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Comment by jstx1 | Hacker News Reader

Does stuff like this help anyone?

I still haven’t forgiven CGP Grey for changing the title to his 2017 ML video to “How AIs, like ChatGPT, learn”. The video is about genetic algorithms and has nothing to do with ChatGPT. (or with anything else in modern AI)

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I read this to see if it would be useful to share with my 9 year old. After reading it, I think it is not any more useful (alone) than watching the 3b1b video on this topic. The video is longer, but has more visualizations.

I think that perhaps reading this description after watching the video might make the process more memorable. My guess is that if I had my daughter read this first, it wouldn't do much to make the video easier to parse. Reading this real-world example after watching the video could help solidify the concept.

Disclaimer: I don't know a lot about AI/ML, so it's possible that I am 100% wrong here!

> I think it is not any more useful (alone) than watching the 3b1b video on this topic

This one? https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDNU6R1_67000Dx_...

Yep! I've only watched the first two in the series so far.

Sorry if this is a personal question, but why would you get a 9 year old into machine learning ?

Fair question. She's very curious about all sorts of things and always wants to know how they work. I also assume she'll find out about ChatGPT in the next year or two, at school. I figure she will probably ask me about how chatbots work, whether they are actually smart, etc. So for now I've been keeping an eye out for explainers that would help her understand things as I've been learning myself.

Sorry if this is a personal question, but how did you choose your username?

Why not? Get them into a little bit of everything, and let them dig further into the topics that they find exciting.

Kids are just as capable as most adults (if not more). Give them a foot in the door and they have all the time in the world to build in that knowledge.

You could just let your daughter see it. To what extent can you "protect" her exposure to the world?

Huh? It’s about efficiency and not wasting time on something that’s not very useful. Should she see A and B, both (in what order), or neither? That’s the question.

I've barely forgiven him for explaining genetic algorithms and acting like they have any relevance to contemporary ML research.

The footnote video was an alright explanation of backprop. If that were part of the main video that would have been reasonable.

I really like his history/geography videos but anything technical leave a lot to be desired. And don't get me started on Humans Need Not Apply.

> And don't get me started on Humans Need Not Apply.

Well now you have to tell us. :) Many of the concrete examples in that video are exaggerated and/or misunderstood but the general question it asks - what to do when automation makes many people unemployable through no fault of their own - seems valid.

> what to do when automation makes many people unemployable through no fault of their own - seems valid

Unfortunately the video doesn't answer its own question directly.

The answer for the past 40 years or so seems to be "move them to lower-paying service jobs, or out of the job market entirely."

Another part of the answer over the last 40 (or 200) years, is to repeatedly create totally new industries that employ lots of people, including a large fraction of HN readers.

Yeah, but what does the Venn diagram look like there?

Yes, new technologies create new jobs.

But it’s not usually the people from the old jobs who are taking those new jobs.

> it’s not usually the people from the old jobs who are taking those new jobs

https://news.mit.edu/2022/automation-drives-income-inequalit...

That can be terribly hard on people, while great for other people. What would you suggest would be better?

A progressive income tax that does not exclude or favor capital income, so that funding ideally targeted transitional assistance, UBI (with a rate ratcheting up with sustained increases in per capita revenue), or, ideally, both so that the adverse effects of labor market shifts which shuffle or concentrate labor demand or shift from labor-intensive to capital-intensive methods are buffered.

How do you prevent UBI being captured by landlords in rent, and similar non-discretionary spending?

> How do you prevent UBI being captured by landlords in rent

Progressive taxation + UBI compresses income ranges, rather than adding it, there’s not really anything to capture unless the market was sharply segmented before and after the change, its dubious even before UBI and to the extent “lumpiness” in income distribution might allow market segmentation, UBI reduces that and weakens capture opportunities.

Competition, both between similar units in similar places and between alternative arrangements. Maybe having a roommate or living with my parents isn't worth it for $X/mo but it is for $2X. Certainly it is for some X for most people. Also the presence of a UBI directly increases "housing" in the sense we mean. We don't really have any shortage of housing - we have a shortage of attractive housing, where a huge part of "attractive" is "sufficiently close to sufficient income" and a UBI makes more things sufficient. And for those in the cities, by elevating the bottom of the income distribution we make developers more interested in building the affordable housing we need.

Will some of the increase still be captured? Probably. More in some areas than others. Will we be right back to square one (or worse)? I really don't think so.

That is an interesting argument: increasing rent might make it financially attractive to move in with roommates or family even if you could afford the rental.

I'm not sure that's always an option if you have to live near your workplace, but it could shake things up a bit.

Yeah, it's certainly not always an option, but it just needs to be enough of an option for enough people in order to put some downward pressure on rents (compared to full capture of the increased income).

In the current US system, much of income is captured by rent and health insurance, regardless of where it comes from.

But I share the same concern that UBI would immediately be added to rent.

And that it might combine poorly with existing perverse incentives:

"Across the nation, landlords with units in poor neighborhoods average nearly $100 a month in net profit, compared to about $50 in affluent neighborhoods, and just $3 in middle-class areas."

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-21/housing-e...

Tax robots. At a minimum, at the highest income tax rate bracket.

How? What should a Roomba owner have to pay? Or a dishwasher owner? Or someone who has a calculator?

Computer used to be a job description, do we all owe?

Where would you draw the line?

How would you enforce it?

Edit/Append: Also, how do you calculate the income to be taxed?

> What should a Roomba owner have to pay?

The same amount that someone with a stay-at-home spouse who cleans the house pays.

Robots don’t have income.

Are you going to pay this tax for your washing machine, dishwasher, car, word processor, electric lightbulbs? The first two are robots, and all of them put a lot of people out of work.

I find this discussion fascinating, but YouTube is one of the last places I’d go for that discussion, unless it’s a debate between two highly-regarded minds on the topic (like Chomsky vs Foucault back in the day). I’m not very interested in listening to random people tell me their ideas without any good pathways for critiques or questions.

Humans Need Not Apply is one of the most phenomenal videos on YouTube, what do you think is wrong with it?

What a strange word to use in that context, why would he need to be forgiven by you? How has he wronged you? Seems at worst, an honest mistake in a complicated topic.

You're not using "at worst" correctly. What you describe is an "at best". Worse would be that CGP Grey deliberately picked a misleading title in order to optimize views, algorithm, etc.

This is, I think, the case. But I don't begrudge them too much, YouTube is cutthroat.

Maybe GP is a non-native English speaker? This construct would be pretty common way for a native French speaker to say they are angry at something. Not sure if it's common in English as well.

This is a pretty common phrase in English as well, it is not meant to be taken literally.

Yep, it may be more common in some English-speaking cultures, but in the midwest of the US it's extremely common to say stuff like, "I'll never forgive him for <thing>" and it's not meant to be taken literally. A more literal translation would be, "I'm very disappointed in this person's decision to <thing>."

The interesting things that one can learn about English usage on HN. ;-)

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