rednalexa (u/rednalexa)

rednalexa commented on We asked 15k European devs about jobs, salaries, and AI [pdf] static.germantechjobs.de/... · Posted by u/birdculture

simfoo · a month ago

Whenever I read those reports I can't help but wonder who they are actually asking. I'm definitely in a bubble working in Munich and either for US subsidiaries or at least close to them (automotive, ai, robotics, aerospace and others) - but it's a pretty big bubble because it's easily thousands of engineers within one or two hops. And we all make north of 100k€! No-one with more than 5-10 years of experience would accept an offer below 90k and I know a lot of folks that earn 150k+. The statistics always feel very low-balled

rednalexa · a month ago

This experience is common in my circles even in the US as well as those I know in Europe. May be a bi-modal distribution where some industries are vastly underpaying while some industries are the opposite and paying well above the average. This seems to have happened in a lot of career spaces. The vast majority will be in the first group too, which is why sampling would get a result like the one in the survey?

rednalexa commented on Heavy chatbot usage is correlated with loneliness and reduced socialization platformer.news/openai-ch... · Posted by u/suvan

ryanhecht · a year ago

I feel ashamed to admit this in public, but...me too. The barrier to entry is so much lower than therapy, I feel less anxiety about explaining my situation correctly, and I can quickly start over with a "new therapist" whenever I want.

Is it a replacement? No, of course not. But boy if it isn't a big help.

rednalexa · a year ago

The only issue is that it needs a good user. Just as you can work your way into good insights, you can work yourself into bad insights just as easily. Sometimes chatgpt doesn't challenge you enough unless you ask it to under specific frameworks or paradigms. It is definitely a useful tool though.

Edit: These are all problems with real therapy too though, on further reflection. It took some time to find the therapist that works well with you. That can be a form of similar bias.

rednalexa commented on Never waste a midlife crisis austinkleon.com/2023/07/1... · Posted by u/herbertl

austinl · 3 years ago

If you don't mind sharing, where did you find a therapist, and what is their background? It seems like there is such a wide range of options, and I'm a bit hesitant about the online platforms.

rednalexa · 3 years ago

Also not OP, but if you open up with any mental health positive people in your life, that's a great place to start. They may even have a recommendation which will really ease a lot of your worries going in as it largely is a personality based thing in my experience.

Also - give a call to some therapists. You can choose some arbitrary screening criteria that make you comfortable - like if you only want to talk to men because you're a man and worry about that, or if you want to find an lgbtq-oriented therapist, those types of things can be filtered. There are even faith-adjacent therapists - but I personally would be uncomfortable with that - but they exist!

Once you have a list after filtering down of 3-5 therapists, call each for a consult. During the consult, if you don't like the therapist, cross them out. After calling 3-5 you can choose the one that your gut tells you. If you can't commit even then, then flip a coin on them to be honest. If your gut tells you to go with two different ones, choose one at random and try it out.

Finally one other thing that I found surprising was even if someone marks cognitive behavioral therapy on their listing (A lot of them do!) - they may not use it in a 'tool-based' fashion. Meaning, you won't get a lot of homework.

If you are someone who needs take home work to be able to function, this could be a question you ask during your calls.

Here is an example of how it could go:

You have the criteria: 1. Must be LGBTQ positive 2. Must accept my insurance 3. Must be skills-based oriented around processing emotions

With these three, if I cannot find the information on their page, I can ask them during the consultation call something like:

1. If you don't accept insurance, can you do a super-bill so I can file a claim with my insurance? 2. Do you do skills-based learning as part of your practice They may say "no, but I do X, Y, Z" in response

Anyway, I'm not editing this down but hopefully that helps a little.

rednalexa commented on Apollo will close down on June 30th old.reddit.com/r/apolloap... · Posted by u/timf

falcolas · 3 years ago

> "Don't be evil" is simply impossible for large corporations

I see Patagonia as the antithesis of this broadly accepted assertion.

