I haven't really seen this, personally. Basically everyone I know is both at once. We acknowledge that it's really good at what it does and use it, but it's not enjoyable to use, and we end up dejected about the future of our craft and our jobs.
The amount of downright hostile comments is insane. HN moment, I guess.
Guys, I don't think he said "all the airlines need to drop what they're doing and start using my model". He's clearly just playing around with some rudimentary simulations for fun. Did we forget that we can do things on computers for fun?
Yeah, this isn't "here is a complete solution", it's "here is an interesting package for optimisation, applied in a specific way that you probably haven't heard of".
I found it quite interesting. The guy isn't going to start a company around it. United aren't going to drop what they're doing. But now more people know about scikit-decide and that is a good outcome.
This looks like a pretty reasonable policy to me all things considered. And no, I'm no fan of Flock. But they do run security cameras for the cops, they can't just say go ahead, go wild on all our customers' cameras. The lawyers would throw a fit.
The carveouts for stuff like configuration and DNS are entirely reasonable. Have you ever been behind a security@ email before? You get a lot of BS reports of that sort.
I think it's pretty analogous to coding, honestly. When it comes to gaining true understanding of a piece of software, I still find today's models almost as useless as they were a year ago.
They can write great code, they can gain understanding of something for themselves, but they still kinda suck at explaining it to people. As the article says, if you want understanding, it seems like there is no replacement for getting in the weeds yourself. A model can help, but it's not going to magically download knowledge into your brain.
Not sure how to word this, but it's been bugging me for a while: In a public consciousness sense, it feels like there's barely sci-fi at all these days, let alone the optimistic sort. Something is off about it in a way I can't really put my finger on.
Every previous major technological shift had an associated wave of sci-fi and speculative fiction, right? We explored space and got a generation of stories about aliens and moon bases and Mars missions. We discovered radioactivity and got The World Set Free, and then the nuclear bomb proper inspired countless Atomic Age works. We discovered the transistor, and Asimov and Clarke gave us visions of possible computer-powered futures. We discovered DNA and got decades of comics and movies about mutants and superpowers and bioweapons.
(Of course, we only remember the good ones. A lot of the forgotten stories were total shit. But people still wrote them! And at least in retrospect, it sure feels like they had a cultural impact, and made interesting observations about the way the technology of the time might shape the world.)
But now? We're currently a few years into what's probably the biggest technological shift since, what, the start of the millennium? And yet it feels like we're all collectively just sitting here watching it happen. The closest we have to popular speculative fiction is some billionaires and Bay area rationalists writing breathless blog posts about either curing cancer with AI or AI killing everyone, and universally being derided for it either way.
And as much as I myself don't like the work those guys put out, the derision does bug me. Because it feels like the effects of an irony-poisoned culture of cynicism. We can't write or discuss speculative fiction, good or bad, about what a future AI world might be like, because... I dunno. It'd be cringe? It'd be unrealistic? Or maybe we just don't want to think about it?
And so we all sit here, for the first time staring down the possibility, scarce as it still is but growing likelier every day, of a future where computers are better at every intellectual pursuit than us. And doing nothing about it! Nobody writing stories about a Culture where the future AIs benevolently rule over us. Nobody writing about a Butlerian Jihad where we take power back from the machines. (You'll note that those two examples are from the 80s and 60s respectively.) We just sit here going "oh man, huh yeah, it'll sure suck if the robots take all our jobs." And hardly even try to imagine a world where that's happened and how much it sucks, or a world where we successfully revolted against it, or a world where we manage to somehow thrive and find fulfillment despite it.
I'm not sure what I expect, really. I know authors can't just pull a grand vision for a future out of a hat. I'm sure many have, and I just haven't read or watched it. But it just feels like something is different this time, like there's something that's gone missing culturally speaking. Oh well. Maybe this is always how it feels being in the Interesting Times, instead of just reading about them after the fact.
People in the Anglosphere have had their imaginations closed off to a huge degree, particular in US culture where media consolidation has made it so that only guaranteed big blockbusters that cater to the boring median get produced.
In the US the lack of funding for the arts and impossibility of making a living as an artist has caused arts and culture to die off and become extremely stagnant, endlessly recycled with no risk taking.
Reading this was a relief, I've only got a hobbyist's knowledge of impedance matching in the electrical sense and felt like I was going crazy... Good to know I'm not alone
Hm, it seems like it'd make sense to automate a script to send one small prompt at, say, 7 or 8am so that you get your reset around noon instead of having to wait until 5h or more into the workday.
I never quite understood why they picked 5h, it seems oddly arbitrary
> They should be underground (that’s not shockingly expensive at the scale we talk about)
... I'm not sure you realize the size of a modern hyperscale datacenter? They're pretty dang big.
The amount of earthmoving to bury one would also be awful for the environment. There's really no need to complicate it that much, they're big warehouses full of computers, just shove them on some unused industrial land somewhere as is already being done.
They should be required to pay for new renewable generation, I agree. That much is common sense.
Sure, that's much more feasible, but there's no real point. We don't do this for any other kind of industrial infrastructure (except the kind that HAS to go in residential areas, like utility substations). It's like the ultimate first world problem, spending money and gas on earthmoving so that the few dozen people who might occasionally drive past this thing can glance at a grassy berm instead of a concrete wall.
People in my area are complaining about data centers being built in rural fields and on former aluminum plant and power plant sites. The debate has become pretty detached from reality. What remains rooted in reality mostly comes down to electric bills / power consumption and the fact that, as everyone is saying, it's the only way for people to push back against big tech billionaires.
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