actusual (u/actusual)

actusual commented on Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence anthropic.com/research/la... · Posted by u/jjwiseman

fourside · 9 days ago

What’s your reasoning for labeling lawyers as low-exposure?

actusual · 9 days ago

My partner is a lawyer (prosecutor for a large city). The reason she is at low risk is simply because of the rate of adoption of AI tooling (or ANY tooling for that matter). IT in the public sector (particularly city government) is so much worse than I ever could have imagined before meeting my partner.

Our city just spent >$15MM on "case management software" that took 5 years to build by some fly-by-night outfit in California who won the contract, haphazardly bolted together MSFT Azure components, then vanished with zero support.

These teams can't in good faith freely adopt AI tooling into their workflow because they don't have the bandwidth to do it well, so they don't do it at all.

actusual commented on The barriers to AI engineering are crumbling fast blog.helix.ml/p/we-can-al... · Posted by u/lewq

ein0p · a year ago

An AI engineer with some experience today can easily pull down 700K-1M TC a year at a bigtech. They must be unaware that the "barriers are coming down fast". In reality it's a full time job to just _keep up with research_. And another full time job to try and do something meaningful with it. So yeah, you can all be AI engineers, but don't expect an easy ride.

actusual · a year ago

I run an ML team in fintech, and am currently hiring. If a resumè came across my desk with this "skill set" I'd laugh my ass off. My job and my team's jobs are extremely stressful because we ship models that impact people's finances. If we mess up our customers lose their goddamn minds.

Most of the ML candidates I see now are all "working with LLMs". Most of the ML engineers I know in the industry who are actually shipping valuable models, are not.

Cool, you made a chatbot that annoys your users.

Let me know when you've shipped a fraud model that requires four 9's, 100ms latency, with 50,000 calls an hour, 80% recall and 50% precision.

actusual commented on The decline of the working musician newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/tintinnabula

dbalatero · a year ago

Rippin guitar solo on track 2. Is the band named after the street in Wallingford by chance?

actusual · a year ago

Yep! Specifically up in Shoreline though. My dad grew up on Densmore north of 180th

actusual commented on The decline of the working musician newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/tintinnabula

nemomarx · a year ago

I don't know if it's good financially, but do you have a bandcamp? I like getting cds / mp3s there usually and it doesn't need a sign in to listen to the song.

actusual · a year ago

We don't. I probably should make one of those, but as a solo act, the number of platforms I need to keep up with is ridiculous. Reddit/Spotify/Instagram keep my time occupied, it's brutal honestly.

actusual commented on The decline of the working musician newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/tintinnabula

mutagen · a year ago

Hey thanks for posting your music, had a listen, enjoyed it.

actusual · a year ago

Thanks for listening!! Every little bit counts :D

actusual commented on The decline of the working musician newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/tintinnabula

jimbokun · a year ago

> They knew the words to those songs, but not his entire set.

This has always been true for recorded music. Originally people would buy mostly singles after hearing a song on the radio, then maybe listen to the B-side too.

Listening to complete albums was only popular for a short while before streaming brought single songs back to prominence as the main way people consume music.

actusual · a year ago

Don't disagree. I'm merely commenting on the dramatic change in his audience, which IMO opinion was driven by TikTok virality. Going from a crowd of people who were singing along to people standing around waiting for the "TikTok hits" was really strange.

actusual commented on The decline of the working musician newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/tintinnabula

actusual · a year ago

I've played music my entire life (picked up a guitar at 6 years old and just never put it down). I actually just released a new record last Friday (https://open.spotify.com/album/6JU0jmz537a6r2xrTvCcmn?si=eg4...). I joined a band when I was 15 (~2004), and we had some long tail success. We were able to tour, play huge shows (the Gorge in Washington, sell out the Showbox in downtown Seattle, an arena here or there). After high school I went to school for audio production, and even then I knew it was going to be tough to make a living. I ended up pivoting, studying math, now I'm in machine learning.

