Recent submissions

Comment · 1 year ago
Do you think this is partly every company now trying to get in on grifting? Just pumping stock with "we're going to mars, we'll have AGI, cold fusion is almost here" kind of stuff?
Comment · 2 years ago
It's unreal how people think tech leaders are geniuses when they keep doing this stuff. Oops we overhired but I take "100% responsibility" however the staff will take 100% of the punishment by being laid off. All while spending $32 billion on legless VR worlds that nobody wants or driving social media giants into the ground. It's Gell-Mann amnesia. Remember how dumb their last decisions were, by their own admission.
Comment · 2 years ago
They were called out on this for not living up to their "data driven culture" when they went to 3 days back and the response was basically "Uh well... Eat shit I guess."
Comment · 2 years ago
It's now been years and they still haven't said what it hauls. Just that cargo and semi combined are at the limit for gross vehicle weight. Should be very easy to say the semi weighs X and it hauls Y.

That they're not saying it after years is really suspicious. Give us all the numbers.

Comment · 2 years ago
The president is supposed to govern for all Americans. In the past, the Democrats have appointed what many would call centrists. Merrick Garland for example, is not a left winger, and that would have been Obama's choice. The GOP has made no secret of stacking the courts with judges who are strict originalists when it suits them, and nakedly ideological when it doesn't.

Overturning Roe has been the GOP goal for a long time. Their plan involved capturing SCOTUS and they pulled it off. You could blame the GOP and also the system at it is being set up for abuse, but Roe and Chevron specifically were GOP end goals. GOP judges and private citizens or corporations bringing cases (sometimes hypothetical cases now!) to SCOTUS.

One this is for certain, saying "under Biden" and assigning him blame is disingenuous.

I am not aware of the White House claiming credit for SCOTUS decisions, but they do praise them if they agree with it. Media and others may erroneously assign credit but that's a different problem. At any rate, what other people do has no bearing on the truth of the matter and does not justify assigning blame.

Comment · 2 years ago
> unless you want to blame the judges Trump appointed.

I mean, yes. That was the point of Mitch McConnell withholding Obama's SCOTUS seat nomination because it was too close to the end of his term, only to ram through Trump's pick in record time when RBG died. This was the plan, to get the court.

"Under Biden" is completely disingenuous, the cases were not brought by the Biden administration, and were ruled on largely by Trump and Bush appointees.

Comment · 2 years ago
Like I said, try asking it if various historical figures are worse than Hitler. It is instructed not to judge.

BTW, here's ChatGPT on Hitler vs Musk.

> Who had a more negative impact, Elon Musk or Adolf Hitler?

Comparing Elon Musk and Adolf Hitler in terms of their impact is challenging due to the vast differences in their actions, intentions, and historical contexts...

Comment · 2 years ago
Everyone is up in arms about the Gemini image generator, forgetting that it is not a search engine. It is generative AI, creating something new and random, every time. It is generally an input to a creative endeavor, not basic research. Unfortunately if you really want to know what a Viking looked like you're going to have to do some actual research. It's wild to me that people expect something that can generate an image of a penguin roller-skating on a loaf of bread shredding on a guitar to generate a historically accurate image of a Viking or whatever. These two problems are very different.

The text interface, also not a search engine. And it is definitely not a *truth engine*, which is what people like Musk expect Grok to be. It's not capable of that level of reason or understanding.

Other commenters have brought up that asking it any type of question like is X worse than Hitler, whether that X is Biden or Trump or anybody else, it's going to respond "it's hard to say." It's being tuned to not pass value judgements at all, because that is not what LLMs are for. It's never going to be your truth engine.

If you think these things are thinking, or that they have values, you've been duped.

As a side note, I think all the big companies are making the same mistake of trying to get a generalized model for all queries, or with the layer that directs them to a specific tuned model. I want sharp detail and lack of hallucinations when it generates code. I want it loose when I'm generating creative text. But in no case to do I want it to talk to me about values.

Comment · 2 years ago
I gave it the three lightbulbs in a closet riddle.

https://puzzles.nigelcoldwell.co.uk/seven.htm

The key complication is "once you've opened the door, you may no longer touch a switch." It gets this. There are many examples of it written out on the web. When I give it a variation and say "you can open the door to look at the bulbs and use the switches all you want" and it is absolutely unable to understand this. To a human it's simple: look at the bulbs and flick the switches. It kept giving me answers about using a special lens to examine the bulbs, using something to detect heat. I explained it in many ways and tried several times. I was paying for GPT-4 at the time as well.

