istjohn

39 ms·

421.
by istjohn 3y ago
Morality is biologically and sociologically constructed. It's not consistent between people, social cliques, regions, or nations. It's a nebulous concept. And unlike, say, our understanding of disease processes, which may be fuzzy
422.
by istjohn 4y ago
Sapere aude
423.
by istjohn 4y ago
Well, yeah, teachers have been bamboozled.
424.
by istjohn 4y ago
If you haven't bothered to try using it yourself, I don't know why you think anyone would care what you think about it.
425.
by istjohn 4y ago
Copy and paste a random Nature article into it in an area that you're not familiar with. It will summarize it in plain language. Ask questions about parts you don't understand or want to know more. GPT-4 is much better than GPT 3.
426.
by istjohn 4y ago
I would have killed to have ChatGPT growing up. It's amazing to have a patient teacher answer any question you can think of. GPT-4 is already far better than the answers you'll get on Quora or Reddit, and it's instant. So it&
427.
by istjohn 4y ago
My experience with therapy, corroborated with that of friends and family, is that most therapists are not very good and many are awful. I can easily imagine an AI therapist soon being more effective on average.
428.
by istjohn 4y ago
Interesting. The AI is already to the point that it can contribute to improving itself. That's...exciting? scary?
429.
by istjohn 4y ago
That's true of just about any technology. Most carpenters would fail to explain why their hammer drives a nail into wood instead of bouncing off, why it has a handle that extends past the hand's grip, why the head of the hammer ne
430.
by istjohn 4y ago
My bigget blocker in web development is fact retrieval. As someone who only dabbles, I don't struggle with how to logically design my project, but I'm constantly forgetting CSS and JS details like how to accomplish a specific task
431.
by istjohn 4y ago
It actually rewrote my explanation and made a substantial change to part of it, using a completely different chain of logic than I did. But you're right, it struggles to do original mathematics. When I asked it to write an explanation
432.
by istjohn 4y ago
Probably because it has nothing to do with the article. It's just a rant about something entirely unrelated.
433.
by istjohn 4y ago
I used GPT-4 in a reply in this thread to rewrite my explanation to make it as easy as possible to follow[1]. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35499894
434.
by istjohn 4y ago
The Supreme Court ruled that you can't criminalize sleeping on the street if there isn't shelter space available, so your dystopia in which people are jailed for existing in proximity to you without being rich isn't going to
435.
by istjohn 4y ago
A 2019 survey found that 70% of people homeless in San Francisco in 2019 reported most recently becoming homeless while living in San Francisco: 22% came from another county within California, and 8% came from another state[1]. Housing poli
436.
by istjohn 4y ago
You're skeptical housing shortages cause homelessness? How could it be otherwise? To address your question, it's incredibly difficult to cope with mental illness or overcome addiction while homeless. It's also difficult to ho
437.
by istjohn 4y ago
In a democracy, you are the government. What we see today in SF is the consequence of decades of hostility to construction and growth from the residents of SF.
438.
by istjohn 4y ago
Today that means teaching them how to cope with [nicotine | gambling | hand guns | fentanyl]. It is in their world. It is not going away. As a parent, I can understand the temptation to just want to ban it. I wish I could ban a lot of thing
439.
by istjohn 4y ago
I have to suspend disbelief when I read Rao's sociological theories. They oversimplify and bend things to make reality fit into these elegent intellectual structures, but they are fun to read, and I sometimes gleen novel ways to look a
440.
by istjohn 4y ago
Maybe you need to reevaluate your opinion of Rao based on your new evidence.
441.
by istjohn 4y ago
In the piece, the Arena Man and the Priest in the Arena are two different archetypes. You may not agree with the analogy, but you understand it. Also, many people with extensive religious backgrounds do not think highly of priests. I used t
442.
by istjohn 4y ago
Wolfram Alpha says the total fresh water on Earth would have a radius of 203 km. The Great Lakes alone would have a radius of 18 km. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=volume+of+fresh+water+o... https://www.wol
443.
by istjohn 4y ago
Here's what GPT-4 would have written: og_kalu, I understand the point you're trying to make regarding the potential intelligence of GPT-4 and the connection with the philosophical zombie, but I believe there are some important dis
444.
by istjohn 4y ago
Correcting the AI rarely works. Better to restart with a different prompt.
445.
by istjohn 4y ago
It's easy to hate Musk lately, and I haven't forgotten when Gates was a ruthless monopolist who made "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" Microsoft's unofficial motto. Gates has made a show of philanthropy, yet he's w
446.
by istjohn 4y ago
But just like building more roads induces more demand by making driving more attractive, this will lower the cost of custom software development and create new demand. Perhaps one day soon it will be affordable for every company of every si
447.
by istjohn 4y ago
If you don't value an asset for what you can get on the open market, then you are valuing it incorrectly.
448.
by istjohn 4y ago
Contrast this to the many crypto meltdowns of late. The libertarian dream is a mirage.
449.
by istjohn 4y ago
Eh, I'm enjoying the excerpts in this thread. It would be annoying in a newspaper, but the imagery and metaphors are beautiful. If there ever's a place for poetic prose, surely it's in a novel.
450.
by istjohn 4y ago
That's politics everywhere. Politics is the nonviolent contestation of power and typically political parties cater to a set of specific people with peculiar interests and beliefs. Sometimes polarization splits people into two equally s

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