hey thanks! spun that up over the weekend. I noticed another Launch HN did that and thought it was brilliant. we are here for feedback, so wanted to make trying it as easy as possible!
On https://www.magicpatterns.com/ you should see an input box. Type anything you want, hit enter, and then you'll get hit with our regular login panel. But at the bottom, for today online, you'll see a "Coming from Hackernews, no login required" button.
Do the settings need to be changed or something so it's public? I just tried but it only shows me the basic info and won't let me chat. I have a paid sub so I should be able to use it if it's properly permissioned.
This is some kind of problem at OpenAI.
I have rechecked all the settings several times. I can see 30+ chats.
But some are working and some are not. Maybe because of the country of the account =(
planning everything around rare failures seems silly to me. If an expensive item has good value, adds utility over a less expensive option, and can still be functionally replaced in case of rare failure mode, i don’t see any white elephant in that picture.
Other than contact lenses/glasses, I'm hard pressed to think of anything in my one bag setup that I couldn't replace easily should my bag be stolen or lost. Electronics (phone, usually the only thing I travel with), documents, and cash notwithstanding. Those would likely be on my person at all times so for them to be stolen would mean I'd have bigger problems than replacing my clothes and backpack (like having been mugged).
The only reason my setup is worth more than $200 (maybe $300) total is because of my glasses and contact lenses.
I take an iPhone and a laptop of course, but if you look at some of these one bag packing lists, they run into the thousands with every last sock being highly technical, boutique, and exorbitant.
there’s literally nothing brittle about a $15 dollar pair of merino socks though, which is the argument I was responding to. If you lose it you can still buy a cheap backup and still have socks, nobody is spending all their time and energy worrying about losing a pair of $15 socks. Some things really do provide more value for a higher price, but everyone’s utility curve is different for each item.
Mostly though i think it comes down to the old joke “everyone who spends more than me is wasting their money on exorbitant whatever and everyone who spends less than me is a cheapskate.”
The list looks like the very definition of brittle to me. Every single item is from a different manufacturer, possibly rare, bespoke, or hard to find (a Japanese version of a highly technical jacket, underwear that even says it’s hard to buy in the description). We’re way beyond preferring wool socks here.
I mean, if the objective would be to replace with exact 1-to-1 replacements, sure that's brittle. But someone listing "Levi's Jeans" may also be hard pressed to replace them with the exact brand when traveling in many countries (ignoring knockoffs and outside of major cities). If the objective were to replace the bag with good-enough locally available things, the listed items are all trivially substitutable for local items, outside the tech gear (which I'd consider a problem for anyone wanting to travel with expensive electronics regardless of their style, one bag or twenty bag).
Sure, that’s exactly my philosophy, to bring things that can be trivially substituted or replaced. The electronics are also trivially substituted, grab another black rectangle of glass off the shelf and have the cloud repopulate your profile.
Then I think we agree with each other, but the One Baggers would not agree with us since they are gear obsessive compulsives and we do not seem to be. At the risk of creating a straw man, I don't think that community would generally say their pack list is trivially replaceable.
Good question. I didn't really pry into other's situations. I was told compensation was based on state, and I really only know my own extremely well. I will tell you Bernie Sanders would approve, and then some, but for my particular area of the state (where most of us live, figures) it is probably deficient by about 3 dollars.
The easiest in terms of pure transit is the corridor in Midtown along the Red Line. From about Alabama up to Downtown. Second is Montrose which for some people will have a cooler vibe.
Within Midtown, the further North you go, there are a few more bars/clubs that make noise at night, so either live further South, live a few blocks East or West of the rail, or both. Huge amounts of apartment stock just came online in the last 3 years there, so you might get a solid rent deal somewhere? For me personally, being able to walk to a grocery store is always key anywhere in the world: shop every 2-3 days on the way home from work, only buy what I need, less waste. That area has two grocery stores: Randall's and Whole Foods.
Montrose is the other top spot. For me it is the #1 example of how Houston's lack of zoning can shine (versus other areas where it is a detriment). Fantastic local retail interspersed among every-other residential block. Montrose is a large-ish area and every half mile can be a slightly different "feel", but there are great options to rent newer apartments, older apartments, or rent spacious, cheap, historical houses close to things like Menil Park, or the big restaurant scene along Westheimer. Sadly the Kroger at Hawthorne is closing, but the huge HEB is dead-center of Montrose. East a bit and you're near Trader Joe's. If you're anywhere along Westheimer, the 82 bus goes to to Midtown Whole Foods and if you're along West Gray the 32 bus goes to the Kroger near River Oaks. The whole area always has things happening (check the pinboards at Inversion or Black Hole), and is next door to Midtown for even more.
