throwyawayyyy

4 ms·

31.
by throwyawayyyy 5mo ago
I think this gets to the conflation we naturally have with consciousness and a sense of self. Does a tree have a sense of self? I imagine probably not, a tree acts more like a clonal colony than a single organism.
32.
by throwyawayyyy 5mo ago
I'm mainly saying it's impossible to know, at least without a theory of consciousness that doesn't exist. Do we consider bacteria to be conscious though, is there something like to be a single cell? I can easily believe there
33.
by throwyawayyyy 5mo ago
One question I am genuinely wondering about is whether a self-driving car _is_ cheaper than a human driver, once all of the externalities are priced in. In SF right now a Waymo is typically priced a little under an Uber (actually quite a bi
34.
by throwyawayyyy 5mo ago
Current LLMs prove that the Turing Test was insufficient all along. But they also prove that intelligence != consciousness. One can, after all, be conscious without a thought in one's head. We certainly have ongoing work in identifying
35.
by throwyawayyyy 5mo ago
There's a story to tell in that: 1) Google has a transformer-based AI that hallucinates too much to release 2) OpenAI replicates the tech then YOLOs it 3) Everyone says: look how Google is getting left behind! Google thinks: the second
36.
by throwyawayyyy 6mo ago
> Going back to the analogies: This is like copying answers through university and then showing up to a job that requires independent thought. That's exactly what is happening now. I wouldn't even call it an analogy, I'd c
37.
by throwyawayyyy 6mo ago
AI could be a huge net benefit, and justify large layoffs. AI could be a huge short-term benefit, justify layoffs now, so long as you (the exec doing the laying off) don't have to worry about the long term AI could have middling net be
38.
by throwyawayyyy 6mo ago
Same! Every so often I remember that I can juggle, and spend a minute or two juggling, and feel better for it. And then I forget for weeks or months. (I taught myself while procrastinating from exam revision, many years ago. I started with
39.
by throwyawayyyy 7mo ago
I do find it hilarious that after all the machine learning optimizations done on people's feeds over the years, all the promos got for a 1% improvement on this metric, every E7 and E8 who can claim x% of this or that, after all of that
40.
by throwyawayyyy 7mo ago
Vibes-CEOing! Only one person at Meta actually matters of course.
41.
by throwyawayyyy 7mo ago
Well hang-on, in this case it is _neither_ reliable in terms of availability _nor_ correctness. Worst of all worlds.
42.
by throwyawayyyy 7mo ago
I am afraid that we are heading to a world in which we simply give up on the idea of correct code as an aspiration to strive for. Of course code has always been bad, and of course good code has never been a goal in the whole startup ecosyst
43.
by throwyawayyyy 7mo ago
I'm reminded of Douglas Adams's take on video recorders as machines to watch television so you don't have to. He should have been around to see Marvin built for real!
44.
by throwyawayyyy 7mo ago
I learned about Therac at college in the 90s. Some years later, I interviewed at Knight Capital, just a couple of weeks before their blowup. (Dreadful interview at which I did dreadfully, being asked to write C _over the phone_ by a supreme
45.
by throwyawayyyy 7mo ago
I've rather assumed this is half the use of airpods.
46.
by throwyawayyyy 7mo ago
A lack of imagination on my part perhaps, but I can't think of anything I'd use it for which isn't either: 1) cheating myself and others of leisure (e.g. I suppose I could use it to fake-keep up with friends..? Or plan a holi
47.
by throwyawayyyy 8mo ago
I do see fewer Square terminals these days, more Toast (and other options too I think).
48.
by throwyawayyyy 8mo ago
I do genuinely wonder about the endgame here. Why would the objective winners of the _current_ system, our billionaire class, want to disrupt that system? Do they really believe that they will necessarily be winners in the new world too, ar
49.
by throwyawayyyy 8mo ago
What I find interesting, and reflects my ignorance of how these things are used, is that if you look at, say, FAANG companies, Office isn't used. I've worked for two FAANGs over the past couple of years, and everything is done via
50.
by throwyawayyyy 8mo ago
I haven't watched the whole interview. In the clip, a couple of things jump out: 1. He was speaking to a receptive audience. The head nods when he starts to make the comparison between the energy for bringing a human up to speed versus
51.
by throwyawayyyy 8mo ago
Just a random comment but: what a delightful blog. Even though I disagree on the virtues of cats (they really aren't all monsters. Ours is only occasionally evil).
52.
by throwyawayyyy 8mo ago
That is an underappreciated point. Wrappers around LLMs are _many_ magnitudes more expensive to run than current SaaS apps.
53.
by throwyawayyyy 8mo ago
If I think about my own use of social media (and I have a facebook account from waaay back in the day, shortly after they dropped the requirement for a US edu email address), I wonder what value it ever had, over and above just emailing tho
54.
by throwyawayyyy 8mo ago
True! But so indelibly linked to the 1997 election, and all the promise and promises of the incoming Labour government.
55.
by throwyawayyyy 8mo ago
Agreed. Though I hated it at the time, in retrospect I am grateful for how often I was bored, growing up in the 80s and 90s. I'm sure I owe my career to it, I started programming computers from a lack of anything else to do.
56.
by throwyawayyyy 8mo ago
If you want to sum up the 90s in the UK for people like me who became adults then, it would be the song, "Things can only get better". A little embarrassing, yes? Naive? and yet there really was an optimism then. If things weren&#
57.
by throwyawayyyy 9mo ago
There'll always be value in having a problem and solving it yourself, rather than asking someone or something else to solve it for you, I would hope.
58.
by throwyawayyyy 9mo ago
In the rosiest view, the rich give their children private tutors (and always have), and now the poor can give their children private tutors too, in the form of AIs. More realistically, what the poor get is something which looks superficiall
59.
by throwyawayyyy 9mo ago
A story that popped up in my Google Now (or whatever it's called these days) feed: "Princess Bride Still Cherished by Fans". With an image from the Fellowship of the Ring. And in tiny text at the bottom, "Generated with
60.
by throwyawayyyy 9mo ago
Interesting! I've never seen a flat rental in the UK without a fridge (washing machine mostly yes too, depending; dishwasher mostly not).

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