paulluuk

I suspect that billionaires don't exactly hang around in normal spaces, so whomever they will run into will be "special" in some way or another.

Interesting! To be fair, I only tried it once, I did not look at a distribution over several attempts, so I may have just gotten (un)lucky. I'd expect this example to be training case #1 though.

Hey, it may have been confidently wrong, but at least it was fast!

Just verified with the "real" Jev: that gave a probability of 84% that it would land on a 1, with 83% confidence within 62ms.

I am about to roll a 1d6. What face will the die land on?

Probabilistic: 1.968 s - 76% chance it lands on a 1.

Generation: 3.083 s - Equal split.

Don't forget about R#

I like this concept of "vocational awe", and I do think it's why, for example, there is so much sexual and financial abuse in the movie, music and game industry: those people are willing to be treated poorly so they can work their craft - do the thing they love. Basically they are trading away good working conditions in exchange for actually doing work you like or find meaningful, the opposite of someone who does something they hate or find meaningless but pays a high salary and where you are treated really well.

I don't know how well this actually translates to AI, though. We all understand that AI art has a pretty low quality, but sometimes low quality is enough. If I want an image for my D&D character that only I and my DM will likely ever see, I am fine with a 7 cent AI-generated image, but I'm not willing to pay 150$ for an artist to do it - not that I don't value their time, I just don't value the image that much. Before AI this was the same, I'd just have used an image from Pinterest and thought "Well, this isn't exactly a good match, but I can't find anything better".

But I assume real illustrators do things like illustrations for children's books? I'd like to believe that those are still done by actual people, not AI.

> Most of the world has solved the worst of the problem by simply not allowing caller-ID spoofing and by blocking bad actors

I live in the Netherlands, and I get several spoofed crypto-scam calls every day. I have also stopped picking up the phone for numbers I don't recognize. My own telephone number has been used to call others for a while, so I would get tons of "sorry I was busy, what did you call about?" return calls from random people when clearly I had not called them at all.

As far as I know, the only reason spoofing is even possible, is so that call centers in other countries can pretend to be calling from a local number, which.. why is that even a feature?

This feels very much like an example of "this should be run by the government" rather than letting this be run by companies.

I had an interview with Google about 10 years ago. Everyone said "Google doesn't ask brainteasers or leetcode-challenges any more".

The interview was literally nothing but back-to-back brainteasers and leetcode-challenges for 3 hours straight.

I didn't get the job even though I only failed to solve one problem, and looking back I think that the problem was in fact unsolvable and they wanted me to come to that conclusion rather than admit that I couldn't solve it in my head.

> yes because doing so means ignoring your manager Oh luckily I've been blessed with managers who don't code or do code reviews, so I lucked out there, haha.

But I'll admit that code review is actually not the best comparison, as my PRs don't get reviews from thousands of people from the public - only from other engineers. So I suppose that's actually an argument in favor of Hart.

Your reply reads very similar to what Hart wrote:

> True, some readers become indignant at their own inability to follow prose of any complexity or to recognize words any more obscure than those they are accustomed to using when talking to their dogs.

I do think that there is value in using precise, obscure words to convey precise, obscure knowledge (as with Hart's pogonotrophy example).

However, if all critique is dismissed as the indignation of swine, then how will anyone holding that position ever be able to tell whether they are just a bad writer?

Hart suggests that they should critique themselves, or rely on the critiques of those who write in the same way as they do. I am a programmer though, not an author. But I know that only accepting reviews from those I consider accomplished enough, and ignoring reviews by others as if they were indignant at their own inability to comprehend my code, is a very dangerous path to walk.

> To understand actegories, let’s start with the definition of a monoidal category

Definitely not written for someone with my starting knowledge, haha.

It depends on so many factors. Reading a long article on your laptop is likely less efficient than letting an LLM summarize it for you and then only reading the summary, while reading the article on your phone would be even more efficient. There are a lot of very contradictory estimations of just how much power, CO2e and water a single prompt consumes, and everyone (myself included) seems to just pick what fits their narrative best.

I consider myself an optimist, but given that the US has been in 229 wars over it's 249 years since founding, it seems highly unlikely that there wouldn't be a "next war".

Why not just only allow a single try, but accept any "real" word?

I assume this was at a highschool and not at university? My IT teacher in highschool was the chemistry teacher, because.. he knew how to use Word, I guess?

He knew we were computer nerds so didn't really care about teaching us (we knew more than him anyway). And we didn't mind that he just sat there drinking coffee and reading a book, as it meant we could just play videogames for an hour. Good times.

> This year, the economist decided that both the midterm and the final exams for his course would be of the take-home, closed-book type (there is a certain tradition of this at Ivy League schools). “It’s a very nice kind of exam, because as you’re giving students practically unlimited time to complete it, it lets you make it harder than normal, to see how far they can go.”

I have no doubt that AI was used for this, but I am shocked that this is even a thing. Before AI, any rich or connected student (which I assume is essentially all ivy league students) could just get someone to take the test for them?

I've tried it, and I find it quite terrible. I can read much faster than it can speak, it's very awkward when I take a moment mid-sentence to pause and collect my thoughts, and it already begins replying, and it's not at all reasonable to do if there is another human being nearby.

Can you explain what the benefits are of actually "talking" with the bot instead of typing and reading?

As someone who would rather send a slack message to a coworker rather than actually walking over and talk to them, the idea of having to talk with my laptop is not appealing at all, haha.

That seems pretty harsh. How do new frontend frameworks, GPU shaders or another article about how great Rust is (which it is) help fight climate change or child starvation?

