nicklovescode

I find the watt thing cool too, and I'm glad you pointed it out

that's my quote, just want to add a few notes because I originally typed that out quickly in a comment on twitter and didn't expect it to get traction

1. At the time iirc maybe 60% of people meant something like "that's a reasonable symptom to run into from EA thinking, I've had something like it too, it's hard to fix even if you know it's not ideal". Although maybe 20% of people did think it actually just made sense as a way to operate and didn't see it as a big problem

2. I agree it's much less common now. I think it's possibly because EA has shifted more towards longtermism. Although around 2016 I switched to working on AGI safety which is very longtermist, so it's possible that's my local bias

3. Luckily the symptom was short lived, maybe ~4-6 weeks in total while I was also experiencing startup founder anxiety separate of EA. I consider myself maybe a little hurt by EA, but not that traumatized, and I still think it has lots of merits even if I don't identify as an "EA person" anymore

no those full results screenshots were the first things i typed in

I’d often send like six images to the person who’s bio I was making and ask them to choose two :)

Yeah that’s right. There were very few strictly-bad ones across the entire thread of generations

The rejections were most commonly

1. Kind of just slightly boring or literally drawing the thing rather than being cool and artistic

2. Cool but similar to the artistic style of bios near it in the thread, whereas I wanted to keep it diverse (surreal followed by literal, oil followed by sharp lines etc) so it's more fun to scroll through

Whereas a few years ago generative models (GANs etc) would often render like static noise sometimes or completely wrong things. I've only seen that problem once with DALL-E across hundreds or thousands of images now (it generated a fully white image)

for that one IIRC I asked for a Robert Moses and one of the cooler ones had giant hands so I put that in the prompt then took two of my favorite from the next batch

just want to say it's super cool and thanks for adding it to our world!

If so I applaud them, it’s non-obvious and perfect. Taking del.icio.us back to the very beginning

It's unclear to me that we navigated the state space so discretely. My guess would be that we used a combination of rock throwing + stock hitting before eventually deciding that combining the two might be fruitful.

After the idea is polished it looks clever, but it may have been invented through a series of mostly random steps