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naeemtee commented on Short Story on AI: Forward Pass karpathy.github.io/2021/0... · Posted by u/yigitdemirag
A free short story idea for you: in the not-so-distant future, we’ve trained AI to predict the probability you might die on any given day. But it’s trained on so many factors, and reads so many inputs, that no one really knows how it works.
So the story is of a random person who suddenly observes their meter jump from the usual 0% to a cautious 3%. Then over the course of the day, it slowly climbs to 20%, and onwards.
No one knows why, and no one can help them.
Finish the story. There are a variety of interesting outcomes (most of which lead to the demise of our poor random Joe or Mary, but not all).
I got GPT-3 to take your story and complete it. It's slightly terrifying.
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Short Story
In the not-so-distant future, we’ve trained AI to predict the probability you might die on any given day. But it’s trained on so many factors, and reads so many inputs, that no one really knows how it works.
So the story is of a random person who suddenly observes their meter jump from the usual 0% to a cautious 3%. Then over the course of the day, it slowly climbs to 20%, and onwards.
No one knows why, and no one can help them. They get a call from their boss, who sends them home early, rather than risk their safety in the office. Strangers offer to take them home. A stranger on the street offers to trade cards with them, and promises that his card can help them.
The meter shows up at 30% on the subway, and the narrator tries to hide it, but it’s too late, and the people around them are already looking at them suspiciously. The narrator tries to call their spouse, but they can’t get hold of them. They go home, but their spouse isn’t there.
By the time they get home, the meter is at 40%. They try to call for help, but the police are already there, waiting. The meter hits 60%, and then 100%.
The police tell the narrator that they’re sorry, but they’ve been watching them for some time, and have seen no indications that the narrator is a threat. The narrator protests that they’ve been trying to call the police, but now the police just say that the meter made a prediction, and they’re just going by the numbers.
The police tell the narrator that they’ll have to detain them, for the next 24 hours, to prevent them from doing anything rash. The narrator protests, but the police ignore them, and cuff them.
The police take the narrator in, but they aren’t taken to a normal jail. They’re taken to a special prison — a prison for people who might die.
He spends the remainder of his life in that jail cell.
naeemtee commented on Show HN: Pakhi – Bangla Programming Language github.com/Shafin098/pakh... · Posted by u/shafin_
While I 100% applaud the effort - and I absolutely love the idea of languages in non-English languages - you should be aware that phonetically (and if you drop the 'h'), the name is a racist term in the UK at least.
Pakhi means bird in Bangla. Bangladeshis also used to be Pakistani, so they're probably fine. ;)
naeemtee commented on Do Things that Don't Scale (2013) paulgraham.com/ds.html... · Posted by u/panphora
I am living through this right now and have asked this questions on several forums because when you're really in the midst of this hustle you start to question your priorities and constantly get this feeling about if there is a better way. This is a counter-intuitive advice on building a product and a company but the other option would be to get lucky.
Couple of more examples about doing things which don't scale:
Instacart manually built their product catalog for the first few million products.[0]
Pandora analyzing 10,000 songs manually for recommendation. [1]
One thing that isn't captured nowadays is that a lot of what "couldn't scale" before - i.e manual work, the type of which you described - is now much more scalable due to how much easier it is to automate tasks at scale.
It's suddenly feasible to build businesses that require at-scale manual operations, because you can do so in a predictable, revenue-positive way.
Interestingly, this is (roughly) the Qur'anic explanation for the genesis of human consciousness.