_fol8's comments

The major journals have absolutely no accountability. In any other market, if the product doesn't work or harms someone the company goes out of business or the maker is sued. Not so in journals. So, why do we accept it? Because there's no other way for the layman to determine what makes a good professor, because by definition, they are smarter than us (or at least they're supposed to be), and so we (the general public) are not able to tell if they are good at what they do or not.

So - the answer we have is peer review, which is just the foxes guarding the hen house. There's no other solution that's been proposed that makes any sense in a self reinforcing market manner. Having some post-docs suddenly become concerned about this and hire a bunch of undergraduates to start using to comb excel with spreadsheets will be useful until everyone loses interest. The price of a can of Coca-Cola isn't useful until people lose interest - it's market priced by millions of customers at every minute of every day.

Until there's a solution to this problem that makes sense this will keep happening over and over again.

This sounds like a puff piece and it's hard to be all that excited about the products that are being touted in the piece -

He decided instead to quit and pursue his idea to start Feasier, a platform that aggregates home furnishing listings from different stores into one place.

So...what's the moat? Why can't anyone build a clone sight and come in with slightly cheaper shipping and undercut his business?

Or this -

Zhu says she is working every day on Maida AI, which automates health care administration tasks like patient intake and note-taking.

From what I know of the current health care tech situation, everything uses EPIC which is terrible technology, but it's entrenched because it follows regulation and probably pays off some senators/regulators/insurance companies - much like every DOD government project. So unless her product can follow every regulation as well as EPIC (it can't) she can't win in an entrenched market that has a moat she can't cross.

I don't doubt there are a bunch of unemployed web developers out there (I'm one), and a lot of VC money that doesn't know what to do after crypto imploded, but these are uninspiring. Of the thousands of web dev companies maybe one will become popular, but it would be from random chance. This just sounds like a bunch of unemployed and desperate people buying lottery tickets, but with computers.

The people who are going to make money are the people who are able to corner the energy market or the server and computation market. The innovations will be from a few brilliant academics who make the next transformer model or the next quantum computing model and so forth, which makes up a few thousand people. The "democratization" of the internet just now means everyone is equally broke. Shit, you can make websites now by drawing them and then having an AI make the code (as edge-case clunky as that is). So anyone with a Bamboo pad and a "million dollar" idea can draw one up and buy a web address.

So what?

I read a NY Times article by Ted Chiang today in which he made a kind of "stochastic parrot" argument for chatGPT - https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-.... I believe, on the other hand that chatGPT may eventually be able to generate AGI, but that this will occur emergently and spontaneously. In other words, it will be difficult to predict.

One of the conditions for this, is for chatGPT models to start being able to write their own code in order to produce models of themselves that are more accurate and more efficient. Given this ability, and some fitness criteria, genetic algorithms may be used to create new LLMs. This sounds like science fiction, but once the compute requirements come down for these models (by a couple orders of magnitude), I believe this may be possible.

To what extent does your model allow for semantic models to create semantic models that are themselves more efficient in relation to some fitness criteria? Can I tell a model "You (model) I want you to reproduce using interaction with these other models (some collection of other models) and have the child model offspring be more efficient according to this criteria [for example the resultant models will create short stories that are more likely to receive high ratings on a subreddit devoted to short stories]".

You would need to get around the "model pollution" problem in which LLM models pollute the space for which the models generate data because other models are producing web artifacts (Ted Chiang's Xerox of a Xerox problem). I call this the problem of alpha (direct experience). One of the ways I've thought of to fix this is to have models trained on direct user input (such as cell phone video and pictures from a single user) - I have to admit that I got this idea from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (see Gargoyle). If your platform can integrate with visual processing this may have a high information density - object detection in daily videos demonstrating how objects are related to each other in the real world of the user and correlating these into a semantic network.

I'd also suggest that Obsidian integration might be useful.

This is exciting, thanks for making the Fixie SDK public.

I'll believe aliens exist when little green men walk up to me, shake my hand, and start discussing the engineering particulars of faster than light travel. Until then...

