vonnik

I wish the author had gone deeper

Dumb LLMs foisted on unwilling users have done more to damage AI’s reputation than AI’s opponents.

Every category and noun is an analogy uniting things unlike in at least some details. We don’t even see most analogies, because they are more common than air and just as necessary.

To be clear this trend starts really early, at least in grade school. I have a second grader and most of his friends have had iPads for years, play video games for hours per day at home. Those kids don’t like to read, and/or are reading slow. Their parents wonder why, and blame the school. You have to make books the most exciting thing in the house for most of the day. And you have to model the behavior of reading; ie read aloud to your kid, and make sure they see you reading for your own pleasure. Go to used-book stores and libraries and keep plenty of books in the house at or near the kids level that they have chosen. Learn to like Dogmab and be ok reading it 1000 times to them before they hit first grade. That’s the only way. Most parents are taking the easy way out with screens, due to deeper issues in the world, like having demanding jobs, dual income households, living far from extended family and not wanting to do the hard work of fighting the societal defaults. But that why most kids don’t want to read, and why we see these stats about teens.

“Three teams. Same underlying data. Three different stories.”

fully support the idea of an emerging technobiont, but i keep asking myself what advantage humans will confer to petro-electric life forms?

the only way forward is for us to genetically edit ourselves into beings that can understand more of what ai knows, if the symbiosis is to be mutualistic, rather than commensal or parasitic.

One of these capsized off the beach at Capitola and now serves as a de facto bird sanctuary.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/05/29/ss-palo-alto-reaches-...

Before it capsized and sank, it served as a dance hall at the end of a pier.

Most CEOs don't understand the actual things their front-line workers do. and many of them have allowed themselves to be surrounded by yes-men. the richer and more powerful they are, the more likely this is. "yes man" is a role where AIs significantly outperform. when you combine front-line blindness with the culture of toxic yes, you get CEOs who think that AIs can both do the work and manage themselves or the residual people. This will turn out to be false.

This strategy has worked well for both Shakespeare and Co. in Paris and Shakespeare and Sons in Berlin. Books + Bakery + Coffee. Both of course are set in living pedestrian cities. https://www.shakespeareandsons.com

If the poster cannot do the work of writing, they should not expect others to do the work of reading. People read based on trust and respond to invest in relationships. LLM verbiage breaks both dynamics.

I feel like the headline relies on a misnomer. Sivers is talking about culture. Most culture occupies a geography, even if it’s a changing one; the culture shrinks, expands or drifts over the land. The land itself shifts and changes under the culture. Both affect each other. But what Sivers is talking about is groups of people changing, and someone returning with a snap shot of what used to be. This is a common experience among returning emigrés, and their time capsule abroad is sometimes referred to as cultural fossilization. They removed themselves of the living dynamic body of a culture, and have become unknowingly conservative toward it in their expectations. This has also been noted by authors like Thomas Wolfe (There’s no going home.), and consolidated to a Greek word, nostalgia, which also means the pain of homecoming.

The interesting thing about “Algvandringen” is that you can hear “Elk wandering” in it, showing the evolutionary similarities of two Germanic languages.

As Alex's story illustrates, really caring about something and acting on that can be a great way to find community.

“You can’t cheat an honest man.”

While that isn’t always true, honesty is a great defense against being enlisted in scams that promise easy money.

This smells like LLM.

I worked for a while selling fractional nurses into for-profit nursing/retirement homes at the end of Covid, got to interview some industry experts, who told me that these for-profit homes are the 21st century equivalent of 19th century insane asylums. If you or your loved ones have to enter one, seek at all costs a home that is not for profit (Catholic orders run some, Jewish organizations others, the VA also offers these homes to vets). Every single one will uphold higher values than the for-profit entities sucking resources from people who are no longer in a position to advocate for themselves.

This is so yawn. Do young professionals starting out have to impress their bosses? Yes. Do bosses have to impress them? Usually not. Who cares? Power dynamics exist, it’s easy to play the grammar game, so just do it and stop pretending it’s some form of oppression.

See Dr Wendy Suzuki’s work:

https://www.wendysuzuki.com/exercise-research

Becoming Led Zeppelin is a great documentary which chronicles the band’s rise. It has some great quotes from Plant about the milieu that fathers around a famous band, supplying drugs and sex. The substances lead to abuse, addiction and sometimes overdoses. LZ’s drummer Bonham choked in his own vomit during sleep after taking 40 shots. Page became addicted to several substances. Many famous singers if they survive are recovering from some form of addiction. Bowie, for example. There’s a culture they enter with fame and travel that is hard to escape.

The easiest way to do something is the first time.

The author is right to critique Cerquiglini. The French legacy is largely lexical. The syntax and the old, short words of English are Germanic. Its several influences drove the relatively large lexicon we have, and probably adapted English to be a globally adaptive language, borrowing words readily.

This is true. But it’s also hard to hold against many of them. Because they are often isolated, slow or immobile, and in cognitive decline. I saw this happen to my grandmother in an assisted living home.

i don't know why this was down-voted... i'm genuinely interested in the answers. feel free to dm me.

What kind of math do you do, and what would “generating proofs” look like do you think?

Yes, Alan Kay is very ill.

Out of curiosity, does anyone know the mathematicians actively leaning into AI + Lean?

It sounds like we agree on the larger strategic point.

The PRC seems to be doing a good job building out its energy infra, fwiw. And it shares a massive land border with an ally and energy producer.

I found this to be a remarkably uninsightful work. He somehow negates the inherent drama of war with the milquetoast prose and myopia of an academic. Much of what he says is in fact false, presumably because he is far from the action and relies on Clausewitz as a crutch for thought.

The key nodes to control have to do with supply chain, energy and information; ie depots, road and rail, bridges, factories, substations and data centers or satellites.

Ukraine has severely weakened Russia by attacking those points, as Russia has Ukraine.

Beijing could well defeat Taiwan (and the US by proxy) by controlling its sea lanes, cutting its cables, and jamming its radio spectrum.

I really like this, and I think one way to make it even more clear would be to use other variable letters to represent breads and milks, because their x’s and y’s somehow morph into the x’s and y’s that represent carbs and protein in the graph.

more broadly, laptops and desktops have also degenerated as tools for thought, largely because they have been turned into vehicles of consumption. every screen has become the infinite push algorithm.

https://vonnik.substack.com/p/how-to-take-your-brain-back

i think it's underrated, too, how much the pairing of phone-camera to produce media amplifies the possibility of consumption via the same device.