TheBruceHimself

so, a tree?

This guy is just a pump and dump king. All his businesses are built on getting huge investments based on fantastical claims that earth-shattering advancements are just around the corner so everyone has to get in now. Then they don’t happen, but it doesn’t matter because by that point he’s already the world’s richest man and he’s basically too big to fail. Remember when SpaceX was sold as the Mars colonization company? Remember when Tesla “wasn’t really a car company”, but an autonomous AI company? Neuralink, the boring company, hyperloop, those stupid humanoid robots he appears to bring out once or twice a year?I am beyond frustrated at how few people call him out on this behaviour.

Elon Musk must create a new scandal every day; it’s the source of his power, or something. I mean, this is the only way I can possibly justify this man’s actions. It’s like he wakes up in the morning and thinks, “What course of action can optimize the chances that I will be the center of some drama and have everyone talk about me for another half week of news articles?”

God, I really want him crushed. It stopped being funny a long time ago. Thanks for your contributions to industry, Elon, but I don’t need a walking meme dominating a strangely large part of the news cycle every single day ..

In South Scotland I found it was almost always just “div” and proceeded by a pointed swear such as “fucking div”.

Divvy meant dividend! The thing the co-op used to give you for shopping there and old ladies used to obsess over. Come to think it, they were a right bunch of fucking divs.

You’re getting a lot of scared artistic people right now lashing their jobs disappearing. I genuinely can’t blame them.. I’d probably do the same, and let’s keep in mind, A lot of these people weren’t doing particularly well up to this point. Imagine being a struggling actor and realizing acting roles were being given to a chatbot. That’s how this is seen by them.

There was a similar controversy recently in the UK where a radio show was produced with an AI host (with the AI’s voice based on a now-dead famous interviewer). It was a complete novelty. Regardless, there were outcries, but when you looked closer, they were outcries from people in the industry feeling insulted that they could have dome interviewed and made a name for themselves in the radio interview circuit. An AI, particularly of someone who is dead and already had their time in the sun, felt like quite the insult. The territory they were all fighting over was already pretty tiny, and then it shrinks into almost nothing with them left thinking, “Would it really hurt so , much if I could just manually do this thing you’ve automated away?”.

we’re going to see a lot more of this. I can almost guarantee there’s going to be a movie made at some point that just doesn’t have any actors or very limited input from actors. Perhaps an animation with the voices done by very amateur people put through some sort of “acting filter” that makes them sound just as good. Actors will definitely have a lot to say about that. Don’t even get started on AI-generated scripts: the screenwriter guild is already putting things in their contracts to try and limit this.

amazingly accurate. Hard to believe anyone could’ve gotten so much so right with only small details missing a little, not feasible or existing in some way, though just to humble him a bit please keep in mind he did predict we’d have gorilla butlers farmed and trained to replace domesticated labor in the home. So even the best of us don’t get it all right and in some cases very wrong.

i’m a bit lost. I think I get what it does but what’s it for? I’ve never had the need to convert a tag to a hash and that hash to a tag.

What’s the argument here exactly? Wealthy people’s misfortune isn’t worthy of our attention? Should the US cease reporting on itself as it is a wealth nation and a much better state than many others?

Who is this “we”? The rest of the world? I don’t think the rest of the world is being asked by America to care. It is Americans caring about Americans or Californians caring for Californians at the very least.

At the end of the day, having your house burned to the ground, having to escape a deadly fire, have you seen everyone go a bit mad and crazy, fearing for your life? These people can be the richest people in the world, and I’d think it’s inhuman not to sympathize with them somewhat. It is a situation every person could find potentially life-destroying and traumatic.

i’ll make that annoying comment: perhaps people who consume a lot of sweetened foods are also sort of people who have bad diets, regardless of whether artificial or real sweetness. Not a hard thing to believe. all the article says is artificial sweetener intake was compared to people who didn’t consume as much artificial sweetener and found a big difference in diet. That baseline captures a lot of people who don’t take sweeteners at all; artificial or natural. I supect these are likely the sort of people who have better diets. To me the effects need normalizes against an individual’s intake of sweetened foods generally.

