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Interview with gwern
- rahidz 2y agoTheir voice sounds so realistic, that unlike the avatar, my monkey brain is not fathoming it being unreal.
- madcaptenor 2y agoFrom https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/gwern-branwen https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/gwern-branwen: "In order to protect Gwern's anonymity, I proposed interviewing him in person, and having my friend Chris Painter voice over his words after. This amused him enough that he agreed."
- Vecr 2y agoTechnically he's pseudonymous. I don't know if he always had the (fictional) last name "Branwen", but I have records of "gwern" (all lowercase) going way back. And yes I'm pretty sure it was the same person. He says he has collaborators under the "Gwern" name now, but the main guy is the main guy and it's unlikely he could hide it. How many citations for "Branwen 2018" are on the ArXiv now?
- robinhouston 2y agoIt's been a bumper week for interesting podcast interviews with an AI theme! In addition to this, there are Lex Fridman's series of interviews with various key people from Anthropic [0], and a long discussion between Stephen Wolfram and Eliezer Yudkowsky on the theme of AI risk [1]. 0. https://youtu.be/ugvHCXCOmm4 https://youtu.be/ugvHCXCOmm4 1. https://youtu.be/xjH2B_sE_RQ https://youtu.be/xjH2B_sE_RQ
- sva_ 2y agoI found the conversation between Wolfram and Yudkowsky hard to listen to. In fact, I didn't make it to the half. The arguments presented by both were sort of weak and uninteresting?
- tim333 2y agoYeah, and I thought Altman + Tan was good https://youtu.be/xXCBz_8hM9w https://youtu.be/xXCBz_8hM9w
- natch 2y agoI'm only half way through that and it IS good, but I wish they wouldn't burn so much valuable time on recaps of the history that has already been told in so many other interviews, and get on to talking about the real changes we should expect going forward.
- Quinzel 2y agoI don’t believe Gwern lives as frugally as he’s described in this (if this even actually is the real Gwern). I’m 100% sure that he has a persona he likes to portray and being perceived as frugal is a part of that persona. When it comes to answering the question “who is gwern?” I reckon Gwern’s a plant a seed in people’s mind type of guy, and let them come up with the rest of the story. Still, I like a lot of his writing. Especially the weird and niche stuff that most people don’t even stop to think about. And thanks to Gwern’s essay on the sunk costs fallacy, I ended up not getting a tattoo that I had changed my mind about. I almost got it because I had paid a deposit, but I genuinely decided I hated the idea of what I was going to get… and almost got it, but the week before I went to get the tattoo, I read that essay, and decided if small children and animals don’t fall victim to sunk costs, then neither should I! Literally - Gwern saved the skin on my back with his writing. Haha.
- mbustamanter 2y agoThere is a comment on the r/slatestarcodex subreddit with supposedly true information about him (which I found googling 'who is gwern'), but it left me with even more questions. EDIT: grammar
- dewey 2y agoThere's some articles on his site about these attempts and they claim that they are all wrong. If it would be that "easily found" I'd guess we wouldn't be having these discussions: https://gwern.net/blackmail#pseudonymity-bounty https://gwern.net/blackmail#pseudonymity-bounty
- tectec 2y agoCan you link the comment here?
- scarmig 2y agoThat comment is just a fanciful flight of whimsy. > Gwern was the first patient to successfully complete a medical transition to the gender he was originally assigned at birth... his older brother died of a Nuvigil overdose in 2001... his (rather tasteful) neck tattoo of the modafinil molecule The only concrete things we know about gwern are that he's a world-renowned breeder of Maine Coons and that he is the sole known survivor of a transverse cerebral bifurcation. He does have a neck tattoo, but it's actually a QR code containing the minimal weights to label MNIST at 99% accuracy.
- A_D_E_P_T 2y agowww.gwern.net Something I've noticed in spending time online is that there's a "core group" of a few dozen people who seem to turn up everywhere there are interesting discussions. Gwern (who also posts here) is probably at the top of that list.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- scarmig 2y agoThere have been multiple times where I read a comment somewhere; thought to myself, wow, this guy is brilliant, let me see who wrote it so I can see if there are other things they've written; and, lo and behold, gwern.
