lostphilosopher (u/lostphilosopher)

lostphilosopher commented on François Chollet: The Arc Prize and How We Get to AGI [video] youtube.com/watch?v=5QcCe... · Posted by u/sandslash

TheAceOfHearts · 2 months ago

Getting a high score on ARC doesn't mean we have AGI and Chollet has always said as much AFAIK, it's meant to push the AI research space in a positive direction. Being able to solve ARC problems is probably a pre-requisite to AGI. It's a directional push into the fog of war, with the claim being that we should explore that area because we expect it's relevant to building AGI.

lostphilosopher · 2 months ago

We don't really have a true test that means "if we pass this test we have AGI" but we have a variety of tests (like ARC) that we believe any true AGI would be able to pass. It's a "necessary but not sufficient" situation. Also ties directly to the challenge in defining what AGI really means. You see a lot of discussions of "moving the goal posts" around AGI, but as I see it we've never had goal posts, we've just got a bunch of lines we'd expect to cross before reaching them.

lostphilosopher commented on AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder resobscura.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/findhorn

tsunamifury · 3 months ago

Trades would collapse if even 10% of the population switched to them. What does no one get about this?

lostphilosopher · 3 months ago

Related - there needs to be individuals and businesses that want/need and can afford upgrades and repairs. If office workers are getting replaced with AI we don't need to build and maintain offices and the ecosystems that support them (see also WFH/Covid) and those workers won't have income to pay for plumbers, electricians, roofers, etc. for their personal property. A worst case scenario AI workforce revolution would attack trades from both supply and demand.

lostphilosopher commented on Remote workers more likely to start their own business theregister.com/2025/05/1... · Posted by u/rntn

deepsun · 4 months ago

I was also thinking the same and advocated with pretty much the same words. Until became a manager, and noticed that yes, most of the employees are like that, but there are some that will screw you over. And just that minority is why we cannot have nice things. Hell, we wouldn't even need written contracts if everyone behaved responsibly.

It's like leaving your bicycle on a street, in Japan you don't need a lock, in San Francisco a lock wouldn't help. Even when 99% people are honest and responsible.

lostphilosopher · 4 months ago

It's worth noting that for those edge cases all the productivity monitoring in the world won't make that employee any more effective, and you won't need those tools to see that they're not cutting it (assuming you're engaged with your team as the other commenter describes). You'll likely lose more in annoying the rest of your team and burning your own cycles with surveillance than you'll gain from it.

lostphilosopher commented on Avoiding skill atrophy in the age of AI addyo.substack.com/p/avoi... · Posted by u/NotInOurNames

gchamonlive · 4 months ago

We also grew with internet and the newer generation is having a hard time following it.

However we were born post invention of photography and look at the havoc it's wreaking with post-truth.

The answer to that lies in reforming the education system so that we teach kids digital hygiene.

How on earth we still teach kids Latin in some places but not python? It's just an example, extrapolate python to everything tech that is needed for us to have a healthy relationship with tech.

lostphilosopher · 4 months ago

I've long maintained that kids must learn end to end what it takes to put content on the web themselves (registering a domain, writing some html, exposing it on a server, etc.) so they understand that _truly anyone can do this_. Learning both that creating "authoritative" looking content is trivial and that they are _not_ beholden to a specific walled garden owner in order to share content on the web.

lostphilosopher commented on People say they prefer stories written by humans over AI, study says otherwise theconversation.com/peopl... · Posted by u/PaulHoule

lostphilosopher · 5 months ago

I don't know if AI books are or will be as good or better than human written, but to me this is the problem - "Even though artificial intelligence is still in its infancy, AI-made books are already flooding the market." There is no scarcity problem in books. There are already way more that I would enjoy reading than I will ever actually read. It's already tough to prioritize which ones to get to without having vastly more to sort through. And people _enjoy_ writing books. I don't want to support automating something away that people enjoy doing, is produced in abundance, and is very low cost to obtain already.

lostphilosopher commented on Two new PebbleOS watches ericmigi.com/blog/introdu... · Posted by u/griffinli

lostphilosopher · 6 months ago

I was surprised at the time how cheap the original Pebbles were, they were nearly exactly what I wanted and I would have been willing to pay more for mine. In fact I ultimately paid more to replace mine with a watch I like less. When Pebble folded I wondered if having too low of price ultimately hurt them - if they didn't pick up enough customers to make up on volume what they left off the table on per-unit revenue? I hope the relaunch is successful, and I assume they have all manner of internal data that says I'm wrong, but my initial reaction to the listed prices is the same as it was to the originals - they seem too low. (I'm setting aside the caveat about a potential price change due to tariffs and assuming they launch at current list price.)

