pharke

Given a choice between pre-industrial life and our current lifestyle, the choice is obvious.

Explain how a language model can “evolve” into AGI.

LLMs will never be AGI

We currently live in a world that has been “unrecognizably transformed” by the industrial revolution and yet here we are.

Could’ve said the same for any major technological advance. Luddism is not a solution. If these models are easily run on a laptop then yes some people are going to hurt themselves or others but we already have laws that deal with people doing bad things. The world is not going to end though. Your Taiwan scenario has a much higher probability of ending the world than this yet you seem unconcerned about that.

They charge per 1k tokens so you must have high volume somehow, are you maxing out the prompt length every time? That’s the only thing I can think of besides sending a ridiculous number of requests that would cost that much in an evening.

You could have saved some money by writing tests. How much text were you sending at a time? I’ve been summarizing multiple 500 word chunks per query in my app as well as generating embeddings and haven’t broken $10 over the course of a couple weeks.

> I argue that the diminished sway of the Catholic Church, nearly 30 years before the French Revolution, was the key driver of the fertility decline

> ...the Catholic Church, threatened by the spread of the Protestant Reformation, took ‘be fruitful and multiply’ seriously and the purpose of marriage became explicitly multiplicative

> The decline of Catholicism, and fertility, in eighteenth-century France turned it from a demographic powerhouse – the China of Europe – to merely a first-rank European power among several

Blaming the Catholic church specifically for high birth rates is a misstep especially since the author compares to England which has a long and varied history with Protestantism. The argument should be reframed around religiosity in general or he should show data for England that indicates a difference in fertility during the periods of stronger and weaker Catholic influence in England.

It's very much in their interest, if the information their models provide is impossible to verify then it severely limits its uses. You essentially can't use it as a source for anything that requires any type of citation or reliability. That's a huge handicap for selling it to businesses and researchers. The general problem of determining what training data was used to produce an output is an open problem in ML and one that is being very actively worked on since it would greatly further the field.

You believe correctly that ChatGPT is not capable of showing sources, it's currently impossible to do but we were discussing Tomorrow so I included it as a possibility. You could potentially hack it in now using traditional search or nearest neighbours but it wouldn't be 100% accurate, probably not even 50%, it would just show a bag of similar texts so not really worth doing.

I'd still be in the market for a book even if we had a perfect LLM that could answer every question I had with impeccable accuracy. I read books because I want to find out about things I don't know that I don't know. It's pretty hard to find those things if you just do question response. It's like a graph, if you start at one node it may take you a very long time to traverse the graph to another node but if you have some outside source that gives you the address of a new node you can just jump straight to it.

Why would someone only ask an LLM questions when they were in the market to buy a book? Most people I know don't buy books in order to look up the answer to a question, sure some people buy reference books and use them but that's not really what we think of when talking about authors and books. If I'm in the market for a book, I'm looking to read a book, not query something or someone for answers. I think your example should go like this:

Tomorrow: 1) you do research, write posts, publish a book, 2) it is all consumed by a for-profit operated LLM. 3) People ask LLM to get answers to some related question or interest 4) They ask the LLM for a list of recent books that go in depth on the topic or are in the genre etc. 5) Your name comes up in the list 6) Goto step 2 from Yesterday

You can also invert this and say that without a system like ChatGPT it is physically impossible for most people to find or use those 570GB of data. A search engine can only get you so far and over time they are becoming less useful as the net floods with junk content. If you don't even know what terms to search for then ChatGPT wins out since you can start with a very simple question and then interrogate it further on details it produces. The best way to think about it is as a better search engine, a fully interactive one that also has some degree of its own agency when it comes to synthesizing data. It could be better, it would be nice to have the option to show sources for the output so that you can verify the facts or do your own research.

I'm of the opinion that all kids books should be heavy on metaphor and allegory and all of the other important and joyful aspects of language. Restricting children to books that have been "written at their level" or "made easy to read" is doing them a disservice. It's no wonder so many people grow up to be seldom readers if their first exposure to reading is saccharin pablum that presents no challenge, no meaning, no mystery, and no danger. A proper children's book should be one which an adult can also read and enjoy if they give way to that childlike wonder that still lives within them.

I've also played a few indie VR games that are using it. It's not like you have to be some technical wizard to enable it, you just need to make sure you aren't stomping on your FPS with a bunch of other stuff at the same time.

On the price point, the original iPhone retailed for $499USD which in inflation adjusted dollars today would be $714USD. The Quest 2 is significantly cheaper than that as a standalone device. The Quest Pro is much more expensive but is targeted at businesses, watch Zuck's intro of it if you doubt that. The biggest barrier is that for really good performance on any headset you need to tether to a gaming PC. That's a lot more cost and complication for non-technical people. That said, the hardware is there and capable of delivering outstanding visuals and inside out tracking. The compute and networking are lagging behind, we really need a small, user friendly and powerful device that anyone can go buy, plug in and then connect their VR headset to with 0 frustration. That would free up headsets to only worry about the displays and tracking.

I don't think the future of VR is portable. I have an aversion to lumping AR in with it since they are fundamentally different. If it makes it easier, VR is desktop, AR is mobile. Similar but not at all the same. The way I envision the future of VR is that it does for your physical experiences what computers and the internet did for your paperwork and documents. Thinking about VR as a cellphone is the wrong mental model, it's not a peripheral that exists in your physical environment. It is a replacement for your physical environment or more congenially, it is another physical environment to which you can travel in addition to the places you currently go to.