Music is the thing I love more than anything. I love writing it, releasing records, playing shows, and connecting with people on an emotional level. Never once have I considered it possible to have a fruitful career as a musician, despite seeing more success as a musician than most can ever dream of. Additionally, the industry (like many others) has changed dramatically over the past 25 years. In many ways, it has put much more power back into the hands of artists: you don't need a huge studio/record label/promotion to release a record. You can just release records, and promote them yourself. The flip side of that is there are SO many more people releasing music these days, which makes it really difficult to cut through the noise if your music is halfway decent.

Finally, recommendation algorithms have truly transformed the landscape of content creation, likely irreversibly. I get messages _daily_ from people who have "hacked" the TikTok algorithm, and can get my bands plays. There is an entire cottage industry of algorithm "hackers", some of them actually have results too.

One odd anecdote: I love Alex G. I've been listening to him for over a decade, and have flown out to see him play in places like New york/Austin TX. A few years ago he played in Seattle, and the entire demographic of the audience seem to've changed overnight. Way younger, more "mainstream" looking kids, filled the Showbox in Seattle. The strangest part was that no one seemed to know the words to his songs anymore. I did some digging, and he'd gone viral on TikTok. A few of his songs went absolutely bananas on there, and it completely transformed his fanbase. They knew the words to those songs, but not his entire set. Is this bad? I have no idea, but the trimming down of content into bite sized morsels _feels_ bad to me, and I believe it will dramatically alter this next generation's baseline attention span. Again, not a moral judgement, just a factual claim.

actusual commented on ChatGPT for Robotics microsoft.com/en-us/resea... · Posted by u/ashkapoor

bamboozled · 3 years ago

That’s cool.

I’m personally looking forward to when I can use a ChatGPT yo build my own ChatGPT and make tons of money out of it too !

It’s pretty interesting because soon absolutely No business will be safe. All tech, most apps, everything can just be stolen as fast as ChatGPT can write it. I’d go as far to say as ChatGPT itself is vulnerable to this ? Am I wrong ?

I’ve been working on a startup and I’m actually really evaluating if it’s worth the time now. I mean it could be stolen pretty fast. Not sure how to reconcile it all yet.

Make my an app which is functionally the same as Netflix, then write the deployment code so it runs on AWS. Ha.

Microsoft and Open AI will may benefit a lot from ChatGPT, but it might eat itself too.

actusual · 3 years ago

I think your worries are very valid, and I agree that this could be a level step change in the consolidation of power that we already see among a few extremely powerful entities. Another observation worth noting is that SDEs who embrace this technology immediately are going to absolutely smoke past those who ignore it, and the gap will continue to widen as time wears on. Imagine having a slightly dumbed down SDE 1 or 2 (eventually 3) slave that can work 24/7. It will completely redefine what "entry level" means for software engineers.

actusual commented on ChatGPT for Robotics microsoft.com/en-us/resea... · Posted by u/ashkapoor

bamboozled · 3 years ago

So ChatGPT can’t do basic maths or can I get it to write functional code most of the time, but we’re going to have it control expensive pieces of hardware ? I don’t get it ?

I wish I did…

actusual · 3 years ago

I think "get it to write functional code most of the time" severely discounts the value of the code produced by ChatGPT. Knowing zero Swift (but being an SDE), I was able to build an audio plugin for Logic Pro X in a day, by leveraging ChatGPT. I'd previously tried this twice, and gave up because of the learning curve and my lack of free time. It's the most insane 0% to 80% tool I've ever seen.

actusual commented on OpenAI used Kenyan workers on less than $2 per hour to make ChatGPT less toxic time.com/6247678/openai-c... · Posted by u/mkeeter

bmitc · 3 years ago

It’s not a sentiment. It’s the definition of taking advantage of. Of course there are various arguments for justifications, but it doesn’t change the situation.

I also didn’t suggest anything like paying way over market.

actusual · 3 years ago

So then what? If paying $2/hour is taking advantage, and paying over market isn't part of your solution...what is the solution? Not hire people in Kenya?

Also...yes it is a sentiment (a view of or attitude toward a situation or event; an opinion). Our opinions about what constitutes "taking advantage" are different. Saying otherwise doesn't make your argument more compelling.