“looks at bookshelf of completely unread books.” Oh… Yeah I love books!

Isn’t this whole thing a bit performative? I mean, dogs aren’t inherently more worthy of liberation from the meat market than any other farm animal.

Not really, it’s just that the sheer quantity of hours has been find to be less important than the original study presented. Essentially, with good aptitude and quality practice, you don’t actually need 10,000 hours to reach the top percentile.

The author of this article seems to have taken this in some weird directions. They have had personal experiences of being pressured to practice long hours at something they struggled in. They find relief in the new study, which they allegedly believe validates the idea that it was a hopeless endeavor. I’d argue that the fault didn’t lie with the 10,000 hour number, but rather with thier family who pushed the author too hard to succeed in a sport they probably weren’t improving at, Rather than reevaluating motivating factors or approach.

Of course 10,000 hours is arbitrary. I’m just saying, the study doesn’t assert that inherit talent even exist, let alone is the primary factor. It only contradicts the number of hours.

I agree, but maybe it’s time for a Linux based Nintendo DS / PSP sized device? I mean, Nintendo has abandoned these truly pocketable consoles. Maybe with a die shrink they could fit something 70% as performant as a deck into that form Factor?

I personally know a lot of people who miss the DS and don’t game anymore now that the platform was dropped. Casual gamer types.

I just dump a liter of bleach in the upper deck and remove the seat. Nothing cleans you up better than a good swirl.

It’s really concerning how many comments are snidly dismissive or in some cases outright hostile to this particular peice of reporting.

Does Hamas deny that the hostages were kidnapped or mistreated? Are the circumstances of these particular people’s capture suspect? Are thier experiences disputed?

I see no comments even attempting to say so. It reads as wantonly jingoistic.

Imo, the true fallacy of using AI for journalism or general text, lies not so much in generative AI’s fundamental unreliability, but rather it’s existence as an affordable service.

Why would I want to parse through AI generated text on times.com, when for free, I could speak to some of the most advanced AI on bing.com or openai’s chat GPT or Google bard or a meta product. These, after all, are the back ends that most journalistic or general written content websites are using to generate text.

To be clear, I ask why not cut out the middleman if they’re just serving me AI content.

I use AI products frequently, and I think they have quite a bit of value. However, when I want new accurate information on current developments, or really anything more reliable or deeper than a Wikipedia article, I turn exclusively to human sources.

The only justification a service has for serving me generated AI text, is perhaps the promise that they have a custom trained model with highly specific training data. I can imagine, for example, weather.com developing highly specific specialized AI models which tie into an in-house llm and provide me with up-to-date and accurate weather information. The question I would have in that case would be why am I reading an article rather than just being given access to the llm for a nominal fee? At some point, they are not no longer a regular website, they are a vendor for a in-house AI.

Sometimes I have a hard time telling when ADHD memes are sincere expressions of a shared experience or people putting thier friends on blast.

This is bloody hilarious 🤣

It sounds really cool, but I’ve honestly had issues installing it on two PCs now on two separate occasions separated by a couple months. Issues I didn’t have installing Ubuntu. The installer would fail to complete. I’m not a Linux power user, and while I tried debugging for a few hours, I gave up.

I keep reading his name as David D Pepe in my head. Far too fitting.

No.

I don’t like the “There’s just stuff bumping into other stuff, and how is that free?” Argument. I feel like it’s unessisarily reductive.

A stone washing down a river might be guided deterministically by fundimental forces, as are all of the actions of a human brain.

However, the stone was dislodged by erosion. My will was set into motion by abstract human concepts. My memories, biases, emotions, education, habits, etc. these are not fundamental or physical forces. I was free, uninhibited by state or peers, to decide based on these internal factors.

Sure, if you rewinded time and replayed it, I would always make that decision, and so would the stone wash down the river, but the human had a meaningful perception of free will.

I would argue that free will is not a physical concept, but a phycological one. It succeeds in describing the experience of mulling over a decision, and freely acting upon it. It is fair and reasonable to say it, just like in my example it is fair and reasonable for me to say a terrible person is evil.

If you twist the definition of free will contain some mention of subatomic autonomy, then sure, it doesn’t exist, but the concept predates such ideas…

Heck, even the Bible- I’m an atheist- but the point of writing that God gave humans free will was the expression of the human experience. The writers wanted to explain why being a human FELT different from being a stone. They were grappling with the experience of consciousness in a spiritual way. The original text never claims to be the ultimate expression of physics. It’s reductive to dismiss the text as meaningless just because some later “free will” proponents claimed that the brain is quantum or whatever.

Sorry, I agree with you about the nature of the universe. I just think these reductive debates are, in general, unproductive. I believe they misrepresent the subject from both sides.

