3
points
jtr1
Joined 986 karma
- jtr1The ending of the article left me feeling he had more of an axe to grind here. The mostly unspoken ideological background is that classical art is often appropriated by proponents of Western chauvinism to demonstrate their supposed innate cultural superiority. Poorly painted reconstructions undermine that image, but it does not mean this was done intentionally. I agree that a more neutral observer would have been interested in learning the thought process of those researchers.
- Interesting. Like many people here, I've thought a great deal about what it means for LLMs to be trained on the whole available corpus of written text, but real world conversation is a kind of dark matter of language as far as LLMs are concerned, isn't it? I imagine there is plenty of transcription in training data, but the total amount of language use in real conversational surely far exceeds any available written output and is qualitatively different in character.
This also makes me curious to what degree this phenomenon manifests when interacting with LLMs in languages other than English? Which languages have less tendency toward sycophantic confidence? More? Or does it exist at a layer abstracted from the particular language?
- What is your personal experience here?
- On the flip side, the crypto hype machine pretty seamlessly flipped to the AI hype machine, so it makes sense the same anti crowd shifted pretty seamlessly. Given the practical applications of crypto were minimal and the externalities were mostly crime and pollution, I’m not at all surprised that many people expect the same for AI.
- They were and we should push back and yes, there is a mountain of baseless hype. But if you train your fire on the wrong thing, you risk not addressing the actual problem.
- I think the point here is that objecting to AI data center water use and not to say, alfalfa farming in Arizona, reads as reactive rather than principled. But more importantly, there are vast, imminent social harms from AI that get crowded out by water use discourse. IMO, the environmental attack on AI is more a hangover from crypto than a thoughtful attempt to evaluate the costs and benefits of this new technology.
- I think you'll have a difficult time comprehending the phenomenon if you look for reasoned arguments. A much more productive framework, IMO, is to see it in terms of a feedback loop between funding sources and the aggregate valence of speech on a particular topic.
The energy industry is one of the largest in the world, with trillions of revenue on the line. The FF component of that industry has every incentive to turn sentiment against upstart competitors, but you do that at scale less by reasoned arguments and more by gut level appeals: "the people who want renewable energy hate your culture and way of life", "renewal installations are ugly and a blight on the landscape of your home", etc.
- 7 points
- One thing Jenny Chase (longtime solar analyst with Bloomberg) likes to point out is that in many places, solar panels are actually cheaper than fencing materials [1]
1. https://www.ted.com/talks/jenny_chase_solar_energy_is_even_c...
- Thank for noting this! I had no idea while I was reading the piece, but I loved those books as a kid. What a delightful connection.
- One way of looking at companies advertising 996 is just that it’s a convenient legal proxy for ageism
- Yes, this reminded me of a similar experience camping with friends where we could only describe the foliage as “ultragreen”. An incredibly vivid blue-green tone that suffused the whole island where we were staying. Been looking for explanations since
- I’ve noticed recently (maybe I missed an announcement) that Siri now functions locally for at least some commands. Try putting an Apple watch in airplane mode and asking it to set a timer or reminder
- Frontend dev here. I think it’s important to remember that there’s not necessarily one use case to rule them all when it comes to the web. If this helps a smaller project that is Python-first get their work in front of a wider audience, is that a bad thing? I’m inclined to think it’s just fine to have lots of approaches available.
- If nothing else, I'd recommend reading it for the chapter on beans. Her companion guide to cooking with leftovers is a gem as well.
- My immediate next question is how much of the article is AI generated filler.
- It seems obvious to me that anyone supportive of psychedelic treatment should be supportive of this kind of investigation. It does no one any good to suppress or ignore stories of negative experiences with psychedelics. On the contrary, research like this can help develop better screening protocols or follow up treatment to help minimize these effects, or even treat people who are suffering long term negative impact from a difficult trip.