GavinB

I've just published my first novel for adults, The Dark Sorcerer's Intern, my bid to bring back fun and comedy to a fantasy genre that has spent years in a grimdark rut.

The relevance to hackers is that unlike most fantasy where spells are cast with hand motions, magic words, or spell ingredients, there's actually an explanation for why that works and makes sense.

https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Sorcerers-Intern-Humorous-Fantas...

This is a compelling theory, especially the implication that humans are early. I do wonder whether we should see the evidence of spheres of growing alien influence out in the stars, but instead we see a highly uniform universe in all directions.

This would indicate a few possibilities:

1. Expanding alien civilizations are relatively low impact and don't collect all of the energy of stars in ways that are visible to our current telescopes.

2. We are a very early civilization, civs are fairly rare, and we're relatively alone in the parts of the universe that we can see. Civs that are expanding in a grabby fashion started less recently in years than their distance in light years.

3. Aliens expand at close to the speed of light, so there are a lot out there but we won't see them until they're almost here.

4. Something that we have already noticed is actually evidence of grabby aliens, but it is happening in every direction so we assume that it is a natural phenomenon, because it is so uniform.

At the very least, it seems likely that we either we are alone in the galaxy, or expansion is very slow. The idea of "expanding in a bubble of influence close to the speed of light" seems implausible to me, just because of the vast amounts of energy required to accelerate and decelerate to relativistic speeds, not to mention protecting the cargo in transit--when you're flying at .9c, almost every other piece of matter in the universe is flying towards you at you at .9c. Accelerating tiny nanomachine von Neumann probes might be a solution, but how would they decelerate enough to not be destroyed on arrival?

It's all fascinating to think about, at least.

Is this in comparison to some other evaluation function which is perfect? I agree that all positions should have a certainty of win, draw, or lose with perfect play, but no engine is close to that level of evaluation function.

I do suspect that this pathological behavior could be trained out with additional fine tuning, but likely not without slightly diminishing the model's overall ability.

I got downvotes for not showing the calculation, fair enough, my mistake. I understand the frustration there. And yeah, you've got to check ChatGPT's work and ask for clarification to understand what it did and why.

That said, I disagree with the assertions made in your post. ChatGPT is a great tool for saving time in doing simple research and calculations, as long as you double check it. It wasn't a year ago, but it is now.

I know, I'm scared by it, too!

If you're going to yell at someone, at least do your own calculation so you can prove they're wrong first, please?

Total Sky Area=4π×(2π360)^2×60^2 = 148,510,660 square arcminutes (you can also look this up easily)

NIRCam has 9.7 square arcminutes FOV (Yes, I double checked this)

NIRCam resolution is 2048 × 2048 x 2 modules for 2.4–5.0 µm (there are lots of different cameras and modules you could look at to make this estimate, but for a sense of magnitude this will work. If you looked at 0.6–2.3 µm that would be roughly 4x as many pixels for the 8 modules, I think? Again, napkin math for fun.)

Total FoVs Needed = 148,510,660.8 / 9.7 ≈ 15,310,377 FoVs

Total Pixels = (2048×2048×2)×15,310,377 ≈ 128,432,754,096,706 pixels

LLMs used to be quite awful at math. Now they're solving quite complicated problems with sophisticated plugins. This is a simple and straightforward calculation, just getting the FOV and its resolution and then projecting that onto a sphere. And, yes, I probably should have posted the full calculation, it's definitely more interesting to see it all written out.

I'd suspect it will actually accelerate moving everything into the cloud.

If your entire business is in the cloud, you can give an AI access to everything with a single sign or some passwords. If half is on the cloud and half is local, that's very annoying to have all in-context for your AI assistant. And there's no way we're getting everything locally stored again at this point!

Alternatively, figure out how to use GPT-3 in a market that involves some schleps. I'm working on one in Education Tech, building something for a need that teachers have been practically begging for. There are particular regulatory challenges, unique sales paths, and a big first to market advantage because educators aren't online constantly researching their options. Once you're embedded in the education consciousness, you're there for years.