- A_D_E_P_T 2y agoYeah. Nick Szabo used to show up a lot, too.
- satvikpendem 2y agoAnalogous to the 1% Rule [0]: > In Internet culture, the 1% rule is a general rule of thumb pertaining to participation in an Internet community, stating that only 1% of the users of a website actively create new content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk. Variants include the 1–9–90 rule (sometimes 90–9–1 principle or the 89:10:1 ratio),[1] which states that in a collaborative website such as a wiki, 90% of the participants of a community only consume content, 9% of the participants change or update content, and 1% of the participants add content. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule
- falcor84 2y agoI don't know what the current HN usage stats are, but assume you would still need to explain about 3 additional orders of magnitude to get from 1% of HN down to "a few dozen".
- nprateem 2y agoHow we're using confirmation bias to credit one out of 8 billion people with special skills.
- Matticus_Rex 2y agoNew to the deeper internet? Just about anyone who has been aware of gwern for long comes to believe he's got some special skills, even if they disagree with him. He's a niche celebrity entirely for being insightful and interesting.
- nprateem 2y agoWhat's the Internet?
- selfhoster11 2y agoIf nothing else, the tech used for Gwern's website is positively inspiring for knowledge organisation system geeks. It's really cool and unique.
- resiros 2y ago>Wait if you’re doing $900-1000/month and you’re sustaining yourself on that, that must mean you’re sustaining yourself on less than $12,000 a year. What is your lifestyle like at $12K?" >I live in the middle of nowhere. I don't travel much, or eat out, or have health insurance, or anything like that. I cook my own food. I use a free gym. There was this time when the floor of my bedroom began collapsing. It was so old that the humidity had decayed the wood. We just got a bunch of scrap wood and a joist and propped it up. If it lets in some bugs, oh well! I live like a grad student, but with better ramen. I don't mind it much since I spend all my time reading anyway. Not sure what to think of that. On one hand, it's so impressive that gwern cares only about the intellectual pursuit. On the other hand, it's sad that society does not reward it as much as excel sheet work.
- camillomiller 2y agoOr maybe, you know, that is not true and it’s part of a character?
- resiros 2y agoCould be, but he does not strike as someone who is looking for fame. Plus the whole discussion about why he would like to move to SF but can't seems pretty authentic.
- blairbeckwith 2y agoIf you want to maintain anonymity, building a character with false traits could be a part of that with no desire for fame.
- wslh 2y agoI don’t know Gwern (except for a small donation I made!), but I truly believe people can be that frugal if their inner self is satisfied. By the way, my father is an artist who feels completely fulfilled living a bohemian lifestyle, selling his work in two art markets and enjoying a vibrant social life there, even without fame.
- 2y ago
- camillomiller 2y agoI really don’t understand why we give credit to this pile of wishful thinking about the AI corporation with just one visionary at the top. First: actual visionary CEOs are a niche of a niche. Second: that is not how most companies work. The existence of the workforce is as important as what the company produces Third: who will buy or rent those services or products in a society where the most common economy driver (salaried work) is suddenly wiped out? I am really bothered by these systematic thinkers whose main assumption is that the system can just be changed and morphed willy nilly as if you could completely disregard all of the societal implications. We are surrounded by “thinkers” who are actually just glorified siloed-thinking engineers high on their own supply.
- whiplash451 2y agoSomeone probably said the exact same thing when the first cars appeared. Where is the data showing that more jobs get destroyed than created by technological disruption?
- passwordoops 2y agoThere is no data, just hyperbole from those same "visionaries" who keep claiming their stochastic parrots will replace everyone's jobs and we therefore need UBI
- camillomiller 2y agoDidn’t say that. If you posit that the future of the corporation is having a visionary CEO with a few minion middle managers and a swath of AI employees, then tell me, what do you do with the thousands of lost and no longer existing salaried jobs? Or are you saying that the future is a multitude of corporations of one? We can play with this travesties of intellectual discourse as long as you like, but we’re really one step removed from some stoners’ basement banter
- satvikpendem 2y ago> Someone probably said the exact same thing when the first cars appeared. Without saying anything regarding the arguments for or against AI, I will address this one sentence. This quote is an example of an appeal to hypocrisy in history fallacy, a form of the tu quoque fallacy. Just because someone criticizes X and you compare it to something else (Y) from another time does not mean that the criticism of X is false. There is survivorship bias as well because we now have cars, but in reality, you could've said this same criticism against some other thing that failed, but you don't, because, well, it failed and thus we don't remember it anymore. The core flaw in this reasoning is that just because people were wrong about one technology in the past doesn't mean current critics are wrong about a different technology now. Each technology needs to be evaluated on its own merits and risks. It's actually a form of dismissing criticism without engaging with its substance. Valid concerns about X should be evaluated based on current evidence and reasoning, not on how people historically reacted to Y or any other technology.
