187 karma · joined September 10, 2021
This was on hacker news a while back, but it now has 4 new chapters - taking the reader from next token prediction to a real AI agent with post-training, conversations, reasoning, and tool use.
My 11 year old son seemed to get it all, so I think it should be pretty approachable, but I'm sure there is stuff I can improve.
The trick is to find ways to carry it with you less.
But I have buried it on the third page of a sub-folder, so I'm not tempted to randomly open it.
I think the most important thing is to just not /usually/ have the phone in your pocket, so you break the habit of reaching for it.
There are definitely lots of things you need a smartphone for today, but fortunately few enough that it's practical to not have a smartphone with you most of the time, even if you own one.
Hopefully if enough people go phoneless, society will adapt to require smartphones less often.
We are working with a consortium of public broadcasters around the world to create a publicly-owned public-interest online space that helps people with different viewpoints understand each other and relate to each other. This project has a lot of momentum behind it, particularly as recent political changes in the US are getting countries interested in the idea of digital sovereignty.
Our partners have a combined regular audience that collectively includes a substantial fraction of the western world, so if we get the product to a good enough state that they can promote it aggressively, it has the potential to be one of the biggest and most important platforms in the world.
The New Public dev team currently consists of me, Rob Ennals (ex Google, Meta, Quora), Blaine Cook (created Twitter), and Daniel Bachhuber (ran Wordpress.com), so it's a fun team to be on. We also have very strong experienced Designers and PMs.
Particularly interested in people with experience working on social products, experience being a core developer of a large product with lots of external contributors, or a deep interest in helping people with different viewpoints relate to each other.
Codex works best when you have a really clean code base, with thorough tests, and well documented best practices. Getting your code base into that kind of shape might seem like a lot of work, but Codex is already great at the kind of mundane tasks needed to get your code into a state where Codex can work well.
Codex has also changed how I think about software engineering. With previous AI tools, I used them to help me write the code, but now my job is to mentor a team of AI agents as they write the code.
Even if you don't write code, it's important to understand what it's like to use Codex, because this kind of "manage a team of AI agents to do your job" is likely the future of all human work.
If we think you could be a good match, then we'll reach out to you.
We are working with a consortium of public broadcasters around the world to create a publicly-owned public-interest online space. This project has a lot of momentum behind it, particularly as recent political changes in the US are getting countries interested in the idea of digital sovereignty.
We have lots of people wanting to get involved in the project, and so we plan to open the project up to anyone to contribute, whether they be public media, private media, institutions, universities, or enthusiasts. To make that work well, we want to hire an open source engineer who can manage contributions, create training materials, do refactoring, manage forums, and do all the other things necessary to nurture a healthy open source community.
Particularly interested in people with experience maintaining Open Source projects and working with outside contributors.
Otherwise this point is indeed correct.
If you read the prior work too early to you get locked into existing mindsets. If you never read it then you miss important things you didn’t thought of.
Even if your approach is less good than the prior work (the normal case) you gain important insights into why the state of the art approach is better by comparing it with what you came up with.
The majority of people buy their cars used, but the car makers make the cars they can sell to the minority who buy new cars - and they have very different tastes. New car buyers like gadgets and they like SUVs.
Bear in mind also that the vast majority of academic fraud isn’t cut and dried easily proved. It’s p hacking or “accidental” flaws in an analysis, or forgetting to mention some important detail.
You can avoid that to some extent by having replication and original work be separate specialities - and making sure that replication gets prestige so good people do it.
And those same people are reviewing the papers you publish and will not hesitate to sabotage your career if you have made them look bad by failing to replicate their papers.
That, and you select for the kind of people who are willing to fake results to further their own careers.
We show up, they run off and do their thing with the other kids. We find them when it’s time to go home.
It’s a place with a fence so they can’t wander of, where you know everyone is safe to be around, and where you know if something bad happened another Elk would see and sort it and and come tell you.
Fortunately they are pretty relaxed about what you mean by God. I’m a pantheist (everything is God and individual consciousness is an illusion) and AFAICT that’s fine. Nobody dug into my beliefs you find out exactly what I thought.
I think the key intention is that you can’t be a hedonist who cares only about yourself. You need to care about living a life of service to something greater than yourself. I’m on board with that.
Being social is effortless. I just show up at the lodge and people I know will be there.
As a parent I can let the kids run wild with other kids within the safe confines of the lodge and have adult conversations.
If I don’t have plans, I don’t need to sit home reading the internet. I go to the lodge.
It’s weird that groups like the Elks have declined so much in recent decades, because it feels they really are the solution to a problem everyone complains about.
You might call them Bill, but they can decide to call themselves Billy, or Will, or Willy, or William - without the hassle of actually changing their name.
There is also a class thing where naming a kid with a short form is seen as being lower class.
If you want to appreciate something publicly then that’s what reshare is for.
When I was in grad school it was common knowledge that if you wanted to get papers accepted you needed to cite the people on the program committee and the likely reviewers - even if you didn’t think their work was particularly relevant to what you were doing.
Not as extreme as an explicit clique telling people they have to do it, but some of the distortions are similar - senior people are senior because they are widely cited, but you have to cite them because they are senior people.
We are hiring a software engineer to work on Public Service Incubator.
New Public is working with a group of Public Service Media organizations across Europe and North America to create a new publicly-owned public-service online platform that is designed to naturally encourage productive discourse between people who see the world differently.
Normally creating a new online social space is super hard (network effects and all that) but our partners have the credibility needed to make a new space high status, and the power to direct the attention of millions of people. So we think we actually have a decent shot.
We've built a prototype that our partners and test users are pretty excited about, and now it's time to turn it into a real high quality product.
We are particularly interested in people with experience shipping social products, an ability to work anywhere in the stack, and a deep interest in finding ways to help people who see the world differently understand each other and work productively together.
Stack: React (Native) | Node.JS | NoSQL | OpenAI
New Public is a non-profit that was founded by Eli Pariser (The Filter Bubble, Upworthy, MoveOn) and Talia Stroud (Prof at UT Austin) with the vision that we should focus not just on how to reduce the harms of online spaces, but how to design them so that they make good things happen. Public Service Incubator is one of our flagship projects.
Of course, he might have just been bullshitting me.
I played around creating GPTs to see how AI could improve the different roles that education plays in society.
One GPT asks you questions to understand what you already know about a subject and then walks you through a personalized curriculum to fill in your gaps.
Another GPT interviews you for a job and determines whether you have the skills needed to do it.
Another GPT entertains a kid with a D&D adventure while teaching them the subject of your choice.
All of these are far from perfect, but they are already compelling enough that it's clear that AI has the potential to massively change education.
And yet cars have managed to replace horses for pretty much all tasks that people previously used horses for. This is because it turned out that, while cars can’t do everything horses can do, their speed and cost advantages were big enough that it was worth adapting the rest of the world (e.g. building roads and gas stations) to compensate for their limitations.
There may be lessons here for how we should expect AI to replace human labor.