dsign

40 ms·

661.
by dsign 3y ago
This has been coming to my mind in the context of fiction writing. Today, the writer's gold standard is publication. In fact, many readers say they won't read anything that hasn't been "published" by a publisher. Bu
662.
by dsign 3y ago
Plot twist: biological evolution works like that too.
663.
by dsign 3y ago
I think that science fiction should tangle more with both science and religion, and not because "it's an opportunity to write something interesting," but because in our real world the two are still fighting and, for now at le
664.
by dsign 3y ago
> That only makes sense if you assume they are superior. In which case, there isn't really anything to discuss because you've obviously already made up your mind and you will take anything anyone says as some desperate attempt
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by dsign 3y ago
The small silver lining is that there are arguably more people who have access to literature, and who like to read, write, and do math, because generally those things have become more accessible to the wider world. But when the going gets r
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by dsign 3y ago
I just love how recurrent this argument gets. Obviously LLMs are not human brains, and we could be all day listing ways in which the two are different just for the pleasure of it. But when we dig, and rip away all the layers of civilized di
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by dsign 3y ago
I was watching yesterday the 2006 movie "The prestige", with incredibly atmospheric locales that feel so alien. And yet, that world is but one hundred years away. It wasn't until 1934 that the Public Utility Holding Company A
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by dsign 3y ago
There is something for that, it's called unions. Where I work, my employment contract had my name, my salary, where in the organization I was going to work and with what role, and a reference to a massive standard contract negotiated b
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by dsign 3y ago
Chat-GPT is quite capable of doing some "reasoning", but assume for a second it's not, and all it does is to search for human-written solutions and adapt them a little to your question. That alone is incredibly helpful.
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by dsign 3y ago
Here is the plan of our elected representatives: - Erode what resistance to total surveillance remains. - Practice total surveillance. Here is my plan to oppose that plan: - Rekindle Orwell's 1984 as a full literary/movie/vid
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by dsign 3y ago
Cuba's unfinished power plant is the least of their problems. At this point, Cuba's problems are so big that they seem insurmountable. To see what I mean, imagine that tomorrow the Communist Party is dissolved, a new democratic co
672.
by dsign 3y ago
I have a feeling that biology research is stuck “at tiny scales”, with scale meaning not size of the components, but the amount of components. Remember when researchers painstakingly designed by hand new algorithms to scale up pixel ima
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by dsign 4y ago
Rejoice! I went with a paper[^1] from the other camp, and although it did a good job of summarizing it, it was not good at answering specific questions, e.g. the type of proteins that were common in Asgard archea and eukariotes. But to me,
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by dsign 4y ago
> the lengths techbros will go for in order to avoid paying an artist for artwork Hiring an artist removes control, it's not your art, but the artist's what ends up on the wall. That's the reason that I avoid hiring arti
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by dsign 4y ago
Let’s engage in some speculative thinking: Somebody, let’s call them Dr. X, invents a computer algorithm that cures cancer. It works by running simulations of the patient’s cells. Its output is a list of diverse interventions, for example,
676.
by dsign 4y ago
Just as the author of the article, I think that all disruptions we are focusing on right now are second-order magnitude compared with the species extintion event we may be cooking for ourselves. If I were a super-intelligent AI trapped in a
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by dsign 4y ago
We are "saving" a GPT some work by training it in human creative products. That makes us special by being "the first", but nothing else.
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by dsign 4y ago
Wall that's a d*ck move. There are other beverages out there that contain caffeine, and Monster's logo ("trademark") is not to my personal taste, not to mention the beverage itself. I guess I won't buy it anymore. T
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by dsign 4y ago
> We can probably create a tool with the ability to act independently and with super-human knowledge and judgement, but without feeling, emotion, or anything except a simulated sense of 'self' to ease our interaction with it Ye
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by dsign 4y ago
>> And once again, Darwin was right. We should write that on the sky. A terrifying amount of things can be explained with evolution and natural selection. It can even be applied to social groups and systems of thought, i.e. religion,
681.
by dsign 4y ago
I'm not sure if you are talking seriously or ironically, so I will assume the former. Agency is a wonderful thing to have. But it's not as difficult to realize as getting something to be good at general intellectual tasks. Just bu
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by dsign 4y ago
In 2015, I shared lodgings with a student of cognitive sciences. This week, conversations that I had with him and his friends kept haunting me. My friend would talk about how we didn't (don't) know so much about the brain. He was
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by dsign 4y ago
I've been playing with the combination of Chat GPT and Wolfram, and while there are gold nuggets in the output sometimes, it is mostly terrifying non-sense for anybody who couldn't already verify those outputs on their own. The cy
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by dsign 4y ago
In the last few weeks, I've noted on myself how I've been going through several stages of the Chat-GPT "disease", or whatever it is. My first reaction was to be afraid for my money-making skills. My second reaction was f
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by dsign 4y ago
If you have savings in a current or savings bank account, then inflation erodes the value of those savings. But inflation was doing that before at a 2 % rate anyway, bank interest on savings is well below inflation rate. So most people actu
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by dsign 4y ago
Has anybody thought about OpenAI being more or less owned by Microsoft? Microsoft, the same company that: - Operates Windows, that tries to strong-arm you to upgrade to Windows 11 in a regular basis with dark patterns and - Forces you to lo
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by dsign 4y ago
Ha, I feel you. "What would the world look in ten years?" One question though, that keeps coming to my mind: right now big ML models use a lot of computing, that even organizations like Microsoft are having trouble to provision. H
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by dsign 4y ago
Indeed. I often see in HN a self-defeating attitude which is: - Step 1: we invent our machine overlords, because it's unavoidable, we are genetically and socially forced to do it. - Step 2: we perish. Neither step 1 nor step 2 are gu
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by dsign 4y ago
> People get accustomed to a certain way of doing it and disruption just means political upheaval I think you have your own answer :-) .
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by dsign 4y ago
>> you can't stop progress Yes we can, it's actually very easy. Just throw in some regulation. Not convinced by USA and the EU? Then look at the Arabic countries, where women must wear head scarfs. Or to North Korea and Cuba

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