Solving conversational intelligence is the same as solving general intelligence (AGI), so unless google has solved the latter I would expect any chatbot system to still be pretty annoying for any nuanced or real world conversation.
Not necessarily. GPT-3 for example can put out entire articles, even generate images or generate valid HTML, doesn't mean it has reached AGI, and while it's far from perfect, it can still have utility.
As per the demo, I can imagine learning about a topic through conversations with an AI. It would still be regurgitating existing knowledge, but in a conversational back and forth way, which to some can have value.
It would be very nice if it was hooked into Google Search in real time. I guess that's the next step for an actually useful Google Assistant?
(GPT?) auto generated replies for karma building seem to be gaining traction, I wonder if it can spell the death of forums haha (most likely, it will bring in better moderation systems).
Not sure disclosing all this helps their image, if people now understand they're capable of faking any sort of public appearance of anyone they need to.
> their biggest worry is a new class of people getting richer than them fast
You can read a lot of Western political history since the industrial revolution, when the new class of mega rich Rockefeller types shocked the established orders, as filled with attempts/policies to prevent new Rockefeller like classes of entrepreneurs from happening. Perhaps counter intuitively, real free market capitalism is a great threat to the established political order since it produces the levels of wealth in new people that can actually change said political order.
At risk of sounding belittling to those spend their life giving their labor to someone else, I think we can't go on indefinitely because we aspire to get something better out of our lives, and somewhere perhaps deep in our minds or hearts we know we need better.
After all this whole concept of spending a career at someone else's company only started in the late 20th C when the industrial rev created the modern corporation.
The nice thing about working for someone else's company is you work 40 hours, then it leaves your mind for the rest of the time. If there's some problem at work, it's usually "not in my job description." Like, printer doesn't work? Call the Department of Inhuman Resources. Not your problem.
If you work for yourself, it's 24/7. No vacations, either. All problems are your problem. Printer quit? Whatcha gonna do about it? It isn't for everyone.
Maybe it's better to have problems you care about. Solving problems that aren't directly related to your well-being is unnatural. That's not how humans evolved. Until fairly recently in human history, if you had a problem in your work (which was probably farming), it was a direct threat to your survival that demanded your attention. You cared deeply about it and solving it in the best way possible mattered immensely.
I'm not saying we should go back to being one problem away from death, but also solving problems that just fundamentally don't matter to us personally doesn't seem to be great either.
The grass is always greener, right? But this is pretty idealistic.
Picture changes drastically if you have an abusive boss or a toxic work culture. There have to be a bunch of people on HN who physically cringed when they saw 40 hours, some have even talked themselves into being macho about it.
The people in the 40 hours, though, dream of the working for yourself, at least you're the cause of success and failure instead of an unpredictable re-org, a new boss, a rapid company expansion or shrinking, a colleague who wants your throat, etc.
But a 24/7 stress of self-employment is not for the faint of heart either. What's the compromise?
The compromise is to work somewhere, usually somewhere small, where you don't have unpredictable re-orgs, new bosses all the time, rapid company expansions/shrinkages, colleagues who want your throat, etc. It especially helps if it's somewhere there's mutual trust between everyone to say "hey, I think this is the most important thing so I'm going to take X days/weeks and work on this. Things will be better/more efficient/more profitable/easier in Q ways as a result." And then you do it, and things are better, and the business chugs along.
Such places don't exist forever, and they don't tend to be massive growth situations. But they are probably what many people yearn for.
> The nice thing about working for someone else's company is you work 40 hours
What in modern society (or even this website) makes you think it's only 40 hours?
Or that you can just go "not my problem boss" -- in an At Will state that can literally get you fired on the spot.
> If you work for yourself, it's 24/7. No vacations, either. All problems are your problem. Printer quit? Whatcha gonna do about it? It isn't for everyone.
Bullocks. You set the hours as a contractor -- literally, in the contact. This is standard freelance stuff.
> What in modern society (or even this website) makes you think it's only 40 hours?
The jobs I've held for the entirety of my so-far 8 year career, where I can count on my hands the number of times I've worked more than 40 hours in a week.
> Or that you can just go "not my problem boss" -- in an At Will state that can literally get you fired on the spot.
The fact that I've done that, many times, and not gotten fired. If you are skilled and a good performer, you have a lot of leverage, doubly so in the current job market.
> Bullocks. You set the hours as a contractor -- literally, in the contact. This is standard freelance stuff.
