scottlegrand2

I get bronchitis once or twice a year. The method by which I clear it is to hang upside down until the s* just comes out of me by coughing as hard as I can. That sounds awfully similar.

You're not the only one leaving stuff in the garage. but for some of the big-ticket items or food items I have doused the box in Lysol spray and let it sit for 10 minutes and then opened it.

but I read somewhere that the half-life of this thing in direct sunlight is 2.5 minutes so after an hour or so it's pretty much gone if that's true.

And if it doesn't hopefully you stocked up on toilet paper and purell to trade in the new hellscape economy...

Buying them for my elderly Chinese inlaws, yeesh. As an asthmatic, I already had a bunch for fire season so I really don't need any more.

Unavoidably slightly political but...

I saw a shift in behavior following Trump's conference appointing Mike Pence as the effective coronavirus czar.

Every morning there was a small stash of N95 masks at my local Home Depot until yesterday. Similarly I started seeing specific sorts of non-perishables disappearing from the shelves of Trader Joe's and Safeways. Where it goes next, I don't know. But I think the crowd has spoken on the subject already.

Every thousand miles or so. Which is to say three times a year because I walk/run about 10 miles a day, which I once thought was original behavior, but see Nikolai Tesla.

Seems like running shoe Luddism to me. I've been using Brooks PureFlow shoes for years. They just happen to be at the slowest running shoe ever created. I'm looking forward to what happens to my running times in Nike vapor fly shoes if only because I love technology. Good thing I never want to compete and I'm also oldAF.

Completely different viruses, but right before the coronavirus outbreak, there was a plague outbreak in Beijing and the CCP responded similarly ineptly to it. The article below is from November 2019.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/11/16/china-bubonic-plague-ou...

There's an interview with an African grad student in Wuhan who says that strange cases of pneumonia were happening all the way back in September of 2019. And this interview was the first I'd ever heard of that.

This could have been a non-starter had not the Chinese Communist party covered this up as long as they did. That's what needs to change. There might be a genetic predilection for Asians to be susceptible to coronaviruses, but if we attack these things head-on as they emerge, they won't amount to much.

If we pretend they're not happening, one day we're going to get a pandemic. That day might be today unfortunately but only time will tell.

https://youtu.be/8uIVf_o9aXM

I agree, but it's so very interesting that when a similar sort of loyalty oath was used even when I was in grad school 25 years ago to enforce loyalty to the state government at Penn State University (as a condition for receiving my poverty-level grad student stipend), it was A-OK with the same sort of people complaining about this right now when it's focused on a more progressive ideology.

But I agree it's absolutely absurd no matter who's pushing these. And all it amounts to is ideological theatre on both sides of the fence. And I don't think that theatre is going to close during my lifetime.

While I don't think there's going to be an AI winter either, I don't think GPT-2 will achieve sentience or anything close to it.

And that's for the same reason that no matter how much data they feed Tesla's self-driving AI, it will still try to kill you now and then. The problem space is just too big. All the people I know in this space don't think it will be solved for at least a decade and maybe not even then.

But I do suspect the 2020s will see the creation of agents combining classical algorithms with deep neural networks to do amazing things in domains that are closed and constant. But they're all going to be glorified (yet wonderful) unitaskers.

The only thing that worries me is that I don't trust FAANG to do the right thing ever anymore, and it's amazing to me that so many have opted into the panopticon of things in exchange for the ability to order stuff and turn their gadgets on and off.

And if we started treating behavior like this as equivalent to the search for bug bounties, we could iteratively patch the law until it is no longer cost-effective to search for them.

Just charge a vacancy tax like Vancouver does.

https://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/empty-homes-t...

It's also my favorite episode of The Outer Limits reboot...

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0667957/

I'm going to disagree. Yes, the biggest perpetrators aged. But in my experience it became more "50 is the new 40" than it went away.

Or you could engineer the roads and the cars to provide telemetry on where they are in high resolution in real time.

This would reduce a nearly impossible job in machine intelligence to a really difficult simulation problem.

But I don't see that happening anytime soon.

Like so many of these rants, he doesn't actually demonstrate his ideas fix the problem, he just insists that they do so without proof.

Less thought-leadering, more actual results please.

By the law of large numbers, the sample mean approaches the population mean as the sample size gets larger. The law of large numbers goes hand-in-hand with the central limit theorem.

I've had a simple rule for the past 20 years. If you offer me less than 1% of the startup I'm not interested in working with you because I am a plebe if I accept that offer. It hasn't failed me yet.

OTOH I chose to pursue a PhD in biochemistry rather than be the third member of the Yost group and that led to 3D Studio.

So I will boil my heuristic down to TLA or BigCo. I'd miss out on the next Facebook or Google with such a heuristic but what are the chances I would get an opportunity to join one of those companies at the ground floor in the first place?

in recent years, there was one startup bought out at a modest price for which I might have made epsilon more money being their CTO but it would have come with sleepless nights and anxiety at no additional cost.

My dad spent his entire career at GE research. One day he arranged for Bill Lorensen to give me a tour of their computer graphics lab. Great guy! Sad to hear that he has passed.

We failed to deliver on nuclear power. And that's on all of us...

Forget 20 years, go out 50-100 years. Given a prior where we haven't annihilated the top of the food chain to give the planet a new shot at intelligent life...