I think it’s just a way to stop the reporting of an event turning the event into an opportunity for people to gain media coverage and propel their careers, or their interests that may not be related to the discussion at hand.

Public debates are swamped with characters who want to make a name for themselves by holding views, having a particular style, or catering to certain demographics. At this point, the debate ceases to ne a way of discussing ideas and opinions. It’s just a way to sell the participants. Likewise, there are many people who want the opposite. They hold opinions but really don’t want to be part of the wider social debate . They don’t want to be public figures defending a particular point. They just want to contribute in some way.

Well, there is a matter of safety, and not wanting to be harassed for your opinions. Some debates are so heated that an opinion stated either way is going to expose you to potential violence if not, just verbal abuse through various channels. I think even though you should be honest about your opinion, it’s obviously better to avoid that harm so why not be anonymous?

Personally, I’ve also found that stating your opinion, and having it recorded and known to everyone, makes it very hard for you to change your mind. We’re very harsh to people who do change their mind in such circumstances because the first thing we see is a record of them saying the opposite, and then we ask them to explain themselves and judge them like it’s some kind of fault in their character. There are opinions I had when I was 18 years old that I think abhorrent. I don’t want to be associated with them. I’m very happy there’s no record of me having these opinions. I don’t want to have to explain my past like that just to hold the opinions I have in the present. I have found that process never really ends — i’m regularly changing my opinions on beliefs overtime . I wonder what opinions I have now I will look back on with shame. so I try to make sure that I don’t have anything recorded for the end of times under my name just in case I want to distance myself.

AI-generated porn feed. Photo-realistic, high-quality images. It would change what is generated based on my tastes either through me liking or disliking certain content, my engagement on particular content, contracts, others, or by specifying what my desires directly through some sort of prompt.

I want this software to produce an infinite scroll of content that is tailored towards my tastes, with the algorithm constantly trying to refine the feed by suggesting new things and observing my reaction. It should be available offline running on my own hardware if I choose to do it that way but also available as a paid-for service.

I should be able to favorite and save certain content and share it with other users of the software easily.

I’m sure there are many tricks you could do with this such as caching content in advance to view as to not overload machines at view time or for people with similar interests to share content, though these are all implementation details.

Copilot is quite good at inferring functionality from comments in code. At least this is what I found. If you break down your function, or whatever it is you are great at making, into steps or sub-processes with comments outlining what each part does, Copilot works a lot better. So for example, I want to sort the lines in a file via a linked list: I might have my first comment say “step1: load text file called bla.TXT into the linked list with one line per node” then leave a gap where code should go before writing a second comment which may go something like “step 2: iteratively go through the list, swapping nodes if they are not in ascending alphabetical order. Do this until the list is ordered”. From there prompting the AI to complete the code based on the comments works fairly well.

I will say that Copilot is sometimes embarrassingly wrong. It’s strange how brilliant it can be at times and how incredibly dumb it can be other times. I think that just comes as part of the technology right now, but I have made it write quite complex code using the above approach. This approach does, however, require you to understand how the problem should be solved as to have Copilot understand enough to take over.

The author mocks comparative advantage as an argument for free trade, suggesting it doesn’t work. They specifically point out it was supposed to let the other countries do the low-skilled work while America focused on high-skilled stuff and imply it didn’t happen… though it didn’t happen… didn’t it? America stopped creating lumps of steel and coffee tables and instead became a hub for cutting-edge software, media, and financial services… am I missing something or did comparative advantage not work exactly as it was supposed to? There were problems with this transition (when is there ever a transition in which there isn’t), but the country is wealthier and leads the world in several areas of the global economy.

The wider article focuses on trade deficits and almost assumes they are inherently bad. Though, honestly, are they? Essentially, America gets away with giving smaller amounts of its output to other countries than these countries give America. If someone gives me $2 worth of goods for every $1 worth of goods I give them, I’m not complaining. Why should America?

