lostphilosopher

Joined 12 years ago

Karma
773
Submissions
200
Member since
Jun 10
Mostly harmless.

http://wyattandersen.com/

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Recent submissions

Comment · 3 months ago
The excessive emojis and heavy formatting really bugs me. Microsoft copilot loves this style.
Comment · 4 months ago
Someone could write a cyberpunk Three Body Problem with this premise.
Comment · 8 months ago
In every discussion of AI eliminating or dramatically reducing the compensation for <some large double digit percentage> of “white collar” jobs (and probably “blue collar” too). It’s unclear to me what the end state is - the vast majority of the economy works on volume. You need large numbers of people with enough money to buy your product/service. As wealth concentrates there are fewer potential buyers and economies of scale start working against producers. (And governments need people with money to tax…)
Comment · 8 months ago
I’ve been looking for tooling that would evaluate my prompt and give feedback on how to improve. I can get somewhere with custom system prompts (“before responding ensure…”) but it seems like someone is probably already working on this? Ideally it would run outside the actual thread to keep context clean. There are some options popping up on Google but curious if anyone has a first anecdote to share?
Comment · 8 months ago
One challenge with hiring a nanny is if they need to take a sick day (or if they quit!) you can end up in a tough spot. In contrast a day care center usually has backups built in so you don’t end up scrambling.
Comment · 10 months ago
Food pyramid was taught when I was in school, but that was before 2011 (as mentioned by another commenter) my own children are in school now and their school lunches align with more modern ideas (veggies and proteins). Certainly could still be improved but I recognize the cost, scale, delivery constraints, plus allergy considerations makes this non-trivial.
Comment · 11 months ago
This seems like what should be a killer feature: Copilot having access to configuration and logs and being able to identify where a failure is coming from. This stuff is tedious manually since I basically run through a checklist of where the failure could occur and there’s no great way to automate that plus sometimes there’s subtle typo type issues. Copilot can generate the checklist reasonably well but can’t execute on it, even from Copilot within Azure. Why not??
Comment · 1 year ago
I have had the experience of approaching or completing something potentially dangerous (merging on a busy street for example) and thinking I should “save” and sub consciously visualizing doing so internally. Very fleeting sensation and doesn’t happen consistently at all but it’s interesting when I notice it.
Comment · 1 year ago
I don't think this is unique to churches, or even non-profits. Plenty of non-church non-profits rely on a few large donors for much or their funding (in fact plenty are designed that way out the gate - they're founded by one very wealthy individual to work on the projects they care about) and plenty of for profit businesses rely on a few large dollar clients for much of their revenue. Both could potentially be seen extensions of the same economic system that concentrates wealth for both individuals and businesses at top.
Comment · 1 year ago
We don't really have a true test that means "if we pass this test we have AGI" but we have a variety of tests (like ARC) that we believe any true AGI would be able to pass. It's a "necessary but not sufficient" situation. Also ties directly to the challenge in defining what AGI really means. You see a lot of discussions of "moving the goal posts" around AGI, but as I see it we've never had goal posts, we've just got a bunch of lines we'd expect to cross before reaching them.
Comment · 1 year ago
Related - there needs to be individuals and businesses that want/need and can afford upgrades and repairs. If office workers are getting replaced with AI we don't need to build and maintain offices and the ecosystems that support them (see also WFH/Covid) and those workers won't have income to pay for plumbers, electricians, roofers, etc. for their personal property. A worst case scenario AI workforce revolution would attack trades from both supply and demand.
Comment · 1 year ago
It's worth noting that for those edge cases all the productivity monitoring in the world won't make that employee any more effective, and you won't need those tools to see that they're not cutting it (assuming you're engaged with your team as the other commenter describes). You'll likely lose more in annoying the rest of your team and burning your own cycles with surveillance than you'll gain from it.
Comment · 1 year ago
I've long maintained that kids must learn end to end what it takes to put content on the web themselves (registering a domain, writing some html, exposing it on a server, etc.) so they understand that _truly anyone can do this_. Learning both that creating "authoritative" looking content is trivial and that they are _not_ beholden to a specific walled garden owner in order to share content on the web.
Comment · 1 year ago
I don't know if AI books are or will be as good or better than human written, but to me this is the problem - "Even though artificial intelligence is still in its infancy, AI-made books are already flooding the market." There is no scarcity problem in books. There are already way more that I would enjoy reading than I will ever actually read. It's already tough to prioritize which ones to get to without having vastly more to sort through. And people _enjoy_ writing books. I don't want to support automating something away that people enjoy doing, is produced in abundance, and is very low cost to obtain already.
Comment · 1 year ago
I was surprised at the time how cheap the original Pebbles were, they were nearly exactly what I wanted and I would have been willing to pay more for mine. In fact I ultimately paid more to replace mine with a watch I like less. When Pebble folded I wondered if having too low of price ultimately hurt them - if they didn't pick up enough customers to make up on volume what they left off the table on per-unit revenue? I hope the relaunch is successful, and I assume they have all manner of internal data that says I'm wrong, but my initial reaction to the listed prices is the same as it was to the originals - they seem too low. (I'm setting aside the caveat about a potential price change due to tariffs and assuming they launch at current list price.)

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