Nah, Microsoft and Meta are obviously partnering up. This is likely just a symptom of that with Meta getting buy in from Microsoft to use Meta's VR platform. I agree that Horizon is the worse of the two but that doesn't mean they'll fail. Worse is better sometimes. The lynchpin will be if Meta is really married to Unity, Unreal Engine is eating Unity's lunch with adoption and features. If Meta makes the jump to UE they'll win a bigger share of the market with a far superior engine. It waits to be seen.

If we're talking about galactic distances and timescales I don't see why we couldn't safely assume enough technological advancement for either aliens or humans to modify their own biology to the point where centuries would be a small fraction of your total lifespan. I think the bigger question is why any significant number of people would travel to more than a few star systems if you had to do it slowly. If the system is uninhabited then you would be isolating yourself from the rest of society for a long time. If it's inhabited then you would have the excitement of discovery and contact but it would still be difficult being separated from your own civilization and you would want to return at some point even if just to share what you've learnt.

How many people today travel to places that are completely uninhabited and have no infrastructure in place for getting there? I'm talking end of the road, getting on a bush plane and landing in the middle of an open field kind of isolated. How long do they stay? Same for contacting the few remaining hunter gatherers on the planet. What if those trips took thousands of years instead of a few weeks?

I think there's a big stretch of time for the development of any technological civilization where they spend most of their effort on developing their own solar system and only send small flyby probes to their nearest neighbours. After that there may be an even longer period during which they colonize those near by stars but each colony likely takes an extremely long time to fully develop. The civilization may send out automated probes to look and listen and maybe the occasional explorer or anthropologist but I doubt there are any galaxy conquering civilizations out there.

So I think I do agree that if anything visits us it is likely to be an automated probe. Bracewell probes would be well suited to any chatty civilization that is seeking contact. Von Neumann probes are more suited to brute force exploration.

This is all assuming that the speed of light is the fastest you can travel and communicate. If it isn't, then I'd say all bets are off.

That's not a great starting assumption. How would the economics of travelling hundreds or thousands of light years in order to "consume" (whatever that means) other life forms work out? What is the benefit? How would it be worth the investment?

I would have to assume that they know this and are in fact only looking for messages that are purposefully sent at very high power. It's also why they favor listening at the hydrogen line since transmissions at that frequency stand the best chance of penetrating through cosmic dust, i.e. you would only use that frequency if you were intentionally trying to transmit across interstellar distances.

I think they don't popularize the downsides of a radio search since it could threaten their already tenuous funding. Basically, they have to be optimistic in order to maintain the pittance of a budget given to them which allows us an extremely small chance at detecting a purposefully sent signal if we happen to be in the right place at the right time and listening on the right frequency pointed in the right direction, etc.

In order to do SETI right we really need radio telescopes in solar orbit far away from the Earth and enough of them so that they can cover all of the nearby stars or other likely directions for signals to originate from. The only way we're going to get there is if space launches continue to become a lot cheaper. Fingers crossed.

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

I think that's a pretty bad choice of comparison. For one, they're two products under the same company. Secondly, Visual Studio is a bit of a dinosaur that suffers (and somewhat benefits) from a long history so it's easy for the VSCode team to look at that and just trim the fat and correct mistakes. They also target somewhat different domains with Visual Studio having a longer history in C++ and VSCode being more geared towards web dev (yes I know it's widely used for other languages but web is the leader and obvious target). Visual Studio is also by far not the best in its class, using IntelliJ products side by side with Visual Studio is like night and day especially when it comes to C++. A better comparison for VSCode would be something like Sublime Text since it's in the same product space of "lightweight" code editors with a focus on web.

All y'all in here worrying about once an eon events when CMEs be like "shit I'm late for my centennial"

Nuclear weapons which are optimized for wide surface area destruction or bunker busting are not very effective. Nuclear bombs like any bomb can be tuned to produce a variety of effects. See Nuclear shaped charges https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_shaped_charge

That made me smile, I think a few teams may drop the juniors and keep the seniors but there's going to be a bunch of places that drop the seniors and proceed with an army of juniors equipped with GPT helpers.

> The real threat that I see is that the AI will leave the boring part to us

Do you enjoy writing code just for the sake of writing code? The thing I enjoy about programming is the results of the programming. Code is just the language I have to speak in order to get the idea that's in my head onto the computer screen. If I could just speak English and have the same result, I would be just as happy.

Yes, this person is an expert manager.

For a vegetarian burger option, nothing beats a potato patty burger done to perfection. It's incredibly simple, essentially just mashed potatoes formed into a patty, breaded and fried. It can be seasoned to your liking with herbs, garlic, salt, etc. and the traditional burger toppings nicely compliment it. You can somewhat emulate it by replacing a burger patty with the fries that often come with an order but it's not the same as a purpose made one.

Mines aren't run with pickaxes and donkeys anymore. Take some time to educate yourself.

I could be wrong, I'm not an expert on the matter by any means, but I think the reason traditional nuclear reactors are so heavily fortified against attack is specifically because of the threat of a catastrophic meltdown if their cooling and control systems are destroyed. If these nuclear batteries can't melt down and rely on passive safety measures then the need for fortification is drastically reduced. Placing them in a fairly standard concrete building either underground or bermed with earth on all sides would likely be sufficient. You'd probably still want security around to make sure no one tried to manually tamper with the equipment.

Money is information. If maintainers eschew their own marketing, sales, and (paid) support then they lose access to this information. When someone else interprets the information provided through payment and non-payment their interpretation flavored by their own goals and shaped by their (mis)understanding of the product will introduce noise (i.e. bullshit) into the signal.

The goal for maintainers who dislike the business side of things should be to write code that makes those business activities as painless as possible for the maintainer themselves. In writing such code they will develop a greater understanding of the process and may even learn to appreciate it. A true win would be to generalize that code so that other maintainers can use it to make their lives easier while still being able to glean valuable information from it.