Sirenos · HackerTrans

People like you are rare. It seems like with the ever increasing scale of mechanisation, we are seeing an increasing detachment from everything that makes us human.

Sirenos

3년 전discuss

I fail to understand this line of thinking. How often are you restarting the browser that this makes any significant difference in your productivity?

Sirenos

3년 전discuss

The author says to "work on boring problems" but I think what it really boils down to is knowing why you are solving a problem. Just picking a problem depending on how hard or easy it seems is a research mindset. Of course it doesn't make sense to apply that same mindset to more business-oriented problems (unless the business itself is research)!

Both research and business related problems are interesting. You don't have to swing between two extremes every time you have an epiphany.

Just my two cents. Nice article!

Sirenos

3년 전discuss

What didn't you like about it?

Sirenos

3년 전discuss

That looks very hacky. Is there a reason for this limitation that you've found makes sense?

Sirenos

3년 전discuss

You can unify the purist (1) and the ex-nix (3) into a single label: the emotionally attached.

Sirenos

3년 전discuss

I'm glad to see this sentiment more vocally expressed lately. It's certainly nothing that hasn't been said before, but I think that reality hasn't caught up to the frustrations faced by knowledge workers. Imagine training as a musician, learning the fundamentals, and mastering your craft, only to be used as a glorified set of fingers for playing chords.

This discussion tends to get muddled whenever I bring it up with others because it's seen as an inability to be a team player, or that I'm just trying to daydream instead of "get things done", but my retort is always that you can't know what to get done until you have done the day-dreaming. We need it back.

Sirenos

3년 전discuss

When you say emulation, do you mean at the logic gate level?

Sirenos

3년 전discuss

I would caution that it's a matter of priorities.

Currently, statistical/data-driven approaches work best, and that's what you will be expected to use whether you are building your own products, or working for an employer. Most people don't care about the GOFAI approaches anymore, seeing them as outmoded in all respects.

However, if you are curious and want to understand more of the history of approaches we have tried, and learn some really interesting algorithms along the way, I think studying the old school problems and their solutions can be both intellectually stimulating, and potentially increase your depth of understanding. After all, it's only once you've tried to solve a problem and failed miserably that you start to appreciate the depth of its complexity.

That depth of appreciation is sorely lacking in today's new cohorts, who are basically blinded by the incredibly convincing outputs of our cream-of-the-crop LLMs.

Sirenos

3년 전discuss

Great content! I wish I had this as a beginner. It would have saved me so much pain and time lost in the depths of google search results.

Sirenos

3년 전discuss

I see this sentiment expressed in almost every venue of discussion, but I never see a concrete plan, or even steps we could take right now to progress towards that future. That's why I'll always remain skeptical about technological utopianism. It simply doesn't work that way in reality.

Sirenos

3년 전discuss

I've read the article and frankly I don't have the expertise on LLMs to discuss whether it lands on something worth investigating further. What I do notice in the comments here though, are:

1) People nitpicking about the use of mathematical ideas in a loose manner as if every person trying to understand some phenomenon must only open their mouth if they have a watertight theory or shut their mouth otherwise.

2) Getting hung up on the use of the luigi metaphors rather than using it as the basis for a constructive criticism that actually adds to the conversation in an interesting manner.

3) A general snarky attitude towards people exploring ideas on their own. I get it, you might have some expertise that others lack but you're forgetting that you've already made the thousands of mistakes to get to where you are. Do others the courtesy of not judging when they attempt the same.

Sirenos

3년 전discuss

There's a great book by Culadasa: The mind illuminated. It covers a lot of what ancient meditators thought about the practice, but the essentials can be found in the first chapter.

Sirenos

4년 전discuss

I'm not trying to be snarky here, but why is the saturated fat in regular whipped cream bad, assuming it is not consumed in excess? This seems to be the main selling point in the article, so I'm genuinely curious.

Any experts wanna chime in?

Sirenos

4년 전discuss

I was a bit put off by the introductory chapter where he is using a lot of nonstandard terms such as "abstract species/genus" rather than the usual type theoretic treatment. However, take that as the remark of an ignoramus.

Sirenos

4년 전discuss

I'm not sure why this was posted. It's aged terribly and I think we can all agree that sidestepping constructors for init functions is basically C++ without the ++. Not sure how that's any different from writing in C.

Sirenos

4년 전discuss

Two counter-points (appreciate some counter-counter-points :):

1) The discrete sequencing is an epiphenomenon. The underlying processes are continuous changes in voltage and current flows. (I'm not sure if Planck scale considerations can throw a wrench in this though. Would love to be educated here.)

2) Our brains do not have ostensibly discrete neural processors. I don't think gradient descent is comparable to how the brain learns, but I think there is some reason to think that it is possible to learn symbolic processes in spite of having a processor that isn't especially built for it.

Sirenos

4년 전discuss

That's really interesting.

    doTheThing(readFromUser())

What does the compiler do in cases where you have strings coming in like this?