getnormality

Good time to stand up, shake hands, say "we'll be in touch!" and leave.

Sometimes you gotta fire your interviewer.

This is for their own good. Nobody cares about imperfect language online so long as you are trying to express real human thoughts. But if it smells like AI then everyone will hate it, rule or no rule.

The rule just makes the will of the community clear to those who want to respect it.

> researchers found that ferrets that developed more severe tinnitus also showed disrupted sleep.

Hold up. How do we know when ferrets have tinnitus???

Everyone who is really into blogging about their AI use sounds exactly like this.

Hmm, I wonder why!

> Otherwise it doesn't make sense to put CO2 into the air with one hand and take it out with another.

I agree that it doesn't make sense, but I also want to challenge the engineering assumption that an extremely relatively inefficient solution should be ruled out.

If direct air capture worked and simply required absurd amounts of carbon-free power, say from nuclear, it would mean that we no longer have to fight political battles against the entrenched incumbents. They could simply emit whatever our elected politicians let them get away with, and DAC would soak it up.

I completely acknowledge that it seems somehow egregious to do it this way. I am an efficiency-minded person and would hope that we could do it the efficient way. But given all the ugly constraints and lack of progress so far, should we really expect this to be solved the way an efficency-minded engineer might prefer?

If we get to that level of desperation though, I would hope that we could simply pay the emitters to install carbon capture.

What I don't think will work is a politics of rage, righteous or otherwise. I don't recall any incidents in history where a politics of rage led to cool-headed, efficient technocratic solutions. The perennial problem is that the same politics of rage is equally accessible to your opponents, and it spirals down from there towards disorder and violence.

Yes, the post is evaluating a personal essay of subjective experiences as if it is an obscured mechanism for convincing people about factual claims.

There is much less to this essay than meets the eye. It boils down to this:

1. The author thinks "it turns out" should only be used to express discovery of objectively surprising facts.

2. Paul Graham sometimes uses "it turns out" to express discovery of subjectively surprising facts.

3. The author finds the difference between his opinion and Paul Graham's opinion objectionable.

It turns out that people use stock phrases in different ways!

Patrick Collison sounds like a lovely, trusting, scientifically-minded man who needs to learn the constructive power of destruction. The power of rage and contempt for bad solutions and bad communication (regardless of intent).

With a smiley face front-end, of course. Wouldn't want to seem not-nice!

AxO prompt engineer: "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!"

So much AI moaning and groaning these days seems based on the idea that people have to be forced to do anything of value, even for themselves.

It seems to imply a great deal of pessimism about human self-determination. Like, I can't be anything good unless there is an external mold pressing me into the good shape. And it can't be my choice because I would never choose anything good. I'll only do good things for myself if forced.

Since AI is supposedly taking everybody's jobs and making it so we can choose never to better ourselves, maybe future governments will need to institute taskmasters to force us into regimens of physical and mental health and vigor. A whole new adult school system will have to be instituted.

I think this author could consider thinking of the AI as more than just a task rabbit that allows us to not code, not think, not understand.

If the LLM is indeed such a master at complex coding tasks that we don't understand, why not ask it some questions about how the code works?

You can even ask directly about the concern. "I am worried that by letting you do everything I am not learning how the system works. Could you tell me more about what you did and how I might think through it if I needed to do it myself?"

I spend an unusually small proportion of my life in meetings, probably an idiosyncratic feature of my job.

My impression is that the main reason most people have so many meetings is because meetings are equated to work. If you are in a meeting, you are at work and you need to work. This is because, in a meeting, everyone is looking at everyone else with the expectation that they are working. But if you are not in a meeting, this expectation doesn't exist, so you are basically not at work and you don't need to work.

In particular, thinking only occurs during meetings. And if it didn't happen during a meeting, it didn't happen.

Call me cynical, but it explains immediately why the vast majority of companies don't tolerate remote work unless they're forced to by a pandemic. Office work means someone could be watching you outside meetings, which causes some work to happen outside of meetings and raises productivity.

So is the actual work of programming is mostly just sitting in meetings where business people and programmers slowly muddle through requirements?

So are you saying that bad programmers play a dual role of attending meetings to get business requirements, in a way that AI cannot do?

Or maybe people who like talking much more than they like code are now very excited about the possibility that talking has eaten software development.

This is exactly backwards. For many tasks, formal languages are better, more real, more beautiful than English. No matter how many millions of tokens you have, you will never talk the formulas of Fermat, Euler, and Gauss into irrelevance. And the same is true of good code.