- nutanc 2y agoExperimenting with creating semantic chunks of large podcasts. Got the following chunks, https://gist.github.com/nutanc/a9e6321649be5ea9806b4450b0bd6552 https://gist.github.com/nutanc/a9e6321649be5ea9806b4450b0bd6... Dwarkesh has 18 splits. https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/i/151435243/timestamps https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/i/151435243/timestamps I got 171. So roughly 9 context discussions in one time stamp.
- maujim 2y agoWhat did you use to create the chunks?
- nutanc 2y agoIt's a new approach I am experimenting with. https://gpt3experiments.substack.com/p/a-new-chunking-approach-to-rag https://gpt3experiments.substack.com/p/a-new-chunking-approa...
- maujim 2y agoInteresting approach. Have you tried using existing clustering algorithms to determine the chunks instead of using distance or slope as a measure?
- throw05678931 2y agoLots of the claims about Gwern in the intro are exaggerated. Gwern is an effective altruist and his influence is largely limited to that community. It would be an exaggeration to claim that he influenced the mainstream of AI and ML researchers -- certainly Hinton, LeCun, Ng, Bengio didn't need him to do their work. He influences the AI safety crowd, who have ironically been trying to build AGI to test their AI safety ideas. Those people are largely concentrated at Anthropic now, since the purge at OpenAI. They are poorly represented at major corporate AI labs, and cluster around places like Oxford and Cal. The EAs' safety concerns are a major reason why Anthropic has moved so much slower than its competitors, and why Dario is having trouble raising the billions he needs to keep going, despite his media blitz. They will get to AGI last, despite trying to be the good guys who are first to invent god in a bottle. By the same token, Dwarkesh is either EA or EA adjacent. His main advertiser for this episode is Jane Street, the former employer of the world's most notorious EA, Sam Bankman-Fried as well as Caroline Ellison. Dwarkesh previously platformed his friend Leopold Aschenbrenner, who spent a year at OAI before he wrote the scare piece "Situation Report" made the rounds. Leopold is also semi-technical at best. A wordcel who gravitated to the AI narrative, which could describe many EAs. People outside of AI and ML, please put Dwarkesh in context. He is a partisan and largely non-technical. The way he interfaces with AI is in fantasizing about how it will destroy us all, just as he and Gwern do in this interview. It's sad to see people who are obviously above average intelligent waste so much time on this.
- Vecr 2y ago"Wordcel" is roon terminology, right? I highly doubt Aschenbrenner is an EA, and if he's a "wordcel" he somehow managed to do mathematical economics without too much problem. Gwern's probably not a "wordcel" either, he can program, right? I've never seen any of his publications though. It's called Situational Awareness too, not "Situation Report", and Yudkowsky said he didn't like it. Not that Yudkowsky is an EA either. I think the situation is more complex than you think it is, or at least more complex than you're pretending. Edit: oh, you're saying Gwern is an EA too? Do you have a source for that?
- adiabatty 2y ago
- uxhacker 2y ago[flagged]
- xk_id 2y agoPlease stop spamming computer generated text
- automatic6131 2y agoI don't think this science fiction writer deserves the credit of someone who is studying and/or influencing the real world > You have one Steve Jobs-type at the helm, and then maybe a whole pyramid of AIs out there executing it and bringing him new proposals Very interesting in a short story (or a side quest in Cyberpunk 2077 - yeah that one). Not so much for a description of our future.
- dewey 2y agoInteresting idea with the avatar, but I feel like just having a voice and some audio waves would be better than trying to create a talking avatar. Could just be my personal preference of not having a mental image of someone unknown I guess? Similar to reading a book after watching the movie adaptation.