What happens when a client decides not to pay you? What happens when you can't find enough work to make whatever amount you want to make? How do you establish a reliable client base that won't saddle you with those first 2 problems in the first place? That's just the tip of the iceberg of problems you'll have to deal with on your own if you go the freelance route, which a salaried job will abstract away from you. Not everyone wants to deal with those issues; I certainly don't.
> What in modern society (or even this website) makes you think it's only 40 hours?
Rush hour times makes it pretty obvious. Another thing is I've worked as both employer and employee. People leave after 8 hours.
> You set the hours as a contractor -- literally, in the contact.
Your 40 hour employee contract says 40 hours, literally. Why are you able to stand up for yourself as a contractor (who can be shown the door any second) but not as an employee?
> in an At Will state that can literally get you fired on the spot
Only if they are looking for an excuse to get rid of you anyway. And contractors are easy to fire on the spot, there are no legal restrictions on that.
Also, if you're a contractor, you spend a lot of time looking for contracts. 24/7.
i realize this is my problem, but lately i can’t leave it at 40 hours. i sometimes wake up completely absorbed with things i think are bad decisions and that deeply frustrate me at work. or i’ll think about the lack of prestige and recognition i’m getting.
Everyone I know who has their own business (or businesses) does less than ten hours a week of "real" work. You only work 24/7 if you don't delegate responsibilities properly, or if your company is mainly just you.
> After all this whole concept of spending a career at someone else's company only started in the late 20th C when the industrial rev created the modern corporation.
Psh, what preceded that was far worse and also involved a lifetime of laboring for someone else's benefit.
So? The fact that slavery- and slavery-adjacent relationships were common through a lot of human history doesn't make them acceptable now.
My take on this is that there's some part of our minds that knows we don't have to be servants to our companies. And knowing that, yet subjugating ourselves anyway creates an itch. That itch grows a little every day we wake up to an alarm and haul ourselves into the office for useless meetings. We know deep down this isn't an acceptable road for our lives. But we're here anyway, with a story that somehow justifies closing jira tickets - day in, day out.
Coincidentally, depression is an evolved mechanism for stopping you from doing something that you know deep down is unhealthy for your soul but habitual. It works by every day making it harder to do the thing you know you shouldn't do. The longer you resist it, the deeper depression burrows, until you finally can't bring yourself to make pleasantries with your spouse - or, in this case, haul yourself into the office.
For my money, burnout is a depression symptom which grows out of a long term, habitual suppression of your will. "I want X, but I can't have it because of <habitual rationalisation>". After growing up being told we can do anything, we aren't adapted for existence as a few pixels in a giant org chart. Burnout is a healthy backstop to force you to pursue the life you need, even if each day you can convince yourself you don't want it.
Your take on depression is extremely interesting and makes a lot of sense to me due to my own experiences which I will not elaborate on. What research are you basing this on?
“…man never regards what he possesses as so much his own, as what he does; and the labourer who tends a garden is perhaps in a truer sense its owner, than the listless voluptuary who enjoys its fruits…In view of this consideration, it seems as if all peasants and craftsman might be elevated into artists; that is, men who love their labour for its own sake, improve it by their own plastic genius and inventive skill, and thereby cultivate their intellect, ennoble their character, and exalt and refine their pleasures. And so humanity would be ennobled by the very things which now, though beautiful in themselves, so often serve to degrade it…But, still, freedom is undoubtedly the indispensable condition, without which even the pursuits most congenial to individual human nature, can never succeed in producing such salutary influences. Whatever does not spring from a man’s free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very being, but remains alien to his true nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness…
…we may admire what he does, but we despise what he is.”
― Wilhelm von Humboldt
Actually the concept was alive and well long before that.
Mid- and post-industrial revolution Europe had many large companies with many employees. In fact, the British East India Company (founded in the year 1600) was the first company to sell shares of ownership to raise enough capital to buy/build the necessary supplies to do large-scale business (in their case, mostly ship construction).
Of course, modern labor laws were created in response to the horrible human rights abuses committed by business owners against their employees beginning at that time.
The opposition of "big capital" vs "labor" (and hence the philosophy built on that dichotomy that underpins Marxism) didn't really exist prior to these large industrial revolution companies.
Prior to that, small businesses (and banks/lenders) were the bread and butter of economic society.
Heck, back in ancient Egypt, a whole town was built to house the craftsmen working for the Pharaoh building his pyramid. And that was only a small part of the logistics and network needed to make it all work.
