bricemo

Very sad to see the United States as “No” and “No” listed next to the protections page linked

To truly call this an improvement, he needs to re-run the evaluation test to see what percentage of respondents can correctly identify the new icons

“One just convinced a Google QA engineer to the point he broke his NDA to try and be a whistleblower on its behalf.”

This is spot on. The danger is not from the AI themselves. The danger is from people’s reactions to the AI’s.

I remember seeing a Boston Dynamics video years ago where they kicked their robot to test stability. The video was littered with comments sympathizing with the robot because it moves in a lifelike way, “Stop being so mean! You’re hurting it!”

The capability to imitate intelligence is only going to grow, and along with it the percentage of the population that believes they are conscious.

It would be wise for technologists to pause and take this human reaction seriously.

Who is the dream team?

I have enjoyed this exchange about as much as the original link. Bravo

This is a great point. You have to consider directed versus serendipitous need. Most advanced careers are being invented at a rapid pace, and also roles change. We have no idea what math an engineer in 2030 will need to know every day. I have no idea what title I’ll have in 5 years.

Better to know the math and not use it for your particular role, than be unqualified because you can’t

I agree, this is definitely not cheating. This is interview preparation. When I prepared for my FAANG interviews I googled so many questions that I couldn’t find another blue link, they were all purple. I prepped for them all. The more you want the job, the more you prep

It’s not that simple though, the study states that replacing the filters removes large endotoxins, but not small ones. The small ones are still present

A few thoughts from a person who used to feel like this, and is now in their 30’s, having done everything from startups to big tech companies, and now feels super happy with their career:

1) great job for posting and seeking help! By doing so you’ve already taken the first step to moving in a better direction, which is more than a lot of people

2) A ton of people, myself included, felt like you are describing. Multiple times. Stuck, falling behind, wasted years, unsure about direction, etc. It is discouraging and I feel for you. But believe me when I say that it is very likely you will get to a awesome place eventually. You’re in the hard part now of not knowing the future

3) Long term (2-5 years) the best road map to turn this around I can recommend is a book call “So Good They Can’t Ignore You” by Cal Newport. It changed my life and helped me build a high value career I love. The basic idea is that you should find rare and valuable job skills adjacent to what you can do currently, and then put in time learning them. This over time leads to an incredibly fulfilling and lucrative career. If this is the only thing you get out of this post, it will be worth it

4) Short term: if this job is killing you, apply to other jobs. Do this by email/text/message 10-20 people you know tangentially at other companies and just say “Hey I am looking around, any roles at your company I should consider?” That’s all that’s needed, no “networking”. Then when you go to interview, prep for them by preparing what questions they might ask and prep answers. Try to find a job that will give you skills in a valuable direction related to what you are familiar with now

Hang in there. From what you describe you have a bright future. I can see that from my vantage point but understand it may be hard to see now. You got this!

Hundreds of millions of people simply don’t have them. They aren’t free and they get holes in them over time

My theory is it’s because people respond emotionally to drama but not numbers. A shark attack, a plane crash, and an explosion are all much more dramatic but less deadly. What would the dramatic terror scene be? Someone swiping away a mosquito? Very boring. So that’s not what gets made into movies.

Secondly, the Gates Foundation does a TON of work with mosquitos and protective nets! They have saved tens of millions of lives. Whenever I have some money to donate and do research on what is the most effective use of each dollar, mosquito nets rise to the top.

I was an exchange student in rural Japan in the early 2000’s and I think that was the final moment you could see the world like this. There were no smartphones yet or ubiquitous internet. I had some guide books but they were very general.

My host family didn’t speak English at all. Every day was like a puzzle: what does this building do? What are these tickets people have? What is this strange food, is it even food? How does this toilet even work? My only contact with home was an email I sent every month, because I had to go to a special place a different city that had internet. There were so many snacks, books, products, clothes, TV shows that no one at home had ever heard of.

I went back in the 2010’s and everything had changed. The security of your phone makes the feeling of isolation, risk, and adventure disappear. You can look everything up, it’s been documented, you’ve heard of it already. You’re still texting and talking to your normal friends on social. Everything is everywhere, you don’t really detach from home.

It really was a special window of time.

By ad supported I just mean that if you aren’t creating enough value for enough people to pay, you may be able to get money from ads. But if the site is growing in revenue consistently that’s great!

Hi there, paid lofi.co member here (I joined to try it out). First off thanks for making this site. I am super into Lofi, listen to it every single day, make my own playlists, have lofi merch, etc.

As much as I love lofi, I agree with the other comments that it's hard to compete with the abundant cheap/free content out there. I'm not saying this isn't higher production quality (it definitely is) or this doesn't pull it all together better (it does). I'm saying: it's not 10x better such that I would want to pay for it. I don't think $1 vs $4 makes much of a difference - it's the jump from free to paid that's the sticking point.