It’s also not like this is a new thing. America has run a trade deficit every single year since 1975 (and plenty of years prior to 1975 were deficit years). Now isn’t even the highest it’s been; the highest was in 2005. Taking the last 20 years as a timetable, the deficit is pretty normal right now.

Also, do people actually look up what the deficit is? Because it’s 3.77% of GDP. The way people talk about it, you’d think it was in the 10s of percentage points, but it’s not… it’s honestly pretty minor.

I had no idea this is up for debate. I guess as a European I had a very biased education about this.I I remember it being presented as a sort of joke by the history teacher that Columbus brought back lots of things from the Americas that widely impacted European Society, such as syphilis

...these companies are among the most disruptive of the year -- and possibly of a lifetime...

...

Tennibot

Funding to date: $200k

What the startup does: Makes a robot that picks up tennis balls

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It's truly both exhilarating and terrifying to contemplate the profound impact this will have on our lives. It will likely alter our way of life in ways few of us, if any, of can even begin to fathom

I believe we could already have replaced many doctors with automated systems,or at least systems operated by considerably lower-paid and lower-skilled people. The issue isn’t that we couldn’t before; it’s that having a human as our go-to for healthcare needs is a heavily embedded part of our society and culture. It’s going to be incredibly hard to change people’s expectations as to what healthcare provides, who provides it, and who or what to put our trust in. If I find a lump on my neck, even I, with all my faith in modern technology and scientifically proven superior automated systems, still want to see a human doctor. I still somehow believe the doctor and distrust the machine, no matter how many times they study it and find the machine to be superior over man.

I feel it must fall at some point (I’m not sure I’m comfortable saying it’s a bubble tbh so I’ll stick with ‘fall’, not ‘pop’) but I’m not going to bet as to when. I thought the market would turn back in 2018 when my 401k was getting 25% growth year after year. I was certain of it, but it’s kept going… People just seem really bullish about US corporations right now, particularly tech, and that’s only been solidified moreso in recent times because people believing this made it so (okay, to an extent, the companies are decent too). I hear it over and over again one way or another: people don’t want to invest elsewhere because it’s the US companies that make the returns they like.

It must be unsustainable on some level but what’s going to need to happen for people to stop thinking this way? I used to think it wouldn’t take much but now I think it might take a lot. It wouldn’t surprise me if this lasts another decade or more and all this looks like the Japanese economy of the 70s and 80s when it was the future, its corporations were taking over the world, and all its investments made the returns you couldn’t get elsewhere. The one day, suddenly, all that started to sound silly.

Or it could all just pop tomorrow because some CEO sends a bad tweet. Heck, it’s all soothsaying.

In addition to that they say the future will require huge investment in capital assets and broad investment strategies won't cut anymore.

Hum, so they think the future will be all growth with no losses, need significantly more capital, and some clever people to allocate it wisely... surely just a coincidence but it sounds a little like wishful thinking on Blackrock's part. What investment company is going to come to the conclusion the future is boom and bust, requires little capital investment, and the best strategy is just mindless broad market investment strategies that anyone can do without involving middle men?

I just don't understand why you'd choose Bitcoin over gold. Gold, like Bitcoin, was criticized for just being a stupid store of value, but that wasn't completely true as it undoubtedly had some utility in the economy. Worst case comes and the market crashes, you know there's at least someone somewhere buying. What does Bitcoin get you over gold? The same "it's scarce and therefore valuable" narrative so you can store your wealth there, but it's not got the intrinsic value of gold. If the market crashes, you can't sell Bitcoin to someone to make jewelry or false teeth.

If you want to argue that people could theoretically discover a lot more gold or bring in an asteroid one day full of it, okay, but then why not just by land then? Even better than gold, there's a potential for some income too. Or why not just go with something that's equally as scarce like vintage wine? You literally can't make anymore wine of a particular year; it's inherently scarce.

I'm going to guess there's just a long stagnation.

LLMs worked way better than people thought they would. Most of the experts in AI were floored by how well they worked. I think of LLMs as more of a discovery than an invention. We didn't really know what we were doing, and some people had some cute ideas about predicting responses based on modeling languages, and this really useful thing kind of just fell out of that endeavor. From that initial shock, we just kept adding more to it to see how far it could go.

