trimethylpurine

There's more than one guy selling hot dogs on the beach. Not joking. This is the most important realization I ever had.

Anyway, on AI, lots of people just don't want to do all the QA and interaction to build the software. And those people are willing to pay to not have to.

Design custom hot dogs (software). That's my advice. It's working very well for me. People hire me for my in depth experience in certain fields (logistics, manufacturing, database stuff generally, chemistry). That they can spend time to learn and discuss it with an LLM doesn't change that one bit. I'm earning more than ever.

People use my software because it's a little cheaper or a little better than some other similar software.

There's room for everyone. You don't need to be the only one in your industry.

Expand the breadth of expertise you can offer. Just as has always been the case, people will rather pay you for it than learn it themselves.

The next hard of hearing terrorist will use this tech to communicate in otherwise inaccessible channels to gain nuclear capability. Or a nation state actor will abuse it to create such circumstances that they will. Or they will use it as a justification for why they need to protect against the hard of hearing and therefore need funding to develop some weapon.

And in all cases your salary will be taxed to fund weapons and warfare no matter what work you're doing.

Your fingers alone can kill. Everything is a weapon. Don't ignore that fact. Seek to empower the evil doer that is doing the least evil. Do gooders don't run for office.

Right but if the cost difference is negligible, as I've pointed out in another comment, in what case would you prefer to tell the crow twice to do something that a better weighted large model could do in one prompt?

I don't see it. In every case my time is more valuable than the cost of the prompt (so far) so the higher dollar cost, one shot, "getter done" model is the better net value option.

This is especially true when taking into account that the crow doesn't just fail on a single prompt, it does something much worse. It creates new problems that need to be undone afterwards. It confidently duplicates, triplicates, etc. a damaging work output that then needs more and more work to clean up before starting over.

Claude Fable 5.1 currently estimates its own total data set at 45TB.

That's a trivial number for sharing between a small user base of, in my case, 150 employees.

What am I missing? You're talking about maybe $60k retail cost in high read speed SANs that are likely already in place for a business of this size anyway? (Probably purchased a few years ago for under $30k. At least mine are.) In a US data center I'm paying a flat rate for rack space, so power consumption isn't a consideration anyway, but honestly it really isn't that much power even if I was being billed for it.

It's really nothing. An overlooked line item on a budget sheet.

So the real cost if I were to self host is video cards. But as mentioned previously, that's not reduced by smaller data sets, it's reduced by better weighted models, right? Let me know if I'm mistaken, please.

I'm very interested to be persuaded otherwise as a decision maker. Thanks for your insight and ideas.

Considering all of the above, I'm currently of the mind that a lower cost model that makes more mistakes is much more expensive in net, actually. So I prefer the most accurate, better weighted model, not the slimmer data set.

I'm not an expert, but I think that:

1. Storing Shakespeare's work costs almost no $ in regards to disk space.

2. If the prompt doesn't include "Shakespeare" or relevant terms then no regression is performed for that topic and therefore there is no effective token cost.

Someone may correct me, but I think it's not a big $ win to exclude relevant topics from the models' overall capabilities. Instead you'd tune weights so that #2 better identifies what is or isn't among the relevant terms on which to run regressions.

It tracks terrorists' efforts to acquire the bomb.

I don't need to cite evidence to point out a logical impossibility.

To make a good experiment you'd need to control for the presence of college in society. The fact that it exists and takes credit for the work of people who would already be doing what it purports to cause makes it impossible to conceive of such a study.

It's just like a church claiming responsibility for human morality, where everyone starts with a church forced on them. Likewise the church will show studies on criminal behavior and drug addicts, and of course, we will find success in their work. God really does save then, right?

I'm not religious, I'm a scientist.

Sure enough lots of people are moral even without the church, and lots of people are incredibly successful, even without college.

And those examples lend themselves to reasoning deductively about the facts, a much higher logical bar when weighing what is or isn't worth believing in.

That's true as far as the latest arguments on the philosophy of science. So I'm perfectly comfortable waving away illogical arguments, and giving less weight to inductive ones, even if they include lots of marketing and other sound research.

It's more worth believing in because it's more logically sound. So no, the sauce is not weak when compared to your faith based argument.

The research you provided shows that we might expect some people to benefit from college. Sure. But to prescribe it for everyone, is clearly a mistake. It's bad for many famous examples, and it's bad for countless more of us who now lead companies in fields we didn't study.

As a side note, for others out there pedaling this lie, it's offensive and dismissive to act like repaying such a huge debt over 20 years is a win. I sweat and struggled, and ate trash for your lies.

Your lies did that to me. Take responsibility for that, and think carefully, before you go convincing other kids to follow in my footsteps.

This doesn't say anything about causality.

The fact that attending colleges requires certain abilities and privileges that also correlate with financial success doesn't say anything about the influence that college has on earnings.

