I would love to see data on what the impact of more local restaurants, cafes and delis are seeing. As we work from home, we are spending more time in the actual places we live. This but paints one picture, and maybe the reality is that we don't need a sandwich shop on every single block.
I think to some degree cities painted themselves into this corner. Various zoning restrictions preventing the densification of residential within the city meant that they were relying on offices etc. to draw in the crowds to support the rest of the city, as the workers in those offices (and in fairness, the other businesses too) were forced to live further and further out.
Since now the apparent need to commute in has been much reduced, now is a comparatively poor time to be trying to operate a sandwich shop in the CBD as a result. But it might be a relatively good time to be operating one in the suburbs or feeder towns (inflation might deflate that a little).
Back in around 2017, I remember looking at the local council's development plan for the city I worked in until 2021 - they had planned for office development for 100,000 more workers, and accommodation for 20,000 more people. Where were the net 80,000 extra people going to live? The residential property situation in the city was already popularly described as a crisis, and unsurprisingly, it only continued to get worse until 2020, with the only thing that's been slowing it since then is people leaving the city to work remotely.
I’m likely eating more sandwiches for lunch since starting working from home.
I can’t see any reason why I’d go out to buy one for $10 instead of making one for $2-3 at home at any frequency anywhere near as often as I bought lunch when working from the office. That sandwich shop needs me to buy $10 sandwiches and I’m not going to walk past my fridge to go do that very often.
When I'm in that scenario, so much to do, so little time, what should I do ahhhh.
I love to ask myself - "What am I resisting?" and then doing that thing. It's the biggest momentum creator that I've found.
It's a highly accurate radar system into the fact that I know what I should be doing, and I just want to cover it over and pretend that I don't as a means of continuing on and amplifying my own exciting melodrama!
One of the key components of Buddhism is that it is experiential. While Buddhism is definitely a religion, it greatly differs from Judeo Christian / Islamic theologies. I would try to pause before applying the same sort of biases or lenses you may have towards other religions. Buddhism is meant to be experienced in the right now, the moment to moment life as you are living it.
I highly recommend digging into it, whatever doesn't resonate - move on, and what does go deeper. There is no wrong way to do it.
As we lift our veils and truly see what life entails, we really get into the nitty gritty of our own lived experience and things begin to greatly change. We discover the broader context that we live in.
Contributing towards this beautiful broader context has given me an immense amount of purpose. I can think of no greater gift I've received than having this click into place.
Aside from that, I highly recommend doing a retreat of some sort. Wether it be a meditation retreat, yoga retreat, or wilderness retreat. Even just a few days can be absolutely life changing. I have seen it with my own eyes.
And finally depending where you are, what your social circle is like, what your mental and physical health conditions are, what traumas you've experienced in your life and simply your access, a guided Mushroom or Ketamine journey may be of great value.
The question you are asking is a deeply important one, may we all spend the rest of our life exploring and finding answers that lead to more questions.
This expectation might seem like a burden and it certainly can be but it also allows you to have an impact from day one. You are hired as an outside consultant and if you see something that you don't agree with, you would do your client a disservice to not at least ask why this is done this way.
For me, that's an important shift in your mindset that needs to happen. The sooner the better :)
100%, this is exactly what I want. Provided that the opportunities are legit and aren't spam and that they pay actually competitive and it's not a race to the bottom like upwork or something
My guess is they are using Embeds to efficiently search a larger corpus of data and picking some data sources that then get injected into the system prompt.
That's how I'm doing it for myself and how many other companies are doing it to enable doc interaction, etc.
Edit:
Wish I knew the term RAG (comment next to me mentions it) before going down a rabbit hole of trial and error with the limited amount of info on Embeds
With that said, I think people who live in cities tend to feel plants, animals and ecosystems that are not ours less, and therefore we may be quite ignorant to the destruction we are causing.
It's one thing to know in the mind that we are destroying other life forms and it's another to live in that destruction.
Sure, depending on the measuring stick cities are more efficient. But I think most importantly, they likely aren't conducive to creating the sorts of empathy required for us to make decisions that are more in line with preserving other forms of life.
I don't quite know the answer, like many things existential...it's complex, confusing, nuanced and hard to grasp. I hope that we figure it out and I hope that I answer the call within me to join in that figuring out.
I live in the city, my parents live in a suburb/village. But the village is all mowed lawn, it’s surrounded by intense farming.
I see more wild animals than they do. There’s a breeding pair of some bird of prey in the park next door, there’s falcons and skylarks on the Tempelhofer Feld, I regularly see foxes in the greener parts of town. It’s not like in a nature park, but suburbs are a desert compared to what I have.
Edit: I also see that I am falling prey to exactly what the paper itself is talking about.
"The more adept LLMs become at mimicking human language, the more vulnerable we become to anthropomorphism, to seeing the systems in which they are embedded as more human-like than they really are. This trend is amplified by the natural tendency to use philosophically loaded terms, such as "knows", "believes", and "thinks", when describing these systems."
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An ignorant statement / question I have is why are you using it write code? It's a chatbot, no?
As you've mentioned, it's a really powerful search, and is like having a conversation with someone who is literally the internet.
For example
"What is the glycemic index of oatmeal?"
"What is Eihei Dogen's opinion of the Self and how does it differ from Bassui's?"
I get highly detailed and accurate output with these.
The first question is simple and the second is far from it. It's breaking down two Zen masters experiences and comparing them in an amazing way.
I've been thoroughly impressed with Chat GPT so far.
Ask it to breakdown the high level points of a book you've read.
Ask it to rewrite a song in the style of a different artist.
It's so cool, I feel like I legitimately have an answer to any random question at my finger tips and have to do zero filtering for it.
"An ignorant statement / question I have is why are you using it write code? It's a chatbot, no?
I've found it so incredibly useful to simply replace Google."
Heard of Stack Exchange?
I teach and I expect many students to use language models like ChatGPT to do their homework, which involves writing code. Lots of what people are doing with it is coding (there have been quite a few posts here using it that way).
I've actually also used ChatGPT for literary/song writing experiments and it stinks, aesthetically. The lyrics it wrote, even with a lot of prompting, were totally asinine. And how could they not be?
I'm curious if you have an NFC tag that you'd recommend or that you like to use?
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