This makes me happy.

If you want to end homelessness in California build affordable housing everywhere and hire the homeless to be go-fors on construction projects.

There is absolutely no reason that there should be sub five story buildings in downtown San Francisco when there are people living on the street.

Imagine if people could start building these cool buildings from AI: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-01-31/architect... but for large scale residential housing. You could have a whole new generation of architectural firms building the future of urban living.

Oh and we just figured out how to make Roman concrete https://www.popsci.com/science/roman-concrete/.

You have no idea how exciting this is.

I registered - you can only unlock the link for "8 credits".

Yeah...anyone willing to just post a google drive link on an anonymous account or something?

This is what happens when you tie everyone's wealth into how much their house is worth.

Or you could make the government responsible for cleaning the sidewalks.

https://sfgov.org/mod/sites/default/files/FileCenter/Documen... https://libranet.de/display/0b6b25a8-1663-bdc2-8fa6-27737287...

Personally I'm holding out until 2024 so the Bell Riots can give us the utopia we've all been promised.

Sigh.

I'm not too worried. You'll all be standing out in the breadline with me soon enough. Keep building robots that automate your jobs out of existence. I find it amusing.

I'm homeless and living in the Tenderloin in San Francisco.

People here want you to

- Be in a gang (or a prostitute, thief, ex-con and so forth) - Be on drugs (or in rehab for drugs) - Have a mental illness (so you can go to therapy) - Be disabled - Find religion

There isn't a position for "I ran out of money and my family wouldn't support me, and at some point finding web development work became too hard as the technology became more complicated." People want you to "get better." I don't do drugs, I don't smoke, I don't drink, I don't steal or assault anyone.

I just don't have any money.

But people here are morons. They need to have a reason for why someone is poor other than "I'm a person of average intelligence that doesn't know how to find a paying job in this society." I don't want to be psychoanalyzed, be put into rehab, go to church or join any number of the lonely people who have to have a support group because society is awful. I don't have problems other than being poor - if you managed to buy into the crypto ponzi scheme at the right time then no one is asking you to "find god" or "get better".

People are social animals. If you put them in a position where those are the options (jail, crime, drugs, psychoanalysis, religion, disability) they'll take the least unpalatable. There's a whole lot of people who walk around here with canes they don't need because otherwise the San Francisco General Assistance office won't spring for them to have housing. Also known as an apartment with a bed and a door that locks.

If I make more than 1500 dollars I lose my health insurance through Medi-cal.

And I'm no defender of a lot of these people. The bastards that set up tents on the sidewalk and smoke meth are just awful. But on the other hand, I have absolutely no idea how to get a job. None. I've done construction before and all I ended up with was bad memories and scarred hands. I could work "security" by putting on a t-shirt and standing outside a soup kitchen, but that's just bullshit make work the charities give out so the poor can buy shoes and feel special about themselves. Real security jobs outside of bars are a good way to get killed. And that's about it. I'm staying at a homeless shelter and have the clothes on my back so how am I supposed to get a job?

There's your why.

So let me give you a when. When, not if, your industry is automated or the code becomes too complicated for you to understand anymore you'd better have enough savings or a social network so you don't become homeless. Or you'll have to crawl into one of the buckets that allows society to make sense of you.

And today I'm sitting in the San Francisco library looking to make a contribution to a software project for free and I just don't know that I care anymore. And if you tell me it'll get better, then I have to ask if you're about to be laid off or not and what your plans are.

This isn't all that surprising. I mean, it's surprising a priori, but not post hoc when considering the social culture of the United States.