I never turned Bixby on either, but on my phone is comes pre-installed and pre-turned-on, and you can't uninstall it, only "deactivate" it.

> I use a lot of AI professionally, but I haven't even turned on Bixby or whatever the Samsung AI is called.

I know this was just a small aside, but man do I hate Bixby and other phone AIs. They are so frustratingly difficult to turn off, and turning them on accidentally is as simply as holding the wrong button for a few seconds, such as when your phone is in your pocket. Very frustrating design.

I wonder how many great engineers with stage fright you would lose this way, though.

> These theories are flawed in the sense that they cannot account for subjective experience and agency

So, I work in AI research (as a research engineer though, not a scientist). I've also studied philosophy and I'm a vegan. Yes yes, insert "they will tell you" joke here, but I promise it's actually relevant this time.

First, while I studied philosophy one of the things that stuck with me the most, was the discussion of "souls": humans have souls, animals don't. For centuries the specifics of souls were discussed: people would be weighed while they died, in an effort to measure the approximate weight of a soul as it departed the body. Discussions about how many souls (or angels) could dance on the tip of a needle. Many people still believe in souls, but it's very hard to have a real discussion about them because by definition they do not "interact" with this world in a way that can be measured.

When discussing whether it's okay to harm animals for food or sport, one other argument I hear quite often (other than having no souls) is that animals do not experience "qualia": basically the smallest unit of "subjective experience". People know that they themselves experience qualia: the sensation of touching a doorknob, the taste of fresh fruit, the sense of beauty watching a rainbow. Ironically, they would say that animals are like robots: just (biological) machines acting on instinct, and feeling any kind of compassion for them means you are anthropomorphizing.

Subjective experience (or at least qualia) and souls both have one thing in common: they can not be measured externally in a meaningful way. You can simply state that an AI system no matter how advanced, has no soul and has no subjective experience. And that's pretty much that. There's no meaningful discussion to be had about it, because no matter what an AI might tell you: it has no way to prove it to you. In fact, you can't even be certain that anyone other than yourself has subjective experiences: you assume that because they are humans like you, and you experience them, that they probably do as well. They tell you that they do. But a human without subjective experience, someone on "autopilot", would be absolutely indistinguishable from a human who does have them.

But perhaps I am conflating here whether experience can be "measured", with whether a system even allows experience in the first place regardless of whether it can be measured. I think that Dreyfus and others argue that in order to have any "experiences" at all, you simply must have a body in the real world, and you must care about that body. Please correct me if that's the wrong interpretation, I haven't actually read the book. That argument would be harder for me to discuss, because I personally believe that consciousness will "emerge" from a complex interaction of relatively simple systems - but that's also just a theory. I don't believe that experience is literally impossible to engineer, as consciousness has emerged from non-conscious being through evolution, so clearly there must be some kind of mechanism for it -- and if there is, then I believe it can be replicated, we just don't really understand it well enough yet to do so. And with how AI tech is going, I think that we're more likely to accidentally stumble upon it than we are to get these deliberately.

I don't know much about the movie industry, but I think the biggest commercial successes for early CGI was possibly Jurassic Park? I don't think it would have been nearly as good if it had all just been done with puppets.

Likewise, there's been a ton of movies since that could in theory have been done purely with SFX instead of VFX, but which is probably must better from having used VFX/CGI, titles like The Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Inception, Avatar, etc.

Obviously there was also charm in titles like E.T. and Gremlins, and I think there might still be a market for movies like that, such as the 2019 Netflix series The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance (I loved the 1982 version as a child, though this sequel wasn't for me).

I guess the question is: will generative AI allow new movies to be made, the same way that CGI has? Or will it just be an economic shift: the same quality CGI but at a fraction of the price?

There may still be people out there who believe that AI will never be able to create CGI as good as humans can, these might be the same people who used to say that CGI can never look realistic. And if you work in VFX, I bet that you can spot a fake mountain with the slightly incorrect shadows in the distance easily, but as a simple movie watcher, I really don't see it, especially when it's only on screen for like 3 seconds.

Twenty years ago my teachers were telling me not to use Wikipedia because you can't trust anything on the internet. You should never date someone you met through an app or website because they are 100% murderers. "The internet is for porn". Things have a way of improving over time, and people always overestimate societal risks of new tech in the beginning.

This is a pretty wild take. What percentage of human engineers are creating novel solutions for hard problems, you think? I work in R&D and even my work is 90% doing things that other people already solved. If you are really doing cutting edge SOTA work that has never been done by another human in some form or another, then kudos to you and I want your job.

The book was never written for children, it was a satirist writing for adults under the guise of a children's book, just as it wrote under the guise of "travel guides". Even at the time, this work was considered weird and not in line with the morality of children's literature.

But even if you accept that children's lives back then were particularly brutal and this was in fact meant as a children's book: there is no evidence to suggest that exposing children to brutality in books will somehow help them function in a brutal world. If anything, I would think that such children especially need something "beautiful" in their lives: the fairy who comes with good advice, the dragon slain in the end, the lost child who finds their way home. A bit of hope.

But I'm not a pedagogue, just a dad.

Sorry, I was not specific enough. I did not mean that open source itself is not enough, I meant that an open source model that can actually run locally on my machine is not enough. a 32B model can not compete with a 250B+ state of the art model, at least that's my experience and seems to be the experience of many others as well.

If open weight models are sufficient for your engineering problems, then you should absolutely use them. But I haven't seen a single open weight model that can get even close to the complexity in my projects. They sometimes work for small toy examples or leetcode puzzles, but not very any real project. Really curious what models you've found that could replace current state of the art.