If Downtown would get a larger grocery store with slightly more affordable staples (no offense to Phoenecia), and have it close-ish to where the rail lines meet, the entirety of Downtown would immediately become more viable (imo). I have friends both in Downtown, and in the Heights (solid bike culture there), but they eat out more than I do. The Heights started getting expensive ten years ago and doesn't look to stop, but it's still an option.
In about 5 years I think the Greater East End will be another great walkable/bikeable region (the actual East End, not EaDo), so depending where along the gentrification curve you prefer to live (before, during, after) it might be worth checking out now.
This is probably a very dumb question but I'm new to all this and trying to figure out how to mix/match these frameworks like you're describing. I have primarily a static site (using Jekyll, but Middleman would apply) but now need to add some server side stuff (e.g. with Sinatra). I see how I could dump my generated site into the Sinatra /public directory, but then I'm serving everything through the sinatra server when I really only want to hit that when I need the dynamic content/calls. How would I keep them separated while still having a single environment? Have tried googling to no avail, don't know if I'm asking the right questions. Any pointers would be super helpful! Thanks
Not a dumb question! I'm sure there are a lot of different approaches that could work.
For my own projects, I like to keep client-side code separated from the server-side code. The static site (with compiled JavaScript) gets deployed to S3/CloudFront, while the Sinatra API is packaged as a Docker image and deployed to ECS (or any container service)[1]. This means that Sinatra is only handling the API requests, and all of the markup, JavaScript, and other assets are served from a CDN.
[1] For this to work, you'll likely need to set up CORS on the server side, but that's well-supported now and fairly simple to set up.
No no it's all very easy, as is brain surgery: Think. Cut. Repeat. Nothing to it. Fine motor skills are irrelevant. Eyesight and depth perception play no role. Knowledge of the field can be learned immediately, in fact all you need to know is right in my three step directions!
When I say "I have a laptop in front of me," I am describing an understanding of something that is being experienced (sensed). If a Markov text generator outputs this text, it's just rearranging bits. I don't see any evidence that GPT-3 is doing anything more than rearranging bits in a much more elaborate way than a Markov text generator. The results kind of dazzle us, but being dazzled doesn't indicate anything in particular. I see something akin to a textual kaleidoscope toy, a generator of novel text that is syntactically valid and that produces odd cognitive sensations when read.
I maybe should have said sensed, not experienced, since experience also leads into much deeper philosophical discussions around the nature of mind and consciousness. I wasn't really going there, since I don't see anything in GPT-3 or any similar system that merits going there.
I also don't see any evidence that it is drawing any new conclusions or constructing any novel thoughts about anything. It's regurgitating similar results to pre-existing textual examples, re-arranging new ideas in new ways. If you don't think actual new ideas exist then this may be compelling, but if that's the case I have to ask: where did all the existing ideas come from then? Some creative mechanism must exist or nothing would exist, including this text.
The fact that the output often resembles pop Internet discourse says more about the mindlessness of "meme-think" than the GPT-3 model.
As for real world uses, social media spam and mass propaganda seems like the most obvious one. This thing seems like it would be a fantastic automated "meme warrior." Train it on a corpus of Qanon and set it to work "pilling" people.
> When I say "I have a laptop in front of me," I am describing an understanding of something that is being experienced (sensed).
I would ascribe that to two factors a) you have a more immediate, interactive interface to the physical world than GPT does, which is limited to a textual proxy and b) GPT naturally is not a human-level intelligence, it is still of very limited complexity so its understanding more akin to that of a parrot trying to understand its owner's speech patterns. It can infer a tiny bit of semantics and mimic the rest. The ratio is a continuum.
> As for real world uses, social media spam and mass propaganda seems like the most obvious one.
Take active learning versus usual learning. Often with active learning you can learn much faster. That's a kind of "experience." Out of distribution problems where it fails to generalize could be dealt with much more efficiently when a model can ask "hey what's f(x=something really weird and specific that would never come up in an entire internet's worth of training data)?" Experience isn't passive, and that makes a whole world of difference. And that's not even touching on the difficulty of "tell me all about elephants" versus "let me interact with an elephant and see it and touch it and physically study it."
The current leading theories on how the brain works are that yes, they are essentially very impressive prediction machines, which obviously rely on all sorts of pattern matching to make said predictions. You can look up Karl Friston's free energy principle or check this book for more details
Sounds pretty interesting. Are there company or federal requirements for where the work actually takes place? I’m a legal US resident but spend ~80% of my time in Mexico.
