I've just published my first novel for adults, The Dark Sorcerer's Intern, my bid to bring back fun and comedy to a fantasy genre that has spent years in a grimdark rut.
The relevance to hackers is that unlike most fantasy where spells are cast with hand motions, magic words, or spell ingredients, there's actually an explanation for why that works and makes sense.
This is a compelling theory, especially the implication that humans are early. I do wonder whether we should see the evidence of spheres of growing alien influence out in the stars, but instead we see a highly uniform universe in all directions.
This would indicate a few possibilities:
1. Expanding alien civilizations are relatively low impact and don't collect all of the energy of stars in ways that are visible to our current telescopes.
2. We are a very early civilization, civs are fairly rare, and we're relatively alone in the parts of the universe that we can see. Civs that are expanding in a grabby fashion started less recently in years than their distance in light years.
3. Aliens expand at close to the speed of light, so there are a lot out there but we won't see them until they're almost here.
4. Something that we have already noticed is actually evidence of grabby aliens, but it is happening in every direction so we assume that it is a natural phenomenon, because it is so uniform.
At the very least, it seems likely that we either we are alone in the galaxy, or expansion is very slow. The idea of "expanding in a bubble of influence close to the speed of light" seems implausible to me, just because of the vast amounts of energy required to accelerate and decelerate to relativistic speeds, not to mention protecting the cargo in transit--when you're flying at .9c, almost every other piece of matter in the universe is flying towards you at you at .9c. Accelerating tiny nanomachine von Neumann probes might be a solution, but how would they decelerate enough to not be destroyed on arrival?
Is this in comparison to some other evaluation function which is perfect? I agree that all positions should have a certainty of win, draw, or lose with perfect play, but no engine is close to that level of evaluation function.
I do suspect that this pathological behavior could be trained out with additional fine tuning, but likely not without slightly diminishing the model's overall ability.
I got downvotes for not showing the calculation, fair enough, my mistake. I understand the frustration there. And yeah, you've got to check ChatGPT's work and ask for clarification to understand what it did and why.
That said, I disagree with the assertions made in your post. ChatGPT is a great tool for saving time in doing simple research and calculations, as long as you double check it. It wasn't a year ago, but it is now.
If you're going to yell at someone, at least do your own calculation so you can prove they're wrong first, please?
Total Sky Area=4π×(2π360)^2×60^2 = 148,510,660 square arcminutes (you can also look this up easily)
NIRCam has 9.7 square arcminutes FOV (Yes, I double checked this)
NIRCam resolution is 2048 × 2048 x 2 modules for 2.4–5.0 µm (there are lots of different cameras and modules you could look at to make this estimate, but for a sense of magnitude this will work. If you looked at 0.6–2.3 µm that would be roughly 4x as many pixels for the 8 modules, I think? Again, napkin math for fun.)
Total FoVs Needed = 148,510,660.8 / 9.7 ≈ 15,310,377 FoVs
Total Pixels = (2048×2048×2)×15,310,377 ≈ 128,432,754,096,706 pixels
LLMs used to be quite awful at math. Now they're solving quite complicated problems with sophisticated plugins. This is a simple and straightforward calculation, just getting the FOV and its resolution and then projecting that onto a sphere. And, yes, I probably should have posted the full calculation, it's definitely more interesting to see it all written out.
I'd suspect it will actually accelerate moving everything into the cloud.
If your entire business is in the cloud, you can give an AI access to everything with a single sign or some passwords. If half is on the cloud and half is local, that's very annoying to have all in-context for your AI assistant. And there's no way we're getting everything locally stored again at this point!
The high pixel density screen and physical keyboard actually make a Droid very possible for this. Mine is very comfortable for reading, but for creating documents it will take some practice--almost every element is part of the UI so it's easy to tap the wrong thing.
I don't see any reason that with the proper UI mapping, a program couldn't let me bang out some writing on this thing.
You wouldn't want to write your entire app (or novel) on it, but for quashing a bug or tweaking some CSS? Absolutely.
The beauty of twitter isn't that you send messages without specifying recipients. Any billboard does this. HTML webpages, blogs with RSS feeds, etc do this.
