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throwuwu

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The evolutionary record is piled high with the bones of extinct species, extinctions caused by changes in the environment or by other species. We are not unique, we are just one of many millions of species to find a way to rapidly outcompete others but the difference is that we often choose not to. So far we can’t even hold a candle to the humble cyanobacteria in terms of wanton destruction of their environment and all life on the planet when they evolved the ability to photosynthesize. Similar though less dramatic events have likely occurred with each major evolutionary adaptation that allows a species to exploit something not available to others. For us it’s intelligence but for others it was eyes, fins, teeth, legs, claws, etc. all leaving a path of destruction and allowing the possessors of such traits to multiply and differentiate until their unique attributes are now the common necessities for survival.

Yes because the greedy capitalists will obviously keep this valuable technology all to themselves, hoarding it away so they alone can revel in its delights. Give me a break, this isn’t 1924, we know how things actually play out. The capitalists want to sell you a product and that is fundamentally at odds with hoarding beneficial technology. They will deliver those benefits straight to your door faster, cheaper and better than any socialized pipedream ever could. If you somehow seize these means I have no doubt they’ll only be available to top party members due to their great expense and the considered opinion that the average worker has no need for such tools in their assigned role.

UBI won’t happen but the price of most goods and services will fall to a tiny fraction of what they are now. There will still be people who are considered impoverished but they’ll likely have a higher standard of living than you do.

I hate this framing of humanity as a “fundamentally destructive species” it’s a meaningless sound that people make with zero serious thought given to it. Exactly which species are not destructive? All animal life must consume other life in order to survive and exactly zero of them have any inhibition that would prevent them from maximizing their consumption and reproduction at the expense of all other life if they could. Humans are the only species that cares at all what happens to other forms of life and makes efforts at our own expense to limit or temper our impact. The only reason the world around you seems even remotely safe and comfortable is due to thousands of years of sustained human effort to make it so.

If you really want to make more work, blow up budgets and create positions for masses of developers and assistants then you should demand we go back to punch cards and doing all the planning and algorithm design on paper before we translate it to instructions and hand it off to computer operators.

If it makes you feel better, the AI will write all the code for the tests and come up with all the variations and do all the fuzzing to try to break things. You’ll just have to do a good job of explaining the requirements to it and adjusting them as it becomes clear you didn’t fully describe the outcome you wanted the first time around.

Because we’d rather be living in a world where textiles are so cheap to produce that everyone can afford to clothe themselves however they want and even the working poor can furnish their homes with upholstered furniture and own more than one towel, blanket, sheets, pillows, and have rugs, mats, carpets, etc. not to even mention all the other woven stuff that isn’t even possible to do by hand along with all the other technologies birthed from the very smart idea of automating a tool that was previously only operated by hand. I don’t know about you but I certainly don’t want to go to my grave bent over this loom.

Steps 2 and 4 through 8 are what this implementation along with others like Devin are doing. 1, 3, and 9 may have surprise answers when a reliable system can produce a working app/website/tool in a matter of minutes. If that’s possible then clients can just keep prompting and checking the results and iterating on changes until they get what they want just like people using Midjourney do to get the idea they have in their head transformed into an image. Things change a lot when apps become so quick, easy and cheap to create that you can try out a hundred variations and modifications in a day.

Jobs aren’t distributed out of some cookie jar. They are needs and wants and obligations that other people will pay to have fulfilled or taken off their hands. Figure out how to solve those problems and you’ll have all the work you could ever ask for.

Move to a higher level of abstraction and architecture. We’re leaving the era of hand wiring data structures and program logic the same way we left behind the era of hand wiring ICs and discrete components. Different skills will be needed.

What makes you so sure that problem solving and invention aren’t just engineering challenges that we can solve by combining LLMs with well designed algorithms? The way I see it, we’ve just discovered something fundamental like steam power or electricity and we’re currently in the very inefficient stage of brute force solutions like mine pumps driven by condensing engines that needed tonnes of cheap readily available coal and arc lamps running off an entire room full of galvanic piles. In other words, we’re just throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks; but stick it will and then we’ll quickly be on to locomotives and lightbulbs.

