trescenzi

Well in this case that’s a valid complaint. The tax code changes yearly. If the primary reason an llm can get through a return is because it’s been trained on some example returns then it’ll work for a year. Which I don’t disagree that’s useful if you can retrain yearly but it doesn’t mean the problem has been solved naively.

Natural language is an imprecise interface. It really ideally is the interface of last resort. If you have a straight line from problem to solution you do not need natural language. It’s only if there isn’t one that you do. And in that case the same sentence can mean different things to different people even those who are native speakers. The most obvious example to me is something like “next weekend” which is a term that can mean different things to different people at different times. But it’s a deeper problem than that.

The AI boom is happening because people what to believe that natural language is precise. Not because it’s actually an effective way to interface with everything.

That’s what I pay in Connecticut for electricity. I believe most of New England and California are in the price range.

I’ve got a Prius Prime and only at around $4+ a gallon does it start to become cheaper to charge than just use gas since the gas engine is so efficient.

A large study linked higher consumption of several *artificial* sweeteners to faster declines in memory and thinking skills.

Yea we saw an anonymous question “Are you using AI to be more efficient” start at 30/70 yes/no and flip to 90/10 after a mandate. I know that’s a very different question but it shows that anon questions are still directly influenced by everything else going on. Hopefully a question like the author recommends would be more accurate but I’d still expect a heavy influence based upon management’s stance.

In a piece that is making a persuasive argument facts are usually included to back up the argument. So I think it is fair to assume the author of the piece believes this is a key part of their argument, which they seem to also think given that it’s listed one of their two main points. The problem with that is it marks the rest of the article as clearly motivated. The claim that the rise in single parent households and those who do not speak English as a first is a _primary_ cause in lack of wealth amongst millennials and Gen Z is a wild one and difficult to back up.

Another comment shows how private school enrollment has held steady or declined since ‘75. However it is true that public school enrollment has partly been eaten away by charter schools. However charter schools are the most diverse as they are most likely to be found in larger cities. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/06/06/us-public...

So like the op commenter I too found it hard to trust the rest of the article. I’m deeply inclined to agree with the conclusions however such a clearly motivated list of statistics, regardless of truth, as the #2 factor turned me off of the rest of the piece.

This is something you could empirically study. Looks like this NASDAQ study from a few years back has some numbers. At 3 months, that’s what’s in their chart, it’s still about 50/50. At 3 years it’s 29% with returns greater than 10% and 69% with returns greater than -10%.

https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/what-happens-to-ipos-over-th...

It depends upon why you have issues with LLMs. If you’re just concerned about quality then sure the dissonance isn’t intolerable. If you’re concerned about their ethics then this becomes a much more challenging position to have.

There is a we though. Society might not act collectively or via central planning but culture can function as such to a degree. The culture in the US is currently that it is ethical to seek returns on your capital regardless the source. This didn’t always used to be the case and it doesn’t have to be the case.

It’s sort of all over the place but it’s mostly the other way round. The poles might see like +5-8c. It’s also the overall temperature. Today’s high temperature where I am is 33 and the low is 25. 33 isn’t super unusual, maybe a dozen days a year. 25 as a low though is crazy high even on days historically above 30. It all averages out to +whatever.

For temps by latitude/region this source seems ok on a quick search https://scied.ucar.edu/interactive/compare-climates-regional...

Hoot[1] already exists and does a very good job of running scheme in web assembly. Everything Spritely is working on is pretty cool.

1: https://spritely.institute/hoot/

There’s two kinds of Effective Altruism(EA). The kind Peter Singer and others promoted for decades and the kind that’s now part of Silicon Valley and finance. The Peter Singer kind basically just says “reduce the most suffering you can” and the cheapest way to maximize that is stuff like mosquito nets. That was all well and good.

When EA met Silicon Valley the basics of utilitarianism, minimize suffering, merged with the standard exponential curve that Silicon Valley loves. It went from mosquito nets prevent malaria for pennies to the future is infinite therefore there will always be more people in the future than the present so minimizing future peoples suffering is key. This is where it starts to combine with super intelligence. If there is a super intelligence that destroys humanity that would cause _maximum suffering_. Therefore the most effective way to reduce suffering is actually to prevent said super intelligence from destroying/torturing humanity. Again because there’s more future people than current people.

This is how it becomes Calvinist. The present has no value. Only the chosen, those working in AI, can save the future. And you must do everything you can to prevent said future.

It can go both ways. Either you believe ASI will always be bad so you believe work must be done to prevent it. Or you believe that ASI can be made good and the good kind will maximize utility. They are both the same though fundamentally and are a belief in a higher power, ASI, which either provides ultimate damnnation and must be averted or provides ultimate salvation and must be brought into existence.

