it was only after I had to manage others that I realized the logic for a lot of these simplistic metrics and rules. they are in place to hold accountable the worst performers. a simple example is when i introduced flexible work hours. it was fine with most people, but there are always a few members that abuse the system. they stretch it to the very limit to what can be interpreted as "flexible". as a manager it posed a dilemma for me. i didn't want to take away this privilege just because of a few abusers, but it was both unfair and set bad precedents if I allowed them to get away with this. and let's say they couldn't be easily fired. most of my peers simply ended up going back to a system where people punched in and out.
this function will be a must-have for all home security systems. I used to spend hours going through home security cameras to check if our cat went out the house when the door was accidentally left open (turned out it was just really good at hiding within the house).
my question has always been why (I think most vertebrates) stop at two? It seems that an extra eye here and there could be really helpful. Maybe it's because all verterbrates evolved from an ancestor that had two eyes, and once the template is in place, it was simply too deep a local maximum to evolve out of? Similar to the 5-digit hand design that all vertebrates share.
I thought this a pretty mature technique? I have seen more than once our local vet using this technique to treat cats with large wounds -- with great results by the way. Interestingly, they too used tilapia fish skin, and not any of the more common local fish species. I wonder if there is something special about tilapia fish skin, or it was simply the species on which the technique was developed, and nobody bothered to try using other fish species.
one example is auto generating subtitles -- elements of this tasks, e.g. speech to text with time coding, have been around for a while (openai whisper and others), but they have only recently been integrated into video editors and become easy to use for non-coders.
other examples: depth map (estimating object distance from the camera; this is useful when you want to blur the background), auto-generating masks with object tracking.
I am getting the sense that the 2nd deriative of the curve is already hitting negative teritory. models get updated, and I don't feel I'm getting better answers from the LLMs.
On the application front though, it feels that the advancements from a couple of years ago are just beginning to trickle down to product space. I used to do some video editing as a hobby. Recently I picked it up again, and was blown away by how much AI has chipped away the repetitive stuff, and even made attempts at the more creative aspects of production, with mixed but promising results.
I wonder if it's really just a function of how much work is involved in taking care of pets. I have had pet turtles and cats for years. Cats easily require 10x the amount of work to keep them happy and healthy.
or turn the food over, or move it to a different position inside the microwave -- the way microwave works is that it heats up the food unevenly (there's a wave involved).
or it keeps monitoring the web and notify me whenever something that matches my interests shows up -- like a more sophisticated Google alert. I really would love that.
another analogy would be: aliens abducting a bunch of humans and recreating the Stanford Prison Experiment and write up on human society based on that, which ends-up reshaping alien culture.
reasons for recommendation:
- it's an example in the biological science, to complement the heavy representation of examples from computer science and entrepreneurship in this thread
- the main character, Kary Mullis, is colorful and controversial. Not a likable individual, but nevertheless had traits (mostly an unreasonable obsession) that enabled him to make such a discovery
- the discovery of high temperature tolerant enzymes predated Mullis' insight by some two decades, and it played a key role in making PCR practical and widely applicable. this is a pattern I have seen often in major inventions, which were made possible by prior discoveries (often decades old) which lay dormant until someone put everything together. This process of re-discovering the pieces and making connections is also where I think machine learning could be particularly helpful. In fact this is my main motivation for picking up this book (by online reviews, not a particularly well-written one).
thank you for posting this... and this is a common enough pattern (looking up previous HN threads on the same or related article) that I wonder if it's worthwhile to automate this.
I have friends who routinely go for #2 or #3 (occasionally even further down). The typical justification they gave is that one's paying a lot of price premium/marketing cost for #1, whereas with #2/3 one gets comparable or slightly worse quality for a lot cheaper.
if your experience is coming from teaching college freshmen, then that's a sample that's significantly above average among high school graduates. I think only about 1/2 of all high school graduates go on to further their education, and that includes community colleges.
and I agree with your assessment -- while it's true that in a long conversation, chatgpt veers off and doesn't keep a coherent line of thought, it is not noticeably worse than the average conversation I have with people.
my first job out of college was at a big name management consulting firm... to riff on your point: yes, such is the entire career for many. and theirs aren't even such bad careers if one only considers money and prestige. two years there completely cured me of any illusion of positive correlation between prestige and intelligence. I used to wonder if the partners at the firm actually believed the bullshit they were spilling -- actually "delivering value" per consulting parlance. I get it that people do intellectually dishonest things just for the money... but the partners seemed to genuinely believe their chatgpt-esque text generation. In the end I figured it was a combination of self-selection (only the true believers stay for the years and make partner) and a psycho-hack where if you want to convince your client, you better believe it yourself first (only the true believers make good evangelists).
for me it was computer games, specifically Civ 2. Imagine playing that as a second-grader with zero English. But I had strong motivation, and ploughed through the game, dictionary in hand.
AI in its current incarnation felt on part with word processing, or even spreadsheet (which powers a big portion of the financial industry, so no mean feat)... but it's not the internal combustion engine, or comparable to the discovery of electricity.
my Chinese teacher supplied me with this supposedly ancient piece of Chinese scholarly wisdom: read any book a hundred times, and its meaning will be obvious.
i have found this to work amazingly well -- particularly with poorly written technical papers.
your comment also reminded me of this one time I was hanging out and watching the Matrix (for the 100th time probably) with a film maker friend. and he was pointing out to me that American film editing guides you with a rather heavy hand on where to look on the screen, whereas European films did little of that and the viewer has to search for what to pay attention to in a scene. after he showed me the editing techniques it all made sense, and explained why i could mindless follow hollywood movies, whereas watching an european film i'd get lost if not paying attention.
yes, the image of that lone penguin setting off to the horizon with (what i read as) resolution had stuck on my mind. perhaps i was seeing too much of myself in it (and i think many others do too).
> When we write, we leave spaces between words. Readingwordswithoutsuchspacesisdifficult.
immediately losing credibility because quite a number of languages, such as Chinese and Japanese (and I think Korean too), are written without space between words or characters. In fact, until quite recently (last 100 years or so), written Chinese had no punctuations.
I am amazed at whoever first thought of doing a reconstruction like that...what was the inspiration? what evidence and confidence did they have that it was going to work?
for non-fiction books TTS is already good enough. what's needed is the convenience and speed for turning text to audio. if with one click on my ebook app I can start listening, it'll be a darn good feature for me.