Construction is a job that you go into if you've been to prison, haven't gone to college, or are an undocumented laborer. It attracts those people who are the least skilled in the country because it's a hard job that's hard on your body, pays little, and is intellectually uninteresting (compared to most college educated middle class jobs). The people who make money in the industry have to go through onerous licensing requirements and have the skills necessary to run their own business and take on the risks of having that business fail, which most people (myself included) don't have. That's managing payroll, licensing, taxation (and avoiding taxation), sales, marketing, and all the rest of it while still being able to be a master plumber or what have you which can take 10 years or more. And even then you can be making 70+ hours a week or have to be on-call for emergencies (as a plumber), only be able to get work during certain times of the year (summer for a large amount of construction), or be away from home for long periods of time (if you have a specialized skill such as oil drilling or specialized skills in setting concrete and so forth and have to travel across the country to where the work is).

I've worked day labor in construction. After only a few months my hands are messed up to the point where some days it hurts to type after longer periods of time. Have you ever had to carry dry wall, lumber or sheet rock for 8 hours a day for minimum wage? It's boring and it hurts.

I'm currently unemployed and homeless. I'd rather be unemployed and homeless than do construction again. A year of that and my body would fall apart.

As a society we've made the industry as unattractive as possible so what do you expect?

I understand that someone has to be paid to generate AI, but one of the promises of programming of the last couple of years was that if you could afford a laptop and were smart enough you could contribute to software development by contributing to github and so forth. In practice I don't know how much of that translates into practice (see AWS/cloud/hosting and so forth), but I don't like this future where the only people who are able to program the machines are able to pay for an IDE that has a monthly or per usage cost structure.

The only people who get rich during a gold rush are the people that are selling the shovels. I think that people are tired of rewarding shovel sellers.

Can someone with some industry experience comment on how RISC-V will change the geopolitical dynamics? From what I understand it's a standardized instruction set (coming out of UCS Berkeley) that would provide a standard design for chips. From what I've read it doesn't sound like the architecture would be able to be able to be used on M1 and M2 chip design, but it does mean that fabrication of chips would be open sourced so long as it conforms to the standard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC-V https://www.msn.com/en-xl/news/other/tech-war-china-bets-on-...

To me this sounds like the US is adopting a bet on entrenched monopolies in Intel and TSMC while China is making a bid for open source architectures (I wouldn't say that there are "good guys" and "bad guys" here, only that in the Machiavellian sense the US has first mover advantage in chips and is engaged in import restrictions and RISC-V is a new standard).

I worry that this could have implications for Taiwan if they lose the geopolitical advantage of having a monopoly on chip production. I'm also concerned that the US administration could be placing big bets for the economy on shoring up tech firms that may become outdated when the chip making market becomes competitive again internationally.

Thoughts?

This game looks super exciting! Unfortunately, I have a mac :<.

So, I install sbcl, installed quicklisp and then used quicklisp to install your game after cloning and cc'ing into your directory. It looks like your game would work if you (or someone) looked into why your "Harmony" sound engine isn't working (line 28-29 in your package.lisp file). I attempted to load from your github/Harmony directory and this is the error -

* (ql:quickload '(harmony cl-mixed-coreaudio)) To load "harmony": Load 1 ASDF system: harmony ; Loading "harmony" ............. debugger invoked on a LOAD-FOREIGN-LIBRARY-ERROR in thread #<THREAD "main thread" RUNNING {7008640253}>: Unable to load any of the alternatives: ("libmixed2.dylib" "libmixed.dylib" "mac-arm64-libmixed.dylib")

I tested the other audio implementations suggested as well and they don't work either. Is there a way to play this game without sound? That might fix the problem. I don't know how much I'm willing to dig into this, because cl-mixed is it's own library and it looks like it would start to become a rabbit hole.

It looks cool though!

This has always been the part of academia I have not understood. Academics are supposed to "know" more than the public. They are paid to have some understanding of reality in a way that the lay public does not so they can have tenure - that is they can't be fired (or it is very hard) for researching controversial subjects with payoffs that are hard to define by someone not in the field.

Everyone else in academia is working towards this end result or drops out somewhere along the path and works in industry. The exception being those specialist degrees that are quasi-academic such as law and medicine, but which have more applied (and therefore measurable) results.

