HP bought palm for 1.2 billion dollars and then did nothing with it. Why is doing something anti competitive but doing nothing not? I’m sure there are other examples than the hp/palm situation.
I think that technology is really the last thing I want in a dungeons and dragons game. I prefer only pen and paper to be in a pen and paper game. And while it is an obvious problem to be solved by LLMs, an LLM will never recreate the fun of using a central casting book to create a backstory [1].
The author makes the classic misunderstanding of talk therapy, that it is designed to talk about your trauma and go over and over about it. This is false, any modern therapist who practices CBT, ACT, schema therapy, etc. only addresses trauma in the context of how that trauma impacts present decision making. The point isn't to discuss the trauma, it is to discuss how your mind may organize your thoughts in a sub-optimum way caused by your previous experiences.
Ultimately this lack of understanding of modern psychotherapy just makes the entire post sound like snake oil. But I suppose if the author can offer therapeutic snake oil and make money grifting on AI bros, why not.
edit: I just want to follow up, reading through some of the other posts of the author where he describes modern psychology as "poison" and that he refuses to even learn about it. This author really just gives me the exact same vibes as dutchsinse, the quack earthquake prognosticator who claims seismology is a scam, earthquakes are predictable, and that he predicts them by pointing to his custom google earth globes and saying "earthquakes happen there". Of course if he could actually predict earthquakes this would be incredible and the world would change in untold ways since predicting chaos should be impossible. Of course, this never actually happens and ends up being anti-intellectual nonsense.
If the author disagrees with modern ideas the author is welcome to publish their methods and participate in a common discussion like any other scientist studying any other system.
The author kind of hints at this but in some countries, Germany included, the kitchen is not part of the flat. Whoever rents it will build their own kitchen. When I lived in Germany I was expected to buy and then sell the kitchen of the flat we lived in. While the author focuses on furniture, I do think this is where a lot of this waste comes from. I do agree that it is strange to buy disposable furniture. But so far I didn’t throw anything from ikea away except for a mattress when I moved countries.
I think it also misses the way you can automate non-trivial tasks. For example, I am working on a project where there is tens of thousands of different data sets each with their own meta data and structure but the underlying data is mostly the same. But because the meta data and structure are all different, it’s really impossible to combine all this data into one big data set without a team of engineers going through each data set and meticulously restructuring and conforming said metadata to a new monolithic schema. However I don’t have any money to hire that team of engineers. But I can massage LLMs to do that work for me. These are ideal tasks for AI type algorithms to solve. It makes me quite excited for the future as many of these kind of tasks could be given to ai agents that would otherwise be impossible to do yourself.
I agree, but only for situations where the probabilistic nature is acceptable. It would be the same if you had a large team of humans doing the same work. Inevitably misclassifications would occur on an ongoing basis.
Compare this to the situation where you have a team develop schemas for your datasets which can be tested and verified, and fixed in the event of errors. You can't really "fix" an LLM or human agent in that way.
So I feel like traditionally computing excelled at many tasks that humans couldn't do - computers are crazy fast and don't make mistakes, as a rule. LLMs remove this speed and accuracy, becoming something more like scalable humans (their "intelligence" is debateable, but possibly a moving target - I've yet to see an LLM that I would trust more than a very junior developer). LLMs (and ML generally) will always have higher error margins, it's how they can do what they do.
Yes but i see it as multiple steps. Like perhaps the llm solution has some probabilistic issues that only get you 80% of the way there. But that probably already has given you some ideas how to better solve the problem. And this case the problem is somewhat intractable because of the size and complexity of the way the data is stored. So like in my example the first step is LLMs but the second step would be to use what they do as structure for building a deterministic pipeline. This is because the problem isn’t that there are ten thousand different meta data, but that the structure of those metadata are diffuse. The llm solution will first help identify the main points of what needs to be conformed to the monolithic schema. Then I will build more production ready and deterministic pipelines. At least that is the plan. I’ll write a substack about it eventually if this plan works haha.
I'm reminded of the game Factorio: Essentially the entire game loop is "Do a thing manually, then automate it, then do the higher-level thing the automation enables you to do manually, then automate that, etc etc"
So if you want to translate that, there is value in doing a processing step manually to learn how it works - but when you understood that, automation can actually benefit you, because only then are you even able to do larger, higher-level processing steps "manually", that would take an infeasible amount of time and energy otherwise.
Where I'd agree though is that you should never lose the basic understanding and transparency of the lower-level steps if you can avoid that in any way.
Russia doesn’t just put people in jail for speaking against the government. They weaponise the generational fear of being disappeared by the government. This is not close to what happens in America where you can post anything anywhere and if Facebook deletes it you can always make your own website about it. If you did this in Russia you go to jail. Even if you say things like “it is sad Ukrainian children die in children’s day in Russia” you go to jail. I don’t think you can compare modern USA with modern Russia in this way. USA does plenty of other things that are bad like jailing so many people for petty crimes without pushing much on speech. USA has its own problems and all these comparisons only hide them.
They are now denying visas, and deporting lawful residents, sending them to offshore torture prisons, for social media posts.
For non citizens, regardless of length of time or legality, this is the case right now. For birthright citizens and full citizens it will be the case very soon
But… they can't remove citizenship retroactively. What I mean is today there are citizens and non-citizens, but there are no classes of citizens. Either you have citizenship or you do not, it doesn't matter how you acquired it.
I read this article (and others) and I am still unclear. I thought this whole idiotic crusade applied only to newly born children. It never even crossed my mind that you could revoke citizenship from your citizens. I mean, the principle of non-retroactivity dates back to the Roman Empire.
I think it's disgusting hypocrisy. We're talking about the USA, aren't we? A country that has started many, many wars, a country that massacred innocent Vietnamese, Afghans, Iraqis. Even at this very moment, the US is participating in the killing of honest, decent, innocent Palestinians and Russians. But that's okay, not worth mentioning.
But deporting lawful residents? How dare you, America? This is definitely the beginning of the end.
Don’t hate the player hate the game. Academia has been perforated with metric driven nonsense from administration at all levels of funding and the university. It is not possible to quantify how much work it takes to generate a new idea that will downstream benefit humanity. This metric driven academic reality has led to two outcomes. An over production of papers on every topic. And the reduction of research into predictable outcomes that cannot be considered science because it is trodding well worn paths knowing it will produce yet another paper. Meanwhile funding agencies, job rules and laws, etc. all incentivize hiring PhDs over all other kinds of positions because it’s usually rather impossible to create lots of forever tenure track professor and research scientist positions since no one has funding for the next 40 years of a persons career. It was wrong that they cheated and they should be removed but i understand why they did it.
I do hate the game. That’s why I wrote, “burn it down and start over again clean”. It is a broken, sclerotic system who misincentives have metastasized (ie all the issues you’ve just described).
That is certainly one viewpoint. Personally I try to make changes in the place that i work and with the people i work with to push the culture in a different direction.
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