For all we know, the fact that college direction is ingrained in a public education system that is required by law, hides the fact that college has a negative impact on one's financial product when taken over a lifetime.

The same people that think college might pan out, also think loans for businesses, or other such behaviors that exhibit initiative, might pan out. We'd expect those same traits in leaders and entrepreneurs, and we'd expect them to be paid more.

Plainly, the claim is misguided and its dissemination, I suspect, is most likely driven by profits.

Exactly. Obviously, if your threshold risk factor is low then your decision as a low risk American precludes you from attending events where the risk for violent or other death is increased.

So if the goal is to help those individuals make a decision about whether or not they should attend such an event (as appears to be the goal of this article) then the data shouldn't be distorted by diluting what would otherwise be very relevant risk factors.

This article is essentially what happens when you give a marketer or journalist a license in society to act like a data scientist despite their having no qualifying background for doing so.

They do exactly what we expect; they lie confidently, because they can't fathom that maybe discussing science intelligibly requires actual education in science. They got a degree, maybe in advertising, so they feel that we as a society implicitly deem it okay for them to destroy the basic trust that we otherwise share amongst one another. After all they have a certificate in writing bullshit, so we're all supposed to just read and enjoy it.

Dear author, get bent. Science ain't your fucking industry. Next time do you job; ask scientists to weigh in and just give us their opinions. You're not qualified to give us yours!

It's not discussed in the article. The article discussed, race, sex, etc. and then makes an assertion that it "wouldn't move much from 4.9."

That's completely false when using geolocation. We can estimate from crime stats easily that a tour of the country avoiding the highest murder rate parts of the country would land you very close to a zero murder rate.

Among healthy adults, that's essentially a near zero chance of death.

That isn't surprising. Attending a festival in a desert with little oversight and lots of drugs is obviously more dangerous than buying groceries in white suburbia.

4.9 is simply not the relevant number unless your goal is to try to say that the event is on par with taking a walk in the wrong part of town.

But I'm certain that wasn't the point of the article. It's dishonest, is my point.

The 4.9 standardized includes deaths from extremely violent, poverty stricken parts of the country,

You need to exclude those areas to lower that number before comparing.

Imagine a tour of the US that includes the more dangerous parts of Oakland, Memphis, and the like.

Most people wouldn't book that tour, so the base line risk factor you're using isn't relevant for most people.

So, honest question, that being the case, is the best solution to let them gain superiority, exercise revolution at the cost of millions of lives, and then hope they don't kill you and your countrymen?

I think making seemingly moral short term decisions that result in maximum casualties is not actually moral. It's stupid, and wrong.

Creating an arms race by letting someone who isn't the current leader gain an advantage ensures that a power struggle will ensue. It implies revolution in all known cases in history.

The moral high ground you're referring to should result in the best outcome. It doesn't arise from a guy standing at the top of a hill by himself shouting that he's the most moral guy while getting us all killed in the course of violent revolution. That's just megalomania.

They're very similar. One relies on rational thinking about actual expected outcomes, the other relies on one's own opinion about right and wrong.

You have to be careful because it's deceivingly easy to be the latter and end up an accidental megalomaniac that kills us all.

See history for countless examples.

You mentioned your feelings. I'm glad you did. Your feelings are nearly always a guide to bad outcomes. I'd trust you more as a leader if you instead relied on your rational faculties to guide us to good and moral decisions and outcomes.

And I'm confident that you'd find that your self doubt is diminished when you can self reflect on your decisions and find in all cases that they were made using the best information at the time, instead of how you felt about them at the time.

Agreement? Never happened.

Sadam Hussein? IRGC? United States?

When?

It's never happened. The US itself doesn't abide by Geneva convention. Let alone other UN members.

You're living in pretense, I'm sorry to point out.

The world is run by terrorists. The only question is which terror group you want to retain power.

Personally, I like the multiculturalism that the US champions, and the Turks used to, and the Khan dynasty used to, and Persia used to. And only because it's the most likely recipe for the longest track record for peace.

Like it or not, history doesn't agree with your optimism as much as you and I wish it did.

I want to clarify my side point. I brought up multiculturalism because I think these societies find that to be a requirement for peace once they've established military superiority.

I want to clarify that because I could see someone taking that statement to mean that multiculturalism is inherently wrong, which is the opposite of what I'm saying.

There might be, but we've never seen one. The culture with the lesser weapons is subjected to inferior quality of life when compared to the oppressing culture in all cases in history.

So, it might be worth entertaining whether you can convince everyone in your culture to be subservient?

Here again, historically that's never happened, so it's not worth believing. And that's just to check if there's a better solution. You might arrive at an even worse outcome.

Revolutions require even bigger weapons, despite sometimes having better long term outcomes. How many people have to die to test our theory?

