saimiam

I don't fully agree with you that it doesn't make sense for Anthropic to claim it is in competition with every other industry.

Take a look at how OpenAI has shaken up higher level math.

Frontier AI labs have a Swiss army knife of a tool that can do as well or better than every other company or collective in every industry.

Say you have a magic hotpot that can deliver any dish you want and each dish it delivers can be as good or better than any restaurant in your area of business. You basically cannot be beaten in the food business. Your competition can only cry about their cooking being more artisanal or whatever but at the end of the day convenience and cost will triumph.

Now say you have a magic pen for art, a magic jukebox, a magic text generator for authorship, and so on. You get the idea why I don't think Anthropic is wrong.

Did you know of Doctor May's other career when you were watching him on the show?

Makes you wonder how many seemingly nondescript people on shows and podcasts are actually superstars in some unrelated field.

Victoria (I think)!

Yeah, AMAs lost their charm for me after she got the can.

The hero image is titled Murch_HERO. Big publishers get lazy with their titling too!

I’m in my mid forties. If VR/ar devices like the Apple Vision Pro were to go mainstream, I can’t imagine myself learning how to use it effectively as a daily driver device to get work done. Heck, even the Internet, I’m pretty sure my relationship with it is more of wary scepticism than most people in their thirties.

I can see why someone who never used email until their fifties would never get fully comfortable with it.

Maybe by comparing the comparative cognitive of twins, one of whom has a hobby and the other doesn’t?

They are wrong but also unrelated to the issue of free public transport and hence include trade offs which don’t directly affect public transport.

Effectively, to offer free public transport, you have to reduce the power of lobbyists and dark money in politics.

To promote solar power, you have reduce the power of lobbyists and dark money.

To promote anti-vaccine ideology, you have to reduce the power of lobbyists and dark money.

To promote a strictly equal society where every person is judged by their abilities and not ethnic history and skin color, you have to reduce the power of lobbyists and dark money.

There are vested interests in every debate and saying we should aim for wholesale societal change for every low hanging result is a recipe for inaction (or at least, very delayed action)

I’m saying that knowing that you’re being (potentially) being watched for fare evasion has a deterrent effect on wanting to commit a crime.

How many times have you heard of road rage incidents which deescalate as soon as one party realises that they are being recorded by a dashcam? People’s behavior under surveillance is different from their private behavior.

Your argument is like saying I won't put a basic privacy lock on my gym locker because, you know, a creep wanting to sift through my things is going to do it anyway.

There is a cost benefit analysis that even serial offenders go through to pick a victim. If a transit system insists on fares, it is likely they are watching out for fare dodgers which increases the risk of getting caught even before the offender gets a chance to offend.

Do you not take flights to travel between cities because they are classist?

to offer free public transport to people, we now have to solve housing at a societal level. To solve housing, we have to fix zoning laws. to fix zoning laws, we have to fix NIMBY-ism which needs partisanship to be solved. To fix partisanship...

> all the money spent

you mean all the money saved? The unspent money are only a factor in the year following the year when the non-spend started. After that, no one will remember that they used to spend to some big figure on all the things you listed and assume that the operating budget of the transport agency has always been the lower figure.

What explains "oboe" being the name of a slender, pipe like instrument?

Human nature is to adapt and extend, sometimes extinguish. If there is an infinite supply of AI slop, we will stop seeing AI slop.

On your next highway trip, keep track of how many lawyer ads you really "see". My bet is that you see a whole lot of them but ultimately, only a handful of them stick because they are funny/clever/interesting in some way.

If "attention is all you need", then the lack of attention on AI slop will kill it far more efficiently than any amount of handwringing.

More laborious than installing piholes and managing DNS?

This is happening in France.

Irony? Camp? “genius is a camp - so good that it’s bad”. “In the sentence ‘this is the sh1t’, ‘sh1t’ is camp - so bad that it is good”.

Genius take!

Well, Meta just settled with states to the tune of 17 billion dollars for harm caused by its algorithms.