I want this to succeed and I think I am your exact target market, so I'm racking my brain trying to figure out what would make this worth it. In its current form it seems to only be providing enough value to be ad supported (hopefully your revenue proves me wrong?).

Stepping back: the overall purpose of lofi IMO is to be able to concentrate and work in a chill productive environment. Some crazy ideas of things I would definitely pay for: - Maybe it's a monthly coffee subscription sent to your house and the coffee gets featured in the artwork - Maybe you can set up group study sessions and listen together. There's been some great experiments of scheduling a focus time with another person and they are highly productive - There's coffee shops in Japan where you can't leave until you finish your work. Maybe some kind of social commitment like that built into the site - Commit Action is a cool service that helps you break down tasks. Maybe some human consultation like that

All of these are pretty big investments.

Good luck!

People have such a hard time with the concept of a trade-off. Life is not a video game where there is an optimal single answer for everyone every time. It’s complicated, especially with something like biology. So place your bets: do you want possibly better blood pressure, higher incidence of melanoma, and faster aging of skin? Or do you want benefits of more sun exposure and greater risk of cancer?

The answer is: it depends on your family history, your lifestyle, and a bunch of other things.

I know that organizations like American Dermatology or Outdoor magazine have to water down their message so it’s digestible, but it annoys me when people expect “The Answer”. Science is constantly updating.

I think inventing Generative Adversarial Networks, which enable everything from Alexa to GPT-3 to DALL-E to thousands of other models we use today, is pretty visionary to the field of ML.

I’m sure you have some nitpick but I don’t think it matters

The simple answer is machine learning algorithms. AI are very effective at this, it is the same thing at YouTube, Instagram, Tiktok. They will optimize to get you to want to come back

Great roundup. AI are great at technical optimization problems (for example, reducing the usage of electricity in a data center). For creative and subjective works, it seems like a machine-human hybrid model will be the way to go for the next decade. The AI spits out some rough drafts, then the human artist picks it up from there. All of these last-mile problems would be trivial for an artist to touch up.

Beyond methane and climate change, this is a lovely step through of simply grappling with a new concept to understand it, one site/paper at a time. I wish I could teach my parents how to do this, they never get beyond the first page

It’s definitely a tradeoff. I personally have gone through alternate phases where I wanted to be responsible for a huge piece of a small pie (startup) versus a tiny tiny piece of a huge pie (big company). There are pros and cons to both. The big slice of small pie feels cooler and more satisfying to my ego, but in the absolute sense the tiny piece of the big pie probably is actually making a bigger difference. 1% improvement at some of these companies means north of billions of dollars and improving hundreds of millions of peoples lives.

As a game developer I’ve always been saddened by the ephemeral nature of games. It seems impossible to make a game that would last 20, 50, 100 years. Books, paintings, even movies have such an advantage

You can still buy Super Mario 64. It’s part of the paid subscription virtual console service on Nintendo Switch

This is frustrating. I’ve been on both sides of it, what’s happening is that the team is likely juggling thousands of bugs in similar or greater severity, as well as their roadmap for new features. Some things just get deprioritzed over and over, even though everyone knows it sucks. It usually takes a rogue engineer in their extra time, or a dedicated “user love” budget (which I always implement on my teams) to fix it

Have you tried https://aidungeon.io/? It creates novel events with GPT-3.

I'm sure some gamedev will add DALL-E for visuals to a game eventually.

I think it’s vitally important to distinguish between skills you do for fun and skills that earn you a living.

For job skills to earn a living, you should definitely be paying attention and adjusting in order to future proof. Learn skills that will not become obsolete.

For skills for fun, don’t bemoan the fact that an AI can do it better. There is still inherent value in you learning and enjoying how to paint. Not everyone needs to be the best in the world. It would be silly to say “I love baking cakes for my family, but there’s no point because of British Baking Show.”

I agree. I could not be more blown away if a real UFO landed and aliens introduced themselves. A week ago all of this was impossible.

I think this is the hard part. How do you engage in good faith when everyone else seems to be engaging in bad faith tactics? How can you be open to changing your mind when no one else is open to changing theirs? Seems like you immediately lose every time.

I believe strongly in these good faith tactics, and I use them to engage with people I vehemently disagree with. Because of this I have a deeper understanding of them than many of my peers on the other side. But understanding doesn’t help the situation. The overall conversation continues to deteriorate year after year.

I think this page is a great definition of what is happening, but a poor prescription of what to do about it.

Can’t get much more hyper focused than this!

He’s not wrong.

There was a startup called ChaCha that was a real live human answering every query in real time. They would chat with you and find you exactly what you were looking for. In the beginning it was amazing, but then they couldn’t figure out how to scale and quality went down.

Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChaCha_(search_engine)