fhe

the article makes it as if the solution to education is "a dedicated tutor to every student". I do not think that's the case. The problem is that not every student has the motivation, and having a tutor on call 24-7 doesn't change it.

the article goes on to describe how such an AI tutor might work:

"As you work through a challenging set of fraction problems, it won’t just give you the answer—it breaks each problem down into digestible steps. When you get stuck, it gives you easy-to-understand explanations and a gentle nudge in the right direction. When you finally get the answer, it generates targeted practice questions that help build your understanding and confidence."

reading it, and watching the demo of gpt-4o tutoring math (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBrdd7xg-dg), I felt the opposite -- that if I had such a tutor, whatever motivation I had would have been stripped away by such a tutor. I really needed the quiet struggle with a problem, and feeling that I conquered it on my own, instead of being guided through a paint-by-number kit. I acknowledge that I might have an unusual learning style, or that I simply belonged to a generation that grew up without such tools, hence the aversion, much like my parents grew up without digital calculators (although they don't harbor any aversion to the use of calculators).

> yet the real-world impacts remain modest so far.

I second that. I remember when Google search first came out. Within a few days it completely changed my workflow, how I use the Internet, my reading habits. It easily 5 ~ 10x the value of Internet for me over a couple of weeks.

LLMs is doing nothing of the sort for me.

I find the separation between the body of the essay and notes makes it harder to read. When I read PG's essay, I always have two tabs open, one on the essay and the other on the Notes section. When I come across a note reference, e.g. "the answer turns out to be completely different. [4]", I switch to the Notes tab to look it up. This back and forth between the two tabs disrupt the reading experience.

Wouldn't it be easier on the reader to simply include the Notes in the body part of the essay? Especially when the notes are short. For example the aforementioned note no. 4 goes:

"[4]Corollary: If you're not intellectually honest, your writing won't just be biased, but also boring, because you'll miss all the ideas you'd have discovered if you pushed for the truth."

Which is short, relevant, and insightful. What's the criteria for which piece of text goes into the body of the essay, and which goes to Notes? I guess if a substantial percentage of readers skip the Notes part, then it's a time-saving practice to separate the two.

on the other hand, my 10 year old mac mini still runs fine, although it no longer supports the latest OSX and many of the more recent APP's. But as a media/entertainment device, light duty file server, and even coding the occasional throwaway program, it comfortably holds its ground.

here's my thought experiment: suppose one builds a generative model that predicts the next digit of pi. if a program can do this perfectly, then it's arguable that it understands what the number pi is. the question is, can such a model be trained by feeding it a large amount of known digits of pi?

My intuition is that it's not doable with current approach to building generative models. the number pi arose out of certain constraints and characteristics of the physical world we live in. but if a model ever sees is just an endless stream of digits, without access to the underlying physical model, I don't see a path for it to 'reverse-engineer' and figure out the physical model that gave rise to it.

I have always wondered to what extent GDP (price-adjusted or not) reflects standard of living. By different sources, GDP per capita for Britain is only 60% that of the US, but visiting these two countries I don't see much of a difference in standard of living.

purely as a thought experiment, I wonder if given enough time, the NYC stray cat population would observe a genetic drift towards larger body size and start preying on the abundant local rat population? I never lived in NYC, and don't know how big the rats are there, but the rats I've seen (mostly at uni. biology labs) they grow to about 25cm in length (about the length from tip of index finger to tip of thumb with hand stretched out to the fullest for someone with large hands, not counting the tail), which I think is entirely within what a normal-sized adult cat can tackle.

urban rodents is a rich food source begging as an ecological niche to be filled.

It's part of my job to have meetings with VCs. You are not wrong.

Ever better weather forecast for one. I can remember that, about two decades ago, weather forecast was still rather wobbly, and could only see a couple days into the future. Now 10-day forecast is routine, and surprisingly good. Much of that improvement came about as a result of more powerful supercomputers.

exactly. it's almost like say dictionaries are better at spelling bee hence smarter than humans, or that computers can easily beat humans in Tetris and smarter because of that.

selection bias? in that the people who were let go from or decided to leave SpaceX were the worse performing ones to begin with?

would you consider living in Singapore? It seems to have a lot going for it, maybe apart from the high living expense.

Even if ChatGPT (and LLMs in general) is not the way to go for AGI, there is plenty of evidence so far that it will prove to be a powerful tool. Much like airplanes did little in the way of achieving bird-like flight, but is obviously a useful invention, in many ways superior to bird-like flight.