Air Canada, a few years back, was found liable when its ai bot promised discounted fares to a customer.

Companies are getting hacked and held to ransom regularly so bad software is getting punished alright.

Maybe the guy writing the actual line of code (or the guy in whose name AI code is being pushed to git) isn’t getting punished but software is definitely being scrutinised for ill effects.

I tried Pips and play Sudoku already. Tiles is pretty rudimentary as a game, as far as I can tell.

Of these, I think Pips is probably something I should try more seriously.

Both these games need a proper "how to play" page. I couldn't figure out what I was doing in either.

Not a fan of installing apps. Personal peeve.

At a high level, why do you like Arknights?

I don’t like installing apps but that’s a personal peeve. 2048 is a good one. Thank you.

Chess gives me anxiety - like I’m supposed to play to win and not just enjoy the game, unlike, say, Sudoku where getting stuck or filling the grid wrongly doesn’t seem as life or death.

I used “live with dolphins” specifically to preclude training on corpuses of dolphin behavior data. Can the LLM simply observe dolphins acting a certain way using computer vision, then form predictions of how a different dolphin will behave under the same circumstances? Can it 0-shot dolphin behavior?

You talked about models not persisting weights. If so, it basically means there is no way to see if LLMs can adapt to a totally non-human world the way a human (presumably) could.

> We need to stop thinking of LLMs as purely a piece of software

Intelligence from LLMs are an emergent property of probability. The LLM chooses a token to add to a chain of tokens based on the probability that humans will want to see that token. Humans see that token and assign it a qualitative but unfalsifiable intelligence score.

The first question we need to ask is whether a system whose claim of intelligence depends on the interpretation of what it produces by other intelligent beings, namely humans, intelligent or not. A cat is intelligent regardless of what humans think. Is an LLM intelligent regardless of what humans think?

If an LLM were to live a year with dolphins, would its weights change to respond to its new reality that it was now operating in dolphin-world? If you sent humans to live in dolphin world, we would eventually evolve to be less landloving and more dolphin like (Darwin thinks so, at least).

I sometimes find myself thinking this too then challenge myself to find a low hanging fruit in an area I’m somewhat familiar with and draw a blank (usually).

Low hanging fruit is somewhat the opposite of sour grapes - I don’t want these grapes because they were probably sour versus so what if he got those sweet grapes - they were hanging low!

Maybe connecting “low hanging fruit” to “sour grapes” is “low hanging fruit” to some but it took a serious mental leap for me.

Only on day 1. After that, I’m blind to animations (best case) or annoyed at having to wait for them to finish before proceeding with my task.

Think of education as a wishing well. There is a wishing well for math, law, dentistry, baking, and so on.

Once you have a wishing well - i.e. you own an eduction in baking or dentistry or law or math or whatever - you can ask it anything and it will grant you your wish. If others want something from your well, they have to come and ask you. What you give them has your name attached to it. So, your reputation rides on the quality of what your wishing well produces.

Prior to AI, universities chose which wishing well they would specialize in building and offered to share that knowledge with students.

In the age of AI, the creation of personal wishing wells has become trivial but universities still think they are in the business of teaching people how to create wishing wells.

Ultimately, the only truth left is for owners of the wishing well to start offering the product of their wishing well to the market and attach their name to it. If there is a market for their product, great. If not, go make another wishing well.

Education used to be pets. Now, it is livestock. Universities are not willing to accept this shift in mindset.

building a community around open source is hard. building one that analyses, comments, and votes on contributions is harder. who is going to read and react to the open sourced content that students submit?

> never actually show any evidence that it works

I think that was the entire premise of the CIA analyst framing - you don't know which one of several outcomes is going to prevail but you have a model which constantly updates its priors to increase the probability of one outcome over others.

In this case, you still don't know whether some guy's passing percentage stabilizing over a baseline will help you win the big prize or not but it does tell you that he may win some sort of recognition for being a standout player or that the guy who scouted him deserves credit.