It's possible, it just takes having a goal for your company that's more than greed.

rednalexa · 3 years ago

Isn’t Patagonia privately owned though?

rednalexa commented on AI Will Create More Developers, Not Less interconnect.substack.com... · Posted by u/ceohockey60

avgcorrection · 3 years ago

We should wish for technological progress causing more efficient (and in turn less) use of resources. It does not seem to be the case.

rednalexa · 3 years ago

Yeah. My worry with Fusion eventually being solved is it will make energy so abundant that we will find novel ways to waste it. Ideally it is used to solve things like our climate crisis - but who knows.

rednalexa commented on Meditations on Moloch (2014) slatestarcodex.com/2014/0... · Posted by u/abhaynayar

fwlr · 3 years ago

No, I haven’t, though I will eventually. In the meantime, some other pieces that always come to mind as being definitely on that list are Weaponised Sacredness by Sarah Perry, specifically the section on egregores (https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/05/07/weaponized-sacredness/ ctrl-f “The Egregore”), Rene Girard’s Scapegoat, and as antagonistic reading (threatening ideas you must engage with) Spandrell’s IQ Shredder, and Nick Land’s Hell-Baked. In general the list is about coming to understand little-recognized forces that control the world.

rednalexa · 3 years ago

Thanks I’ll start with those! Moloch was a great one so I’ll be happy to dive into more.

rednalexa commented on Meditations on Moloch (2014) slatestarcodex.com/2014/0... · Posted by u/abhaynayar

fwlr · 3 years ago

Scott Alexander’s opus magnum, and one incredibly important piece of writing. I remember when it first came out, I used to attend a little social gathering once a month. One of the many things we did was function as an informal reading group of SlateStarCodex posts. That month, the gathering happened to fall just a few hours after Meditations on Moloch was published. We all turned up looking like stunned mullets, just staring at each other and saying “Moloch, right?” before lapsing back into thought.

Every few years I think about putting together a compendium of “Required Reading to Save the World” and this piece is always on the list.

So many beautiful, chilling, inescapable lines:

“In some competition optimizing for X, the opportunity arises to throw some other value under the bus for improved X. Those who take it prosper. Those who don’t take it die out. Eventually, everyone’s relative status is about the same as before, but everyone’s absolute status is worse than before. The process continues until all other values that can be traded off have been – in other words, until human ingenuity cannot possibly figure out a way to make things any worse.”

“…Maybe there is no philosophy on Earth that would endorse the existence of Las Vegas. … Las Vegas doesn’t exist because of some decision to hedonically optimize civilization, it exists because of a quirk in dopaminergic reward circuits, plus the microstructure of an uneven regulatory environment, plus Schelling points. … Just as the course of a river is latent in a terrain even before the first rain falls on it – so the existence of Caesar’s Palace was latent in neurobiology, economics, and regulatory regimes even before it existed. The entrepreneur who built it was just filling in the ghostly lines with real concrete.”

“The ocean depths are a horrible place with little light, few resources, and various horrible organisms dedicated to eating or parasitizing one another. But every so often, a whale carcass falls to the bottom of the sea. More food than the organisms that find it could ever possibly want. There’s a brief period of miraculous plenty, while the couple of creatures that first encounter the whale feed like kings. Eventually more animals discover the carcass, the faster-breeding animals in the carcass multiply, the whale is gradually consumed, and everyone sighs and goes back to living in a Malthusian death-trap. … This is an age of whalefall, an age of excess carrying capacity, an age when we suddenly find ourselves with a thousand-mile head start on Malthus. As Hanson puts it, this is the dream time.”

““If you don’t work, you die.” Gotcha! If you do work, you also die! Everyone dies, unpredictably, at a time not of their own choosing, and all the virtue in the world does not save you. “The wages of sin is Death.” Gotcha! The wages of everything is Death! This is a Communist universe, the amount you work makes no difference to your eventual reward. From each according to his ability, to each Death.”

“Suppose you make your walled garden. You keep out all of the dangerous memes, you subordinate capitalism to human interests, you ban stupid bioweapons research, you definitely don’t research nanotechnology or strong AI. Everyone outside doesn’t do those things. And so the only question is whether you’ll be destroyed by foreign diseases, foreign memes, foreign armies, foreign economic competition, or foreign existential catastrophes.”