- djmips 2y agoHow about just listening to the interview then?
- dewey 2y agoI'm aware of that possibility but I don't mind watching the other interviewer and I'm also not sure if there's something being shown (screenshots etc.) after the first few minutes I watched. I know it's probably a "me problem" ;)
- luke-stanley 2y agoIt does make me wonder what easy way to do ML assisted shot / person detection and `blanking` is. I'm just gonna point out there is a nerd snipe danger here ;D Although the avatar tool is probably not SOTA, I thought the 3D model was a really cool way to deal with interviewing Gwern, I am quite enjoying the current video.
- admksx45v65uqpw 2y ago[dead]
- michaelt 2y agoIt seemed weird to me too. In my country, when TV series are interviewing anonymous people they use specific visual language - pixellated face, or facing away from the camera, or face clad in shadow. Having an actor voice the words is normal. But having an actor showing the anonymous person's face is an... unusual choice.
- 2y ago
- mola 2y agoEverything I read from gwern has this misanthropic undertones. It's hard to put a finger on it exactly, but it grits me when I try reading him. It is also kinda scary that so many people are attracted to this. It rhymes with how I feel about Ayn Rand. Her individualism always seems so misanthropic, her adherants scare me
- herculity275 2y agoI'm not entirely sure what you're referring to, but pretty much every major 20th century intellectual had misanthropic undertones (and sometimes overtones) - people who read/think/write an exceptional amount don't tend to be super people-loving.
- southernplaces7 2y agoThat should depend on what you read. There's more than enough in the history of our species and in books about us to make someone love humanity too, at least conceptually if not in daily practice.
- awanderingmind 2y agoI've never really experienced that from his writing, and I am definitely not an Ayn Rand fan. I'm also pretty sure he's not interested in creating a movement that could have 'adherents'... I suppose I could be wrong on that. But on the contrary, I find his writing to be often quite life-affirming - he seems to delight in deep focus on various interesting topics. The worst I can say is that I find his predictions around AI (i.e. the scaling laws) to be concerning. edit: having now read the linked interview, I can provide a clearly non-misanthropic quote, in response to the interviewer asking gwern what kind of role he hopes to play in people's lives: I would like people to go away having not just been entertained or gotten some useful information, but be better people, in however slight a sense. To have an aspiration that web pages could be better, that the Internet could be better: “You too could go out and read stuff! You too could have your thoughts and compile your thoughts into essays, too! You could do all this!”
- Tenoke 2y ago
- dbacar 2y agoWho says Gwern is even human?
- pizza 2y agoI think I might have heard so from Nicolas Bourbaki
- Metacelsus 2y agoI met him at a Slate Star Codex meetup in 2018 and at a conference in 2022.
- 7thpower 2y agoHow do you know?
- keiferski 2y agoBy writing, you are voting on the future of the Shoggoth using one of the few currencies it acknowledges: tokens it has to predict. If you aren't writing, you are abdicating the future or your role in it. If you think it's enough to just be a good citizen, to vote for your favorite politician, to pick up litter and recycle, the future doesn't care about you. These AI predictions never, ever seem to factor in how actual humans will determine what AI-generated media is successful in replacing human-ones, or if it will even be successful at all. It is all very theoretical and to me, shows a fundamental flaw in this style of "sit in a room reading papers/books and make supposedly rational conclusions about the future of the world." A good example is: today, right now, it is a negative thing for your project to be known as AI-generated. The window of time when it was trendy and cool has largely passed. Having an obviously AI-generated header image on your blog post was cool two years ago, but now it is passé and marks you as behind the trends. And so for the prediction that everything get swept up by an ultra-intelligent AI that subsequently replaces human-made creations, essays, writings, videos, etc., I am doubtful. Just because it will have the ability to do so doesn't mean that it will be done, or that anyone is going to care. It seems vastly more likely to me that we'll end up with a solid way of verifying humanity – and thus an economy of attention still focused on real people – and a graveyard of AI-generated junk that no one interacts with at all.
- MichaelZuo 2y agoO1-preview is already indistinguishable from the 50th percentile HN commentator with the right prompts… no editing at all needed of the output.
