I think a lot of it has to do with the somewhat complicated engagement protocol, if everyone assumes that nobody else wants to talk then it's easier to just keep your head down and at best nod or even avert eye contact but when someone extends a level of conversational courtesy I think people often respond in kind. My challenge is that I don't often have the impulse to break the ice but when I do and feel genuinely outgoing people tend to appreciate the chit chat even if it's just about the weather but I also have many moments of standing awkwardly in elevators silently ascending or walking down the street silently and even feeling awkward ordering food. Being able to consistently be outgoing I feel would be a net positive but I'm not sure what the trick is to just turn it on without it feeling forced.
I remember when they were briefly owned by Google (I think) and assembled the MotoX in the US so you could buy a bamboo or customized case. It had one of the first low power always listening CPUs to listen for you to say Ok Google. Once that didn't work out Lenovo bought them and they had decent but not many flagship midrange phones. Moving forward a phone with decent security running grapheneOS that isn't a Pixel sounds good especially considering how other manufacturers such as OnePlus are embracing AI integrations. I think a number of people get sold on Apple devices based on their purported security so this collab could bolster some sales, let's hope they make it work and keep it open. I'd buy another one especially if I could get a bamboo case.
Ohio was populated with numerous earthworks, the Hopewell Earthworks finally being recognized as a UNESCO world heritage spot after being preserved for years by being used as a golf course. Unfortunately many of these have been lost as European settlers destroyed many of them. This continues to this day as Google is building a data center in central Ohio a top of land that was home to numerous native american burial mounds - https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/google-breaks-gro...
”You moved the cemetery, but you left the bodies, didn't you? You son of a bitch, you left the bodies and you only moved the headstones! Why? Why?” </Poltergeist>
The commons were actually fairly well regulated by community norms that were well documented and established. The creation of the notion of the tragedy of the commons was quite possibly propaganda so that large land owners could consolidate and enclosed the commons under the guise that they could manage it better especially after traditions were disrupted.
> The commons were actually fairly well regulated by community norms that were well documented and established.
Not really. You are correctly citing the enclosure acts as a historic example, but that was not beginning or the end of history. It was just a recent, location-specific historic moment when big English landlords won in the millenia-old power struggle between peasant and landlord.
Control of the commons - land and the resources buried in it - has been a point of contention and bloodshed for as long as recorded human history. It's a pendulum that swung back and forth, but has always had bad actors making personally-profitable, socially-impoverishing decisions.
For an alternative example of how things have gone in other places, look at the blood feuds between ranchers and farmers[1] in the American west, concerns over upstream and rainfall water rights in literally any part of the world that relies on irrigation, or, the varied situations where existing landlords politically won the struggle... Or lost it in the 20th century.
As for well-established[2]...
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[1] The enclosure acts echo this farmer/rancher dichotomy, actually. Feudal lord/serf relationships have the lords derive wealth from having ever more serfs doing ever more labour-intensive agriculture on their land. The enclosure acts, however, were intended to drive the peasants from their land, because in the case of England, the lords figured out that they can derive way more wealth from turning over their land to low-labour grazelands for sheep. And the way they could do that was to use the law as a cudgel to drive out their tenants at sword and gunpoint.
[2] They were only well-established for particular points in history. Prior to William the Conqueror arriving in England, and stealing all the land in it for himself and his mercenaries, there were also 'well-established' land use norms - that greatly limited the power and ownership-of-land granted to lords and petty kings. The Norman conquest turned all that over - into a different 'well-established' equilibrium - that was then, again, turned over into a 'well-established' equilibrium after the passage of the enclosure acts.
Sadly there's a lot of truth there. Generally it's a bad idea to lend tools to people that don't know how to use them. I don't lend my tools to friends,
although I make exceptions when I 100% trust the guy. This is based on experience.
But I'm happy to help, either by me going there or the friend bringing his stuff to my workshop.
This reminds me of colorized black and white movies from the 90s although I can know imagine AI being used to do that and upscale the past creating new hyper-real versions of the past.
This looks like a good resource. There are some pretty powerful models that will run on a Nvidia 4090 w/ 24gb of RAM. Devstral and Queen 3. Ollama makes it simple to run them on your own hardware, but the cost of the GPU is a significant investment. But if you are paying $250 a month for a proprietary tool it would pay for itself pretty quickly.
> There are some pretty powerful models that will run on a Nvidia 4090 w/ 24gb of RAM. Devstral and Queen 3.
I'd caution against using devstral on a 24 gb vram budget. Heavy quantisation (the only way to make it fit into 24gb) will affect it a lot. Lots of reports on locallama about subpar results, especially from kv cache quant.
We've had good experiences with running it fp8 and full cache, but going lower than that will impact the quality a lot.
I really found the story in chapter 14 (recursive self-improvement) about the guy who got so addicted to self-improvement that he ended up in his own meta-reality unable to understand even himself because he was getting so much better and hacking his learning. A completely fabricated story with no basis in reality that I'm aware of but man there are a lot of bullet points to make it seem factual. What are we going to do about the worrying trend of 10X hackers self-improving so much that they aren't able to exist in the real world.
Here's an excerpt
"The Addiction to Acceleration
The fourth uncomfortable truth is how recursive improvement becomes compulsive. Kenji can’t stop because each day of not improving his improvement feels like stagnation. When you’re accelerating, constant velocity feels like moving backward.
This addiction manifests as:
• Inability to accept plateau phases
• Anxiety when not optimizing optimization
• Devaluing of steady-state excellence
• Compulsion to add meta-levels
• Fear of falling behind yourself
Recursive improvement can become its own trap."
I find that this criticism is far less applicable to say individuals but perhaps it could be levied against the way companies are currently treating AI. Which of course is where this comes from.
Honestly there are some interesting concepts and broad overviews of them but this is hardly a "book" but just a verbose LLM document that briefly lists a lot of concepts without sufficiently or consistently fleshing them out into actual meaningful chapters. Not to say that this sort of thing isn't potentially useful but it seems more like the starting point of an outline of a book rather than anything resembling a finished published book.
I have a horrible time editing my own work. Decision paralysis and what not, but I did have the idea that a good way to practice would be editing the content of LLM generated fictional narratives. I think the point that many are making that LLMs are useful as cognitive aids that augment thinking rather than replacements for thinking. They can be used to train your mind by inspiring thoughts you wouldn't have came up with on your own.
