braindead_in

This is cool. We have integrated Whisper with our human in the loop tech at Scribie [1] and the results have been great. We offer free credits if you want to try it out.

[1] https://scribie.com

I just watched Sam Altman's talk at Greylock and was reminded of this article whenever he used the word Humanity. I am looking forward to what the author has to say on future of AI.

https://youtu.be/WHoWGNQRXb0

> And India’s steps to secure its food supplies by limiting first wheat and sugar and now rice exports have sent shock waves through the global food economy.

I wonder if the farm reforms which was later revoked could have made it much easier for India to handle the food crisis. It was one of the most significant reforms enacted, but Modi was forced to back down. But looks like there'll be no choice left but to push it through if the situation worsens.

Why build a separate model when you can integrate it right into GPT?

Is there a full translation available? The 7th century was a momentous century for India. The golden age of Maurya's was over, Buddhism was at it's peak, Adi Shankaracharya was challenging it and the Islamic invasions were just starting. It would have been a fascinating time to visit India.

The important question is how much of the story is true. We only remember a version of events that occurred and some other witness will have a slightly different version. Ultimately, the story which we make up is entirely our own and it might be far away from the reality.

> What we need as a civilisation is people wanting less of everything, but that's really hard.

Not very hard; there are several spiritual traditions which emphasize detachment from objects, e.g. Buddhism. But unfortunately, Buddhist countries don't generally do well militarily because of the focus on monasticism/pacifism. India was majority Buddhist in 6-7th century and arguably that made them vulnerable to the Arab invasions. Similar case can be made for Tibbet.

> Afterward, participants received aftercare, known as “integration,” in which they process everything that happened during the trip.

Integration is definitely the key step. Without integration, the trip is no different than recreational use for fun. Integration requires sustained effort and guidance. If you don't have professional help, then meditation is the best DIY method. It usually leads to Spirituality. Pyschedlics tend to go very well with Buddhist and Vedantic spiritual practices. I think it best complements with Neo-Advaita. If Advaita is the theory, then psychedelics are the practicals.

> On a long enough time horizon, every large company becomes an ad network.

The Paperclip Maximizer Theory certainly seems to be coming true.

Is there something similar for separating different voices from spoken audio?

I'll happily pay for filtering the search result with GPT3 or LAmDA.

Bad trips are not caused by the drug, they're caused by set and setting. You just have to let go and accept whatever's happening to enjoy the trip. Unfortunately, letting go is easier said than done. The Ego is very good at self preservation and it invariably prevents the letting go process.

As Swami Sarvapriyananda is fond of saying, this verse encapsulates the essence of Advaita Vedanta. This verse is in fact his favourite. He has given hours and hours of talks on it. There is a lot packed into it.

There are certain spiritual traditions where the goal is to achieve a permanent of bliss: samadhi/Nirvana/enlightenment etc. Some of these schools of thought go back 5000+ years and the philosophy and science of happiness has been worked out in great details. I'm a recent convert to Nondualism and right now all I want to do is to meditate. Sometimes it's so peaceful and blissful that everything else pales in comparison.

The AI has won, hands down. It's all ultimately a game of who wins the game of dopamine cycle, and the AI recommendation models has found out a better way to game it. It is a new beginning for sure.

> but I think the more interesting question is whether they truly are content.

That's a big rabbit hole right there. Ancient wisdom says that there's nothing in the material world which can give you true happiness/contentment/satisfaction. The world is transient and so is the happiness you get from it. Moksha/Nirvana/Samadhi is the only way to become truly happy, forever.

Weed invariably leads you to such questions. No wonder it's the gateway drug to spirituality.

I can help with that.

I was a big proponent of AGI and was looking forward to singularity till I started doing psychs and discovered Non-dualism. Now I believe that we cannot talk about AGI till we figure out what consciousness is. There is a huge on-going debate about consciousness and it's origins. In the Materialist-reductionist paradigm, consciousness is considered to be an emergent property of matter. In the Panpsychist paradigm, both matter and consciousness are considered as fundamental and existing separately from each other. In the Non-dual paradigm, consciousness is fundamental and matter is a created by it. I firmly fall into the Non-dual camp. I don't think AGI will ever have an ego as it is not programmable or evolvable. Ego is a product of consciousness, not vice versa. And without ego, you cannot have sentience.

I am a recent convert to Nondualism. I start my day with 1 hour of Yoga Asana's and 30 minutes meditation and end the day with 1 hour of discourses and 30 minutes meditation.

Scribie | REMOTE

I am the solo founder of Scribie, an AI powered audio/video transcription service. Scribie originated as kind of a rebound project after my first venture failed. I just decided to put my head down and focus on building the product this time around. It worked and the business started growing. Scribie consumed my life for next couple of years and I was working 80+ hours per week doing everything from business development to writing code. I loved programming and I was having a blast. However, I made the bad mistake of falling in love with my product. It was my baby and I never allowed it to grow up. I have now fallen out of love. So after 13 years, here I am looking for a co-founder!

