an End or a Means to Our End?
I think you already know this then.

https://youtu.be/r84pbPbBAFY

passion__desire··on The disunity of consciousness in everyday experience
The way I think is it is like a pattern trying to maintain itself. Pattern is the ghost in the machine. But the pattern isn't significant in itself in that apart from continuing its existence there is no other requirement. It's just that intelligence either individual or collective helps in continuing the pattern further. Self in that sense is like a soliton on a water surface.
passion__desire··on Tell HN: DanBC has died
We have limited familial / personal attention and care to give to others. Either you could spread it thin by becoming a big leader but no personal depth among fans. Or you could increase depth among very few near and dear.
passion__desire··on The disunity of consciousness in everyday experience
I personally find process philosophy to be the ultimate description. i.e. Heraclitus position

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/process-philosophy/

Put another way, it's dynamic structures all the way down or up

https://youtu.be/j96Hls_-Ulc

passion__desire··on The disunity of consciousness in everyday experience
> the unification is an illusion or an appearance

Julian Baggini - The Duality of Non-duality

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

Bundle theories of the self, inspired by David Hume, view the self as a collection of experiences, memories, and thoughts rather than a fixed entity. This perspective sees the self as dynamic and changing, without strict borders, yet maintaining a high degree of order and stability over time. While rejecting the idea of a core self, it doesn't advocate for "no self" or "many selves," but rather a gradualist approach that acknowledges the fuzzy distinction between self and other. The speaker emphasizes that this view doesn't negate the practical existence of individuals or invalidate logical thinking. Instead, it suggests that different levels of description are valid for understanding reality, and that metaphysical views about the self don't necessarily dictate how one should live their life.

passion__desire··on Fuck founder mode. Work in "Fuck off mode"
What about "Lean In"?
passion__desire··on How America's universities became debt factories
> "financially innocent"

and "alcoholly irresponsible". I want to know do these loans also provide for booze or binge drinking that happens in college campuses.

passion__desire··on Going open-source as a VC-Backed company
Looked another way, isn't it great that we, as a society, are allowing such experiments to be conducted. At the same time, training people to build stuff who will go on to build other great stuff even if this particular experiment fails. Sort of like cambrian explosion.
passion__desire··on Ford seeks patent for tech that listens to driver conversations to serve ads
Would you stop having smartphones? Because "they" do the same thing as revealed in news reports recently.
passion__desire··on GPT-fabricated scientific papers on Google Scholar
Existence of LLMs make Google search even more relevant for cross-checking rather than less relevant for deep research. Daniel Dennett said we should have all levels of searches available for everyone i.e. from basic string matching to semantic matching. [0]

[0] https://youtu.be/arEvPIhOLyQ?t=1139

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