You’ve never made a mistake in your reasoning?

Tongue in cheek but this has been considered and has resulted in experiments like tree of thought and various check your work and testing approaches. Thinking step by step is really just another way of saying make a plan or use an algorithm and when humans do either they need to periodically re-evaluate what they’ve done so far and ensure it’s correct.

The trick is training the model to do this as a matter of course and to learn which tool to apply at the right time which is what the paper is about wrt interspersed thoughts.

Your definition is incomplete:

an MVP is the smallest subset of useful features to take the product to market in order to prove or disprove its viability

and the reason you want to keep it to the minimum is to minimize the time and money invested in it so that you can throw it away if it doesn’t work and then try a different product. You’ll probably have to do this several times before succeeding so your budget for each should be about 1/10th of your available time and money.

Exactly, they’ve reached feature parity with large expendable launch systems so they can piggyback paying customers with a high risk threshold (starlink) on flights they’d be doing anyways. Given their cadence this phase won’t last long, they’ll likely achieve at least one successful landing next flight.

If they passed a law requiring US companies operating in Europe to divest their ownership in those subsidiaries or be banned from operating there then that would be their right as a government. Isn’t the EU rather famous at the moment for forcing foreign businesses to comply with their laws and regulations? e.g. GDPR

You need a data centre if you want to run the bleeding edge SOTA models but the weights of these models are fixed which means it should be possible to instantiate them in hardware and once you have a model smart enough to do most things you’d be crazy not to build a factory to churn out little boxes that you can connect to literally anything to give it a natural language interface and useful levels of intelligence. Mark my words: your doorbell will have an LLM in it in less than 10 years.

On a tidally locked planet the polar region is effectively the terminator line. There is also a greatly reduced Coriolis effect due to the very slow rotation. The insolation of the day side is a lot higher as mentioned in the article and is continuous rather than intermittent. All of that would lead to increased convection. Imagine the difference between a kettle being heated on a burner vs a kettle being heated by a blowtorch that rotates around it. The behaviour of the fluid in each will be quite different. Not a perfect model by any stretch of the imagination but maybe more intuitive.

I like this a lot. We need more hard records of personal correspondence. It would be cool to do this as a service.

Honestly when I read the title I thought it was going to be about using message history as a basis for generating a narrative account of the events using an LLM.

The point is to not be some random person you’ve never seen before suddenly talking to you. You don’t start out talking to every person that walks through the door. First you have to establish yourself as “that person who’s always here on Tuesday at lunch”. You don’t do anything other than make eye contact and smile. If someone you see regularly seems friendly and has established a habit of smiling back or nodding when you do then make a point to talk to them if you find yourself standing in line with them or sitting near each other. Just comment on something ordinary like the weather or some nonpolitical event in the news. If you don’t strike up a conversation then don’t force it but be aware of their body language and if they seem comfortable with the interaction then do the same thing the next day you run into them. After a couple interactions you can make a point to say hi to them when you see them next and ask how they are if they don’t seem busy or in a rush. Eventually you’ll strike up a proper conversation and you can introduce yourself by name. After that it’s just a matter of saying hello and asking about the things they express interest in and finding things in common.

It sounds really weird to write it all out but this is just how it works. Familiarity leads to social interaction and you need to be consistent about it if you don’t want it to peter out.

It should also be said that if someone is not comfortable with any stage of this then it’s best to leave them be.

That’s still a shortsighted view, regardless of human activity or presence other species will continuously go extinct including mass extinctions. That’s the entire history of life, evolution and extinction. The only way to intentionally prevent extinctions is with human intervention but humanity has to be around and technologically advanced and rich enough to do such things. It’s one of those put your own oxygen mask on first situations.