meeton

I don't trust a vibe-generated course to be great yet, but some day I will and learning will never be the same again.

Asking ChatGPT a question uses approximately 10x as much energy as a traditional search engine

Traditional search engines use vanishingly little energy, and 10x vanishingly little is still very small.

It is estimated that AI alone will evaporate between 4 and 7 billion cubic metres of water per year in 2027

ChatGPT has 1 billion users every week, so AI is adding 1% to their water usage?

One extra consideration I haven't seen flagged: if you pick Red and the blue pressers die then everyone who's left alive definitely pressed Red. Then there will be a society-wide tacit agreement that this was a fine thing to do, blue pressers were all dumb and had it coming, and no-one needs to feel bad about it. So you won't even need to feel guilty.

https://i.imgur.com/xsFKqsI.png

"Draw a picture of a full glass of wine, ie a wine glass which is full to the brim with red wine and almost at the point of spilling over... Zoom out to show the full wine glass, and add a caption to the top which says "HELL YEAH". Keep the wine level of the glass exactly the same."

So I'm one of these seemingly non-verbal thinkers, including when I code.

I think it makes me more capable of _making use of_ complex concepts. I came into programming through mathematics, and I treat them both as aesthetic exercises. When I'm building a system in my head the solution usually appears visually, and ideas overlay themselves over the problem as aesthetic "feels". Yes it's a lot like being a visual designer: I can step back, view the solution, and just 'see' if it looks right.

Why should we structure our solution like this? I can't easily put it into words but it just... would be more natural like this. And then a few days later the reason it was correct becomes liminal and I can explain it properly. It lets me hold more ideas in my head and make use of them all at once. When picking up a new idea I can grasp the underlying concept, see the symmetry with ideas I already understand, and slot it into place.

Of course it has major downsides too. It's an effort for me to put my full ideas into words. Coding, like anything worth doing, is a team sport. If I can't vocalize my ideas then half the time that makes them worthless, especially when the decisions are important and therefore contested. I tend to make mental jumps that lose other people, and lose track of what state other people have.

Also, and this is in line with what you said Aedron, it does make it harder to check the details. I'll make silly mistakes because checking them isn't part of my mental construct. I can chase a half-formed idea for a day before realizing my mental picture was off, and I didn't catch it because I never put the problem into words. Pracical-but-ugly hacks don't occur to me because they aren't aesthetic. I'm worthless at remembering my girlfriend's friends' names.

This year I'm focusing on moving slower, writing more things down, and talking to people more. So far it's been really helpful. But I don't think I'd have got to where I am now, or be able to solve the kinds of problems I do, if I was a mostly verbal thinker.

Podcast pro tip: listen on 0.8x speed. Everything becomes so dreamy and sleepy sounding.

People are saying this is 'basically the same as autocorrect or predictive text'. It's not. Autocorrect doesn't make any creative decisions for you, whereas this does.

That is to say: we think at the level of words, not letter-by-letter. When I make a typo, autocorrect corrects what my hands do to match what my brain is thinking. My brain still has primacy. This thing sits at the level of words and even sentences: if it's autocorrect, it's working to correct what my brain is thinking. Which is creepy and sad.

It's a little bit more like predictive text I admit. But because predictive text only suggests one word at a time, there's little semantic meaning to a suggestion and it's rare that I have my thoughts distracted or changed because of it. It's still largely a convenience tool. Suggesting a full sentence is shaping the direction of your thought, which is very different.

I'm still horrified that Google has put this out.

This is awful. We need _less_ mediation and commodification of our personal interactions, not more. What is the use of this? At best this is a solution searching for a problem, at worst it's an attempt to standardize our communication in a way which makes semantic meaning easier to analyse.

... I guarantee that if you draw that out for us, someone will 4-colour it for you. That's what "theorem" means.

How about this: when you get into the booth you're given an ID. You then cast your vote for Ms A and you can see on the block chain that it was recorded for A. After you cast, the system shows you a bunch of ids on the chain which voted for other candidates and you can memorise the id shown that voted for Mr B. When people come round, you tell them that other id. When they look it up they see that it voted for B and leave you alone.

That doesn't solve the potential problem of vote stuffing... Still thinking about that one.

India did that!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Indian_banknote_demonet...

Assuming this is being sold to companies other than strictly self-improvement apps, how can you consider this to be an ethical thing to have created?