Genghis Khan created centuries of peace horrifically with bigger guns. The Ottoman Turks similarly did. The US, now. And many more cases that we know of. All of these examples coincidentally allowed multiculturalism, and even more, they enforced it as a matter of law. Just as an interesting side point.

Life is terrible in all cases in history where it's not clear who has the biggest guns. That's always been the demarcation of the beginning of a new regime at the cost of millions of lives.

Revolutions are horrible. That's what we know for sure.

You can't prove that walking through walls is impossible but you are an idiot if you keep trying. It hurts. That's called inductive reasoning.

We've never seen a case where some government in some country doesn't work as hard as possible to ensure that they have the biggest possible weapon. So you should believe someone is doing that. (Point in fact, we know of several governments currently trying to achieve nuclear, aerial, and AI superiority today.)

You can check out why scientists use this same philosophy in modern discovery and belief systems by catching up on the subject of "the philosophy of science." You'll find some 5,000 years of scientific debate and conclusions that roughly culminate in the above system of belief.

I'm teaching my kids how to build a business, and how to learn chemistry and deep science through self learning programs, like Aleks, and the like. Same curriculum as I got in college.

But none of the loans and none of the "go work for IBM" mentality that taught me how to be a loser for way too long.

A few years head start on actual business building is way more valuable than a 250 kid lecture hall with a teacher who never built anything in their life.

The future belongs to entrepreneurs, and that's even more true now with LLM built businesses.

Get them a face to face sales job for a bit. It does a lot for one's character to learn how to break the ice and be personable. And it teaches work ethic.

College just doesn't work. They don't know what jobs will be available and they are way too far behind the professional sector to teach about them anyway, with rare exceptions that aren't economically favored for, institutionally.

The system forces schools to increase enrollment by assigning a tuition price based on attaching a loan to it. It's basically for profit. Then, the loans can't be forgiven in bankruptcy when the outcome of the education platform fails to produce an income that supports repayment.

To get an education that doesn't completely screw you over, you need to be a minority with a scholarship or actually have rich parents and attend for fun. But in either case, your only benefit financially is the hope of connecting with other students whose parents are richer than yours.

Exceptions for subjects with artificial barriers of entry (medicine, law, etc., and each of those has its own set of problems, mainly the price of education).

(Speaking about the United States, but probably a lot of this applies to many places.)

I disagree with the sentiment that the rich are dissuading college enrollment. I'm not rich. I don't hire college grads. They are broke, entitled, and lack work ethic. After 5 in a row, I started giving opportunities to smart kids, from good families, who exhibit an appreciation for hard work and good moral character. Those people learn in a month what takes a college grad 6. They appreciate opportunity, instead of expecting it.

As I should have always known, a good person is far, far more valuable than a piece of paper certifying victimhood.

The most obvious solution is to discard.

"the actual targets are just normal people..."

How do you know?

NPR did an episode of Planet Money on paid protests that are indeed funded by Chinese and Russian governments. So have many other news organizations.

I didn't think it did stuff. Everything I've read about it indicates that they fabricated results randomly, or that results were generated by a third party. Nothing to indicate that any results were ever legitimate whatsoever.

Maybe I misunderstood?

NeuroLink isn't on the market. So I can't call that a comparison either.

I mean, don't invest in crazy stuff, obviously, but... Probably Elonism isn't the end all unified theory of economics either.

Unlikely. The product didn't work. It was terminal no matter what PR was thrown at it.

Elon has some functional products in markets where he has no competition, and they work.

Starlink works and sells. FSD drives untrained routes. No competition in either market.

Second to safety is not the same as non existent. Nice try though.

You've misunderstood my point then, I think. I don't care about greater purpose at all and I don't think there is one.

America won't let China have defense technology that it doesn't get to use.

It has nothing to do with OpenAI, or any other company, nor artists, nor right from wrong. If OpenAI eats small children for breakfast, or feeds all the hungry in Africa, makes no difference whatsoever.

You can ignore that fact and stand on a mountain and shout about OpenAI being evil all day long.

But you're going to lose the lawsuit if you ignore the facts of reality. No matter how loud you cry about it.

Sure. I guess I don't see how that's relevant to the case.

Yeah maybe it should be. But for now, they should sue for something reasonable. Better than nothing.

The architect's financial gain comes second to my safety.

I wouldn't say they should. In some cases there is no other choice. Defense competition exists whether it's desirable or not. Pretending otherwise won't help to win a lawsuit.

I don't think your analogy is representative of reality.

If you copy what my house looks like, no, I won't call the police.

Especially if you copy it for the purpose of empowering the police (govt) to protect my actual house.

That's a much more accurate analogy.

Yup. They need to start with the fact that competing nations have access to it no matter what anyone says or does.

Negotiate from there.