We did I this before at my company but running, maintaining and keeping the forum up to date turned into a lot of work over time - so we switched it off and went back to Slack.
Sure messages disappear on the free plan, but there are ways around that.
You can run discourse in a container and the only real hassle is publishing your own version of the discourse app so you can get push notifications without having to pay them.
Not in my experience.
We spent a nontrivial amount of time on running and maintaining our discourse instance - dev time that is very costly as a small company. Might be different at Posthog level of investment of course.
That was about three years ago, so maybe running discourse is much easier now.
Everything just gets worse as you age.
Sure, my dad said it too back then, but he just didn't get how the world moved on and improved. This time around though it's real, everything gets more stupid and dumb and I hate it.
One of the advantages of getting older is you get to see the same dumb shit play out again and again, and that's how you realize it's dumb.
Mainstream culture has always been vapid, heavily manipulated by big corporations, and mostly a waste of time. Anyone bemoaning how social media has guard rails and is all about passive consumption, is not old enough to remember television I guess, which was at one point just three networks telling you exactly what you could watch and when.
And in the TV era there was this same class of would-be commentators and tastemakers who would complain about how the culture had now turned to shit... they are just trying to make a buck and a name for themselves, but I always thought they seemed like a particularly unhappy bunch.
The only thing that seems really unique about the current era to me is the smartphone/social media combo, it shovels all this crappy mass culture into your brain at a level of efficiency and comprehensiveness that was previously unimaginable.
But you can just turn that off. My phone was either switched off or out of sight for all but 2 hours per day last week. With that piece of junk out of my hands life basically just feels like a better version of the year 2000 or so, in the real world not much has changed.
I read it more as wry irony. "My dad was dumb and wrong, but I'm totally right when I feel the same way he did." I don't think the comment really means either one of them was right or wrong.
I think (hope) it was sarcasm, but one sign of this time and age is, that it is increasingly hard to tell. Often people themself don't know anymore ..
So anyway, in this case I think the bitterness is real and the awareness, that it might be "just subjective" and not objective but that doesn't change the bitterness and misery of watching all those idiots out there ..
I guess you wanted to say forgettable, but just to expand on that:
I recently read the book and I couldn’t even remember the character now and had to look up who was meant. Maybe that is more a testament to how bad I am at remembering stuff I read in books than how important the character is but there you go.
Working on yourself / mental health is not working on nothing - it’s probably the most important, hardest and rewarding work you can do apart from recreational work.
Recreational work is all the work that is required for everything to function but that doesn’t produce anything- think of cooking, cleaning, childcare, elderly care etc. - you know all the work that traditionally is/was “women’s work”
I have come to value “productive work” much less than recreational. We have enough stuff already to last a dozen lifetimes.
Just think that the brightest minds of our generation are working on making people click more ads.
And then be thankful that you are not in the same boat and OK with not being productive at all.
While this is pretty cool I believe generalist robots will not have a fraction of the skills an average human has , at least not within a realistically foreseeable timeframe, let’s say within this century.
IMO a much more desirable route would be to build a number of specialist robots that do all the things humans really don’t want to do. Even that seems really hard to do - at least I haven’t seen a robot that is able to vacuum a house really well. I saw some versions at friends places but they were more like gimmicks - took really long to setup, basically nothing was allowed to be on the floor, generic rectangular room setup required and they didn’t last more than two years or so. I think all of them went back to vacuuming themselves or employing a human to do it (the second option is vastly more efficient than the robot and much cheaper too)
Maybe I am missing something, but a really versatile, robust, and cheap vacuuming robot would be an actual improvement to life quality for a lot of people.
The research is very interesting though of course and much better this than no research in that direction at all.
> While this is pretty cool I believe generalist robots will not have a fraction of the skills an average human has , at least not within a realistically foreseeable timeframe, let’s say within this century.
I'm pretty sure they will be flipping burgers by the 2040s, if not before, and doing everything else needed to efficiently make a (big) percentage of people jobless in first-world economies. Though, not in parts of the world where electricity regularly in the wire is still rare...because those problems don't solve themselves in a few short decades.
