gradascent

Thank you for sharing! I’m of the opinion that human interaction, and especially the in-person kind, is a more deeply fulfilling experience than anything you could get with AI, but to be fair I haven’t tried building a pseudo-relationship with a chatbot. It makes me wonder about that commonly cited fact that one of the biggest predictors of longevity is having strong social ties. How much of that positive effect could one get from AI? My guess is: more than having nothing / nobody, but less than having a real human community.

Interesting, can you elaborate?

> Genie 4 is natively multimodal, enabling audio-like music, ambient noises, and interactive dialogue

What on Earth is audio-like music? Do they mean music-like audio?

At least you're being honest about the fact that you're selling out. Many people working there believe that they're making the world a better place, or think that Meta is just another amoral company like the many others, or that they as an individual aren't contributing to the negative impacts. Money will do strange things to good people.

Not only do they train on that data but they train ONLY on that data and don’t have to generalize to other domains. And the architectures themselves, including hyperparameters, loss function, etc are chosen and tuned specifically for the quirks of this domain. So this result doesn’t surprise me either.

Carpenter and park ranger sound gratifying. But truck driver? Can you help me understand the appeal?

I just took the Amtrak from Southern California to Seattle.

Pros:

- space! wide seats and leg room are awesome (I'm 6'5" so this is everything)

- Freedom to move around and explore. Lounge car, dining car, snack bar

- Spectacular views

- Train stations are much more pleasant than airports

- Opportunity to meet people from all over the place. On a plane everyone is going from A->B, people on the train could be starting/ending anywhere along the route, including small towns you've never heard of.

Cons:

- 32 hours of travel

- Pay an extra ~$500 to get a bed, or sleep in your seat

Overall I have no regrets but I'll probably not do this again until I'm retired or extremely bored.

Similar to the author’s story, I crashed on my bike going pretty quickly on a busy road. No serious injuries but I ended up with scrapes and a softball-sized bruise which lasted over a month. But after I fell and got off the road a man sitting on his porch eating dinner asked me if I was ok. I told him what happened and he quickly grabbed some tools to fix my bike and alcohol and bandages for the wound. His roommate came home and assumed we knew each other but nope he was just my guardian angel. I hadn’t thought about this in a while… now I’ll be sure to remember it again.

From the figure in the first paper listed:

> Responses to the query “Write a metaphor about time” clustered by applying PCA to reduce sentence embeddings to two dimensions. […] The responses form just two primary clusters: a dominant cluster on the left centered on the metaphor “time is a river,” and a smaller cluster on the right revolving around variations of “time is a weaver.”

I just gave Gemini 3 the same prompt and got something quite different:

>Time is a patient wind against the cliff face of memory. It does not strike with a hammer to break us; it simply breathes, grain by grain, until the sharp edges of grief are smoothed into rolling hills, and the names we thought were carved in stone are weathered into soft whispers.

I was thinking the same thing. That one accelerates its growth in the presence of radiation. But it also seeks out human flesh and brains to build its biomass intelligence blob, unfortunately.

Adding to the chorus: I like the older images and the precise year is important! The underground shelter is something that wouldn’t exist just a few years after that photo, or before.

Great deep dive. I've learned a lot already and haven't even finished the introduction

Then why do I never get an “I don’t know” type response when I use Claude, even when the model clearly has no idea what it’s talking about? I wish it did sometimes.

They're all names of popular Kendrick Lamar songs. Don't ask me why though