I remember reading some where that it's one of those scenes that didn't make it to the final release of the movie.

fellow nonlinear-reader here. random access to an otherwise rather linear content format is so key for me, and the responsiveness and user interface are maddening. now i can't stop marveling at paper as a medium -- it got so many things right. it certainly wasn't the first try by humans. we tried clay plates and sheep skin and bamboo chips, until we hit upon paper. but nonetheless it's amazing that paper is still not surpassed after more than a thousand years.

this feels like the Cambrian Explosion, when multicellular organisms where just coming to stride, and there was an explosion of body plans, many look incredibly creative and weird compared to modern animals. It was as if evolution had no assumptions and was exploring. then after a few hundred million years, a handful of body plans won out, and have stayed stable ever since.

tip to anyone following the link: you can drag the progress bar at the top, and make the playback much faster.

one observation: PG does plenty of local edits (reworking over and over one sentence), but not so much changing the order of sentences, or moving paragraphs around -- these are the things that I have always been told (such as in college writing workshops) I should be doing. maybe such "macro" edits are not needed in such a short piece. and truth be told I never found much need for them either, even for pieces that are quite long.

fellow sidewalk worm helper here. ever since i was a kid, i could never bear the sight of earthworms on the side walk, getting stepped on or baked dry when the Sun comes out. i had always thought i was alone in this behavior (none of my friends did this), until i read that Albert Schweitzer did this too. he won the nobel peace prize in 1952.

perhaps in the not so distant future, we can simply feed a movie script to the program and out comes a feature film.

"Decentralized systems by nature suffer for slow adoption"

I don't see why that's self-evident. Decentralized applications get fast and wide adoption all the time, e.g. Napster.

the one theory i read about on the correlation between height and managerial position is that, people's confidence correlate highly with height when they were teenagers (I am assuming that people's height when they are teenagers also highly correlate with their final, adult height), and in a corporate environment, marginally more confident goes a long way -- way more than marginally better at programming or building spreadsheet.

And as someone who is in a bit of a managerial position myself, and having watched many others try to manage to various degree of success, I'd say this translation between confidence to managerial responsibility is a feature not a bug. You really do want to put a confident person in charge if only that others are more inclined to follow her. An adequate plan resolutely executed is much better than a somewhat better plan timidly presented.

check out this old HN thread on "rich kids already won the career game" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2296550

just to add another data point, I tried the same search too, and all results look normal and relevant.

I use the M1 Mac Air for office work. It replaced my 2017 MBP, and the difference is very noticeable -- with some 3 dozen tabs open on my browser (not the best of browsing habit) the M1 can take it without breaking a sweat. Yet for entertainment and hobby programming I revert back to my (really) old 2011 iMac that runs High Sierra -- I have invested much time fine-tuning that machine. I tried to migrate the setup to the M1, but a bunch of dependencies were broken. I'd stay with the iMac for as long as the hardware can hold out.

I'd just want to add that, I in general don't think it's a good idea to train cats to learn behaviors that are unnatural for them. One could say that, eating processed cat food and living with humans are already unnatural, which is true. But to the extent that's possible, I want to provide my cats the freedom to act as naturally as possible.

On this particular cat toilet training trick: cats are in fact quite particular about litterbox -- where it's positioned, how safe it feels inside it, how it smells. A human toilet is decidedly an unnatural setup for cats, and who knows what can happen. Maybe the cat learns to use it but constantly feels anxious about it (e.g. slipper surface). Maybe it will avoid pooping until it gets really uncomfortable. All of these can't be good for its health.

it's actually not that much money -- a few hundred million dollars for world wide market? also it seems a fairly inelastic market, i.e. if price drops to 1/5 it's current price, demand won't go up any where near 5x, so current suppliers have little incentive to increase supply or lower cost.

this is exactly that I have been looking for -- and I wonder how I missed it until now in my search for ML tutorials. Many thanks.

Having an audience helps tremendously. I remember reading that children write better when they knew someone will read their stories. I imagine they are more motivated to write too (although on second thought, I can imagine it works the other way -- it could scare people off).

My guess is that when we were hunter-gatherers, one of the strongest motivations for us to go out of the cave was an empty stomach. I am purposefully keeping myself a little hungry during working hours. The idea is that my body will keep sending signals to my brain to "not slack off".

I learned English as a second language. I have often found certain usages of the English language imaginative and poetic -- while such observations seem to escape my native speaker friends. for example, I found much beauty that English uses the same word for both "wave someone goodbye" and "water waves". Now when I walk by the shore, I feel the sea is calling out to me -- this is an association that I never had in my native language, which makes no connection between hand-waving and water waves.

Hofstadter wrote about this, that in different languages people bundle together different concepts. and such bundling is hidden from native speakers. My friend (a native speaker of both English and French) once remarked that she really wished she could re-read some French literature as a non-native speaker so as to deeper appreciate the beauty of the language.

Have you seen people manage to breakout from the poverty cycle? I have lived long enough to actually see a handful of people doing just that, and I often wondered what made them different.

One trait I often observed is risk-taking. The ones that broke free from their upbringing always seemed to have high tolerance for risks. So maybe it's simply statistics -- if you have a group of people taking a lot of risks, some of them are bound to end up doing well (with a comparable subset end up doing worse).