This is me all the time, but as I've gotten older I realized extensive note taking is extremely helpful for work. I can't recommend it enough for people like me
Nothing changed my work life more positively than having a notebook and pen with me at all times. "This is simple, I'll remember it, no need to write it down"... no you won't.
Fully agree with both of you, especially about writing even simple things down, because it's usually the simple thing I didn't write down that trips me up.
The hardest part is making sure my notes are always up to date, which sometimes means rewriting them to make it easier to tell at a glance what my responsibilities for the day will be.
I've also found that I sometimes remember the first letter of a word even if I can't remember the word itself, so I also keep an index by letter of medium-term information. For instance, I might remember that a contact's name for a work project starts with S, so I flip to S and see his name is Steven. It'll also be filed in a project-related contacts list so if I can't remember the first letter, I can at least skim until I see the name.
I've just started experimenting with transcribed voice notes combined with a local LLM to help me write high-level summaries as well as helping create the index. Still needs work, though. I always have to double-check the outputs to make sure the LLM didn't miss anything important.
Side note: LLMs, even relatively small ones, are really good at helping me find a word via a vague conceptual description of what I want to say. Quite helpful, because on bad days I run into a missing word several times a paragraph when writing. When that fails, I use a related words site and drill down finding closer and closer words until I see the one I wanted.
I learned thinking too much about it makes it worse. Just have to do lists that are ephemeral that you'll rewrite and start over 5-10 pages from now. Just pencil and nice small notebooks that are portable is more important than my laptop or phone most of the time for work
I try to keep things simple because any attempt at a complex/heavy process will never become a habit. But what I find is, even the act of writing something down means I will remember it.
What is a social media site? Any site where anybody has to register to make a comment or just to read comments will require validation. It means that every adult to access any webpage, such as HN, will require to provide government proof of ID. No anonymity anymore. The internet will die as a social medium.
> What is a social media site? Any site where anybody has to register to make a comment or just to read comments will require validation.
Per the article, "HB 3 applies to platforms that have 'addictive features' such as infinite scrolling and push alerts — and in which at least 10% of users are kids under 16 who spend at least two hours per day on the platform."
Not saying it's a good idea but it sounds like the law is more targeted than that.
the internet as you remember it died a long time ago.
they're already tracking you, and the likelihood they can identify you, specifically, is pretty high. yeah yeah it's HN so I'm sure someone will pop out of the woodwork and talk about how they de-Google'd 3 years ago and have a rooted phone and bla bla bla -- sure. the tiny minority of you beat that game, but at this point most of you are already ID'd.
let's just call the spade a spade, and then find a way to mitigate some of the most negative, pernicious influence of social media.
Perhaps you'd like to explain your reasoning? While social media can certainly amplify harmful voices and give growing minds access to information they may not be ready to process fully - why is this the government's job?
Please be sure to include the age verification and other forms of data collection that similar politicians are passing as part of your argument.
Alcohol is restricted to those 21 and up, so it seems theres precedent for such a thing, even though the implementation differs (because it has to, sure to the nature of the thing).
Why do we have public schools? Why might that be the government's responsibility? The answer might clue you into why the government would want to do such a thing.
For the same reason drugs and gambling have policies - the government is (supposed to be) the collective will of the people and enough people deem it harmful to society as a whole.
There are levels of government that regulate even things like heights of fences in neighborhoods (you could pick something more serious, like occupancy limits to buildings), is it wild to think we wouldn't apply some level of policy to highly addictive and demonstrably detrimental surveillance capitalism?
There is plenty of established precedent for gating certain public health hazards behind age requirements, I'm guessing it gets tangled in the courts for awhile but ultimately survives in some form.
Can I.. vote against this? Death has historically been the only equalizer and return to the mean that has saved us from Tyrants and excessive concentration of power and control.
I'm fine with having the life expectancy that I have, am I the only one?
Meet the new tyrant, same as the last tyrant. It doesn't really equalize anything. All that means is churn. There's no guarantee that changing to a new tyrant will result in something better. It might even be worse.
All though human history, we have kings, emperors, knights, and so forth. Now dictators and elected politicians. Some of them enacted absolute calamity and caused the death of millions. This can continue before they either die in office or are assassinated or overthrown.
Human societies are always changing, even under dictatorships. Political collapses are always going to be possible if you have a system that continue to deteriorate. The mistake that people make is living forever is assuming that power structures don't change. Humans are not rocks. We change and react and have agencies.
Many tyrants have been multi-generational. Many have been deposed, so death can't be the "only" equalizer. And many modern "tyrants" are organizations and systems, not individuals. And who knows, maybe tyrants will act more sensibly if they expect to live in the future they're harming (wishful thinking perhaps).
If you take antibiotics when you're sick or choose your diet based on health concerns, you're not fine with the life expectancy you have. Natural lifespans (my words, not yours) don't make any sense with the level of intervention we do.