“But the current ruler of the universe – Moloch – wants us dead, and with us everything we value. Art, science, love, philosophy, consciousness itself, the entire bundle. … The only way to avoid having all human values gradually ground down by optimization-competition is to install [a different God to rule] over the entire universe who optimizes for human values. … Once humans can design machines that are smarter than we are, by definition they’ll be able to design machines which are smarter than they are, which can design machines smarter than they are, and so on in a feedback loop so tiny that it will smash up against the physical limitations for intelligence in a comparatively lightning-short amount of time. … In the very near future, we are going to lift something to Heaven. It might be Moloch. But it might be something on our side. If it’s on our side, it can kill Moloch dead.”

“Moloch is exactly what the history books say he is. He is the god of child sacrifice, the fiery furnace into which you can toss your babies in exchange for victory in war. He always and everywhere offers the same deal: throw what you love most into the flames, and I can grant you power. As long as the offer’s open, it will be irresistible. So we need to close the offer. Only another god can kill Moloch.”

“There are many gods, but this one is ours.”

rednalexa · 3 years ago

Did you ever put together the reading list? Id be curious to check them out.

rednalexa commented on GPT-4: A Copilot for the Mind every.to/chain-of-thought... · Posted by u/dshipper

echelon · 3 years ago

You're looking at this in a black and white way, overlooking all of the uses where it doesn't have to be perfect. If it saves humans even a few minutes, it's a good tool.

rednalexa · 3 years ago

Absolutely. The user still needs good taste right now too - if it writes you a mission statement or something else you have still have to know whether its good or not.

rednalexa commented on 'Rater' is paid $10 hourly to teach Google's algorithm finance.yahoo.com/news/go... · Posted by u/exz

jancsika · 4 years ago

If Google can't use it's vast array of user data to tell the difference between SEO bots and non-bot users, what's even the point of it collecting all that fucking data in the first place?

rednalexa · 4 years ago

I would assume that if Google is paying 10$/hour for humans to rank content, someone else is paying 11$/hour to fool it with a human generating content, clicks, etc.

Additionally, people writing bots learn just like Google learns, and start generating what appears to be legitimate interactions. Same algorithms that fit to critique between 'bot' and 'non-bot' class can be used to create bots that fall into the 'non-bot' category.

It's a losing battle - but what we get is better than we would get if they collected less data.

rednalexa commented on Unlearning perfectionism arunkprasad.com/log/unlea... · Posted by u/akprasad

syntheweave · 4 years ago

I often apply it from the beginning for creative projects. For example if I am writing a story, I will need to consider "what makes a good story". If I were to develop the benchmark for this by consulting a list of "top 10 ways to make a good story," or did my research by looking at best-sellers, then I would only be capable of writing cliches. It would be very hard to get off of the blank page without just copying a complete work and then trying to modify parts.

But if I decide on particular concepts of good for this story, suddenly the path becomes clarified. And so I might select a theme to explore, a word or a phrase like "sunshine on a cloudy day", and then develop the basis of the story by making the contents abductively(as in abductive reasoning) similar to that theme - by inventing characters, settings and plot devices that would suggest similar ideas and then seeing how I could make them work together. As I add more, additional themes and principles might come up and I would navigate their use by looking for ways in which they are compatible with the primary theme. If there are contradictions between two themes, then I will have to resolve them or else drop exploration in that direction.

And you can see that there is a lot of work that would go into developing the story from a set of themes into a finished narrative, but it is also not work that would go in circles; there is a start and end to it, a point at which it definitely communicates the theme, and does so efficiently. The rest is a matter of adding some polish, smoothing out the particulars of the telling. It would only grow unbounded and become a truly "perfectionist" endeavor if I allowed too many contradictory elements to slip in and create problems, or burdened myself with too many technical constraints like those found in a top 10 or "do's and don'ts" list of quick-fixes. That advice can solve particular problems, but it comes after having a good foundation.

rednalexa · 4 years ago

Thanks for sharing. That is a good strategy to try as I do often let things go either unbounded with no constraints or with too many constraints.