Now, we both are cynics and should go for a beer together. Who knows, maybe we will come up with a more catastrophic and highly probable scenario that combines your outlook with mine...
Oh yea, I would love to be wrong- and if I can’t change my mind about something then I am as good as dead.
I believe we will sooner solve the electricity problem with renewables though.
Agree that a vast majority of the jobs will be automated fairly soon - just not those pesky jobs that really need to be done and no one wants to do - like cooking, cleaning, childcare, taking care of sick people.
Sure we will have some more nifty appliances that make it easier maybe, but I want (most of) that stuff fully automated, at least the cleaning part!
Anyway a beer sounds good right about now and we will just have to wait and see how it plays out I guess
The problem is that even a specialist vacuuming robot needs to be more of a generalist than you realize.
For example, take the "nothing was allowed to be on the floor" restriction. To relax this restriction, the robot needs to know what it can and cannot do for something it sees in the floor. List everything that could be on the floor (I'll wait). The robot needs to recognize all of these things, and know the correct behavior for each.
You could still do this! You'd need to label a ton of items and hardcode a bunch of behaviors. After all this R&D your robot vacuum would need to cost $5k-$10k, and you'd wish you'd worked on a higher priced product like a robotic forklift instead. Still, it's feasible to build this.
However, manipulation is a few orders of magnitude more complex than navigation. You have to recognize many objects, their precise poses, and many aspects of the objects. Think about opening a can with a can opener. The robot needs to recognize a few parts on the can opener, and how it fits on the can. Then you've got to hardcode behaviors for attaching the opener and then turning the knob until done, and removing the lid. Doable, but very very hard.
This is feasible, and you can build a can opening robot, but after 9 months of R&D, that's all your specialized robot will be able to do, and oops, there's 40 more tasks it needs to accomplish to cook a dinner. The only way to build this product is to tackle all the tasks at once, and that's why this research is so important. Everything you want a robot to do needs O(dozens) of individual tasks, and when each task takes O(year) to build it's impossible to finish.
So most the specialist problems we've had that were not 'generalist hard' we've already mostly solved with machines that we don't consider complex robots.
It shape of the robot isn't the issue, the problem space of reality is. A roomba can suck stuff off a floor, it has a much harder time dealing with (or even identifying) a sock that needs moved out of the way first. To do that for all the different objects that could show up in front of you, you need a general purpose AI.
Good floor cleaning robots are effective. Your anecdote doesn't prove otherwise. It's like a 4-5+ billion dollar market.
If you look at demos from this article, ALOHA, Tesla's bot, Asimo, etc. you will see more and more skills being demonstrated.
The biggest thing missing from most systems is probably strong fluent motion with integrated sensing and actual hands. But the Tesla robot for example has made a lot of progress on those fronts and does have hands with touch sensors.
What are the skills that your average human has? And let's see if we have robots that can do that. Maybe not quite as well YET, but still the same skill.
- can walk around. Check
- play soccer. Check
- locate and pick up objects from a flat surface. Check.
- assemble objects together. Check.
- put dishes in a dishwasher.check
- play the piano.check
- climb stairs. Check.
- do a front flip. Check.
- open doors. Check.
- drive a car. Check.
- write a computer program. Check.
- draw or paint. Check.
- put clothes in dryer. Check.
- understand and produce natural language. Check.
We are really at the point of just making these things work better and be deployed. And there is rapid progress.
The large multimodal models provide a new level of generality that is accelerating this.
I believe that within say 2-5 years you will see an explosion of robots with more skills than any human could ever hope to achieve in their lifetime. Just like you can download LoRAs that make LLMs more capable in a certain programming language or art style, there will eventually be adapters to instantly provide any type of skill desired.
You will just say "I would like a martial arts lesson" and your android helper just looks off into the distance for a few seconds and then says "I.. I know Kung Fu!" Then launches into a demonstration worthy of The Matrix.
How does locking away most of the knowledge, research and learning materials in the private vaults of a few publishing houses for their personal profit promote the progress of science I wonder?
Even scientists are tired of the predatory and rent seeking behaviour of the publishers they have fallen prey to and are looking for any way out.
