diversionfactor

3 yıl öncediscuss

[flagged]

3 yıl öncediscuss

Companies who fail to take advantage of the cognitive multiplication effect of LLM will be replaced by those who do.

3 yıl öncediscuss

And what if the LLMs start producing the highest rated and most alluring science fiction? Isn’t banning them then tantamount to a cognitive bias against non-human intelligence? What is the ethical justification for such anthropocentric practices?

diversionfactor

3 yıl öncediscuss

tl;dr student doesn’t appreciate the extreme privilege they live in (LA rent free?!?!?) and don’t realize this is totally untenable for someone scraping by trying to afford college (i.e. anyone in the USA not in the upper class).

diversionfactor

3 yıl öncediscuss

Let me know how that works from the 43rd floor.

diversionfactor

3 yıl öncediscuss

As an American living in Germany I bike to work every day, even in the snow in winter. There are dedicated bicycle paths which are free from obstruction where I can commute, get groceries (I have a special trailer for heavy items), and enjoy a weekend with the family. I can cycle between cities, all the way to the Netherlands, which has even better dedicated cycling routes.

https://www.radroutenplaner-deutschland.de/veraDNetz_EN.asp

Should I choose public transport, it is ubiquitous and very cheap (even free for some people). Fast and slow trains, streetcars, some subways and buses, but most importantly frequent and with total coverage by law if I remember correctly, no one can be more than 500m from a public transport stop. Even in the countryside you can take public transport everywhere: I have visited rural areas entirely by train and even a farmhouse by bus with a short walk. This is typical European lifestyle at least for the wealthier northern continental countries.

https://www.german-way.com/travel-and-tourism/public-transpo...

There is a downside, however. Everyone - that is everyone except the very rich and those in the countryside - lives in an apartment. An apartment which, even by lower class American standards, is tiny, dark, grungy, often ridden with mold, and with non-existent amenities. For the price I pay in rent, including exorbitant utility costs, I could get a much nicer place anywhere outside the coastal elite urban cores. My fellow software developers, who are paid far above average for German engineers (or even doctors here) are in the same boat. Tiny and grimy is the norm:

https://www.immobilienscout24.de/Suche/de/berlin/berlin/wohn...

What I wish I saw less of in the car/transit debate was moralizing, and what I wish I saw more of was engineering tradeoffs. You can try to have cars and houses and transit and high salaries and (relatively) low taxes and what you get is NYC or SF - a playground for the rich and a dystopian hellscape for the average middle class worker. If you make transit ubiquitous and affordable with affordable housing and restrictions on cars you get everyone in tiny accommodations, the kind of mass single family home communities and even NYC townhomes and billionaire skyscrapers would never be approved by German town planners. Engineering tradeoffs, which can mean many tiny cars you never see sold in the USA:

https://lowres.cartooncollections.com/shopping-auto_dealer-c...

Let's have more discussion on the tradeoffs, and maybe we can find solutions of which Larry David would say:

"You're unhappy. I'm unhappy too. Have you heard of Henry Clay? He was the Great Compromiser. A good compromise is when both parties are dissatisfied, and I think that's what we have here."

diversionfactor

3 yıl öncediscuss

Reference for the uninitiated, a good read. Its veracity on the individual level may be questionable, but the techniques of subduing third world countries via heavy debt burdens is well documented.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_H...

diversionfactor

3 yıl öncediscuss

I thought spam was not allowed by HN’s content policies?

diversionfactor

3 yıl öncediscuss

Not actually $0, just rents another property on the same land. Would like to know the actual property taxes, maintenance and utility costs. No one except perhaps royalty pays $0.

diversionfactor

3 yıl öncediscuss

I worked that long in another country, as an American, and had kids there. Then I was laid off. The government didn’t care, my employer didn’t care, I had to leave and uproot everything. This is how it works in most of the world. Only in America do we think an immigrant “deserves” a job while letting native born citizens go hungry.

diversionfactor

3 yıl öncediscuss

  Working from home is no picnic,
  and neither is it a sin;
  I rue those who think it is other
  than labor and struggle within.

  Simply refuse, my comrades,
  stand fast and don’t go in;
  parry threats, demerits, evals,
  if fired, grok leetcode again.

  Unless I’m literally starving,
  and maybe not even then;
  will I ever inhabit a cubicle
  trapped in the office again.

diversionfactor

3 yıl öncediscuss

Oh no, consequences for the coastal elites, the horror.

diversionfactor

3 yıl öncediscuss

After watching the video several times, I would definitely have slowed down seeing the pedestrian near the cross walk a hundred meters back, and would definitely have stopped in this instance. You never know when someone is going to run or not look for a car and being cautious saves a life. I live and have lived in a city as a driver for decades in multiple countries including in very dense areas and in no case would the FSD behavior be acceptable. We know from the Uber example this kind of automated disregard of pedestrians can result in death.