Of course, a lot of code is ugly and utilitarian too, and maybe talking will make it less painful to write that stuff.

This author is pointing out that the fraction of the tech dream du jour that is actually realized is consistently about 1%, so taking tech dreams du jour seriously is guaranteed to give you a false world model. Which is unhelpful and maladaptive, unless perhaps your goal is to make money off of other people with that false world model.

I believe that full automation of the mundanities of human life is coming in the fullness of time. But for that insight to be helpful to me, I have to get the timing right, and the data suggests I should be extremely skeptical about excitable tech guys predicting big things in short time frames.

> So far it seems to me that self-attention really brought new capabilities to a network

Do we have a layman explanation for what makes self-attention so uniquely powerful? Something more than "it lets you do self-attention".

I find it so fundamentally unhinged that people think things will get fully automated to the point that humans no longer matter. We are centuries into the deep automation of certain things, like looms, but people with deep understanding of those things are still needed to guide the automation and keep it working to meet human needs.

To ignore that pattern and say everything's going to be automated and humanity will be irrelevant seems to me to be... more of a death wish against human agency, than a prediction based on reality.

I agree. One way to sum up what you've said: love in any substantial sense is a commitment of effort, and all such commitments are economic in nature - that is, inherently limited and subject to tradeoffs. And these commitments will follow a natural order favoring family and kin, according to our nature as evolved organisms.

The key here is that favoring doesn't need to mean excluding anything else!

The vectors containing the weights of each ingredient live in the positive orthant (x >= 0).

When you divide by x by sum(x), the resulting vector p has p >= 0 and sum(p) = 1. That new sum constraint is how you get the simplex.

Yeah, that's why I'm not really resentful or disappointed, exactly. Life is still good without it. You have your actual family, maybe some other people you really share life with, and everyone else is just doing their own thing, and you're existing together without causing problems for each other. That's not a bad way for things to work.

I grew up with a very strong sentimental sense of moral universalism. I loved Beethoven's Ode to Joy and the romantic idea of universal brotherhood.

But as I bank years in the adult world, as a worker and a neighbor, I've been progressively disillusioned. I don't find universalism to be a common viewpoint. I've found it to be very rare that anyone wants to be my "brother" or "sister". And sometimes those that seem to, end up being exploitative, callous, or strictly fair-weather.

I'm not resentful or anything. I have a happy family and a few close-ish friends, and life feels full. But I can understand how the loneliness and coldness of the world makes people more particularist. People may think: "if the world acts like it owes me nothing, then what do I owe the world?"

So if you were overwhelmingly wrong about technology fads in your lifetime by saying yes to everything, you can comfort yourself by saying that if you had gone back a century and said yes to everything, you would have been right about some things!

I wonder what folks on 2009 Hacker News would have said if a company announced layoffs.

Would the top comments have been questioning it, telling the CEO what he should have done instead, worrying about how hard it would be for those people in today's economy?

This looks like an important post. What makes it special is that it operationalizes Polya's classic problem-solving recipe for the age of AI-assisted coding.

1. Understand the problem (research.md)

2. Make a plan (plan.md)

3. Execute the plan

4. Look back

"Obsolete" is an incomplete characterization of the state of play.

LLMs put the information from StackOverflow into an arguably more helpful format, but they're still heavily dependent on human input. The LLM must periodically harvest info from human communities to stay up-to-date with technological progress. If those communities die, the LLM will not compensate, and other communities will arise to replace them. Those communities may have different attitudes towards the LLMs that killed their ancestors.

Blog posts by authors claiming AI has transformed them into godlike engines of productivity: 103728369129

Interviews by celebrities predicting AI will revolutionize the economy: 2837191001747

Software and online things I've used that seem to be better than they were before ChatGPT was introduced: 0

Why would anyone get sick of it if people have been happily doing it to each other for so many years prior?

Does the fact that a machine can ape it so easily somehow reveal its vacuousness in a way that wasn't obvious already?

I keep hearing people with job titles like "SEO growth hacker" saying it's depressing that AI can do their jobs better than they can.

Really? That's the depressing part?

Yeah, the vibe of this post is that of a 2000 Viagra spam king coming forward and telling the world "yes, but... what are good and bad, really? Who's to say what's right and wrong?"

Maybe we can't stop you today, but we can keep you on the shit list.

Lol, nothing matters? We'll see about that.

What does it have to do with privilege? This person's need for grammar seems to be self-imposed. I don't see where anyone judged him for bad grammar while a privileged person was given a get-out-of-jail-free card for the grammar police.