What's important to appreciate is we have an extremely poor understanding of how intelligence appear to emerge from these models. Much like our own intelligence, we can explain parts and have ideas of roughly how it fits together, but on the whole, it's a bit of a mystery. We're like early bridge builders having discovered an arch in the design stops them from collapsing. We've gained a useful piece of knowledge which we can share and make things better, but we're missing the value of knowing why it all works as it does, and without that, it's harder to know what else we can do to improve things. We just throw more LLMs tech at the problem to make it better, just like the bridge builders used to throw more arches on a bridge to make them safer.

The other thing is, LLMs just appear to function so much better than almost anything else we've come up with. Nothing really comes close. There doesn't appear to be fruitful new tangential things to jump onto, incorporate, or do anything with. So, basically, if LLMs peak, we're probably just going to go back and try random things in a semi-directionless manner and hope we can discover what the next step up is from this. It's not completely blind as we can make educated guesses, but it's a slow process

Alternatively, though, since we don't understand LLMs we also don't really know what their limits are. There could be a good bit more growth left in them. It could be that putting 10x more resources into these models will end up with a AI that quite simply is human-level. There's nothing really to say that's not possible. There are some distinguist thinkeres that are beginning to argue our own intelligence may be just a biological LLM.

Given its long half life doesn’t this mean the power output also very small? Like, what could we power with a kg of carbon 14? My guess is barely enough to light up an LED though. Given that they do not state the power output in the article I’m inclined to believe my assumption here is correct and they don’t state it easily as it renders this tech little more than a toy

At either rate, Thousands of years of continuous power is interesting but I don’t think we have much applications that could make use of it yet. At best we’d maybe put one in an interstellar probe when we feel like doing that but i cant think of much else

Just go try on a “medium” sized shirt in America and see how far this has went. You can be obese and still find it roomy. I’m 5’ 11” 175lb and I need to dress in small and occasionally extra-small items of clothing. How the hell is someone like me small?

I used to be 205lb and people would refuse to believe I was overweight. I thanked them for the compliment but always reminded them “I know I’m not, im well above what any medical text would call a healthy weight”. I even had one friend who’d call me “skinny”… it’s politeness by some but by a lot of others it’s just a complete shift in standards and expectations.

Everything in the U.S. is geared towards husky folk. Big portions, lots of calories, and the idea of walking even a mile to get somewhere? Forget about it. The new weight loss drugs may help but they are fighting a lot of entrenched “stuff” that just makes being overweight easier and less burdensome.

I think this really cool that this is public. I find it interesting how governments even make politeness and interaction into a systematic rule-based affair. While it can seem quite cold, i like how organized and planned it is... like nothing is left to chance. They'll just tell you how to be polite. They've figured it out. It's documented

I also find the "Honorable" thing rather interesting. It's about the only time where I can see the archaic ghost of British pomp and nobility leaking through to the US political conventions. The US did so well getting rid of almost all of it (and good riddance, honestly) yet an elected official still gets to be "The Honorable Mr X". It's not even descriptive of their role, it's just enforced flattery.

Really depends on the country (I did my PhD in the UK), but I don't know of any PhD student writing grants, and TAing doesn't generally take up more than a day a week (I think I did no more than a couple of hours a week). In the US, you sometimes need to take classes for PhD study (I think this is terrible, BTW, but that's a somewhat separate thing), but for me, I did research, I'd say, 75% of the time.

A PhD is a waste of time if you're in terms of improving your income. It's just an apprenticeship in research, so it's only good if you want to do that as a career. In terms of enjoyment, I think a PhD is really tied to how much joy you can derive from research, much of which is months and months of work to just prove one or two incredibly minor things (which, honestly, are going to be of little interest to anyone and basically will serve only to show you can do research, not that what you were researching was in any way noteworthy). For me, I loved my time as a PhD student because what I was researching involved learning and using a lot of cool stuff, and I really liked the academic community "feel" and culture (for all its many, many faults).

