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AI 2040: Plan A 12 days ago

If we can solve 99% of the world's problems with current non-AGI models then nobody besides a select few will care about AGI

Why can't you just publish the prompt instead? Do you not see how LLMs subtly alter your original message and erase your voice? They fill gaps that didn't exist, they create syllogisms that make no sense, and the voice is now so ridiculously AIdiosyncratic that it makes my eyes boil!

If you have a message that takes 100 words to say, do not use a LLM to add 400 words to it, this isn't a school assignment! Stretching a spaghetti does not yield more spaghetti, it just makes a mess!

Where is the value the LLM adds? Grammar? Vocabulary? The price you pay is you sound like everyone else and your original message is lost in the noise.

Do the research yourself, the old fashioned way? Search things, write them down, summarize?

The problem with LLMs outputting English is that they're very good at bullshit and it can be really hard to see through the nonsense. The output can be skewed by the model parameters and this can be really hard to spot.

The compiler analogy doesn't work: compilers are (mostly) deterministic and I can verify their output if I wanted to, just ask the compiler to output assembly.

With code generation I can also more or less instantly see if the code is correct or not, because code has less words than human language. The same would apply to images: it would take even less time to see if a generated image is correct or not. That said, I don't use AI for image generation, since I have no use for it.

A heat pump is not necessarily dug into the earth. Rather, the flow of the heat pump is moving heat (thermal energy) from outdoors to indoors or the other way around in an air conditioner.

Depending on the direction of the coolant flow, you get either a indoor heating or cooling unit. This is best demonstrated by going in front of the outdoor unit of a heat pump, when they are cooling, the outdoor unit generates heat because it's compressing gas, which then is then expanded when it reaches the indoor unit, generating cold. Exactly like a refridgerator.

Depends what you make it from. If you distill eight litres of wine into about a litre brandy without removing methanol, it has the same amount of methanol than eight litres of wine did. Given the average of 150mg/l of methanol in red wine, this puts it to about 1g of methanol in that amount. That is not healthy, but you need to keep in mind ingestion of alcohol slows down the metabolism of methanol through competition and the methanol will be excreted by your kidneys instead of being metabolized.

So, just like you won't go blind from a bottle of brandy, you won't go blind from distilled wine. However, you're likely to have a serious headache the morning after.

It is a good reminder that most of us that work in software engineering will never build anything remarkable and will fade into history. Even if you do brilliant engineering work for a company, said work was commissioned by the company and the intellectual property rights belong to said company. It wasn't yours to begin with.

I am also glad the commercial niche illustration markets like Magic the Gathering are extremely hostile to AI art, though of course I would think Wizards of the Coast, the company that publishes MTG, probably see artists as a cost. Maybe.

Perhaps in the future artists will be used to train models that can output a certain style of art and the artist will receive royalties based on their influence on the trained model and its popularity.

Makes sense, though, doesn't it? An elephant's trunk is the fusion of its nose and upper lip, wouldn't that be the location where the mystacial vibrissae (whiskers) be located on any other mammal, making these homologous to e.g. cat's whiskers, which are highly sensitive?

Lena by qntm (2021) 5 months ago

I loved There is no Antimemetics division. I haven't read the new updated to the end but the prose and writing is greatly improved. The idea of anomalous anti-memes is scary. I mean, we do have examples of them, somewhat, see Heaven's Gate and the Jonestown massacre, though they're more like "memes" than "antimemes" (we know what the ideas were and they weren't secrets).

Alex, the bird mentioned in the article, is also the first animal ever to have asked a question. When shown its reflection in a mirror, it asked what color it was.

We've trained chimps and gorillas for decades and they have never asked a single question

Depends on the niche. Original physical art for trading card games or comics is a significant chunk of the income of your typical artist. Digital art in those niches does not have this source of income. But then again digital art has other niches where the actual commission rates are high enough to not make this a problem.

Indeed, as a kid of 10, I remember learning C/C++ thanks to DJGPP, a DOS port of GCC, being free software. I didn't have any money to buy a commercial compiler, though I never asked my parents. I wasn't sure how to frame the question, I guess. Well, regardless, getting your hands on a commercial compiler wasn't that difficult in the late 90s/early 00s. Soon after though small non-commercial indie games kinda died out and everyone was using DirectX using MSVC on Windows, until SDL came out.

Your sentence makes it sound like Yeniseian languages are language isolates, but what is absolutely astounding is that Yeniseian languages seem to form a family with the Na-Dene languages of North America. Two language families separated by the Bering strait over 15000 years ago!

Battery cell production alone is massively expensive. The expenses in setting up a production line is counted in the billions.

So the only way to start fresh here is to raise billions in capital. Unless you're Volkswagen or something, when you could invest billions in an enterprise like this one.

It's also curious how a variation of the CCR5 gene, CCR5-Δ32, which gives increased immunity to HIV, is thought to have been selected for by smallpox in Northern Europe. While giving increased immunity to HIV and smallpox, it makes the carriers more suspectible to serious versions of flavivirus infections (tick-borne encephalitis, West Nile virus). This might be a pretty bad thing in the age of climate change!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CCR5#CCR5-%CE%9432

So what's the truth of the hardness/blackness grade? Did Conte invent it? Because Hardtmuth, one of the large pencil manufacturers, claims otherwise:

"According to the personal notes of Franz Hardtmuth, the marking of pencils using the letter H originates from the family surname Hardtmuth, B means Budweis, or Budějovice in Czech language, and F refers to his first name Franz."

https://www.blog.koh-i-noor.cz/post/the-story-of-iconic-koh-...

Sounds a bit apocryphal to me.