I like to imagine that choosing how and when you will die will one day be right there with self-actualization in Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
This research would protect us from aging, but not from bullets or poisons. The likes of Hitler and Stalin would have still died at about the same time had anti-senescence treatments been available to them.
From every lawyer I spoke to about this, this was not a win for Ripple but the SEC.
They were found guilty of unregistered offerings to institutional. There's no way that the jury/judge won't take that prior decision into account with the non-institutional tranche. Somehow this was spun as a good thing?
I know a lawyer who happens to have a CS background who specializes in technology and cryptocurrency law. IIRC he was saying this was more of a win for Ripple/crypto, as it paved a path for crypto projects to not be classified as securities
I'm not sure. After this ruling every platform quickly relisted xrp. I assume they have pretty good attorneys who looked at the ruling and essentially declared "game on".
This doesn't just resonate with creatives - the startup / path to tech entrepreneurship is structured in a very similar way.
I've seen lifers, trust funders and day jobbers succeed and fail in different ways, raise funds or bootstrap with nothing for years. Obviously the trust fund kids succeed substantially more often than the lifers or day jobbers
Several years ago I was mulling starting up a retail store in my town and when I looked closer at some of retail stores I liked in similar/adjacent markets I couldn't help but notice the backgrounds of the young founders of those stores, that they just so happened to come from enormously rich families and were obviously independently wealthy.
Their outwardly appearing successful stores may have well been simple hobbies and passion projects.
Possibly these persons were also great business persons and those stores were genuine profitable successes, but there was really no way of knowing. It was something that did dissuade me somewhat from my idea of venturing down the same path.
I absolutely did not have the sort of infinite safety net that they had.
Yup, threw my hat into the ring to try this for three years and I can see the path forward, but I don't have the income cushion or (VC) sales skills to pull it off except as a dayjobber.
Well written, but it side steps the X-risk and even the employment/ capitalism failures looming on the horizon.
2 years ago I thought we were decades away from general purpose AI, this is coming from a guy who implemented transformer models on day 5. My time estimates have been proven very wrong.
I'm equally worried about the value of white collar labour dropping to near zero in my lifetime, and the ultimate centralization of power. The movie Elysium seems less and less science fiction every day.
I am happy politicians and think-tanks are taking this seriously, you should be too.
Have they been proven wrong? What is the roadmap to get to general purpose AI, and what is the proof that we are close?
The domains where AI experts can beat domain experts is certainly growing, but I don't see how you can get from that to a claim of general AI. I certainly don't see how you can get there from the recent LLMs in particular which can't beat domain intermediates at anything.
The transformer model is one more incremental improvement that made the language problem tractable. This has only captured the public interest because the language problem is so much more flashy and easy to understand than something like protein folding.
AutoGPT style of bots, aka agent universe discovery systems are still obviously nascent - but as someone who generally leverages LLMs for nearly all of my work, I would certainly say they are general purpose.
I would be remiss in saying they are anywhere near average human capability in most areas, but I do worry that my estimation capability is off and that we're closer to the concave part of the S curve than the convex. It just takes a couple more breakthroughs in model/dataset design
So these bots, as they currently exist, are already suitable for:
* Predicting the physical geometry of proteins
* Playing Starcraft
* Playing Go
* Trading stocks
* Controlling motors to make a bipedal robot walk
* Analysing data from particle accelerators
* Analysing data from telescopes
* Detecting cancer in medical images
These are all things that AI can do today. Are you suggesting that we are near a paradigm shift where a single AI system will ve competent in all of these domains? And will further be simmilarly competent in novel domains for which it has not been designed?
>The transformer model is one more incremental improvement that made the language problem tractable. This has only captured the public interest because the language problem is so much more flashy and easy to understand than something like protein folding.
Language is the process of thinking rendered into tangible medium. If you master language, you master cognition. Many researchers recognized long ago that NLP would be one of, if not the, core of AGI.
> 2 years ago I thought we were decades away from general purpose AI...My time estimates have been proven very wrong.
What's your working definition of "general purpose AI"? What does it include? What does it not include?
Does the AI have to be smart enough not to very often state incorrect information? LLMs still are unimpressive to me from that front.
I asked ChatGPT to explain the usage of the term "Wonder Kid" in the popular Apple TV+ series Ted Lasso, and which character it's tied with. It gave me confidently-stated incorrect answers multiple times until I told it the answer. (At which point it stated the correct answer with an apology.)
This doesn't feel close to "general purpose AI". Feels like we're meeting the limits of LLMs and finding they're not a magic AI bullet.
It's as good as an intern today, there's definitely room to improve to avoid saying incorrect things - great work being done on providing negative samples during RLHF training; also some papers working on incorporating trust (not near my laptop so don't have links)
Textbooks are all you need is another extremely interesting area of focus.
