I think this is pretty well established as far as neurologists are concerned and explains a lot of things. Like dreaming for instance.. just something like the model running without sensory input constraining it.
Always wondered if dreaming is some kind of daily memory consolidation function. Logged short-term/episodic memory being filtered and the important bits baked by replaying in a limited simulacrum.
There was once a neural network that used dreaming phases for regularisation. It would run in reverse on random data and whatever activated was down–weighted.
I'll also recommend Being You by Seth Anil. It makes a lot of sense of consciousness to me. It certainly doesn't answer the question but it's not just throw your hands up and "we have no idea why qualia", and it's also not just "here's a list of neural correlates of consciousness and we won't even discuss qualia".
It goes through how sensations fit into this highly constrained, highly functional hallucination that models the outside world as a sort of bayesian prediction about the world as they relate to your concerns and capabilities as a human, and then it has a very interesting discussion about emotions as they relate to inner bodily sensations.
I am very tired of seeing every random person's speculation (framed as real insight) on what's going to happen as they try to signify that they are super involved in AI and super on top of it and therefore still worthy of value and importance in the economy.
One thing I found out from my years of commenting on the internet, is as long as what you say sounds plausible and you state it with absolute conviction and authority, you can get your 15 minutes of fame as the world's foremost expert on any given topic.
You have to understand the people in the article are execs from the chip EDA (Electronic Design Automation) industry. It's full of dinosaurs who have resisted innovation for the past 30 years. Of course they're going to be blowing hot air about how they're "embracing AI". It's a threat to their business model.
I'm a little biased though since I work in chip design and I maintain an open source EDA project.
I agree with their take for the most part, but it's really nothing insightful or different than what people have been saying for a while now.
It’s in software too. Old guard leadership wanting “AI” as a badge but not knowing what to do with it. They are just sprinkling it into their processes and exfiltrating data while engineers continue to make a mess of things.
Unlike real AI projects that utilize it for workflows, or generating models that do a thing. Nope, they are taking a Jira ticket, asking copilot, reviewing copilot, responding to Jira ticket. They’re all ripe for automation.
(As a musician) i never invested in a personal brand or taking part in the social media rat race and figured I concentrate on the art / craft over meaningless performance online.
Well guess who is getting 0 gigs now because “too few followers/visibility”
(or maybe my music just sucks who knows …)
I always thought I would kinda be immune to this issue, so I avoided social media for my entire adult life.
I think I am still in the emotional phase about it, as its really impacting me lately, but once my thoughts really settle i wanna write some sorta article about modern social media as an induced demand.
I still very much would prefer to not engage at all with any of the major platforms in the standard way. Ideally I'd just post an article I wrote, or some goofy project i made, and it wouldn't be subject to 0 views because I don't interact with social media correctly.
seems like it depends on what your goal is. i'm guessing if you want to be a musician that makes a living in your current life, a personal brand is extremely important. if you don't mind doing it for the sake of the art and soul fulfillment and the offchance you'll be discovered posthumously then i think it doesn't matter!
Thanks for the offer!
I don’t wanna dox myself on this account just yet - and I am slowly building an audience on IG/SC now, basically have admitted defeat of my previous strategy. Also have 2 gigs coming up in the summer _fingers-crossed_
I just was feeling some type of way seeing that comment and wanted to vent thx for listening
I routinely see this in biotech, I've seen hiring managers from our Clinical Science team blatantly discriminate against candidates not on linkedin, even if they come with a strong referral and have 15-page super thorough CVs with 150 credible publication references. "Oh, they're not on linkedin, this person is sketchy" - immediately disqualifies candidate.
I had a pretty slim linkedin and actually beefed it up after seeing how much weight the execs and higher ups I work with give it. It's really annoying, I actually hate linkedin but basically got forced into using it.
To me the post reads more like “we couldn’t convince current engineers to adopt LLMs so we’re going to embed it into the curriculum so future engineers are made to believe it’s the way to do things”
I think I'm the opposite! The key is to ignore any language that sounds too determined and treat it as an opinion piece on what could happen. There's no way of knowing what will, but I find the theories very interesting.