But yes, another random thing GUI for generating marketing copy from GPT3 isn't a good long term play.

Having this be a universal policy has a big clear benefit--when someone at the company dies, their family's immediate needs and expenses are taken care of. It avoids the awkward "passing the hat" to the company or fellow employees for support. There's no need to make special exceptions, determine how much to help out in a crisis, etc--it's taken care of automatically, to a pre-determined extent. No one can complain that an employee died and big rich Google did nothing for their family. It saves a lot of potential handwringing, bad PR, and employee dissatisfaction, etc.

I agree in principle. On the other hand, global crises have always called for extraordinary measures.

Even in this pandemic, we've (correctly, I would say) basically thrown out important principles like freedom of movement and freedom of association during lockdowns. I think that allowing volunteers to put themselves at a relatively low risk to speed up vaccine trials would have been a relatively small transgression, compared to the lockdowns and travel bans (which, again, I think were justified).

But I do take your point.

There was discussion of it early on, but there's no evidence that it was done on any significant scale outside of the efforts of individual pharma companies working on their own supply chains.

It's possible that I'm wrong! Maybe we invested everything possible and couldn't have done significantly more. But it's striking that this article doesn't even address that question.

Basically, I haven't seen any evidence that this take is wrong: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/01/28/covid-bill-gates-and...

Yes, all of them. Or possibly expanding capacity for each of the major vaccine types, to be ready when we know which one is the winner.

And then, yes, a lot of those factories would have ended up sold for scrap (or mothballed for future pandemics or mutations). But the few that worked then save trillions of dollars of value and hundreds of thousands of lives.

It's a simple matter of calculating expected values and investing accordingly. But thats not how our civilization works.

So no, we did not “have the vaccine” in February.

We did have it, we just didn't know which one it was. And we refused to risk any individual life in order to potentially save hundreds of thousands or more.

We also could have invested single digit billions early on to build capacity for all of these different potential vaccines, but we decided to play if "safe" and will now be spending over a trillion again to try to save the economy.

I don't blame the pharma companies for this. Our government and medical establishment was not intellectually prepared to make the hard decisions required to save us. And we need to be building momentum to learn how to do better.

It kind of is. Hypothesis rejection is the primary means of advancing knowledge.

"We tried to prove this hypothesis wrong and could not" is the main thing you want a study to do. Having everyone try to prove your hypothesis wrong, and failing, is the main way that science advances.

Given that a vaccine may not provide total protection, they should consider how to sell a potential early, safe but only moderately effective vaccination. For instance, calling it a "COVID-19 Immune Booster Shot," and be very transparent that it reduces your protection against the virus but is not total immunity. Then the world won't lose faith in science and medicine when folks who had the shot are testing positive and even dying.

Hopefully either way the amount of news coverage will be enough that most people will get informed about it, in a way that they don't for most issues.

Yes, flat-earthers would probably count as non-conformist. I think the point is that in order to have Galileo, you have to tolerate flat-earthers as well.

I do agree that calling most people "sheep" is uncharitable, and would add that calling aggressive conformists "stupid" is also not accurate or productive. They might be making stupid decisions, but they're not stupid people.

Just needs some rendering presets, star field backgrounds, lens flare, GPT-2 title generation, and you've got random SF novel book covers!

That's true in theory, but rules of war do have a long history of limited but very real success. The key is to keep a multipolar civilization so that the cost of defecting from the rules (for example, the Geneva Convention) is higher than the benefit of getting an edge in the current conflict.

Even in a bi-polar conflict, the threat of mutually assured destruction helps to enforce official and unofficial rules of engagement. The Cold War demonstrated that quite effectively.

It gives users easier access and a better experience, so they're more likely to return and to spend longer. The ultimate goal is to become a "default time waster" for as many people as possible, who open the app whenever they're bored.

The thing about warehouses is that they have high ceilings and big windows. So people started to associate the outsides of those buildings with the bright and spacious interiors.