Improved correctness and a general reduction in hallucinations I predict will end up hitting OSS models by EOY
How is that "as good as an intern?" Interns, for the most part, do not hallucinate and confidently lie on topics they know nothing about. Good interns tend to ask a lot of questions and quickly learn the cultural cues around the office, allowing them to fit in and become productive. LLMs are incapable of any of this.
John Schulman from OpenAI recently gave a talk about the hallucination and uncertainty issues [1]. He claimed that models already have information about their uncertainty but that it remains an open problem as to how to express that uncertainty in natural language. One of the big issues with trying to prevent the model from hallucinating is that you can err too much on the side of caution, causing the model to lie about things it actually does know the correct answer to.
That doesn’t sound too surprising since isn’t that model trained on data from 2021? It may have very little information about Ted Lasso. But to your larger point, I personally don’t think I would derive all my complacency from an example like that simply because models can be trained on highly relevant data if that’s what it takes. Plain-vanilla chatGPT probably can’t take over the job of every entry-level office worker, but specific models can probably be trained individually to be a medical receptionist, health insurance coder, auto insurance claims representative, welfare caseworker, Ted Lasso analyst, etc. In that way, it’s really not that different than a ditzy, green but highly teachable 18-year-old in terms of its potential to take over a lot of jobs. I don’t have a solution/opinion/comment on how that will play out, just making that observation.
That scenario is easy to explain. If it hasn’t been trained on the Ted Lasso script then it’s going to just be guessing and will likely be wrong. Training a GPT model to identify when it lacks enough information to answer is something researches are actively pursuing. In the mean time you could try pasting in a transcription of the episode in question and then asking.
I'm equally worried about the value of white collar labour dropping to near zero in my lifetime
(Shrug) If it turns out that humans have a higher purpose than doing a robot's job badly, I don't see the downside to letting the robots do the job. I'm all for capitalism, but it's an ideology, not a religion. If there's something better on the horizon, let's help it along.
ML looks like it is probably going to be the next step in human evolution by punctuated equilibrium. And it's about time.
People thought that for a long time, that we'd be able to persue higher minded activities such as art, business management, entrepreneurship and writing.
What we've discovered is that the first model breakthroughs have been able to largely demolish that dream. As a writer I can tell you that writing with GPT4 today provides me with superpowers that non- accelerated authors could come close to; and theres no plausible way to distinguish our two works.
I'm more worried about the coming depression / suicide spiral (which were already in by the way) because of human uselessness than I am of terminators coming to farm us.
As a writer you are pursuing higher minded activities. You aren’t working in a factory or steering a plow behind a team of oxen. You aren’t illiterate. You even have free time outside of your already very refined employment to pursue even loftier goals of personal fulfillment. Sure, not everyone can say the same but the proportion of people in grinding poverty continues to shrink and is minuscule compared to even just 100 years ago let alone compared to before the industrial revolution.
Here's a mundane example; AI is aligned and used without harming humans. If/when robotics catches up, we will be heading to a world without a need for humans (at least based on the world pops we have today).
Humans _hate_ being useless, and we were already running into surplus human issues last decade in certain parts of the world.
I foresee a depression/suicide spiral never before seen in our history unless we do something radical
Plenty of people are quite happy without doing economically valuable work. Maybe most. So this isn't an X-risk in the sense that humans might go extinct. Workaholics may remove themselves from the gene pool, but there'll be plenty of people happily chilling.
A lot of people that retire from their careers pursue other interests that fulfill their needs, maybe it will be the era of amateur artists everywhere.
Others prefer to manually do tasks that can be automated.
Others could engage in cooperation with robots because humans will always have creative desires.
Amature artists doing what? Trying to figure out why human greed is insatiable, therefore they have no place to live?
There are any number of problems that have to be solved together. Giving the capital class hyper powerful AI robots so they can own the world while everyone else suffers is an AI risk.
Are people's self worth really intricately tied to what they do for a living?
I mean I enjoy my work, for the most part anyway. But if I could spend all my time with my family and hobbies I see that as an improvement rather then something to be depressed about.
Most people that retire don't turn into murderers or anarchists. I find very interesting how people tend to picture the worst possible scenarios, maybe a lot of Movies or TV influence?
Technology that's putting those folks out of work (and into rioting, etc.) will also provide the tools to repress them. I don't like it, but that's the way it seems to me. E.g. Hong Kong.
So 'now' has a problem. We have no means to know if our social environment is actually stable or not. Currently we are in a long 'peace' after WWII. Maybe it will remain, and improving technology will improve our lives and and things will continue to remain stable. Or, we'll have further climate instability coupled with AI labor displacement and things will go to shit faster than they ever have in history.
The point is people that believe the world will be stable in the future are more apt to build a stable future. If everyone is watching the news and they believe the future will be unstable, then the future will become unstable as a self fulfilling prophecy.
Something we were pretty worried about, not every kind of vote needs privacy - but there was a story with Eth DAO having people like Vitalik abstain from voting to not affect other voters opinions, happy to see further progress in this area. Can't wait for an openzepplin primitive.
