Sol2Sol

Poster could have had the 5 year old son at 13 you know?

Kids grow up so fast these days, you know.

<Snark>

The issue of morality and character wasn't just raised by Democrats and the "fake news" media. It was also raised by Republicans who directly served in the administration. When your former VP, chief of staff, military leaders and scores of former cabinet officials say issues of character made him unfit for command, I think people should and ought to have taken that very seriously in both the primaries and general election. This is before you even get to his numerous legal issues both civil and criminal. It is unfortunate that so many still choose to see this through only a political lens.

This. I don't use twitter for political discourse and since new guy took charge and made his political inclinations clear I'm being bombarded with political content and "news"/"hot takes" that skew a certain way. If wanting to use the tool for topics that are of interest to me, is me being in an echo chamber, then so be it.

I can't high-five this enough.

I don't have a problem with Musk supporting one candidate or the other. But I do have a problem with Musk apparently tweaking the algorithm to specifically promote one candidate and to bombard me with political content that skews a certain way even when I selected other interests or never used the platform to engage in political discourse. This while bellowing about X being a platform for free and open speech.

I realize that in this epoch we are living in the only rule is that money and power gives you the right to do as you please. This may be old school but I think that values, honesty and ethics matter too and should guide our behaviors in life and in business. Kudos to the Guardian for taking a stand even if it costs them a few dollars.

You would be better off getting your content from mainstream news outlets than relying on podcasts, substacks, blogs etc. for factual neutral reporting. Specifically I'm referencing the news divisions of the mainstream outlets that offer actual reporting and not the opinion jockeys that dominate prime time.

The alternative news sources you mentioned are merely opinion echo chambers that serve to reinforce preconceived ideas and inflame passions rather than offering up any kind of neutral reporting.

I see this got flagged, but when big tech players had such a significant role in the election and will have significant say in policy going forward, me thinks this is more than an intellectual curiosity and relevant to the board.

He also easily brushed aside the Republican contenders during the primaries so I think it is a bit more than voters can't stand woke democrat policies.

All of the character issues were raised and known during the Republican primaries and they still selected him as their candidate.

This is also a source of great frustration to me. That so many people discounted the character issue when many who worked directly with him including his own former VP, Chief of Staff and military leaders said that his character issues disqualified him for the job is amazing to me.

My motto for the rest of the year and going forward is to no longer try to understand the actions of others, but to just accept. Peoples actions won't necessarily match my paradigm of what is rational and logical.

Been following the story, mostly on twitter don't know if any of this is true but at this point it is just pure entertainment reading some of the speculative theories:

https://twitter.com/YourFirstAI/status/1727661862781612215

If Q* is what I think it is… this is absolutely BONKERS

Q-learning has existed for decades already. It’s just a basic reinforcement learning algorithm. A* is also fairly old- it’s a heuristic-based path finding algorithm.

In typical engineering fashion, they may have found an intersection of the 2 and named it Q*. This is total speculation, but if this is a “breakthrough” that means OAI built an algorithm that can feed a highly efficient heuristic into Q-learning. That is MASSIVE.

This is just an intuition on my part. AI will make steady progress, but AGI will not be realized til we better understand consciousness. There will be progress in domain specific AI, but general intelligent autonomous action requires that the lights be on, that is, consciousness.

I have had a similar hunch, that while humans have and will create powerful AI tools, that AGI is not achievable without consciousness.

I am also fascinated with the idea of conscious realism - the idea that consciousness itself is fundamental and that the material world arises from consciousness and not the other way around. If true, AGI will not be realizable within the current framework that is being pursued which may be humanity's saving grace.

Based on Hoffman's theory the reason there is consistency in how the world is viewed and experienced across tribes is because we are born with similar gear - something akin to a built in VR headset. Hoffman gives several examples in the book of objects we create on the fly that are not really there - we call them visual illusions - based on our unconscious visual intelligence logic rules.

I agree about not trusting entirely anything about consciousness. I said Hoffman's theory was fascinating, not that I bought it entirely as there are too many unanswered questions. But for me it was a paradigm shift in terms of how one could look at what we call reality. Hoffman is a serious scientist a professor emeritus at UC Irvine with impressive credentials in neuroscience and cognitive psychology.

Far and away the most interesting theory on this topic for me is from Hoffman. I recent read his fascinating book The Case Against Reality - mind blown pretty much sums up my experience of the book. In short he advocates that consciousness is fundamental and that what we experience as the material world...people, objects, atoms is the product of our consciousness and not the other way around. Space time he argues is not fundamental.

Just finished reading The Open-Focus Brain by Les Fehmi and highly recommend it as it is a self help book that actually helps and is grounded in science. The book also comes with a CD of guided meditations.

The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. I had pretty much given up on the self help genre but a comment left by a poster on Youtube video led me to the book. Something about the title grabbed me and I read not only The Power of Now but 3 of his other books as well over a 3 week period in December - all of which strongly resonated with me. I live my life - really each present moment - differently because of Tolle's teaching. So my life changing books for 2015 - all by Eckhart Tolle were:

The Power of Now; Practicing the Power of Now; Stillness Speaks; A New Earth

runzoom.com healthdataweb.com

While I have blueprints for both I'd consider selling at the right price so if interested send me your contact information.

There are lot of technology issues to be solved in healthcare separate and apart from medical device technology. As one example Heritage Provider Network has been running a competition that will award $3 million dollars to anyone who can develop an algorithm to identify patients who will be admitted to hospital in the next year using historical claims data. Generally predictive analytics is a significant opportunity in healthcare. And as I noted in the OP, HHS has been opening up its huge data set to entrepreneurs and developers. Aetna also has an initiative in play to open up de-identified claims data to the developer community. A lot can be done in the area of developing tools around analytics & reporting and gaining not so obvious insights from claims data at both the individual and aggregate level. The bureaucracy is falling to the wayside but of course in order to accomplish anything developers need to have some understanding about the data they are working with. I have been itching to do something in the area myself but working on the analytics business side of the equation I need technical support.

Prior Knowledge's Veritable database sounds intriguing. I do a bit of work on the analytics side with medical claims data. I wonder how effective Veritable would be against a large medical claims data set where you have multiple hospital claims, lab claims, pharmacy claims for each member.

Did you do the OSQA implementation yourself? I want to deploy OSQA for an idea in a niche area I'm testing. I want to do Q&A but I also want to add a news section sort of like the setup here on Hacker News. I'm not sure how easy it is to customize OSQA though. I am not a developer so I would be willing to part with a few dollars to get this done.

It would be interesting to know what these start-ups facing a cash crunch are all working on. Are they all chasing the same pie or are they a diverse bunch engaged in finding technology solutions for problems in a range of industries? I asked the question but I think I already know the answer.