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Damn, I hate to plug products on HN, but I'd say that the New Yorker is the one subscription I've loved maintaining throughout my life. First got it right out o
by zetazzed 4y ago
Damn, I hate to plug products on HN, but I'd say that the New Yorker is the one subscription I've loved maintaining throughout my life. First got it right out of college and appreciate it 20 years later.
Everyone is publishing think pieces about ChatGPT - yawn. But only the New Yorker said, hmm, how about if we get frickin' Ted Chiang to write a think piece? (It is predictably very well written.)
- thundergolfer 4y agoCertainly beats a Medium subscription, where you pay (more?) to read 95% garbage when compared with what's put in The New Yorker.
- ravenstine 4y agoI don't really like the New Yorker, but even I agree it's a way better deal than Medium. I can't remember the last time I read anything on Medium that wasn't mostly vacuous.
- arcanemachiner 4y agoThere are people out there that pay for Medium?
- donohoe 4y agoWholly agree. I worked there many years ago, leading the re-design and re-platform (fun dealing with 90 years of archival content with mixed usage-rights) and paywall implementation (don't hate me, it funds journalism). When you see how the stories get made and how people work there, well, its just amazing.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- msla 4y agoI notice that the extremists never use paywalls, meaning extremism is allowed to spread unchecked. If respectable newspapers and magazines cared about society, they'd follow suit, and give the extremists some competition.
- hjadal 4y agoI think respectable papers would go out of business if they followed suit. They are usually respectable because they dont rely on a outside organisation for funding, but instead rely on creating good journalism people want to pay for.
- hackernewds 4y agoThey also then have less motivation to rely on clicks. Like outlets on both sides have devolved to.
- wizofaus 4y agoThe Guardian would surely qualify as somewhat respectable and still paywall free...(I pay for it anyway, given I read it pretty regularly. It's only publications I read articles from maybe 3 or 4 times a year I have an issue with signing up for - would have no issue with a one-off payment if it was easy enough to do).
- macintux 4y agoI have yet to see any evidence that “sunlight disinfects” or that mainstream media can out-shout disinformation.
- gowld 4y agoThat's because the extremism is the advertisement. They get paid to inject garbage into your brain.
- majormajor 4y agoYou volunteering to pay for it?
- donohoe 4y ago
- somberi 4y agoI hear you. A few articles a year, such as this one, makes the 70ish dollars I cough up every year, worth it.
- euroderf 4y agoI've been tempted to subscribe. But I emailed them trying to find out what the price would be after the trial sub expired. They replied that they could not say. So it seems obvious (to me at least) that they segment renewals and charge what the market will bear.
- msla 4y ago[flagged]
- wg0 4y agoDamn too, actually. Reading the piece, I've been thinkking this publication really dserves to be subscribed to! Amazing write up. ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the internet.
- dwringer 4y agoIt is certainly one of the best and most concise ELI5 explanations I've seen.
- freediver 4y agoToo bad that this kind of writing is married to 31(!) ads/trackers on that page. Can the journalism like this really not survive without all that crap?
- wbobeirne 4y agoThey sell the perfect solution to this: a magazine.
- jraph 4y agoIt's not perfect because it's one time paper that takes spaces or goes to waste quickly. But it's indeed a good solution nonetheless.
- squeaky-clean 4y agoThe magazine still has ads in it, doesn't it? I'd rather they know my ip address rather than my mailing address.
- gowld 4y agoThey also have weekly cryptic crosswords that are cryptic enough to be interesting but as easy to completely solve as a regular crossword. (With cryptics, very good ones are also very hard.)
- wizofaus 4y agoJust don't try to use ChatGPT to help! (To be fair, it can be useful at general knowledge based clues, but certainly not ones relying on word play/anagrams etc.)
- msla 4y agoIf this article is the best the New Yorker offers now, I'm glad I don't subscribe. It used to have high-quality articles, certainly.
- PaulHoule 4y agoI thought the author was uncharacteristically perceptive for a reporter. Yann LeCun or Geoff Hinton couldn't have come up with a better analogy.
- hackernewds 4y agoAnalogy of?
- PaulHoule 4y ago"Blurry JPEG" for how ChatGPT "compresses" character-based knowledge into vectors. That "compression" process gives ChatGPT an ability to generalize because it learns statistics (unlike JPEG) but like JPEG it is a lossy process.
- nightski 4y agoIt's a terrible analogy because the entire point of ML systems is to generalize well to new data, not to reproduce the original data as accurate as possible with a space/time tradeoff.
- PaulHoule 4y agoThe thing is that generalization is good enough to make people squee and not notice that the output is wrong but not good enough to get the right answer. If it were going to produce ‘explainable’ correct answers for most of what it does that would be a matter of looking up the original sources to make sure they really say what it thinks they do. I mean, I can say, “there’s this paper that backs up my point” but I have to go look it up to get the exact citation at the very least.
- jrgaston 4y agoAgreed. I've subscribed to many a magazine in my long life. The New Yorker is the last one standing as it is excellent from cover to cover.
- passion__desire 4y agoIn his short story Understand, he talks about two superintelligent individuals who are having high bandwidth conversations. Maybe ChatGPT and Bard are those bespoke intelligent agents. https://web.archive.org/web/20140527121332/http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/under.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20140527121332/http://www.infini... We continue. We are like two BARDs, each cueing the other to extemporize another stanza, jointly composing an epic poem of knowledge. Within moments we accelerate, talking over each other's words but hearing every nuance, until we are absorbing, concluding, and responding, continuously, simultaneously, synergistically.
- galleywest200 4y agoFor anybody who does not want to pay, your taxes likely already pay for a subscription you can use from your local library on the Libby app. King and Snohomish counties in Washington provide unlimited digital copies of The New Yorker and The Economist as an example.
- msla 4y agoAfter reading the article, it is obviously a publicity piece for the author, and not to be taken seriously. Is that the best the New Yorker can offer?
- sdwr 4y agoInteresting that it's such a conservative, opinion-less, air-tight piece. Guess its his technical writing background coming through.