If you’re donating mosquito nets or reading up on the best charities in your area that’s not Calvinist. If you’re devoting your life to AI because you believe that’s how you can be most altruistic it starts to look something like a religion and Calvinism is an imperfect but useful analog.

My stance is more that compute isn’t the limiting factor anymore. These models are useful if you’re a software dev. What we need is time to integrate these models in ways that are useful to normal people. I do not share the belief that if we keep expanding we’ll hit some magical limit where it’ll suddenly be a god and solve our problems.

It’s because speedometers aren’t showing a fraction of a whole. Analog clocks work by showing how far through the minute/hour/12 hour period you are. Speedometers are just sticks pointing at numbers. Analog speedometers do however do a better of representing your acceleration than digital ones because the speed of the dial does show acceleration.

Totally agree. One thing the AI bros believe though is that growth == useful. If you strongly believe that the larger the model the smarter it is then you think through growth we get AGI which implicitly is useful because reasons.

Yep this is why I prefer analog watches. They are much faster to internalize the time but slower to convert to numbers. Because it’s an abstraction I innately know as someone who learned to read them as a child they are very familiar and easy to read. You really only need the actual numbers when someone asks you for the time.

This is a large part of why I went with a Retroid Pocket over buying a Switch 2. It’s not nearly as powerful but it’ll run Linux and most indie games I buy on GOG. It’s more work of course but knowing that the games I buy I’ll be able to play into the future on any number of devices is worth it.

Huh what is dystopian about that? I’m just referencing how MMT prescribes to solve for inflation and the reality that it’s hard in a democracy to raise taxes.

Yea the covid money printing is regularly pointed to as a reason why MMT is clearly bad but that ignores that there’s literally a solution to this problem in MMT. Raise taxes to reclaim the money. It’s a trivial solution which is sadly politically incredibly challenging.

1999, 2006, 2010, 2011. There are others with multiple 100+ days but no others with 100+ in a row.

This is the source: https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/cdo-web/search?datasetid=GHCND

Not all of the stations have temp data so make sure you pick one with what you want.

I was curious how extreme this was in comparison to the past. I grew up near Philly so I looked at the Mount Holly historical data set. Since 1996, that’s the cutoff of the data I found, there’s been 4 summers with two 100+ days in a row in them. Zero instances of three in a row. Honestly it’s rare enough I didn’t believe it had ever been over 100. But it does seem like it’s a once every 10 or so years event. I’d already made plans to go to Florida. I guess I’m going there to avoid the heat this year.

Disclaimer: not trying to make a climate statement here just genuinely curious.

The level of trust in leadership is remarkable. There’s reasonable ways to have people try power tools. Have one team use power tools and another hand tools and see the outcome.

The mandate was literally “the more sawdust you create the more money you’ll make”. Nothing of value is learned by that mandate. Sure it’ll make people use power tools but it won’t cause anyone to learn how to use them to make furniture.

They might understand the danger of bad metric but that doesn’t mean they aren’t victims of them. If there was intentionality here it was lazy as hell at best.

Dangerous to whom exactly?

He’s not saying he has any of those experiences. He even qualifies it at the end with the bit about Oliver Twist. The point isn’t “I’m better than you” it’s that experience brings a different sort of knowledge than simply reading about things. And yes that knowledge is more complete simply by virtue of there being more to an experience than just reading about it.

We do multiple trips. A few long weekends, one one week, and one two week. The two week one we have to take it easy. I also backpack and ski and while Disney is obviously real cushy when you’re getting up at 6am every day and doing 25k steps it’s surprisingly exhausting.

That’s next level and might even be more than Disney adult. I spent a whole month last year at Disney Word and am doing it again this year but even I describe that as going too far.

I was replying to the comment not necessarily the article. The _not new_ was in reference to college grads not always having an easy time. That being said looking at the cited data I don't really know if I agree with the conclusion.

https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:...

While it is new, since 1990, that recent college grads are doing worse than all workers it's not the case that the degree is no longer a buffer. If you compare Young Workers(7.5%) to Recent College Grads(5.6%), i.e. the same age range, or All Workers(4.3%) to All College Grads(3.1%) as of today there's still a buffer.

Edit: They point this out later in the piece themselves

This isn’t really new. When I graduated in 2013 the barista with a college degree was a trope for a reason. Maybe 50% of my graduating CS class had a CS job within 6 months of graduating. Friends with other degrees spent years trying to find something in their field.

There is no independent "consciousness mechanism" that one might imagine humans have learned or evolved for its own sake.

There is nothing that a priori constrains token prediction from the domain of consciousness.

We don’t know either of these are true or false though. We simply don’t know. There is no agreed upon definition of consciousness, aside from maybe _the having of qualia_, so arguing that some can or cannot be conscious a priori can’t be done.

Every time I read one of these I’m impressed by the language server work. Gleam’s DX is so good.