Physical books are irreplaceable to me. I love the feel, the smell, and having a house full of them. Just went to a library sale this morning and got even more.
I also really need a break from screens, and reading a book is a great excuse to not be on my phone or watching tv.
Reading a book is also relaxing in a way that reading on a screen is not. It just feels more, I don't know, laid back? I have no idea how to describe that.
It sounds like there wasn't really a counter narrative for the models to learn from. This feature of how llms accumulate information is already being gamed by seeding the internet with preferred narratives.
I'm not sure how many Medium articles, blog posts and reddit threads I need to put out before grok starts telling everyone my widget is the best one ever made, but it's a lot cheaper than advertising.
I'm not sure "being gamed" is the lens I would see this particular instance through. People (some at least) have gotten into their heads that they can ask LLMs objective questions and get objectively correct answers. The LLM companies are doing very little to dissuade them of that belief.
Meanwhile, LLMs are essentially internet regurgitation machines, because of course they are, that's what they do. Which makes them useless for getting "hard truth" answers especially in contested or specialized fields.
I'm honestly afraid of the impact of this. The internet has enough herd bullshit on it as it is. (e.g. antivaxxers, flat earthers, electrosensitivity, vitamin/supplement junk, etc.) We don't need that amplified.
People really like using the word "narrative". I guess we're creatures of story.
But this really highlights how much we've been benefiting from living in a high-trust society, where people don't just "go on the internet and tell lies" - filtered by the existing anti-spam and anti-SEO measures intended to cut out the 80% of the internet where people do just make things up to sell products.
LLMs are extremely post-structuralist. They really force the user to decide whether to pick the beautiful eternal fountain of plausible looking text with no ground truth, or a much harder road of distrust, verification, and old-school social proof.
I’m expecting a lot of things like that similar to the 2000s blog boom, only to see it whither even more quickly as the AI companies switch to value extraction mode. You’re really exposed if one company you don’t even have a contract with controls your customer supply.
Can a model not just ignor all things that have no counter-argument by default? Like - if there are not flat earthers, widly debunked, drop the idea of a spherical earth? It only exists if it was fought over?
Even if you could do this rigorously (not at all obvious with how LLMs work), it's not a reliable metric: you can easily fabricate debate as well, and in this case the main issue was essentially skimming the surface of the reports and not looking any deeper to see the obvious red flags that it was an april-fools-level fake (which obviously even a person can fall for, but LLMs are being given a far greater level of trust for some reason)
you would just game it the same way then, and how would it know who won an internet argument? how can it prove who is telling the truth and whos... hallucinating?
It's not very realistic. It would significantly impact the user experience.
Many things have not been fully discussed on the internet; there isn't that much luxury of corpus data available.
You're grasping for a reliable unsupervised truth machine. That's a fundamentally intractable problem until you limit it down to a wolframalpha clone. And not even that by LLMs.
The majority of my encounters with West Coast Buddhism have been... off-putting.
Particularly in the SF tech scene, there is an unfortunate 'competitive enlightenment' vibe amongst many of those who profess to follow Buddhist teachings.
"Oh, you've only attained the second jhāna? I got through all four on my first try."
I am certain there are plenty of genuine and sincere practitioners out there, but my small sample has not included any.
If it's any consolation, they are full of shit. In the second jhana and above, the factors of initial and sustained attention disappear. In practical terms, this means you cannot direct your thoughts away from the object of concentration once you enter such state. You have to decide beforehand how long you will be in that state and give yourself a mental timer. See Dipa Ma's biography for a case of someone actually entering higher jhanas that way.
This is the reason that anything beyond the first dhyana is not encouraged in Mahayana, as it is impossible to apply vipasyana in a state of concentration so deep that you cannot direct your mind.
The teachers popular in the SF scene are inflating their own achievements and the ones of their students by using very lightweight criteria. I had that experience when I attended a TWIM retreat before their founder died. According to them, I reached the fourth or fifth jhana. I can assure you I did not.
Yeah, agreed, there's a lot of misinformation. I'm always encountering people that say they just started, followed a guided meditation on the jhanas and entered fourth jhana within a week. And then the signs they describe are all just your basic things that arise when you first start having some facility over your practice, probably not even stability in the first jhana. Not to mention that it's impossible to be following a guided, external voice when you're in such a state of absorption.
As Chogyam Trungpa would probably say, they're all practicing spiritual materialism.
I worked in SF prior to the dotcom bust. Since I was commuting and made a day of when I had to be in the office. I took yoga with Larry Schultz - the yoga teach for the Grateful Dead, he had a studio near 4th and Brannon (I believe, memory foggy). He was great to listen to stories and learn from.
As mentioned in another post, I've been to SF Zen Center events both in practice and adjacent classes.
The tech scene now has become much more narcissistic than it was then. I didn't see the evolution as clearly as I did in Palo Alto while working there and in Mountain View.
I would not couple the tech scene with spiritual practices themselves. Judge the so called practicioners not the practice / practice instructors/organization.
Perhaps I'm getting the wrong impression, but it seems like this author is either ignorant of a lot of very successful contemporary scifi or is just taking a narrow view of the genre based on their own preferences.
AI and independent publishing certainly make it harder to sort the wheat from the chaff, but the ubiquity and convenience of aquiririg reading materials has never been better in all of human history.
I will never get caught up with all the scifi books I want to read, and nothing could make me happier.
"The researchers tested their framework on nearly 1,000 LinkedIn profiles to see if it could match them to accounts on Hacker News. These were profiles where the real-world identity was known to the team, who removed names, links, and other obvious identifiers from the bios.
The AI-powered framework successfully linked accounts with up to 67% accuracy at 90% precision, whereas the best non-AI methods struggled to succeed."
Many are complaining about banking app compatability, but I've never felt compelled to use anything other than my browser for banking. What's the big deal with the banking apps?
Am missing out on some huge advantage here?
"Excel's default behavior is to convert certain text entries into dates. It makes sense for general spreadsheet use, but not for geneticists. Genes, like Membrane Associated Ring-CH-Type Finger 1, are given alphanumeric symbols (MARCH1) as a shorthand for their full, complex names. When a scientist would input "MARCH1" into an Excel spreadsheet, the software would automatically interpret this as a date and convert it to "1-Mar"[...]For a long time, Microsoft's position was that this was a niche issue affecting a small number of users"
To be fair, this really is a niche issue. For all that I agree with the frustration for Microsoft's terrible behavior in so many other respects, it's hard to fault them for not being immediately responsive to something like this.
I think it does not make sense even for general spreadsheet use; it would be better to specify the type explicitly. (I also think a "zoned spreadsheet" would be better, although sometimes compatibility might still be needed with existing spreadsheets so a zoned spreadsheet cannot be the only implementation.)
That's not really a counter argument to what was said. Daoboy said (and he's right!) that MS hasn't done anything because the behavior impacts very few users, not because it benefits very many users.
It's also less helpful because it's not very deterministic. A year is a short time and when it rolls over it will pick the current year even when you may have wanted last year.
My physician prescribed Vitamins D and B12, so a quality Omega 3 is the only supplement I currently purchase.
After an absurd amount of trial and error with every over-the-counter, trendy supplement over the last couple of decades (and lord only knows how much money), these are the only ones that seem to make a subjective difference on my quality of life and an objective difference in my bloodwork.
I also really need a break from screens, and reading a book is a great excuse to not be on my phone or watching tv.
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