You see all of those HN posts asking where one can buy a “dumb” non-smart TV? That’s the future of software.
We're remodeling our kitchen, and for some reason so many stoves come with wifi and bluetooth.
Readit NewsJauntTrooper commented on Is there a no-AI audience? thatshubham.com/blog/ai... · Posted by u/DorkyPup
That is such a long latency period.
I wonder if it slowly progresses over time, or if it develops opportunistically once some other bodily system that keeps it in check breaks down with age.
This has moved heavily into group chats and I’m not sure it’s coming back.
Group chats are basically the Circles that Google+ saw the need for but could never get fully set up. A lot of people don’t want to share personal updates and photos to a broad swath of friends and acquaintances.
Meanwhile Instagram and Facebook keep evolving. Facebook is turning into a weird Reddit for older people. Instagram is turning into a hipper LinkedIn, where artists, musicians, and local businesses share career and business updates and advertise their wares.
WhatsApp has really taken on this role for me, now that mention it.
I have a channel for my neighborhood, another for the parents at my children's school, another for my extended family, another for work colleagues and another for a few friends.
JauntTrooper commented on The Dire Wolf Is Back newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/adrianhon
Paywalled so I have to ask, why the dire wolf? Why not an animal that humans drove to extinction like the dodo bird? Is it because dire wolves sound cool and were in video games?
Birds are more difficult to clone than mammals. I don't think we've been able to clone one yet.
I hope to see a passenger pigeon one day though.
JauntTrooper commented on EPA Launches Biggest Deregulatory Action in U.S. History epa.gov/newsreleases/epa-... · Posted by u/latchkey
Is coal uneconomic? China still uses quite a lot of it, which makes me wonder why it would be economic there and not here.
The US has a lot of cheap natural gas and China does not.
Natural gas is hard to transport and often needs to be liquified to travel overseas, so global prices vary widely.
Many philosophical traditions which incorporate a meditation practice emphasize that your consciousness is distinct from the contents of your thoughts. Meditation (even practiced casually) can provide a direct experience of this.
When it comes to the various kinds of thought-processes that humans engage in (linguistic thinking, logic, math, etc) I agree that you can describe things in terms of functions that have definite inputs and outputs. So human thinking is probably computable, and I think that LLMs can be said to be ”think” in ways that are analogous to what we do.
But human consciousness produces an experience (the experience of being conscious) as opposed to some definite output. I do not think it is computable in the same way.
I don’t necessarily think that you need to subscribe to dualism or religious beliefs to explain consciousness - it seems entirely possible (maybe even likely) that what we experience as consciousness is some kind of illusory side-effect of biological processes as opposed to something autonomous and “real”.
But I do think it’s still important to maintain a distinction between “thinking” (computable, we do it, AIs do it as well) and “consciousness” (we experience it, probably many animals experience it also, but it’s orthogonal to the linguistic or logical reasoning processes that AIs are currently capable of).
At some point this vague experience of awareness may be all that differentiates us from the machines, so we shouldn’t dismiss it.
When I was a kid, I used to imagine if that society ever developed AI, there would be widespread pushback to the idea that computers could ever develop consciousness.
I imagined the Catholic Church, for example, would be publishing missives reminding everyone that only humans can have souls, and biologists would be fighting an quixotic battle to claim that consciousness can arise from physical structures and forces.
I'm still surprised at how credulous and accepting societies have been of AI developments over the last few years.
We've been having really good models for a couple of years now... What else is needed for that 10% growth? Agents? New apps? Time? Deployment in enterprise and the broader economy?
I work in the latter (I'm the CTO of a small business), and here's how our deployment story is going right now:
- At user level: Some employees use it very often for producing research and reports. I use it like mad for anything and everything from technical research, solution design, to coding.
- At systems level: We have some promising near-term use cases in tasks that could otherwise be done through more traditional text AI techniques (NLU and NLP), involving primarily transcription, extraction and synthesis.
- Longer term stuff may include text-to-SQL to "democratize" analytics, semantic search, research agents, coding agents (as a business that doesn't yet have the resources to hire FTE programmers, I would kill for this). Tech feels very green on all these fronts.
The present and neart-term stuff is fantastic in its own right - the company is definitely more productive, and I can see us reaping compound benefits in years to come - but somehow it still feels like a far cry from the type of changes that would cause 10% growth in the entire economy, for sustained periods of time...
Obviously this is a narrow and anecdotal view, but every time I ask what earth-shattering stuff others are doing, I get pretty lukewarm responses, and everything in the news and my research points in the same direction.
I'd love to hear your takes on how the tech could bring about a new Industrial Revolution.
Under the 3-factor economic growth model, there's three ways to increase economic growth:
1) Increase productivity (produce more from the same inputs) 2) Increase labor (more people working or more hours worked) 3) Increase capital (builds more equipment/infrastructure)
Early AI gains will likely be from greater productivity (1), but as time goes on if AI is able to approximate the output of a worker, that could dramatically increase the labor supply (2).
Imagine what the US economy would look like with 10x or 100x workers.
I don't believe it yet, but that's the sense I'm getting from discussions from senior folks in the field.
I scarcely recognize the person I was at 19 as the same person as me.
I have almost no recollection of school except for maybe a couple of dozen moments and a handful - no more than 4 or so - acquaintances. They were friends at the time, but we went to different colleges in different towns, we're not close now.
I remember books I read, but they're detached from a timeline. I remember programming - that was the most formative thing I learned, and it was outside school - but I have very little recollection of actual time spent, just that I did a huge amount of learning.
Wow... really?
I'm in my 40s and I remember my school days vividly. I remember like ~20-30 specific lessons and events from 4th grade alone.
It’s been almost two years of Bluesky being a comprehensively better microblogging experience with stronger integrity guarantees than Twitter, and it’s still struggling to sustain 2 million DAU.
The unfortunate lesson learned is that nowadays only a very small percentage of social media users will switch to an equivalent platform for ideological, ethical, or practical reasons. Disruption of the incumbent is required.
I think Threads is disrupting Twitter fairly well... it's at 200 million+ monthly active users and growing.
I switched from Twitter to Threads and have been happy with it (Bluesky was invite only at the time so I didn't bother). Threads actually got me to start using Instagram too, ironically.
This happens every once in a while in investment banking, and we were warned about it regularly in HR training.
Here's Matt Levine on one of the incidents: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-09-04/wells-far...
The logic is if you couldn't trust a banker to not defraud their employer by submitting dishonest meal receipts, how could you trust them with client money and confidential information. I don't disagree.