- notahacker 2y agoI think the wider question mark about that sentence is that even if LLMs that ingest the internet and turn it into different words are the future of humanity, there's an awful lot of stuff in an AI corpus and a comparatively small number intensively researched blogs probably aren't going to shift the needle very much I mean, you'd probably get more of a vote using generative AI to spam stuff that aligns with your opinions or moving to Kenya to do low wage RHLF stuff...
- 2y ago
- eru 2y agoThe headline contradicts itself. Gwern is pseudonymous, not anonymous.
- keiferski 2y agoYou can see this with many words – the most commonly known word gradually encompasses all similar ones. I don't know if there is a formal linguistic term, but I call it "conceptual compression." It's when a concept used to have multiple levels, but now just has one. It seems like an inevitable outcome in a society that doesn't care about using language accurately.
- eru 2y agoI'm not quite so pessimistic: just as often, we have concepts splitting in twain to show new distinctions. Btw, the article gets it right and starts with 'Gwern is a pseudonymous researcher and writer.' Headlines are seldom decided by the writers.
- sourcepluck 2y agoI clicked on the video asking myself, wait, how does the title make sense, how is he anonymous if he's doing videos? Then when I saw the frankly very creepy and offputting image and voice, thinking he'd been anonymised through some AI software, thought, oh no, this kind of thing isn't going to become normal is it. Then - plot twist - I scroll down to read the description and see that that voice is an actual human voiceover! I don't know if that makes it more or less creepy. Probably more. What a strange timeline.
- indoordin0saur 2y agoAh, that was a human voice over? I really wish they hadn't done the voice thing as I found it distracting. The emotion felt all off and misleading. I guess it's better than an AI voice at least but a traditional voice mask would have been better IMO
- sourcepluck 2y agoYes, someone called "Chris Painter", who could easily be a nice person, I suppose. Maybe the generic U.S. "non-offensive" male A.I. accent is based off his voice originally, and we're coming full circle?
- Vecr 2y agoHe's Gwern, he knows that wouldn't provide what he wants.
- moi2388 2y agoBenefits of anonymity: “ I have derived a lot of benefit from people not being able to mail heroin to my home and call the police to SWAT me” Downsides of anonymity: no free heroin
- demaga 2y ago> I love the example of Isaac Newton looking at the rates of progress in Newton's time and going, “Wow, there's something strange here. Stuff is being invented now. We're making progress. How is that possible?” And then coming up with the answer, “Well, progress is possible now because civilization gets destroyed every couple of thousand years, and all we're doing is we're rediscovering the old stuff.” The link in this paragraph goes to a post on gwern website. This post contains various links, both internal and external. But I still failed to find one that supports claims about Newton's views on "progress". > This offers a little twist on the “Singularity” idea: apparently people have always been able to see progress as rapid in the right time periods, and they are not wrong to! We would not be too impressed at several centuries with merely some shipbuilding improvements or a long philosophy poem written in Latin, and we are only modestly impressed by needles or printing presses. We absolutely _are_ impressed. The concept of "rapid progress" is relative. There was rapid progress then, and there is even more rapid progress now. There is no contradiction. Anyway, I have no idea how this interview got that many upvotes. I just wasted my time.
- mynegation 2y agoThat works in reverse too. While I am in awe of what humanity already achieved - when I read fictional timelines of fictional worlds (Middle-Earth or Westeros/Essos) I am wondering how getting frozen in medieval like time is even possible. Like, what are they _doing_?
- fallingsquirrel 2y agoThey're probably doing the same thing humans on our earth were doing for centuries until ~1600. Surviving. Given how cruel nature is I think we're lucky to have the resources to do more than just survive, to build up all this crazy technology we don't strictly need to live, just for fun/profit.
- tim333 2y agoMost people get on with life without inventing much new stuff themselves. It was interesting trekking in Nepal that you could go to places without electricity or cars and life went on really quite similar to before and probably still does. Though they may have got solar electric and phones now - not quite sure of the latest status.