Twitter allows you to:
1. Communicate on equal footing. You're living on someone else's blog, or their social news site, or their subreddit, or their messageboard, or in their chat room. There's no need to shout anyone down with negative karma, because everyone controls their own feed.
2. Control your world. If you stop following someone, they basically cease to exist. On the other hand, they can follow you if they want, with no harm to you. This allows celebrities to share directly in a way they never have before.
3. Stay engaged with minimal time. Tweets are limited to 140 characters for everyone. Writing a blog post requires a commitment and willpower. A tweet is extremely easy.
Despite all of this, Twitter itself is very awkward to use, and making sense of the un-threaded mass is very difficult. It's reaching mass adoption because it can be all things to all people (microblog, chat, rss feed, friend updates, broadcast announcements, etc).
There are better ways out there to facilitate good discussions. Google is trying to tackle the office collaboration problem with Wave, and I think there's huge progress to be made in the space of online discussions, separate from the current plethora of news reaction sites (coughhackernewscough) that we have now. The inevitable rise of self-posts on news sites (it's usually resisted or frowned on at first) shows the existence of this need.
You're totally right. Guiding people in the choice between even just the various computing options is a major task. This is just a big, big nut to try to crack..
To anyone attempting it, I'd suggest again starting in a very tightly focused domain. My pick would be cameras -- the classic "whattheheckdoIwanttobuyIhavenoideawhatthesenumbersmean" product.
My first thought was “doesn’t Amazon already organize things independent of vendor?” But what we’re really looking for here is a recommendation engine, and Amazon really isn’t very good at that. As I see it there are three main steps which should be done in order. The more you know about ahead of time, the further you can skip ahead. Here are the steps:
Step 1. I don’t know what I’m looking for.
Maybe I’m looking for a good science fiction book. Or a gift for a 14-year-old niece. A deep gift recommendation engine alone could probably make a good startup. The engine should ask some probing questions and give recommendations—either specific products or product categories, depending on the type of question. This experience mimic the experience of having an experienced salesperson ask questions and point you towards good options.
A beautiful browsing option would be a great way to conclude this step.
Step 2. I know what I want, but I haven’t decided which brand or model to get.
Here we need a deep comparison. The ability to rank priorities would be really helpful. Let’s say I’m buying a laptop. The site should ask me how much I care about weight, screen size, processing power, etc. It can then recommend models that fit within my budget.
There’s a huge amount of domain-specific knowledge required to get this right for a variety of products.
Step 3. I know what product I want.
Here we need to give comparisons among vendors. Price, shipping speed, return policies, and other general customer feedback are important. This is where it helps to be a trusted third party.
This problem is a huge undertaking, which is why no one has come close to solving it yet. Frankly, unless the domain is very restricted, I don’t think a three person team will be able to do enough specific programming and testing to make it work.
The principles and mechanics would best be discovered in a very narrow marketplace, and one full of confusion. Electronics would be the natural stating place, but a less crowded market might also work.
I can't help but think that while pg may be hinting that he has a solution in mind, it's just a trick to get people to think harder about it and come up with new ideas.
Sometimes, getting people to believe that something is possible is the best way to get them to come up with a solution.
This is phrased almost as a guessing game, so forensic analysis of RFS 1 is in order.
The phrase "you can't have aggregators without content" and suggestion that a writer is needed implies that this is content creation, not aggregation.
One way to start from making money is to let users pay to get what they want.
Here's one place it could lead: Let readers bid (or paying subscribers vote) on what they want investigated or discussed. Journalists are actually quite cheap, so a few hundred interested parties could fund a weeklong investigation by a professional journalist. You could also solicit leads and research assistance from the readers.
Then, once the story is published you still get any ad revenue, which could be targeted to the audience that you serve. Journalists could liveblog updates as they investigate, encouraging supporters to give additional funds to help them through the search. The editorial staff could float suggestions for stories and let users vote with their wallets on what they want investigated.
In this way users could also directly support the journalists who do good work, and the organization would scale by the level of interest.
Probably not what pg had in mind, but it doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility.
The relevance to hackers is that unlike most fantasy where spells are cast with hand motions, magic words, or spell ingredients, there's actually an explanation for why that works and makes sense.
https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Sorcerers-Intern-Humorous-Fantas...