saimiam

Think of education as a wishing well. There is a wishing well for math, law, dentistry, baking, and so on.

Once you have a wishing well - i.e. you own an eduction in baking or dentistry or law or math or whatever - you can ask it anything and it will grant you your wish. If others want something from your well, they have to come and ask you. What you give them has your name attached to it. So, your reputation rides on the quality of what your wishing well produces.

Prior to AI, universities chose which wishing well they would specialize in building and offered to share that knowledge with students.

In the age of AI, the creation of personal wishing wells has become trivial but universities still think they are in the business of teaching people how to create wishing wells.

Ultimately, the only truth left is for owners of the wishing well to start offering the product of their wishing well to the market and attach their name to it. If there is a market for their product, great. If not, go make another wishing well.

Education used to be pets. Now, it is livestock. Universities are not willing to accept this shift in mindset.

building a community around open source is hard. building one that analyses, comments, and votes on contributions is harder. who is going to read and react to the open sourced content that students submit?

> never actually show any evidence that it works

I think that was the entire premise of the CIA analyst framing - you don't know which one of several outcomes is going to prevail but you have a model which constantly updates its priors to increase the probability of one outcome over others.

In this case, you still don't know whether some guy's passing percentage stabilizing over a baseline will help you win the big prize or not but it does tell you that he may win some sort of recognition for being a standout player or that the guy who scouted him deserves credit.

> reasonable success rate

Or little to nothing to lose.

Both are good reasons to jump up the hierarchy chain

I discovered this post not through luck or because of prior (prescient) bookmarking but because a VC decided to build a links aggregator so that techies would hang out on their porch (web property) rather than elsewhere and therefore, would give said VC a chance to invest in their next rocketship.

DuckDuckGo browser on iPhone 14

I tried it on mobile.

Far too many screens to click through to get to the good parts.

And then, the good part starts and is immediately interrupted with some error. On retrying, o start getting a long answer which seems to make sense but o can’t read to completion because of another overlay which hides the bottom three-quarters of the response behind yet another nag screen about the research I’m supposedly consenting to.

So true.

My son wanted to wear his undies on the outside a la Captain Underpants and I tried war gaming this with him - hmm, so your undie on the outside is going to require another one inside your pants and we are out of fresh pairs etc etc. In the end, he gave up on the idea of mimicking Captain Underpants.

Completely random but o remember reading back in the day that Nostradamus had predicted the rise of a Hitler like figure except he had named a Hister, not the actual.

https://www.history.co.uk/articles/did-nostradamus-really-pr...

Only a society which doesn't want anything, needs nothing, demands nothing can do without ads. While privacy invading ad tech is obviously a bad thing, ads - namely the thing used to introduce you and others like you to a new idea - is a good thing.

Seems to me that your positions are in opposition to each other.

1. There’s a traditional visual language that people instinctively prefer.

2. Modern architectural sensibilities have superseded traditional visual language through repetition.

I’m reading this to mean something like “people like their own traditional foods but since they've been drowning in pizza for the last 70 years, they’ve forgotten about their traditional foods.”

How can a basal, instinctive preference just disappear? Can the sex drive disappear with enough brainwashing?

"O can" instead of "I can" on the iPhone is the one which has been driving me bonkers for at least a couple of years now.

A bad driver never misses an exit.

Ohhh, that’s why Google gave up its “dont be evil” stance!

I don’t understand this story. What lesson/joke am I seeing here?

This sounds roughly at par with Y2K in terms of “you need to fix your shit right now wherever it is” complexity except every day is Y2K for your code base.

(from the trailer) Holmes' mouth reminds me of the Amazon logo. Not just the shape. Also the complete disconnect between the commonly held meaning of a smile and the entity which is currently using it.

Isn’t alignment ultimately an ethics question? Given a strong enough incentive, most humans will also rationalise their shortcuts/crimes. E.g., the hardest part of running a marathon is suppressing the voice in your head telling you that completing the race is pointless.

I’m not at all familiar with AI SOTA but sounds to me that feeding the models enough content about ethical behaviour should help because, as it stands today, these models don’t know how to think morally.

But moral behaviour needs a personality type. Maybe some agents in every cohort of agents need to be told they are like Jesus/Mohammed/etc and see how that influences the behaviour of that cohort?

Even human morality needs guardrails in the form of law enforcement so why should agents be different?

Who’s “Bobby” mentioned in the article? Did the writer just mix up Billy Evans with Bobby?

It’s not a linear growth problem. Acceleration is quadratic.

As per your intuition, how many seconds later will you hit 10% of c?

How is this a joke?

Knowing exponents and how to apply it is not the same as having any intuition about what the actual value of a certain exponential function will be at a certain point and when it crosses a threshold.

All Indian banks use bankname.bank.in as their domain. I’m not sure who owns bank.in but this is a common suffix which is different from the .co.uk pattern.

If something at rest is accelerating at 9.8 m/s^2, how long in seconds will it take to reach 10% of c? Answer to the nearest order of magnitude - will it take approximately 1000, 10k, 100k, 1000k seconds?

I’m sure you know this is an exponential growth question but have no intuition of the answer.

According to UNICEF, globally, Diarrhea causes 444k deaths of children under 5 or ~1200 per day.

Globally, 1.2 million people (all ages) die of diarrhea every year.

India accounts for 120k deaths of children under 4 or roughly one fourth of global D related deaths or 328 deaths per day.

Assuming a similar ratio across all ages, India must account for 300k D related deaths every year of roughly 820 deaths. Not great (obviously) but at least it only accounts for 1/4 of all D deaths, not 1/3rd.

Edit - worth pointing out that India has 1.4B out of 8B humans globally or a little more than 1/6th.

https://data.unicef.org/topic/child-health/diarrhoeal-diseas...

https://www.joghr.org/article/75428-evaluating-india-s-inten...

Such anti patterns are like Nostradamus’s prophecies - you see a company flopping then curve fit a narrative to justify the antipatterns.

How do I, as a founder, know that I am falling into an anti pattern? I don’t believe it is possible to know. You can only “know” in hindsight and that makes these anti patterns useless.

> external point of view

So time is localised? I’m not sure what localised time means but I’m hoping the question makes sense.

Does time accelerate just for the astronaut approaching the black hole (meaning they would be witnessing the future) or does it accelerate for everyone (meaning approaching a black hole is going to make everything end quicker)?

I honestly thought concubine would fit in here to make the joke but without other clues, dismissed the idea. I wonder why the writer picked this as an example of the author’s supposed humor skills. It seems rather contrived.

Even charitably, we’d have to be super familiar with everything the author has written to understand than Heaven could mistake porcupine for concubine.

I got the second one.

Jack’s saying that since he’s a seafarer, navigating by the moon is important. It’s standard British-understatement-as-comedy trope.

Just up thread from your comment, someone commented in a positive way on the infinite customisability of vi.

So which is preferable - customisability or very limited feature set?