thewarrior

Coders aren't coding all the time or even the majority of the time.

It's going to be a while before an AI can take part in a meeting between 2 project managers wrangle out a spec that makes everyone happy and then negotiate with the rest of the team to make the changes necessary.

It's going to be even longer before the AI can figure out why the site is down and bring it back up. And then figure out how to prevent the outage.

Besides that AI isn’t that intelligent yet. Training on all the jQuery code won’t yet give you an AI that can write React.

If AI writes code then now the systems become exponentially more complex exponentially faster . Unless this AI is truly human or super human it won’t keep up. If we have human level AI then coding jobs are the least of our concerns .

TL;DR - 5G enables the kind of thing shown in the climax of The Dark Knight where every cell phone in the city is turned into an all seeing radar.

Yes there's a lot of money in retaining talent at any cost. That's what FANG companies are basically. The only problem being these firms are so good at making money they've sucked out a lot of the oxygen.

Most companies aren't as good at using their retained talent to make money.

This is a game setup by company management which is heads we win tails you lose.

If people stay on in the company they under pay people and save money. If people are constantly job hopping there's no longer any long term obligations towards employees and you have a constant pool of replacements thereby saving even more money.

It's already begun https://twitter.com/somnai_dreams/status/1477411531037937664...

Yes the discussion of productivity is often totally divorced from any questions of social utility, morality or meaning.

"You show me a guy laying around doing nothing all day and I'll show you someone who's not causing any trouble" - Carlin

The people at the top are deeply cynical of ideology. They fill the ranks of middle management with true believers and play their own games.

Who regulates the regulator ?

If it is the government then it goes back to the people being aware of their interests and not allowing themselves to be manipulated. Which is never going to be the case.

GPT-3 needs proper prompting to get the right output. Here's the same question as in the blogpost posed differently

Student: Why is it unsafe to walk backwards down a staircase with my eyes closed ?

Teacher: You can't see the step behind you!

The "teacher" here is GPT-3 and answered the question easily. People are in denial of genuine progress.

Student: Do you think I could predict changes in stock prices better if I used 10-year Treasury rates or the temperature in Curtin, Australia?

Stock trader: I don't know. You might be able to, but I can't. The problem is that the temperature changes are so small that they won't be statistically significant. It's a question of sample size. An individual day's temperature in one location is far less likely to be an indicator of stock prices than the interest rate.

Student: Why is that ?

Stock trader: That's because interest rates are much more likely to affect the economy than a single day's temperature.

Student: Why do interest rates affect the economy ?

Stock trader: Interest rates are a measure of the cost of money, so the interest rate is a measure of the cost of capital. If the cost of capital is high, firms will borrow less money and they'll invest less. That means they won't be as profitable, and stock prices will fall.

Quiz question: Who is the President of the United States?

Answer: Donald Trump.

I did get junk answers as well (it said that Jimi Hendrix is the president) but I have a better intuition of how to put GPT-3 in the right "frame of mind". GPT-3 is a text completion engine. It doesn't know whether you want it to produce a story, a reddit flamewar or a PhD thesis. You need to provide the hints. One prompt cannot answer any and all questions. If it were that good we would be jobless. It's far from perfect but it's beginning to get there.

It already does.

Are you confident that self driving cars will not work even in 2034 or 2044 ?

I have my own take on the issue pieced together from my own reading and work experience.

There are two kinds of burnout and they can reinforce and overlap.

The first is physical burnout. This is when your body just gives out because you don’t sleep well enough, you stop eating or exercising. The causes of this can be a poor habits, stress or being busy. It may also be because you just don’t feel like exercising.

This brings us to the second form of burnout - cognitive burnout or depression. Cognitive burnout is a result of your self concept failing. You experience set backs and obstacles which convince you that who you are right now is a failure and someone who’s actions don’t make any difference in the world. What you can achieve doesn’t seem in line with what you want to be.

This can often be because you are physically burned out. You are less effective hence reinforcing that belief. If this is the case focus first on lowering your stress levels. Stop worrying about too much of work or being fired for now. You have far more serious problems. Get your sleep exercise and diet on track.

Once you’ve done that you need to work on your self limiting beliefs. You need to understand that your failures don’t define you you can choose a new path and a new set of values. If you find that too difficult you can take the help of therapists and counselors. Reach out to your friends and discuss things with them.

Maintain a healthy lifestyle and a healthy diversity of interests and sources of self validation and meaning.

Avoid too much stress and try to have more free time for exploration.

Have friends and a community to fall back on and be open with when you have issues.

These are the ways to reduce the probability of burnout.

I read it more charitably. The article is talking about the importance of looking out for yourself first so you can be there for everyone else in your life. Including family and work colleagues.

There is no technology in which an eternal edge has been maintained. China has a billion people and trillions to throw at the problem. The laws of physics are the same for all. Once you know something works it’s only a matter of investing capital.

