cowpig

I feel like language models help me search through concepts really quickly, and will also help me understand things just well enough to use those concepts more quickly. So they kind of narrow what I learn down to exactly what I need in the moment.

I don't think I'm actually learning more though. I think the act of banging my head against the wall to learn something the hard way teaches me more, but feels harder and is slower.

But then I really retain it, and I've also learned a bunch of meta-skill in the process.

So I think it's just different. Now it's harder to force myself to bang my head against the wall when the easier path is so accessible. Used to just have far fewer available paths because they were too hard.

Is there a good resource you would recommend for learning about chronobiology for someone who is intellectually curious?

What about for someone who wants to better understand how sleep and their biological & cognitive functions are related?

> It's a symbiotic relationship

That's right, and the difference is that this one is parasitic.

Why?

edit: In all seriousness, some numbers I'm concerned about for children are the

- % of carbon in the atmosphere

- the number of militaristic demagogues in positions of power

- the number of hours the average person spends reading propaganda on social media

- the parts per million of microplastics in drinking water

- the democracy index

The sum of dollars consumed, dollars invested, dollars spent by governments, and net exports is a weird proxy signal to obsess over

Your children need the number go up?

lose what?

The number of people raw-dogging software that executes arbitrary instructions on their machine coming from a 3rd party server just absolutely baffles me.

The same people who've spent years of their career making sure that never happens.

I guess I have to ask every law firm I work with whether they use OpenAI and Claude products now

As someone who has privacy concerns this is horrifying to me.

Both companies have settled lawsuits for illegal use of data. I would be extremely upset to learn that anybody is passing my private information to these companies for any reason.

> Plaintiffs allege1 that the City, through a series of acts and failures to act, caused lead to leach into Jackson’s drinking water. City officials then, despite the presence of lead in the water, incorrectly told residents that the water was safe to drink, despite knowing it likely was not.

This is the allegation. Doesn't sound much like "the constitution guarantees us safe drinking water," but rather "the constitution says our city government officials can't knowingly poison us and lie about it"

I don't know what you mean when you say "by necessity be a loser" here.

My point is that Meta and Google have had an almost comical resource advantage when compared to all of the rest of the firms in the AI race.

Anthropic raised $65 billion this year, meta is spending double that on capex and alphabet 3x.

That's just their capex.

If you also factor the deadweight loss the duopoly imposes on the entire economy, it paints a grim resource efficiency picture.

Not to mention the negative externalities caused by the decline of journalism. This one is hard to quantify but I believe is the worst.

> How is wielding this weapon against our most innovative companies going to help the United States compete at scale against China? Scale is sort of required to do so.

Meta and Google gobble up an absolutely gobsmacking duopolist's share of western world's economy each year.

Meanwhile, two other American companies without monopolies are ahead of them in the frontier model race.

Why do you think that is?

this is a felony right?

> I am spending the equivalent of $122k/month of API token spend, or about $4,000 per day, using 21 Claude Max accounts

That's ~$1.4 million/year