Also, can we just STFU about AI and jobs already? We've long since passed the point where there was a meaningful amount of work to be done for every adult. The number of "jobs" available is now merely a function of who controls the massive stockpiles of accumulated resources and how they choose to dole them out. Attack that, not the technology.
> Also, can we just STFU about AI and jobs already?
Phew, yes I'm with you...
> We've long since passed the point where there was a meaningful amount of work to be done for every adult.
Have we? It feels like a lot of stuff in my life is unnecessarily expensive or hard to afford.
> The number of "jobs" available is now merely a function of who controls the massive stockpiles of accumulated resources and how they choose to dole them out.
Do you mean that it has nothing to do with how the average person decides to spend their money?
> Have we? It feels like a lot of stuff in my life is unnecessarily expensive or hard to afford.
We have, yes. If you notice things to be too expensive it's a result of class warfare. Have you noticed how many people got _obscenely rich_ in the last 25 years? Yes, that's where money saved by technology went to.
2 well identifiable classes in western societies are landlords vs renters, where the latter is paying a huge chunk of their income to be able to use an appreciating asset of the former.
This class thing is especially identifiable in Europe, where assets such as real estate generally are not cheaper than in the US (with the exception of a few super expensive places), yet salaries are much lower.
Taxes tend to be super high on wages but not on assets. One can very easily find themselves in a situation where even owning a modest amount of wealth, their asset appreciation outdoes what they can get as labor income.
> Have we? It feels like a lot of stuff in my life is unnecessarily expensive or hard to afford.
Look at a bunch of job postings and ask yourself if that work is going to make things cheaper for you or better for society. We're not building railroads and telephone networks anymore. One person can grow food for 10,000. Stuff is expensive because free market capitalism allows it and some people are pathologically greedy. Runaway optimizers with no real goal state in mind except "more."
> How? What are you proposing exactly?
In a word, socialism. It's a social and political problem, not a technical one. These systems have fallen way behind technology and allowed crazy accumulations of wealth in the hands of very few. Push for legislation to redistribute the wealth to the people.
If someone invents a robot to do the work of McDonalds workers, that should liberate them from having to do that kind of work. This is the dream and the goal of technology. Instead, under our current system, one person gets a megayacht and thousands of people are "unemployed." With no change to the amount of important work being done.
The first half of your comment doesn't quite click for me.
I appreciate the elaboration in the second half. That sounds a lot more constructive than "attack", but now I understand you meant it in the "attack the problem" sense not "attack the people" sense.
What I think we agree on is that society has resource redistribution problem, and it could work a lot better.
I think we might also agree that a well functioning economic engine should lift up the floor for everyone and not concentrate economic power into those who best weild leverage.
One way I think of this is, what is the actual optimal lorenz curve that allows for lifting the floor, such that the area under the curve increases at the fastest rate possible. (It must account for the reality of human psychology and resource scarcity)
Where we might disagree is that I think we also have some culture and education system problems as well, which relate to how each individual takes responsibility for figuring out how to ethically create value for others. When able bodied and minded people chose to spend their time playing zero and negative sum games instead of positive sum games we all lose.
E.g. If mcdonald automates their restaurants, those workers also need to take some responsibility for finding new ways to provide value to others. A well functioning system would make that as painless as possible for them, so much so that the majority experiencing it would consider it a good thing.
> The first half of your comment doesn't quite click for me.
Anything specific?
> When able bodied and minded people chose to spend their time playing zero and negative sum games instead of positive sum games we all lose.
What types of behaviors are you referring to as zero and negative sum games?
I think at the very least we should move toward a state where the existence of dare-I-say freeloaders and welfare queens isn't too taxing, and with general social progress that "niche" may be naturally disincentivized and phased out. Some people just don't really have a purpose or a drive but they were born here and yes one would hope that under the right conditions they could blossom but if not I don't think it's worth worrying about too much.