We will have solved artificial intelligence and that's a game changer. It will create an age of limitless wealth. But what I wonder about is whether our hindbrains will insist on maintaining inequality in an age where everything is cheap and plentiful. And what will the AIs make of us?

Who cares about health care if there's cheap immortality? That's the best healthcare of them all. But will we make it generally available or will we try to attach artificial value to it as an entitlement?

And that's because once people stop dying from natural causes we're going to have a population problem. That means we're going to have to get off world.

That also means that climate change becomes irrelevant because if we can terraform Mars etc, then tweaking the climate of the Earth is trivial.

The one true god that has delivered on all of its promises is science and I don't think it's done delivering the good stuff. But it's also a wrathful and vengeful god in the wrong hands.

But even then, I'd rather live in the above future then in a future where we continue all of our petty squabbles over which nation state is the best. That's creating misery worldwide. We could end hunger and homelessness today for pennies on the dollar. But we refuse to do so in favor of a huge military and prison industrial complex. All that's doing for us IMO is giving other countries a chance to leapfrog us mid-21st century.

So I'd suggest you do as I am doing. Fight your own mortality to your dying breath and try to make a difference between now and your probably inevitable dirt nap because it might not be inevitable because we're heading for one hell of a phase transition (no singularity required).

I don't know how old you are but I'm a lot older than 41 as well. I am also stymied by the increasing tribalism in this country and I don't feel like a member of either major tribe. But I will admit there's a fine line between a wise elder and a crazy uncle at Thanksgiving. You sound like you started as the former but you're drifting towards the latter if you think you are entitled to respect simply because of your age.

My own frustration is that most of our so-called challenging problems have relatively simple solutions, but one or more of the above tribes will block those solutions so we go nowhere fast. That said, the world is a lot better than it was a hundred years ago. And if we ever collectively get our heads out of our butts and own our bipartisan $h!+, we can fix this. But I'm personally betting that won't happen until we get a moment of clarity delivered to us from China or India. And I'm not sure I'll still be above ground by then.

The funny thing for me is that if The Economist had just hacked the input into GPT-2 so that it was an ongoing conversation they would have found that it's OK at holding a conversation, better than I expected when I did so.

The conversation that I posted at:

https://medium.com/@scottlegrand/my-interview-with-the-world...

is performed in one shot. And I think it shows both the abilities and the limitations of GPT-2 and similar models. I am 100% role playing with the language model and prompting it to go in the directions it goes, but it surprised me several times, and eventually it all fell apart because I didn't perform any transfer learning on the model I just used the raw GPT-2 XL model to measure whether further work would be worth the effort and I would conclude yes it would be.

The first thing I need to do is dramatically increase the length of its input context. It's pretty good at running with an ensuing script because I suspect much of its training data was formatted that way. But since I ran out of context symbols, it eventually suffers from several incidents of amnesia and eventually effective multiple personality disorder. It also contradicts itself several times but then no more than the typical thought leader or politician does IMO.

What The Economist did was effectively erase the thing's memory between questions. So they were starting fresh with each question. And I think that's why they had to do the best of 5.

Usain Bolt chose his core competency wisely. Although it does imply hilarity would ensue from an all robot Olympics team (from the nation of 0 1 obviously), no?

I always thought Amazon would build a YouTube killer. They're really the only company perfectly placed to do so. And yet while I'm pretty sure they've talked about it they've never acted on it.

One can be obsessive about a thing without being offensive about that thing or anything else. I think you are equating two separate issues. Social awkwardness is just not the same thing as anti-social behaviour.

And in my industry experience, having an encyclopedic knowledge of an obscure subject around a bunch of imposters does not go well, doubly so if their career depends on convincing others that they have skills on par with yours despite never putting the time into acquiring them.

To me it's like they demand everyone be fungible when the real power move is using comparative advantage to build a winning team.

Interesting take on intelligence. It also explains why people who have such passion frequently end up "bad cultural fits(tm)" among those who don't.

Edit: I'm always surprised by which of my posts get the downvotes. Wonder whom I'm offending this time.

We certainly tend to fall into scripts and follow those scripts for many things in life. GPT-2 demonstrated how much online prose is glorified mad libbing IMO and yet it has no sense of a consistent long-term context nor do its articles make any sort of significant point. Reading its output is impressive but it reminds me of what I hear from someone with dementia.

that said I think if you made its context recurrent in some way between responses and queries you could probably build a really interesting chatbot that could ramble about just about anything and nothing but do so in a sufficiently coherent way to scare up venture capital. Just a guess but it is my guess.

When I was working on recommenders at Amazon. I didn't really perceive this as modeling the mind of some sort of Oracle.

Instead I saw it as a change of basis from the space of previous purchases to the space of recent purchases. That approach led to an entire AI framework and it still makes Amazon quite a bit of money annually apparently if Jeff Wilke's 2019 Re:MARS speech is to be believed.

I'd love to work on something more ambitious like AlphaGo or AlphaFold but those require tremendous resources and I'm really focused on bang for buck. But even then I'd see it as the marriage of classical search with modeling the probability of victory.

If someone says that the AGI is almost upon us I pretty much bozo bit them no matter how prestigious or fancy they may be otherwise.