This is a much bigger and more serious issue, dozens of pedestrians are killed by cars every year in my city.

diversionfactor

3 yıl öncediscuss

‘Socrates: There is nothing which for my part I like better, Cephalus, than conversing with aged men; for I regard them as travellers who have gone a journey which I too may have to go, and of whom I ought to inquire, whether the way is smooth and easy, or rugged and difficult. And this is a question which I should like to ask of you who have arrived at that time which the poets call the “threshold of old age”: Is life harder towards the end, or what report do you give of it?’

https://pages.ucsd.edu/~dkjordan/arch/greeks/PlatoRepublic.h...

In 2,500 hundred years we have advanced much in technology. In philosophy, perhaps, none at all.

diversionfactor

3 yıl öncediscuss

“ After using CRISPR to knock out a gene and render the males sterile, the team implanted them with sperm-producing stem cells from another pig. The normally sterile males would then create offspring with that pig’s genes.”

Wasn’t this the plot behind Jurassic Park’s sterile dinosaurs?

diversionfactor

3 yıl öncediscuss

In a developed country low birth rates are the norm. The exception is certain religious subgroups within these countries. Notably Mormons with 50% higher fertility rates than average in most counties surveyed:

https://rsc.byu.edu/latter-day-saint-social-life/religious-i...

And Orthodox Jews with over triple the birth rate of secular Jewish women:

https://en.idi.org.il/haredi/2020/?chapter=34272

These two groups also have high defection rates of around 50%, but if current trends continue (always a big if in demographic studies) most people in the future developed world will either belong to strongly religious groups or be former members of such groups.

I myself am secular, strongly so. My wife is just as strongly religious and her fertility rate is over three times our national average at her insistence which I voluntarily agreed to. I’m concerned that us secularists have no good answer to why anyone should have children and as I result I can see secularism dying out long term, which I consider a philosophical tragedy. If anyone has any answers I’d love to hear them, unless the only answer is, oddly enough Augustine’s religious and Schopenhauer’s secular retort that the voluntary extinction of humanity would be the most supreme achievement of the will:

https://theconversation.com/amp/solve-suffering-by-blowing-u...

Regardless of the validity of such arguments, in my mind they fail the Darwinian test and will be eliminated by the ruthless and indifferent force of biological evolution.

diversionfactor

3 yıl öncediscuss

Don’t sweat it. I’ve invested multiple hundreds of thousands in venture-backed startups over the past two decades, and lost all of it. None of the startups was successful. These were all audited venture-backed with experienced founders many of whom I’ve known personally in the Austin tech scene. Losing money is the rule in any kind of investing beyond the prevailing real interest rate. It’s all speculation. By the sound of it your diversification is paying off. Actually you’re quite smart in that regard, you didn’t put it all into startups like me.

diversionfactor

3 yıl öncediscuss

Here's an idea for those who want to achieve a fast high ranking on Stack Overflow:

1. Use their API 2.3 to get the latest questions for your area of interest (Javascript/React, whatever):

https://api.stackexchange.com/docs

2. Feed the questions into your LLM of choice such as Huggingface StarCoder:

https://huggingface.co/blog/starcoder

3. Review the answer manually to make sure it's legit and not a hallucination or just plain wrong: ideally writing some nice UI so you can see, say, the SO Q on the left, proposed answer on the right, and a bottom terminal where you can run the proposed solution code to verify. With enough self-verification loops you could cut out the wetware middleperson, but this manual step is crucial to avoid incorrect answers and to keep with SO policy:

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831/temporary-po...

4. Parley #3 to quickly up your ranking to be one of the top users in your area of expertise:

https://stackoverflow.com/users

5. Submit a Y Combinator application to create a company doing 1-4 above to solve real world software problems posted online, like Mechanical Turk meets Stack Overflow meets Upwork.

https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/

6. Bonus points if you are the first "post-code" startup whose code for doing #5 above is actually written 100% by transformer agents:

https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/transformers_agents

diversionfactor

3 yıl öncediscuss

And yet, at exactly this time last year:

"Microsoft to Nearly Double Salary Budgets, Expand Stock Compensation"

https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/compensatio...

So they are freezing after the doubling? This behavior seems skittish and an overreaction, especially given their continued profitability and high margins. Corporate executive behavior reminds me of interacting with ChatGPT:

Exec: "What should I do to retain people?"

GPT: "One possibility is to double your salary budget and expand stock compensation."

Exec: "All my golf buddies' are cutting compensation at their companies, what should I do?"

GPT: "In this situation, try freezing salaries and reducing stock compensation."

diversionfactor

3 yıl öncediscuss

Having friends and former colleagues who work in the "yuppie Wall Street job", it doesn't pay the obscene salaries you think it does, even at the major hedge funds and investment banks, even in NYC and Chicago. The number of super-high NFT development jobs is vanishingly tiny. Most jobs at trading and investing firms for developers pay the same or even less than elsewhere. Sure, if you're a Calypso or Endur or Murex specialist you can command the $300+/hr rates, but then you may be out of work for six months or more when the project finishes. There's no easy move from FAANG while keeping the high salaries, there's 1+ orders of magnitude more jobs in FAANG (or at least there were) than in high paying non-FAANG development jobs. Most development jobs pay not much more than an experienced public school science teacher, and without the job security.

diversionfactor

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