- YeGoblynQueenne 2y agoThis will come across as vituperative and I guess it is a bit but I've interacted with Gwern on this forum and the interaction that has stuck to me is in this thread, where Gwern mistakes a^nb^n as a regular (but not context-free) language (and calls my comment "not even wrong"): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21559620 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21559620 Again I'm sorry for the negativity, but already at the time Gwern was held up by a certain, large, section of the community as an important influencer in AI. For me that's just a great example of how basically the vast majority of AI influencers (who vie for influence on social media, rather than research) are basically clueless about AI and CS and only have second-hand knowledge, which I guess they're good at organising and popularising, but not more than that. It's easy to be a cheer leader for the mainstream view on AI. The hard part is finding, and following, unique directions. With apologies again for the negative slant of the comment.
- aubanel 2y ago> For me that's just a great example of how basically the vast majority of AI influencers (who vie for influence on social media, rather than research) are basically clueless about AI and CS This is a bit stark: there are many great knowledgeable engineers and scientists who would not get your point about a^nb^n. It's impossible to know 100% of of such a wide area as "AI and CS".
- nocobot 2y agois it really? this is the most common example for context free languages and something most first year CS students will be familiar with. totally agree that you can be a great engineer and not be familiar with it, but seems weird for an expert in the field to confidently make wrong statements about this.
- YeGoblynQueenne 2y agoThanks, that's what I meant. a^nb^n is a standard test of learnability. That stuff is still absolutely relevant, btw. Some DL people like to dismiss it as irrelevant but that's just because they lack the background to appreciate why it matters. Also: the arrogance of youth (hey I've already been a postdoc for a year, I'm ancient). Here's a recent paper on Neural Networks and the Chomsky Hierarchy that tests RNNs and Transformers on formal languages (I think it doesn't test on a^nb^n directly but tests similar a-b based CF languages): https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.02098 https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.02098 And btw that's a good paper. Probably one of the most satisfying DL papers I've read in recent years. You know when you read a paper and you get this feeling of satiation, like "aaah, that hit the spot"? That's the kind of paper.
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoEarlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42128876 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42128876
- dang 2y agoWe've merged that thread hither since the current link has a bit more background.
- okasaki 2y agoInteresting that there's no mention of human biodiversity (aka blacks are dumb), as if you spend five minutes on #lesswrong you'll notice that that's a big issue for gwern and the other goons.
- ChadNauseam 2y agoIs #lesswrong an irc channel? I’ve never been there, but I can say I’ve never seen that discussion on lesswrong the website
- FeepingCreature 2y agoYeah on Libera (former Freenode). I'm not gonna say that people there don't think that hbd is real, but it's not an everyday discussion topic. Mostly because it's kind of boring. (Do spend five minutes on #lesswrong! We don't bite! (Generally! If you come in like "I heard this was the HBD channel", there may be biting, er, banning.))
- pcrh 2y agoI noticed a similar vein in SlateStarCodex. There's a strong vibe that "some people" are "naturally" more intelligent than others....
- A_D_E_P_T 2y ago"Goons." Nice. Thing is: Are you absolutely sure that notion of human biodiversity is wrong? IQ is heritable, as height is heritable. You'll grant that there are populations that differ in their genetic potential for height -- e.g. Dalmatians vs. Pygmies -- so how is it that you dismiss out of hand the notion that there might be population-wide differences in the genetic potential for intelligence? I can hear it now: "But IQ is not intelligence!" I agree to a point, but IQ -- and, strangely, verbal IQ in particular -- maps very neatly to one's potential for achievement in all scientific and technological fields. The Truth is a jealous goddess: If you devote yourself to her, you must do so entirely, and take the bad along with the good. You don't get to decide what's out of bounds; no field of inquiry should be off-limits.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- fwlr 2y agoMy favourite Gwern insight is “Bitcoin is Worse is Better”, where they summarize an extensive list of objections to Bitcoin and then ask if there’s a common thread: No! What’s wrong with Bitcoin is that it’s ugly. … It’s ugly to make your network’s security depend solely on having more brute-force computing power than your opponents, ugly to need now and in perpetuity at least half the processing power just to avoid double-spending … It’s ugly to have a hash tree that just keeps growing … It’s ugly to have a system which can’t be used offline without proxies and workarounds … It’s ugly to have a system that has to track all transactions, publicly … And even if the money supply has to be fixed (a bizarre choice and more questionable than the irreversibility of transactions), what’s with that arbitrary-looking 21 million bitcoin limit? Couldn’t it have been a rounder number or at least a power of 2? (Not that the bitcoin mining is much better, as it’s a massive give-away to early adopters. Coase’s theorem may claim it doesn’t matter how bitcoins are allocated in the long run, but such a blatant bribe to early adopters rubs against the grain. Again, ugly and inelegant.) Bitcoins can simply disappear if you send them to an invalid address. And so on. https://gwern.net/bitcoin-is-worse-is-better https://gwern.net/bitcoin-is-worse-is-better
- indoordin0saur 2y agoGreat interview but I wasn't a fan of how they handled the voice. Whether a human voice actor or an AI "voice actor", it inserted cadence, emphasis and emotion that I have no way of knowing if it was Gwern's original intention or not. Reading the transcript of the interview would probably be better as you won't be mislead by what the voice actor added in or omitted.