This is not promoting progress this is the opposite of it
I think it grossly mischaracterizes what copyright protects to describe is as "most of the knowledge, research and learning materials". Still I agree, that the extensions of copyright length and the behavior/incentives of publishers works against the original intent of copyright. Having said that, publishers only have control of copyright because authors give it to them. Copyright rests with the creator — the system where people are compelled to sign this over to publishers is a different (but of course related) problem. Scientists who are tired of the predatory behavior of publishers have other choices today. It's not clear what alternative you are proposing.
> vaults of a few publishing houses for their personal profit
Because they made it, it wouldn't exist without them, and others value it. If this data wasn't objectively valuable, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
How does it protect a small artist against a large corporation profiting off their work?
I don’t even have the means to start litigation, let alone see it through.
It only protects those who are already moneyed and/or famous enough to negatively impact a large corporation’s reputation - and even in those cases it’s mostly for the benefit of the lawyers and bureaucrats who make a living off it.
If you register your work, which requires some effort, but is not prohibitively expensive or difficult, you can sue for statutory damages, which are substantial enough (up to $150k for willful infringement) that lawyers will work on contingency. There are many individual artists how have been successful here. The law actually has some real teeth that individuals can use to protect their work.
It would be nice if there was a preventative concept, where the role of the creator being a predator, seeking and suing, would be mostly reversed, so that others would instead ask for permission, and maybe get the rights to copies through a fair exchange of money, like a license. We could call this "copy rights".
GPT-4 was introduced just less than a year ago. Development didn't stop. It doesn't mean that AI will invent something, but mimicking existing works is easy. After all most humans writing is just this. There are real works, while most is just a flood of some gray mass. These writers can use AI and there will be no difference. Another category is autobiographies written by celebrities with no writing skills. Today they use human coauthors, but soon AI will be doing text expansion and style correction just as well.
BTW, "good" is subjective metrics. As soon as it's known to be AI generated it becomes average at best. Just like with images today. Nobody is trying to find 'hidden depth' in them.
> These writers can use AI and there will be no difference. Another category is autobiographies written by celebrities with no writing skills
I would argue this is a common fallacy: I can't do something but I can use automation to do it. But chances are, being unable to do it also means you're unable to judge the result and understand what is right/wrong.
This is the standard thing if you try to put together a UI without any design skills, you will use existing components and styles, and it will still look crap.
AI will make it easier for people who know how to write to do automated ghost writing, but it won't allow people who can't to do it.
That kind of was my point as well.
If you are a good author, sure you can probably write a book faster with AI - maybe even faster than without using it.
But this fantasy of “people will just dump a prompt into GPT and it will produce a masterpiece (or at least something that a reasonably big audience perceives as good)” is just that: a fantasy.
I am open to change my mind of course once I see a good story written mostly or completely by AI.
Sure “good” is subjective but I think no one can argue that the stories produced by AI today are good by any measure - at best they are a passable mimicry of a story that already existed.
> I would argue this is a common fallacy: I can't do something but I can use automation to do it. But chances are, being unable to do it also means you're unable to judge the result and understand what is right/wrong
While in general it's true, reality can be different. I'm using GPT-4 for coding thing that I don't know much about. I have only ideas what I want, but not how exactly to code it. Simple offloading to AI works fine. I can learn libraries and APIs it's using, but that isn't my goal. I want the working product. This semi-automated approach saves a lot of time.
That was just a practical example. We can argue that in some cases it doesn't work. Yes, and may never work. But there is an area where it works. And this area at least is not going to shrink.
Seems like if you do this over and over and over again under different brands - say on like a staggered Decade schedule - you optimize your profits, milking as much out of your market as possible while severely cutting cost and quality and competence.
Completely different thing. The gist of the Boeing theory is that it was ruined by a finance-driven culture that resulted in cost-cutting away quality and safety.
"Enshittification" is not based on cost-cutting or optimizing for profits. It's when a product that's already "perfect" and widely used, has lots of money/effort invested in it to chase further growth, and the changes end up making the product worse for its existing userbase.
Sure messages disappear on the free plan, but there are ways around that.