lostphilosopher commented on Do AI companies work? benn.substack.com/p/do-ai... · Posted by u/herbertl

xenospn · a year ago

Is this why almost all CompSci PhDs are actually “doctor of philosophy”?

lostphilosopher · a year ago

PhD itself is an abbreviation for "Doctor of Philosophy." The title is more about the original Greek "lover of wisdom" than about the modern academic discipline of philosophy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_of_Philosophy

Doctor is similar - in the US, when someone says "Doctor" they usually mean "Medical Doctor" but "Doctor" just comes from the Greek "teacher" / "scholar" which is more broad and the title can still be used officially and correctly for PhDs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_(title)

lostphilosopher commented on Just Your Handyman plough.com/en/topics/life... · Posted by u/merrier

neverartful · 2 years ago

I mostly agree with you. I've been a full-time software engineer for the past 28 years and a part-time handyman for the past 5 months. One of the biggest differences that you don't mention is the use of your body. Software engineering is purely intellectual -- often to the detriment of your body (or mine, anyways) since it's often the case where I sit at the keyboard for hours on end, day after day. As a handyman, your body necessarily is a key part of the work you do. Lifting tools, materials, carrying them, getting into weird positions to access the problem area (under bathroom sink for example). The other aspect is the physical nature of the work. The work is tangible. You can take a photo of the thing that needs to be fixed before the repair/construction and then another at the end and compare the before/after photos. Even if you don't care about the photos, you can still see the tangible, physical end-result of your work. With software engineering, at best it's usually just a status update on a Jira ticket.

Regarding AI technologies, I agree that it's extremely unlikely that AI will take over the work. It's possible that may help in some diagnostic cases. I strongly disagree with "all the out of work engineers and designers will move into those industries". Why? Many (perhaps most even) software engineers that I've worked with are too lazy or too proud to do handyman type work. Some of the handyman work can be physically quite taxing and some of it can be quite humbling. Examples of taxing work - when you're doing a gate rebuild/repair in 107 degree temperature in direct sun. Example of humbling work - opening up p-traps under sinks and having some of the smelly, dirty water splash on you.

lostphilosopher · 2 years ago

I’m less concerned about the supply of handymen inflating and more concerned about demand falling. If AI really does replace a huge portion of the people with the money to hire handymen and plumbers and the property to need them where do they get the work from? More people will DIY out of necessity even if the results are worse because they won’t have another option and fewer people will have the property to maintain in the first place.

lostphilosopher commented on Playstation is erasing seasons of Discovery shows from customer libraries arstechnica.com/gadgets/2... · Posted by u/derstander

nottorp · 2 years ago

Do not buy console titles you think are good enough to replay later on consoles except on disc.

That's for games. For video content, i'd say do not "buy" anything digital. The video content industry has Kafkaesque licensing agreements and a pathological fear of "piracy" so you're guaranteed to lose access either because someone's agreement thrice removed from whoever you "bought" the content from expired, or because the latest copy protection that was in fashion when you "bought" it is now unsupported.

Edit: hey, can your kids inherit your "digital content"? They can inherit your disc collection.

lostphilosopher · 2 years ago

> Edit: hey, can your kids inherit your "digital content"? They can inherit your disc collection.

With arrival of the holiday season I brought out my Christmas CDs and records from storage. I use these exclusively for music in the house/car/etc., and part of why is that I have kids and I want them to be able to inherit these some day. I understand that physical media degrades and they may not be able to "use" these at some point, but they'll still have the objects and know exactly what versions they "grew up with" and could potentially track down / make replacements. (See also: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/217710-this-milord-is-my-fa...)

I've had family members pass and I've appreciated having physical things I can hang onto, especially things like tools, music, and books where I can use/listen/read and feel a connection with them.

(Full disclosure I also prefer physical games, music, and books in general both for my own consumption and for ownership rights reasons.)

lostphilosopher commented on The Fall of Stack Overflow observablehq.com/@ayhanfu... · Posted by u/ayhanfuat

tzs · 2 years ago

> moderation on SO has gotten progressively more horrible. can’t tell you how many times I found the exact, bizarre question I was asking only to see one comment trying to answer it and then a mod aggressively shutting it down for not being “on topic” enough or whatever.

Related: I've often been looking how to do X, find an SO question asking that, but the answerers there refused to answer until the person explained why they wanted to do X, and then all the answers (correctly) told the person that they actually needed to do Y and explained quite well how to do Y.

I actually need to do X, so those answers are useless to me.

Then I find another question on how to do X, and the mods close it as a duplicate of that earlier question. Even when the questioner specifically notes in their question that it is not a duplicate of that earlier question because they really need to do X the idiot moderators close it.

lostphilosopher · 2 years ago

Even if X isn't the right solution to my use case I still often want to know _why_ X (or my implementation of X) doesn't work. The answer to that might be a really valuable learning independent of the problem at hand.