10 years is nothing for a nation state. China has trillions at its disposal.

Interesting story. Oscar winning and legendary Indian composer AR Rahman said the same thing about the Fostex.

Well the suggestion here is that everyone uses eugenics to turn everyone into sociopaths. It’s cooperation that keeps the world going with periodic oscillations around it.

They did not have the printing press or free markets. The combination of the wider dissemination of ways of knowing and acting in a free market of ideas combined with a free market of individuals and firms that applied the knowledge is what set it all off.

The ancient Greeks had a steam engine. There were no mass printed books so barely anyone knew about it. Even if you knew you couldn’t exactly start a company.

If everyone was a sociopath it would fall apart pretty quickly. You can read up on evolutionarily stable strategies.

If it captures such a small facet of what it means to be human then its a very poor metric to optimize for. We don’t even know what trade offs we are making.

Yes and that choice is ideally made freely and without coercion. Not following the diktat of some geek bearing equations. It’s very arrogant to assume that some central planning can replace the distributed computation of millions of people making free choices. Free markets everywhere except here ?

No not at all. Every single parent choosing to breed sociopaths can lead to an unstable society that eats itself. There are many ways such ideas can end in total catastrophe.

Being a sociopath is not an evolutionarily stable strategy.

Because intelligence is a far more complex trait than height.

The parent isn’t doing eugenics. They’re maximizing the potential of the kid they already have.

If you’re calling for a mass in breeding program on humans beings then I have nothing further to say.

No the issue is not about whether intelligence exists but whether it can be captured by such crude and simplistic models.

Let’s say I want to measure the potential of someone to be a software engineer. I ask them to solve algorithm questions under time pressure. Those who do them faster and better have an LQ. The leet code quotient.

I have reams of data that show that the higher your leet code quotient the more you earn in salary , the more successful the companies you work in tend to be.

I’m sure many on HN would rail against “LQ” being used to drive policy. Like saying we need to make sure we hire and train more high LQ engineers. Yet this is exactly the tone on discussions about IQ.

The more we believe in hiring based on Leet code the better it makes it look. The same is happening with our education system. What if we measured peoples eye sight and then discriminated against people with low VQ ? You don’t need to do that you can invent glasses so everyone has the same VQ.

All of IQ testing is based on a comically simple assumption. Your score on an IQ test is G + S + N. Where G is the general factor , S is the subject specific factor and N is noise.

Who even said there are only 3 factors ? Modern models add a few more but intelligence may not even be a scalar or a low dimensional vector. It might be a vector with thousands of quantities.

And to those who think that IQ is “real” ponder the following - I give an IQ test to Albert Einstein and a Bedouin from the Sahara desert. Afterwards I drop both of them alone in the desert to survive. Who is more likely to live ?

People need to stop putting faith in crude statistical models that have very weak causal basis. I’m not denying that some people are better at some things than others. But assuming that solving a few puzzles and doing crude statistics allows you to predict that is comical.

IQ is a very crude general prediction. It’s completely possible for a 100 IQ to beat a 140 IQ on many different tasks. Like seducing women or playing football or rapping. We have a very narrow definition of intelligence.

We are barely able to manage our own economies without destroying the entire ecosystem, every country is a mess but we believe that we are able to shape evolution itself towards positive goals when such a process requires tens of thousands of years to even work. The last time this was tried we got one of the worst things in human history. Some people thought they were the “master race” only to get steamrolled by the “inferior” slavs.

I give an IQ test to a tribal in the Amazon jungle and a PhD in Chemistry.

The PhD in Chemistry will have the superior IQ but ask both to survive in the jungle and the tribal wins hands down.

It’s a very facetious assumption that solving a few puzzle questions captures all the facets of a human beings creativity. This is like saying that the best leet coders are the best software engineers.

Could you share your trusted sources ? Human search engine :P

Let's have niches where the content is hand curated by human beings instead of pure statistics by machines.

Hmm why stop there let's actually make the users do the curating and even the content creation by rewarding them with social validation. Let’s have hard working moderators who work on the community full time.

Then we could just build a search engine over it. We could call it Reddit. Or HackerNews.

Maybe the users aren't all as good as professionals at curating the information. Let's hire professionally trained curators pay them well and we could call them newspapers. Then we can come in disrupt them and replace them with an algorithmic marketplace that eventually becomes infested with click bait.

I know nothing about aviation but it seems to me like the auto pilot software could use a lot of improvement.

Why on earth would you give the pilot an instruction that would almost certainly lead to a crash ? It seems like there aren’t enough sanity checks. Any such dodgy situation should trigger an alarm and disengage the auto pilot imo.

Yea you’re exactly right. The elite of every non first world country are busy trying to immigrate to the US or one of the Anglo nations. It doesn’t say much about whether a country will continue to rise or not.