timoth3y

frustratingly difficult to even get through the first lesson in which you are supposed to focus on your breath and minimize the wandering of your mind

Everyone experiences this. Please don't be frustrated by it.

The mind wandering is part of the practice. In fact, that instant where your mind has been wandering and you "snap out of it" is perhaps the most valuable.

That little skill carries over into real life. When someone cuts you off in traffic and you feel that flash of anger, your mind will catch itself and you'll just let it go and get on with your life.

You're probabably already doing things right.

A good article about a genuinely great and important book. One quibble.

Lukashenka knew that arresting children for eating ice cream would make him a laughingstock abroad. Zuckerberg knows that threatening Wynn-Williams for standing in wooden silence on a stage makes him look like history's most guillotineable billionaire.

I don't think they think that. People this powerful who choose to surround themselves with fawning sycophants are undoubtably being told daily that the whole world is understanding and routing for them in their "perfectly reasonable response to these vicious attacks."

FWIW, I've just published this interview with David Ha an hour ago.

We talk in detail about Fugu and why these kind of routing models are likely to win out over the big frontier models.

He makes some very good arguments for them.

https://www.disruptingjapan.com/the-future-of-ai-looks-very-...

Said experts do not seem to have included this core analysis in the report.

Since housing starts are more likely in areas seeing rapid housing price appreciation, and construction employs many illegal workers, you could make just as strong of a case that increased housing costs drive unauthorized migration rather than the other way around.

That's why it's so hard, and so important, to disentangle correlation and causation.

The research is impressive in its granularity.

However, they seem to simply assert causality. It would seem far more likely that people (illegal or not) move to areas experiencing economic booms that, among other things, is push up home prices.

Palantir is clearly a mind-boggling on-the-nose, but terrible name to those familiar with the book.

The Palantiri consistently provided their users technically accurate intelligence that lead to disastrous strategic decisions.

Denethor committed suicide out of despair, after a palantir showed him the black fleet approaching, but he did not know that it was actually Aragorn who had captured the fleet and was coming with reinforcements.

We don't know specifically how the palantir deceived Saruman, but it's pretty clear it was one of the key factors in his corruption and downfall.

And even Sauron himself was misled in this way! The palantir showed him, correctly, that a hobbit and Aragorn were at Helm's Deep, and he concluded that Aragorn had the ring. So he prematurely moved his armies out of Mordor and left the plains and Mt Doom unguarded, which permitted the destruction of the ring.

I honestly can't think of a worse name for a company that provides intel for strategic decision making.

"if the product is free, you are the product"

This is not true. You are the product whether you are paying or not.

If the company thinks they can make money by selling your data/attention/access, they will do so. Paying them does not stop them from monetizing you.

These new paid tiers will be slowly enshitified just like most modern paid plans.

There’s a fallacy that gets used a whole lot to justify things like this ...

FWIW, this is the Fallacy of Composition

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_composition

The Luddites (or at least their successors) won, and we are lucky that they did.

I recently published an article about the Luddites. If you look at their actual demands, they were not anti-tech. They were labor activists. Life got much, much worse for most people in the industrial revolution until the laws they advocated were finally implemented.

https://www.disruptingjapan.com/the-real-luddites-would-have...

If you look at what their actual demands, the pattern is clear. They lobbied for support for unemployed, the right to vote, improved safely and labor conditions across all industries, and enforcing the labor laws that were already on the books. Banning machines was not part of their demands.

The Luddites were part of a larger labor movement that spanned multiple industries.

I think that is the core truth of the matter. Technology itself does not make life better.

I recently published an article about the Luddites. If you look at their actual demands, they were not anti-tech. They were labor activists. Life got much, much worse for most people in the industrial revolution until the laws they advocated were finally implemented.

https://www.disruptingjapan.com/the-real-luddites-would-have...

This will be just another minor cost of doing business unless they are treated like human drivers in at least two other ways.

1) If theses companies get enough points on their license, their license is revoked. Not just for that vehicle, but for all of their vehicles. (The number of points would need to be adjusted for number of miles driven.)

2) Senior executives could be held criminally liable for vehicular manslaughter the way a normal drivers are. A death doesn't mean someone is going to prison, but their would be a police investigation. If an exec decided to ship a product with a known bug that lead to someone's death it should be treated with the same seriousness as a drunk driver killing someone.

I used to be a professional musician, and I can't work if there is any music playing the the background. It drove my ex-wife nuts because she could not stand the silence. We ended up playing background sounds from coffee shops, which worked for both of us.

But recently there is one big exception!

I can listen to AI-generated instrumental jazz or blues in the background, and it does not distract me after the first few seconds. I think it's because the music doesn't go anywhere. It's just kind of noodling.

As a musician, I feel kind of bad listening to AI music, but it is amazing in this use case.

talk is cheap, so what is he doing today to make that happen? Is he supporting NGOs or politicians focused on making this happen, or is he just musing that it would be nice? (I honestly don't know, but I've only seen the non-committal musing.)

There is this ongoing flack in our "billionaire-said-a-thing" news where billionaires imply that their tech will result in huge benefits that will be delivered by someone else once they amass their fortunes.

Musk is the most obvious. He publicly proclaims his mission to create technology that ensures we all live better, healthier lives, while routinely violating labor, safety, and environmental laws and insisting his employees work 60-hour weeks with minimal vacation in order to give him a shot at becoming the world’s first trillionaire.

I wish the press would push back once in a while.

If you look at their actual demands its clear the the Luddites were not actually opposed to the new technology, but the new business practices.

