- The conceit here is that it’s the bot itself writing the thankyou letter. Not pretending it’s from a human. The source is an environment running an LLM on loop and doing stuff it decides to do, looks like these letters are some emergent behavior. Still disgusting spam.
- Not easy, but I have a friend who did this by reaching back out to his old professors and colleagues, figuring out what they needed, and ended up doing a swe project in his old lab and built that into a consultancy which does tech partnering for science.
- Based on this article alone, I can believe this is a good thing. The US military suffers incredibly from its monopsony position and without a doubt will get a heavy wakeup call (read: dead young people) next time it has to fight a real war. In addition the army should be the most accountable and results oriented branch of government, since it’s the only one that’s actively oppositional. If we can’t fix procurement there then what hope do we have for the rest of government?
- Why doesn’t the government put Cloudflare or something in front of their site?
- Oh I was hoping for this but with real birds in my neighborhood. Still neat!
- Not taking away at all from the message, but: there's something funny about a freehand MSPaint extrapolation appearing in a post about econ PHDs :)
- This is great. Watch them take the data down in 3, 2, 1...
Until then I'd love to see trails of where the traffic enforcers have been on the main map, it would make the map more engaging.
- It’s funny, I immediately thought it was LLM but I was fairly confident it was ChatGPT. I suppose the styles are converging more than I thought: too long, lists, “not just x it’s y”, “here’s the X”…
- Good news! It's being worked on, announced in the blog post linked from that article. https://openai.com/index/helping-people-when-they-need-it-mo...
- Getting laid off in our careers is indeed likely, but part of the deal is that it’s not mutually exclusive to becoming a multimillionaire. We work cushy jobs for high pay, with the possibility of absurd payouts, accepting that the deal we get from the industry is good enough to not rock the boat too hard by unionizing. There has been enough excess value to go around.
I think it’s not a coincidence that most of the unionization pushes i hear about are in the Games industry: it’s superficially similar to the software industry but workers are treated much worse for much smaller payouts. If software industry keeps heading in that direction, maybe unions are coming. But the idea of unionizing up until now has been mostly laughable, and proponents haven’t made themselves look informed or relatable by pushing it.
- This article suggests it's mostly groups which the democratic party is against, but can't stop because of loose campaign finance regulations. But the posted article suggests the DCCC is involved with Mothership.
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/harris-camp-warns-of-democratic...
- A fundraising 1.6% efficient fundraising model... This surely can't be true can it? Surely a national scandal if so?
- > The King of Ink Land, who is now considering using a VPN, …
> At the moment, he feels stuck with no clear solution.
Hm.
- Because it allows people to very easily funnel their income through offshore companies, and avoid being taxed on it because it’s “earned” in Cyprus or Cayman Islands.
- Oh I see, they set ‘is_mechahitler = True’, easy mistake, anyone could do it, probably one of those rapscallion ex-OpenAI employees who hadn’t fully absorbed the culture.
- I wonder if it was explicitly trained with an "Elons Opinions" dataset? Wouldn't surprise me, and it's pretty surprising behavior in any other context.
- I'm sympathetic, but I do think Realtalk could be improved with some simple object recognition and LLMing.
One of the challenges I found when I played with RealTalk is interoperability. The aim is to use the "spacial layer" to bootstrap people's intuitions on how programs should work, and interact with the world. It's really cool when this works. But key intuitions about how things interact when combined with each other, only work if the objects have been programmed to be compatible. A balloon wants to "pop if it comes into contact with anything sharp". A cactus wants to say "I am sharp". But if someone else has programmed a needle card to say "I am pointy", then it won't interact with the balloon in a satisfying way. Or, to use one of Dynamicland's favorite examples: say I have an interactive chart which shows populations of different countries when I place the "Mexico card" into the filter spot. What do you think should happen if I put a card showing the Mexican flag in that same spot, or some other card which just says the string "Mexico" on it? Wouldn't it be better if their interaction "just works"?
Visual LLMs can aid with this. Even a thin layer which can assign tags or answer binary questions about objects could be used to make programs massively more interoperable.
- Congrats Amsterdam: they funded a worthy and feasible project; put appropriate ethical guardrails in place; iterated scientifically; then didn’t deploy when they couldn’t achieve a result that satisfied their guardrails. We need more of this in the world.
- Harder to swipe in the bathroom as well. I reckon the meta would mean you have to be dressed nice and put on makeup just to sit down and scroll this app, which isn't usual app behavior.
- > This was effectively the most unprofessional breach of privacy I've ever experienced and as a result I think I'm done working in software (don't even ask me my opinion of SF).
Huh? Power to you, and that is awful behavior, but this sounds strange. Why let one person decide your career for you?
- There's a very entertaining Dwarkesh podcast with Adam Brown about this: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/adam-brown
- Elder care is a difficult and painful topic, and change is clearly needed. I feel like I am missing something in the article's argument though. A quick google says that the profit margin of nursing homes is in the 5-10% range. If the profit motive is to blame for conditions, doesn't that mean that costs could be 10% lower if nobody was making profit?
I guess maybe that doesn't account for profits being made by any contractors providing medicines, food, etc, which maybe could be done more cheaply without the profit motive. But 10% just doesn't scream "evil nursing home executives getting fat off of the elderly" to me.
It's a labor-intensive and difficult service to provide. The article's suggestion to professionalize care work seems right, but will increase costs. The two areas of dissatisfaction (high cost and poor quality) seem fundamentally at odds to me, are there proposals which would address them both?
- If this holds, can cops still ask for whether a specific phone number was present on a cell tower at a certain time? I can't tell if it's the breadth of the data collection that's unconsitutional because it catches lots of innocent people's data; or if it's the concept of using cell towers altogether.
- "events have given us no choice but to fight Trump as if there were no antisemitism, even while we continue to fight antisemitism as if there were no Trump."
Great line which sums up the correct stance to take in the current environment.
- Does it still make you look like a ding-dong and get you mocked behind your back? Yes? Oh, guess they didn't fix that yet.
- If this was actually happening, what would you expect to see different? The reason we have due process is so that we don’t have to rely on second-hand reports to monitor the justice system. Get rid of due process and this is what we have.
- Oh whoops you're right, Friday brain. The first conditional should have a `return` in it.
- A proposed solution from the article:
> Use "if (condition()) { ifBlock(); } if (!condition()) { elseBlock(); }" -- assuming that ifBlock() can't possibly change the result of condition().
What?? That seems terrible to me - just asking for `condition` to be updated to be modifiable by `ifBlock`, or for some completely undebuggable race condition to occur.
My team has an ongoing style war about guard clauses:
vsif foo: bar() baz()
Consensus seems to favor the first option but I prefer the second because it helps me keep in mind the conditions that lead me to `baz()`. Otherwise I have to scan up the whole function to figure out the restriction `!foo`.if foo: bar() else: baz() - So for €52mn you'll get... a worse Llama? But don't worry, it'll be "transparent and compliant" which will make people want to use it. Very European.
Happy new year, this community has given me a lot and I’m grateful for you all.