agonz253

It may not be an interesting point of view, but it is based on the most fruitful philosophical position in history, plain-old empiricism.

Your statement that “I no longer have any specific task that I’m confident AI won’t be able to do” is founded on that.

> It feels to me like something that would require a qualitatively new approach

This sentiment has been a recurring theme throughout the history of the field.

There’s no such thing as the greatest movie of all time.

Whether a song is uplifting or not is completely subjective. Intelligence has nothing to do with it… Sometimes even a perfect expression of despair in a song can be uplifting to the listener, for many reasons.

Whenever I’ve been at my lowest, for ex, the various versions of Dylan’s "Not Dark Yet" have always been a source of comfort.

Is it the embargo that prohibits fishermen in Cuba from fishing, farmers from harvesting, cubans from freely doing business? Is it also responsible for cubans getting beaten and imprisoned for thinking differently? Was it the embargo that destroyed every sugar mill in the country, textile factory, shoe factory, you name it?… The dictatorship is the one responsible for all these things.

Since you mentioned Einstein, it reminded me of a comment by Max Born on the subject, from the Born-Einstein letters:

“Einstein expressed over and over again the thought that one should not couple the quest for knowledge with a bread-and-butter profession, but that research should be done as a private spare-time occupation. He himself wrote the first of his great treatises while earning his living as an employee of the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. He believed that only in this way could one preserve one's independence. What he did not consider, however, was the organizational rigidity of almost all professions, and the importance which individual members of a profession attach to their work. No professional pride could develop without it. To be able successfully to practice science as a hobby, one has to be an Einstein.”

Indeed. I recommend also checking out the 2nd volume of Einstein's collected papers. There is one with the proceedings from a conference on the subject, and Einstein is basically alone in trying to convince his peers, including Planck, of the reality of "quanta" of light, independent of the process of emission and absorption or mathematical tricks.

Are there no distinguishing features between these vector databases? I'm not familiar with them so I was looking for any comment on that in the article, whether some make different tradeoffs than others, are easier to operate or implement, more scalable, etc. That together with their relative novelty might help explain why there are so many.

> most successful podcast ever made.

What's that Schopenhauer quote, "he who writes for fools will always find a large audience". I suppose the same can apply to podcasts.

Individual machine failure is not likely, but we're hypothesizing the need for multiple shards for high performance. So now we have more machines and so the probability of failure increases. So we need to add replication, but then we need to deal with data getting out of sync, etc.... As others have mentioned though, these issues only really become important at a certain scale.