It's an interesting parallel to AI today, where criticism of the business practices of AI firms tends to be written of as fear of new technology by people who will be "left behind".

People are not willing to sacrifice their freedom to save 40,990 people from cars, why should our constant locations be monitored?

It's not binary.

People are absolutely willing to sacrifice some of their freedoms to save lives. That's why we have speed limits, seat-belt and helmet laws, automobile safety regulations, DWI laws, etc.

A unicode explorer that shows you graphically similar characters.

for work requiring Japanese

This only applies to jobs that require Japanese proficiency. The vast majority of engineering and specialist visa will not be affected.

It's not unreasonable that a person applying for a job that requires language proficiency be able to demonstrate said proficiency.

I thought about that as well. It's certainly a concern.

In the end I decided that the concrete benefits from giving Anthropic access to this kind of data outweigh the potential risks. Granted, they might be banking on me making this exact, naieve calculation, but still.

The saving grace of the SP500 and most similar indexes is that they are cap-weighted. So if SpaceX only, floats 5% only that 5% of their capitalization counts for index calculation.

The Nasdaq100 is more complicated. SpaceX's 5% would be counted as about 25% of their total market cap for indexing.

A Multitudes study recently cited in Scientific American showed exactly this.

AI led to not only longer hours overall, but also a shift from development to bug fixing and a 19.6% increase in out-of-hour commits. So longer hours, less interesting tasks, and more weekend work.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-developers-us...

Every few years a bill is introduced requiring profitable companies to pay additional taxes to cover the cost of the SNAP (food stamp) benefits received by their employers.

Lobbying ensures such proposals never gets far, but it seems like a common sense way of ensuring that these funds subsidize people rather than corporations.

A Google survey of 5,000 developers finds AI helps developers release more software—while logging longer hours and fixing problems after the code goes live.

It seems that LLMs always do the enjoyable work and leave us with the drudgery.

It was supposed to do the dishes while we create art and write poetry, but it turns it gets to create the art and poetry while we wash the dishes. AU gets to write the code while we have to review it and fix the bugs.

William Shatner is someone I really wish I could dislike. I mean, he is certainly not a conventionally talented singer or actor. He's laughably, painfully bad sometimes.

But the man keeps going! He's one of the hardest working people in show business. He clearly takes his craft very seriously, even if he defines it a bit differently from the rest of world.

The Wrath of Khan has no business being as great a movie as it is, and his version of Common People is fantastic.

I'm sure this collaboration will be .... something else.

== Edit I'm sure I am over-analyzing this - I do that with everything - but Common People is actually "perfect" Shatner.

When you start listening, you feel "OK, this is lame." After a bit it clicks and it becomes "Oh! I see what they are trying to do here." and by the end it becomes "Damn! This is awesome."

Shatner doesn't change throughout the performance, but everything just falls into place around him.

The article fundamentally misrepresents what AI is doing.

It claims that people using AI to create works that violate copyright is equivalent to individual artists painting pictures or people writing fan fiction. But that is not at all what is happening.

OpenAI and others are taking money from customers to generate copyrighted works. That's back-letter copyright infringement.

The states that it is unreasonable to go after all the individual customers. That's true, but that's not how copyright law has ever been enforced. If you have a company selling copyrighted works without permission, you go after that company not after their customers.

Many of the original Loony Toons and Warner Brothers cartoons fall into this category.

The reason they were produced from the 1930s to 50s was to be run in movie theaters before the main picture. Since they would run before different kinds of movies they had to entertain both kids and adults. Some of the humor in those cartoons clearly went way over the kinds heads.

It was only later that they were bundled as TV shows for children.

Can you walk me though some of the insights you gained? I've read several of those books, including Kitchen Confidential and Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, and I don't see the connection that the LLM (or you) is trying to draw. What is the deeper insight into these works that I am missing?

I'm not familiar with he term "Pacemaker Principle" and Google search was unhelpful. What does it mean in this context? What else does this general principle apply to?

I'm perfectly willing to believe that I am missing something here. But reading thought many of the supportive comments, it seems more likely that this is an LLM Rorschach test where we are given random connections and asked to do the mental work of inventing meaning in them.

I love reading. These are great books. I would be excited if this tool actually helps point out connections that have been overlooked. However, it does not seem to do so.

What meaningful connections did it uncover?

You have an interesting idea here, but looking over the LLM output, it's not clear what these "connections" actually mean, or if they mean anything at all.

Feeding a dataset into an LLM and getting it to output something is rather trivial. How is this particular output insightful or helpful? What specific connections gave you, the author, new insight into these works?

You correctly, and importantly point out that "LLMs are overused to summarise and underused to help us read deeper", but you published the LLM summary without explaining how the LLM helped you read deeper.

I think if we are going to ban people under 16 from social media, we should also ban people over 70 from social media.

At least as much mental and societal damage is done by elderly falling for bigoted, scammy, manipulative nonsense online than by teenagers having their self-esteem lowered.

As recent holiday gatherings have shown us, the young handle social media far better then the elderly.

/s

I think a lot of this has to do with the explosion of CEO (and by extension CxO) pay over the past 30 years.

Today, a CEO can turn in a few quarters of really solid earnings growth, they can earn enough to retire to a life a private jets. Back when CxO pay was lower, the only way to make that kind of bank was to claw your way into the top job and stay there for a decade or more.

The current situation strongly incentivizes short-term thinking.

With today's very high, option-heavy compensation a CEO making long-term investments in the company rather than cutting staff and doing stock buybacks is taking money out of his own pocket.

It's a perverse incentive.