calepayson

Ah, cause they inherited a ton of cash ya?

I actually tend to keep my cards super concise. I treat Anki as a way to practice fundamentals, like memorizing certain formulas. Anytime I try to add conceptual stuff to cards I feel like I'm only memorizing one specialized version of the thing and it doesn't feel super useful.

I think of it like drills in a sport. If your practice is 100% drills, you'll be pretty bad. But drills give you an awesome foundation to do the really complex stuff intuitively.

My little brother is a beach lifeguard but in the last year he’s pumped out so many incredible projects. It feels like he’s been unleashed. Such a cool era!

I'm not sure the Black Death is a good example of gradual population decline

I feel like this is a joke but honest answer: I worked ocean rescue for 4 years then lived with some tech folks in sf who were making literally 5-10x my salary.

What’s stopping me? Probably some combo of wanting to one day afford a home and a family without having to move to Memphis and the a sense that I’d get bored as a welder and therefore be a bad one.

Man, septic pumper tho…

Yay.

Honestly great question. I think of it as:

I invest my wages to take advantage of compound interest. It’s kind of my only hope of having a family / owning a home / retiring. If stuff stops compounding, I’m fucked. Multiply by however many millions of people are on the same position.

I don’t necessarily think the theories are making any assumption about what is good (except for the “greed is good dicks”)but more acknowledging that this is how our system currently works and the first generation to step off this ride will have a horrible time.

> Pain for whom? The people profiting from cheap labor probably.

A pretty consistent trend throughout history is that shit rolls downhill.

Ya but I’m 28 and have had enough with these contractions. For Christ sake can I get a sane decade so I can actually build a career. :)

Shot in the dark but my sense is that a lot of our economics presumes growth and, if we don’t get it, a lot of terrible stuff happens. I feel pretty confident that ai will eventually be a large driver of growth but I do worry about whether it'll come soon enough.

In your opinion where is the line on where LLMs are useful/harmful to learning?

In my school projects I've found them super useful for working with libraries. In the past it felt like the theory I learned was pretty low impact. 80% of my time was spent learning the quirks of a library. Now it feels like I can take theory and iterate over a ton of different solutions without having to worry about learning whatever library the professor requires. Basically I'm I feel like it lets me spend more time learning the thing I want to learn rather than all the busywork around it. Would be curious to hear your thoughts. Thanks!

I think you're right in that it has the shape but I think it's missing a pretty key piece. We still haven't been able to solve catastrophic forgetting, yet everything with a brain has. Basically LLMs seem good at approximating intelligence on a moment-to-moment basis, but feel quite far away when you chat with one over time.

Like at some level, yes, transformers are trying to emulate a human brain but the second you ask folks if they do a good job of it, I think most rationale people would say no.

> 1) This definition could actually be expanded (for example, with definitions from Mumford or Reuleaux). But still this definition cannot be applied directly to living organisms.

I'm not sure I understand this. Why not?

I think the point of the commentator above is that there are two extreme narratives that start each start with an uncontroversial assumption and then taking it to a pretty wild place. One narrative takes the assumption that brains are just matter so it should be possible to engineer consciousness and then argues that LLMs are conscious. The other takes the assumption that LLMs aren't conscious but then argues that because they aren't we won't ever be able to make anything conscious.

I don't actually think the commentator you responded to is arguing for either of these narratives and I thought it was a pretty useful way to look at some of these arguments.