- jessriedel 2y ago> Reading a transcript of the interview would probably be better I might be reading to much into the "a" (rather than "the"), but to be clear: there is a transcript at the bottom.
- indoordin0saur 2y agoYou're right, corrected my comment.
- kittikitti 2y agoWhy was this reposted? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42128876 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42128876 This leads me to believe that the content and the subsequent posts are for self promotion purposes only.
- Vecr 2y agoIt's not. I don't know if you think we're all Gwern, but he's provided a useful enough service for enough people that a discussion with more than 13 comments is worthwhile.
- dredmorbius 2y ago<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41569102 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41569102>
- arthurofbabylon 2y agoThis was a tough listen, for two subtly similar reasons. The voice was uncanny. Simply hard to listen to, despite being realistic. I mean precisely that: it is cognitively difficult to string together meaning from that voice. (I am adjacent to the field of audio production and frequently deal with human- and machine-produced audio. The problem this podcast has with this voice is not unique.) The tonality and meaning do not support each other (this will change as children grow up with these random-tonality voices). The conversation is excessively verbose. Oftentimes a dearth of reason gets masked by a wide vocabulary. For some audience members I expect the effort to understand the words distracts from the relationship between the words (ie, the meaning), and so it just comes across as a mashup of smart-sounding words, and the host, guest, and show gets lauded for being so intelligent. Cut through the vocabulary and occasional subtle tsks and pshaws and “I-know-more-than-I-am-saying” and you uncover a lot of banter that just does not make good sense: it is not quite correct, or not complete in its reasoning. This unreasoned conversation is fine in its own right (after all, this is how most conversation unfolds, a series of partially reasoned stabs that might lead to something meaningful), but the masking with exotic vocabulary and style is misleading and unkind. Some of these “smart-sounding” snippets are actually just dressed up dumb snippets.
- Vecr 2y agoIt's a real voice. Probably with some splicing, but I don't know how much. Gwern admits he isn't that good at speaking, and I believe him. He also says he isn't all that smart. Presumably that's highly relative.
- freejazz 2y ago> He also says he isn't all that smart Oh, how humbling and modest of him!
- JohnBooty 2y agoThe voice was uncanny. Simply hard to listen to, despite being realistic. I mean precisely that: it is cognitively difficult to string together meaning from that voice. What? According to the information under the linked video, In order to protect Gwern's anonymity, I proposed interviewing him in person, and having my friend Chris Painter voice over his words after. This amused him enough that he agreed. I'm not familiar with the SOTA in AI-generated voices, so I could very well be mistaken. But it did not sound fake to me, and the linked source indicates that it's a human. Perhaps it sounds uncanny to you because it's a human reading a transcript of a conversation.... and attempting to make it sound conversational, as if he's not reading a transcript?
- ndneighbor 2y agoI really did like this interview quite a bit and helped me deal with the shame of being a bit unfocused, Gwern shows that it all connects in the end.
- dredmorbius 2y agoIs there a podcast stream without DRM? Neither mpv nor my browser can play the interview. Edit: The YouTube link from an earlier submisison works: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a42key59cZQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a42key59cZQ>. Sad commentary when a YouTube link affords greater accessibility (I'm listening now via mpv) than a podcast URL. Sigh.
- orsenthil 2y ago> I use a free gym. Gwern, how did you end up with free gym? Interested for myself.