Yep! My only point was that it apparently took a ton of work to find a way to hack into a place which is already considered fairly insecure. Basically I don't think there's any reason to panic or be surprised by this story, or for Assa Abloy to be terribly embarrassed.

With the equivalent of a budget of several hundred thousand dollars and custom hardware, any commercially available equipment can probably be hacked.

I'm sure the work that F-Secure did was very technically impressive, but I don't think this demonstrates that "these electronic locks may not be very secure" as the article states.

I'd imagine that there are very few commercial technologies that couldn't be hacked if you can get research on a working copy and throw "several thousand total man hours" of highly qualified researchers at it, including building a custom device. And the hack has already been patched!

And then the end payout is that you can get into hotel rooms, which are regularly accessed by low-paid hotel employees and generally considered not a secure place to leave valuables—there's a reason for the safes in the closet of every hotel room.

Scholastic | Assistant Project Coordinator, Associate Project Manager | New York, NY | Onsite | Full Time

Scholastic is the world's largest children's book publisher. We are looking to fill positions working in product and project management. The currently open one is available for applications here: https://scholastic.referrals.selectminds.com/jobs/assistant-...

The above position is a fairly entry level one managing websites and marketing through a CMS. We also will have an Associate Project Manager position managing development, if you're interested in that feel free to drop a line to gbrown@scholastic.com.

I submitted my data but I'm getting an "unknown request" on the URL https://www.legalist.com/equifax-sent/

Also, it's unclear what court you're supposed to file in. I did some research and, at least in New York, you're supposed to file a claim where the defendant does business. I put my local county small claims court in (New York County Civil Court), but I'm not sure if that was right. Maybe because Equifax is such a big company doing business everywhere I can file in my local court? Otherwise it looks like I would need to file in Atlanta, where their headquarters is.

this is basically linking up a bunch of in-accurate sensory parsers, coupled with some limited machine learning, connected to a bunch of if statements

Add enough complicated if statements and you've got a rough definition of a human!

The moment you agreed to a fixed bid, the incentives between client and customer are directly in conflict. Any additional thing that the client wants has to be renegotiated.

If your development is in any way exploratory or creative, my experience is that hourly billing frees everyone up to focus on making the best product. It also lets the developers and designers be creative and figure out the best way to build something, rather than having to build exactly what was drawn up by some idiot (usually me!) who isn't actually the one doing the work.

Yes, you have to trust that the hourly worker isn't wasting your time. Yes, they may have to raise their rates as they get more experienced and more busy.

So a company that blatantly cheated will pay some fines and still be worth billions. The founders and early employees will all be rich, or richer than they were when they started. The investors will get a very healthy return.

The lesson: break the rules and grow so fast that by the time regulators catch up, you can put on a show of reforming and still keep most of the value that you created.

Admirable disruption or horrible cheating? I don't know how to feel about it.

The end of Moore's law is like commercial fusion power--always just around the corner but it never seems to get here.

It does seem like we should stop counting how many transistors fit in how much space. At this point, size isn't the limiting factor. Tracking either the cost of a unit of processing power or the total processing power of the planet would be more meaningful in benchmarking technological progress.

I just had my first novel released this month! It combines gaming and literacy for kids. It's themed around the idea of "becoming a player character in your own life." The main character, Josh, uses the ideas of experience points, quest hooks, and allies to get ahead in his life.

http://amazon.com/Josh-Baxter-Levels-Gavin-Brown/dp/05457729...

The reviews so far have been great, saying that it's "Smartly paced and emotionally engaging" (https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/gavin-brown/josh-...) and from "an author who gets his audience and knows his games (http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-545-77294-5)."

The Segway is quite large and needs parking or storage. Also, it can't go up stairs. Hoverboards can be picked up and carried easily around an office or home, and can be tossed under a desk or in a backpack for storage.

A Segway is like a bike in that you always have to be thinking about where to put it when you arrive. Hoverboard is much more like walking, in that you can toss it in your backpack or just carry it when you arrive.

Though I'd rather just walk.

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