I would say that education is essentially at the core of everything, it's the only mechanism we have to move the needle on any of it.
Great point. The people who popularized 'the end of history' were right about it from the PoV of innovation benefiting humans. It's been marginal gains since. Any appearance of significant gains (in the eyes of a minority of powerful people) has been the result of concentration in fewer hands (zero-sum game).
The focus of politics after the 90s should have shifted to facilitating competition to equalize distribution of existing wealth and should have promoted competition of ideas, but instead, the governments of the world got together and enacted policies which would suppress competition, at the highest scale imaginable. What they did was much worse than doing nothing.
Now, the closest solution we can aim for (IMO) is UBI. It's a late solution because a lot of people's lives have already been ruined through no fault of their own. On the plus side it made other people much more resilient, but if we keep going down this path, there is nothing more to learn; only serves to reinforce the existing idea that everything is a scam. This is bound to affect people's behaviors in terrible ways.
Imagine a dystopian future where the system spends a huge amount of resources first financially oppressing people to the point of insanity, then monitoring and controlling them to try to get them to avoid doing harm... When the system could just have given them (less) money and avoided this downward spiral into insanity to begin with and then you wouldn't even need to monitor them because they would be allowed to survive whilst being their own sane, good-natured self. We have to course-correct and are approaching a point of no return when the resentment becomes severe and permanent. Nobody can survive in a world where the majority of people are insane.
I've encountered resistance to UBI from otherwise like-minded people because Musk and Thiel talk about it or something. When described as gradually lowering the social security age, it clicks. We already have this stuff. It's crazy.
Agreed, but I'd add tech influencers and celebrities to the top of that list, especially those invested in the "AI" hype cycle. At least the perspective of a random engineer is less likely to be tainted by their brand and agenda, and more likely to have genuine insight.
I think he was saying upper classes that didn't do much physical labor have existed since at least classical era and needed to do some kind of physical training to maintain strength?
Beowulf translation is a whole academic field, the translation has been debated ad nauseum for 100s of years, Tolkien had his own translation and opinion, which differed from others. One additional scholar adding his own interpretation doesn't necessarily overturn anything. There is not enough detail in this article to know how compelling the case is or what the counter arguments would be.
The article references a forthcoming publication that I can't find a draft of. Here's an older publication on the topic by the same author: http://walkden.space/Walkden_2013_hwaet.pdf
Edit: Oh, the PF article is from 2013, so this must be the actual publication after all.
The paper (someone else linked it) makes a pretty strong argument with quite a bit of evidence.
It does seem quite likely that the translation that begins "What!" (with the exclamation mark being inserted by translators) was just an error by early translators who were over-indexing on Latin grammatical patterns which weren't at all common in Old English.
> There is not enough detail in this article to know how compelling the case is or what the counter arguments would be.
The only real way to make the case compelling would be to discover new Old English texts. So there is enough information; the case is not going to be compelling.
Check out the paper - someone else linked it. It has several examples from Old English and other related languages which support its case. It seems pretty compelling to me.
The fact that earlier translators had to break up the original sentence and insert an exclamation point after "What" is already a bit suspect. Walkden's interpretation actually makes more sense, when you see examples like "Hwæt stendst þu her wælhreowa deor?", meaning "Why are you standing here, cruel beast?"
This may be a case where early translators over-indexed on e.g. Latin patterns and made a mistake which was then just accepted by subsequent translators.
Depends entirely on what you're selling, the margins, the conversion rate of their landing page, and conversion rate of their sales funnel. Some companies are on auto pilot and are over paying, but the math and techniques are simple for SEM ROI when done with a little attention.
If what you're selling is mortgages or franchise businesses the cost you are willing to pay for a click just to get a chance to convert to a lead, just to get a chance to convert to revenue, is surprisingly high.
My experience with this was great. It went really well. We also did our own ops with in a small boundary of systems organized based on domain. I felt total ownership for it, could fix anything in it, deploy anything with any release strategy, monitor anything, and because of that had very little anxiety about being on call for it, best environment I ever worked in.
reply