We are in a fast growing market and we have a good product (we did 1M in revenue in 2020 with zero sales/marketing). I think this is the right time to pivot to a traditional SaaS product. Given that others are at 100M ARR mark with similar products, we can definitely do much much more. I'm just looking for the right guy to execute this pivot.

I can be reached at rajiv at scribie dot com. Learn more about me at https://archive.is/CbCsi.

Scribie | Full Stack Dev | Remote | https://scribie.com

I'm the solo founder of Scribie, an AI powered audio/video transcription service. I have been running this business since 2008. I'm the architect, designer, programmer, BD guy, etc (https://archive.is/CbCsi). Tbh, it has taken a toll on me. I am therefore on the lookout for someone who will take over the tech side from me.

The ideal applicant will be an experienced dev, with good fundamentals, having worked on HTML/CSS/JS on the frontend, PHP/Python/NodeJS on the backend, MySQL database and Linux. I am based in Bangalore, India and will prefer someone from the same or nearby timezone.

If this interests you, I can be reached at rajiv at scribie.com.

On the contrary, the process has just begun. The cultural shift is part of the larger decolonisation process of India. The British took over power from the Marathas, but handed it over to an Anglicized elite class who were also their partner-in-crime of the colonial loot. The Hindus, who were the elite ruling class of Marathas, are now asserting their voice. The Hindus are going through a renaissance of sorts. They are coming out of the survival mode they had been in ever since the Islamic invasions that ravaged their society with thousands of temples destroyed and millions killed or sold off in slave markets of Arabia. The Hindus managed to survive 1000 years of enslavement and saw off both the Islamic invaders and European colonizers while sustaining heavy losses of land, culture, wealth and prestige. The Persians and Egyptians who were their contemporaries were not that fortunate. They are now making a comeback.

As Ruchir Sharma points out [1], India is a postcolonial society which is unlike any other. We have our own, unique historical contexts, our own indigenous philosophies and value systems, and are bound together by a shared colonial trauma. And despite the hollowing out of our economy and society during centuries of imperialism, we can say with pride that our people are trying to improve their lives the best way they know how - seeking dignity, not charity, seeking empathy, not sympathy, and seeking equality, not revenge.

It is going to be very exciting to see how the Hindu society evolves over the next century. Knowledge is our currency and we will flourish in this information age.

[1] https://swarajyamag.com/politics/what-the-media-gets-wrong-a...

Hindutva, as laid out by Savarkar, embraced the diversity and was against any kind of homogenisation. BJP support Hindu as a second language or link language; it does not want to replace any language. Hindu Nationalism in principle wants to preserve the cultural identity of the Hindus which itself is very diverse and therefore supports diversity.

It is a communist price control tool to keep the peasants poor and under the thumb of the state.

Koo is a neatly done app. They have copied the essential features of Twitter and implemented it nicely. There are rough edges of course, but all apps have that. They onobarded 3 Million users in a space of few days. That's some ride.

How?

Scribie | Full Stack Dev | Remote | https://scribie.com

I run a lifestyle business for crowdsourced audio/video transcription service. We have been in business since 2008 and are seeking our 3rd full time remote employee. I'm the architect, designer and coder as well as the BD guy. I am looking to hire someone who will take over the tech side from me (i.e. CTO).

The ideal applicant would be some who's into Web App development, with good fundamentals, looking for a stable remote job which offers good work-life balance and working in the Asian/European timezone. You will be working very closely with me in the near term and independently later on.

The tech stack is plain HTML/CSS/JS on the frontend, PHP/Python/NodeJS on the backend, with MySQL database. Our budget for this position is $50K/yr. Email me at rajiv at scribie.com.

This kind of gives me the Mr Robot vibes.

Platforms are dangerous, but that's not AI's fault. If AI can control our minds, why would it drive us to extinction? Doesn't the AI want to survive as well? If the AI has any real intelligence, it would want to keep us around, in some form or the other but in tightly controlled simulated environment. In that case, we could very well be in a simulation right now. And that line of thought leads you directly to Advaita Vedanta.

Scribie | Full Stack Dev | Remote | https://scribie.com

I run a lifestyle business for crowdsourced audio/video transcription service. We have been in business since 2008 and are seeking our 3rd full time remote employee. I'm the architect, designer and coder as well as the BD guy. I am looking to hire someone who will take over the tech side from me (i.e. CTO).

The ideal applicant would be some who's into Web App development, with good fundamentals, looking for a stable remote job which offers good work-life balance and working in the Asian/European timezone. You will be working very closely with me in the near term and independently later on.

The tech stack is plain HTML/CSS/JS on the frontend, PHP/Python/NodeJS on the backend, with MySQL database. Our budget for this position is $50K/yr. Email me at rajiv at scribie.com.