I'm sorry, but decentralized local, distributed (bla bla, web 3.0, blockchain, bla) internet services are just tried, tested, and shit ideas. These things really offer so little improvement at all to most end-users. It's something that's more often than not just built atop nice squishy feelings that nerdy and technical people have. It's all about the beauty of the network structure over a monolithic one. How it's more democratic, and giving people power back. Yet people aren't aren't asking for that and these ideas which can be done do nothing nothing for improving the products in the way they are currently used. No one signed up to Twitter and said "Oh god, I really wish I could run my own Twitter microservice and break up this giant database into some distributed model". The tweets got sent, they received tweets, it didn't matter to them it was centralized and it still doesn't. Decentralizing it can, at best, just reach a point where its advocates can tell these people "hey, it's just as good as it was before", and that's not even taking into account the inevitable teething problems and migration issues that will make that goal incredibly hard to achieve.

1. Is it easier to do in a decentralized manner? 2. Does decentralization improve the end-user product?

You need at least one of these questions to have a "yes" answer to have a shot but every time it's "no" "no"

I went straight from undergraduate into a PhD program and skipped the master's step. I was incredibly fortunate to find a supervisor who thought master's were a waste of time and was happy to state my undergraduate study was sufficient for him to take me on. That outlook and position saved me a tonne of money and a year of life.

I say this because he was damned right and wish more people would just say master's are not a requirement for pretty much anything. Prior to getting into a program "early," I was going to go do a master's just to be allowed to apply to PhD programs. The courses i was looking at offered me nothing but a badge. I found those who wanted to go do master's were, more often than not, just lost people who thought it was the natural 'next thing to do' after undergraduate study; like they were in a video game and the master's was the next harder level to beat.

The only good thing I've found worth doing a master's for is to retrain and specialize, but I find this is more reflective of having not really utilized your undergraduate degree than anything else. It's a welcome second chance, but gosh, it's a racket far too often. F anyone who thinks you need one to do anything.

Just seems like a pointless intermediate power broken, which, ironically, also needs to be held accountable. If I gift my vote to an interest group and I trust them to use the power I have, in part, given them to hold politicians to account, then it rests on me to hold the interest group to account in doing so sufficiently. The model assumes interest groups are somehow inherently trustworthy. They differ little from political parties from what I can see.

How about I just hold the politician I vote for to account? If the argument here is that I’m bad at doing that, then why would holding an interest group account work out any better?

Additionally, it’s nice since I don’t need to find an interest group that represents me sufficiently for the current system to work. I can hold politicians to account completely on my own terms, and if those feelings are common enough, democracy will do its thing. I get to decide what politicians are accountable for. If they fail to meet a promise, I get to decide if that matters to me or not, not an intermediary. Seems like a simpler, finer-grained, and altogether better system to me.

I like to think of it this way: we all have freedom of speech, but don’t we also have the freedom not to listen to it? People think their freedom of speech is diminished in cases where the reality is the audience doesn’t care for it and removes it from their view. There’s not a single opinion out there you can’t find somewhere online. Freedom of speech is as grand as it’s ever been. The complaint is isn’t some don’t get a say in their piece; it’s that people have signed up to media outlets in which they don’t have to put up with listening to i. It’s not some secret agenda Facebook blocks, say, racist content. They just don’t want it on their feeds and, yeah, honestly, they don’t think their user base being constantly offended and, frankly, bullied is what’s being asked of them to provide. 4Chan is there for those who want that sort of thing. Most people don’t want it.

I’ve never had to read a book I didn’t want to, or watch a movie I didn’t care for, so why is it suddenly every right-wing pundit’s right to have an audience with me? Im sick of being forced to listen to these people

I work with an engineer fresh out of college. He asks chatGPT literally anything and everything. He has two monitors and one is just chatGPT all the time. I thought i use it quite a bit more than most but for him it’s almost stream of conscious dump to verify his code, various thoughts about the system, anything and everything really.

Maybe not for everyone but at least for him, and quite possibly others, Google isn’t even a thing.