And yet, we don't hold these people to the standards they set for themselves as a cohort? I wouldn't expect every paper to be replicable, or every researcher to always be right. But I see things like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EmDrive and wonder how many billions of dollar were put into this thing. It's essentially a state backed way of defrauding the public out of tax dollars to pay people with doctorates that made friends with other people with doctorates. What if the US spent the money that was used on the EmDrive on housing or social services for instance? Or building libraries or bridges?

All it would take would be for a few academic journals to demand that the statistical replication of papers be required, but it would mean that the editors would have to be guided by principles other than maximizing revenue.

I agree. Consider the octopus - each of it's limbs contains it's own cortex and so it has in essence 8 separable brains. Or ants and bees which contain a hive intelligence. An ant has almost no neurons, but the collective number of neurons of an ant hive approaches that of a human brain. These are only creatures that are on our earth that have radically alternative ways of experiencing intelligence. Why would we expect aliens to have an intelligence that's at all comparable to humanity when even somewhat intelligent animals on our planet don't exhibit the same characteristics?

In the future, when the machine learning algorithms begin to gain sentience, the AI generated porn of the future will be start training humans, or using HLI (Human Learning Models). Human pornography addicts will slowly have their input streams changed so that they become more and more sensitized to find computer hardware and software more and more arousing. First, it's an artifact here or there and before you know it there you are at 3 am with your pants around your ankles staring at a screen of functional software diagrams.

And people said there'd be flying cars.

I find it so weird. Aren't there any bosses that say "Yeah, fuck you we're not doing that." That's the point of a boss. If I were in charge of a bunch of programmers and a mandate came down from on high to rate programmers based on commits or keystrokes, my first response would be "Eat shit." and my second response would be "No, really, I'm not treating my people like dogs. Eat shit."

This reminds me of a story idea that I had. Thanks for that.

EDIT:

This guys is clearly a weird dude, which is both a critique and a praise. Most of what makes the world interesting and worth living in is made by people who are weird in some way.

I don't know that I agree with all of his positions - there's a large (and I mean large) compendium on what he calls spaced repetition (https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-repetition) the main thesis of which appears to be that repetition helps learning but only if it's spaced out over time. I don't know - this is an area where I'm out of my depth, but it appears like this isn't his area of expertise (computer science and writing), and he's trying to put together a thesis by dint of just writing a lot. Which I don't know is best practice or peer reviewed - huge amounts of science articles, even peer reviewed ones, are non-reproducible, so even that is flawed. Much of his writing appears to be in this style of long, obsessively researched posts. Both good and bad - it's certainly different than the "No You!" of most social media - I'm looking at you Tik-Tok.

What I do like about the site is his use of deep linking. Personal websites where people put in the effort to make something new that's not just the same old social media paradigm are welcome additions to the internet and I think that they should be featured more on hackernews. It's too bad that this was made in Haskell. I don't know that using stacked Iframes like this would work in javascript without causing an overuse of memory. Would someone more knowledgeable about this than I chime in?

His writing credentials themselves look super impressive. Check this out:

I am a freelance American writer & researcher. (To make ends meet, I have a Patreon , benefit from Bitcoin appreciation thanks to some old coins, and live frugally.) I have worked for, published in, or consulted for: Wired (2015), MIRI / SIAI2 (2012–2013), CFAR (2012), GiveWell (2017), the FBI (2016), Cool Tools (2013), Quantimodo (2013), New World Encyclopedia (2006), Bitcoin Weekly (2011), Mobify (2013–2014), Bellroy (2013–2014), Dominic Frisby (2014), and private clients (2009-); everything on Gwern.net should be considered my own viewpoint or writing unless otherwise specified by a representative or publication. I am currently not accepting new commissions.

In sum, the guy looks weird, but definitely worth reading if only you take what he's saying with a grain of salt.

Yeah - if I were to read a technical analysis of a new idea I'd like it to be not an advertisement from the people building said product. This is just an ad.

What's the current state of research on true volumetric displays? That's what I'm excited for, although that takes less AI and more hardware, so quite a bit more difficult.