I would not consider this thinking. It's unable to make this simple abstraction from its training data. I think 4 looks better than 3 simply because it's got more data, but we're reaching diminishing returns on that, as has been stated.

Comment · 3 years ago
My point is that we don't have any documented anything for the first couple hundred thousand of years of humanity's existence, and we encountered the most horrific viral and bacterial infections, many of which caused unthinkable mass deaths. They were so awful we attributed them to God(s) as punishment for our bad behavior. None of them have documented microbiological origins. Some would have some from spontaneous mutation in humans and many would have come from animals. They are de facto not lab leaks, so the fact that we have some lab leaks documented in the last few decades isn't really convincing. There is nothing there that makes a zoonotic origin less likely.

Here's a scientist who said we couldn't dismiss the lab leak, and asked for more research, which he did.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/07/19/1016005...

The early cases are clustered around the market. I know the market and the lab are "close" on a global scale, but the details matter. They are 30km apart, about a 45 minute drive in traffic. Looks about as clear as John Snow's map of cholera outbreaks in London.

That article is from 2021, but he stands by it in 2023:

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-03-08/covid-lab-l...

"What is the chance that a big Chinese city like Wuhan would have a lab doing the kind of research that has come under suspicion? The answer is, the vast majority of the biggest cities in China have labs involved in such research. If COVID had emerged in, say, Beijing, there would be no fewer than four such labs facing suspicion."

Edit:

2 things.

It's important to rule out that the idea that this could only be engineered, which would imply a definite lab origin. That is why engineered viruses come up. A non-lab leak is certainly plausible, and a lab leak is not ruled out.

There are labs all over China, there are markets all over China. The overlap of cities having both is significant. Viruses appear in larger, denser population centers. The "next thing" was very likely to appear in a city with a lab. The thing is, it's not very close to the lab. There's a large cluster around the market.

Lab theory doesn't have much going for it. It's not actually that close to the epicenter. There are labs everywhere. SARS is widely studies.

Sure some viruses have long incubation periods, but that would show as far less of a tight cluster around the market. Your hypothesis seems to be that it spread from lab distantly because of incubation time, then stopped spreading distantly once it reached the market? That does not make sense.

Comment · 3 years ago
"Although the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here. However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features, including the optimized RBD and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.

More scientific data could swing the balance of evidence to favor one hypothesis over another."

Pretty standard scientific writing. I think the lesson is don't trust journalists and the general public to not blow what you're saying out of proportion and assign it more certainty than you intended.

Lab leak is possible, sure. But keep in mind every horrible disease humanity has faced up until the early part of the 20th century came about before microbiology labs even existed. Historically, a zoonitic origin is extremely likely.

Imagine if polio or smallpox or leprosy popped up today, you'd have every Joe internet theorizing how it came from a lab in whatever country it appeared in first. I guess back in the day they used to say it was punishment from God. The Spanish flu, God out there smiting the Spaniards.

Comment · 3 years ago
Comment · 3 years ago
I'm curious how this view works out when trouble comes up. If you have a friend going through a rough time for a few months or years, do you just say I'm not going to get caught up in the sunk cost fallacy and cut ties? Even when I've had friends with difficult times and we spend less time together. I still feel for them and my heart hurts, even if I can't be around them as much to protect myself if they're spiralling.

Similarly what would you do if a friend was dying? Sorry I just don't see the ROI here, don't think I can get much out of your last few months?

Comment · 3 years ago
I took some Spanish and was taught the "se" form. Is it maybe a "traditional" Spanish vs common usage which has picked up on English sentence structure? A question for parents or grandparents I guess.
Comment · 3 years ago
https://news.wisc.edu/decades-on-bacteriums-discovery-feted-...

Taq polymerase is about my favorite thing discovered through basic research. Just some scientists looking at interesting stuff in a Yellowstone geyser, who happened to discover the molecule that enabled DNA replication in a lab and essentially exploded the field.

No corporation these days is going to pay somebody to do that. I think it's worth the risks to get something like that.

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