I mean before that you largely had a job that was assigned at birth, and you kept at it till you were down and out, with no real expectation of changing that state. The notion of significant social mobility is itself fairly novel to post-revolution.
You weren’t beholden to someone else’s corporation, but you were to someone else’s land or tribe/community.
Do you have money? Quit your job, go travel, go entrepreneurial pursuing something that moves you.
Living in some San Francisco apartment, building a career at tech companies making 6 figures a year is, once you have some money, a pretty crappy wheel-spinning way to live life, by some opinions.
I don't understand why the author casually says Basecamp "burned it all down". Basecamp took action to set a culture they believed would help them succeed long term. Is having a tough conversation with employees that risks offending some of them burning it all down?
Basecamp/37Signals was by most accounts a profitable and great place to work for at least 20 years. Most orgs would do well to get to that situation in the first place. Few companies get to fall from that perch.
Folks whose only takeaway from Basecamp is a warning story missed 90% of the lessons.
I'd recommend starting out with a landing page first before you build the app. Like a really nice, well-designed one, that captures your vision and core points. Just copy some startup landing page you like and tweak it. Create from scratch or use webpage builder.
Gives you advantages: something you can share with others, a developed/implemented vision, something you can actually launch at any time without the underlying product for testing reasons, and something that will psychologically motivate you.
I used to build out backends first because it was easier for me, but many projects just didn't get launched. The landing page first is actually harder in my opinion, but psychologically having something presentable makes the project feel real.
Had a cold water realization a few days ago that Doge, which has all the functions of Btc, in being non elitist, populist, and easily marketable because it's entertaining might very well be on its way to replacing Btc in market cap. Wall Street doesn't care about the underlying currency just returns; main street is going to like Doge more than Btc because it's not elitist. What's stopping it from dethroning Btc?
My understanding is doge code has old bugs that haven't been fixed since the code is not actively being maintained.
Doge also has no max supply limit, which is a major feature of bitcoin. As far as the deflationary function is concerned, Doge is more similar to the Zimbabwe dollar than Bitcoin.
This is false information. There is definitely an active development team and the yearly new coin caps are pretty controlled with a decreasing inflation rate that will reach zero eventually.
It's absolutely built to be a real crypto at this point.
>yearly new coin caps are pretty controlled with a decreasing inflation rate that will reach zero eventually.
So there are ~130 billion Doge in circulation, what is the max possible supply and who is setting that supply cap?
My understanding is there is no supply cap and will never be a supply cap just like ETH, which means Doge can be devalued right into the dirt. This sounds like an extremely bad store of value to anyone that has studied what makes hard money.
I expect a lot of people will be burned when this great example of bad money unravels....
That is what folks have been saying for at least 3 months since I've been following.
I think you underestimate how the mainstream views cryptos as elitist silicon valley stuff, while dogecoin positions itself as "the peoples" currency. I think there's some bigger forces too that want to embarrass bitcoin and said elitist elements.
I'd actually be willing to bet 10k USD with you that by end of August Doge will still be over $1.00.
> I think you underestimate how the mainstream views cryptos as elitist silicon valley stuff, while dogecoin positions itself as "the peoples" currency. I think there's some bigger forces too that want to embarrass bitcoin and said elitist elements.
When it is covered on the news and they are all telling you to 'buy DOGE', for the early ones it is time to sell and take profit and it's 'bye DOGE' to the late comers; followed by negative coverage and smear campaigns to mess with the psychology of the retail investor to buy on the hype and all time highs, HODL, and sell when it is too late.
> I'd actually be willing to bet 10k USD with you that by end of August Doge will still be over $1.00.
Good. I'm sure it will go beyond $1. When that time comes I'll be on the other side shorting DOGE all the way down as soon as there is a sign of a pull back from its >$1 target ATH.
Perhaps you can keep your $10k or even put it on DOGE since we're both certain that it will go above $1.
The same arguments could made against Btc and Eth just a couple years ago. I did lose an embarrassing amount betting on them circa 2018. Even today, Btc could suffer a 51% hash power takeover that would for all intents ruin Btc. Betting on Doge is not any more risky than the average crypto project.
Given the mainstream's reaction to crpyto, Doge, being cast as a refreshing, non pretentious alternative to Btc, might as well eclipse it in the coming future, I really wouldn't mind if it did, why not.