Hmm. I disagree a bit with this idea, but more on the grounds of semantics. In a deterministic world, you might fret over a decision for weeks, taking influence from several factors. You are free to make any decision, and your will may be driven by rational desires.

In this model, at an atomic level, you have no special, privileged position. A magical being with a perfect physical simulation could perfectly predict your actions in the same way as the movement of a falling stone.

However, unlike a stone, your mind is tuned by all sorts of important human factors. Your memories, habits, biases, education, relationships, and perception. Just because they are the result of the same fundimental physical properties doesn’t mean they are suddenly devoid of meaning or random.

Alternatively, if we imagine a world where the human mind is dependent on non physical, non deterministic factors. Does it actually change our previous hypothetical decision? Probably not. You’d still make a similar decision based on all of those human factors. Perhaps, this hypothetical non deterministic human might occasionally decide to “flip a coin” so to speak, and do something truly random, but to me that feels uninformed and uninteresting to my own experience. Few definitions of free will demand that we be able to make random decisions.

I feel as if the answer to this is, by general consensus, yes. You have free will.

Like, does Evil exist? Scientifically? No, absolutely not, but the word still has meaning. If I say, “that man is evil!” And you look at him and recognize his terribleness, then, sure: he is IS evil.

Just because something isn’t objectively, physically quantifiable, doesn’t mean that it’s not a valid rational construct.

I think the actual argument which has been making the rounds recently, is not, “do humans have free will?” But, Rather is, “are humans accountable for their actions, given that thier will is significantly biased by factors outside of their control / awareness?”

It’s just that doesn’t get people’s attention.

Ps, I believe that fundamentally, all physical interactions are deterministic in practice. Any conscious or rational being is fundamentally set in motion with the arrow of time, and if you could develop a fuzzy quantum state based intelligence, you’d only succeed in creating a person with slightly more random ideas. There would be no meaningful uplift in “free will.” However, I also Believe that this is an absurd deconstruction of heady topics. It’s akin to telling someone that a table doesn’t exist because it’s just a decomposing tree. Free will is a rational idea for human animals, and judged by that standard, fulfills it’s purpose in describing the experience of conscious decision making.

Not piracy, but if you’re in the US and get a library card, you can use the Libby app, which has tons of free audiobooks on demand. Definitely worth it, imho. You can download for offline use easily too, which makes it excellent for travel.

Piracy? I’ve been converting my epubs into html files and then using the edge browser’s excellent voice to text to read it out to me, but that’s my own special brand of insanity.

I’m not anti ai, I use it generative ai all of the time, and I actually come from a family of professional artists myself ( though I am not ). I agree that its a tool which is useful; however, I disagree that it is not destructive or harmful to artist simply because it is most effective in thier hands.

1. it concentrates the power of creativity into firms which can afford to produce and distribute ai tools. While ai models are getting smaller, there are frequently licensing issues involved (not copywrite, but simply utilizing the tools for profit) in these small models. We have no defined roadmap for the Democratization of these tools, and most signs point towards large compute requirements.

2. it enables artist to effectively steal the intellectual labor of other artist. Just because you create cool art with it doesn’t mean it’s right for you to scrape a book or portfolio to train your ai. This is purely for practical reasons. Artists today work thier ass of to make the very product ai stands to consolidate and distribute for prennies to the dollar.

you fail to recognize that possibility that I support ai but oppose its content being copywritable purely because firms would immediately utilize this to evade licensing work. Why pay top dollar for a career concept artist’s vision when you can pay a starting liberal arts grad pennies to use Adobe suit to generate images trained in said concept artists?

Yes, that liberal arts grad deserves to get paid, but they also deserve any potential whatsoever of career advancement.

Now imagine instead if new laws required that generative ai license thier inputs in order to sell for profit? Sure, small generative ai would still scrape the Internet to produce art, but it would create a whole new avenue for artist to create and license art. Advanced generative ai may need smaller datasets, and small teams of artist may be able to utilize and license boutique models.

I disagree with this reductionist argument. The article essentially states that because ai generation is the “exploration of latent space,” and photography is also fundamentally the “exploration of latent space,” that they are equivalent.

It disregards the intention of copywriting. The point isn’t to protect the sanctity or spiritual core of art. The purpose is to protect the financial viability of art as a career. It is an acknowledgment that capitalism, if unregulated, would destroy art and make it impossible to pursue.

Ai stands to replace artist in a way which digital and photography never really did. Its not a medium, it is inference. As such, if copywrite was ever good to begin with, it should oppose ai until compromises are made.

I think my lead deferred it as a case covered by code inspection. So… probably not! I don’t work at ge anymore 😁

While investigating an uncovered node in some aviation datalink software, I discovered a 15 year old comment from 1993 along the lines of, “this function never runs, I’ll fix it later.” I wish will all my heart I could have heard their voice. Even if just for a moment.