Yet, I am unqualified to join an AI startup because I’ve never made an API request to OpenAI

I know PhDs in data science and language technology who are not startup material because they’re too uncomfortable outside of MatLab/Jupyter/R.

I hear you on geography though. Luckily the human body doesn't change too much between locations.

In this particular example, the word cargo in cargo cult is redundant. All cults have ridiculous ceremonies for cult members to engage in. These ceremonies come from human nature, our inability to distinguish correlation from causation. We're told to conduct a ceremony, get a good outcome, then believe it's the ceremonies that caused the outcome. Just call them ceremonies, because that's what they are.

However, when Feynman wrote his speech he must have thought that a cargo cult is a much more graphic metaphor than a dry lecture about stats and human biases.

The cargo cults were made by people who were enslaved and violently oppressed and then believed that cargo they were forced to create for their oppressors (e.g. flour, rice, tobacco, and other trade) should belong to them

I'm not sure that was in the article was it? These were exotic goods brought from overseas.

I'm not trying to say there was no oppression, but the examples in which they believed the trade goods should belong to them were still about trade goods which arrived by boat.

"[The leader proclaimed] that the ancestors were coming back in the persons of the white people in the country and that all the things introduced by the white people and the ships that brought them belonged really to their ancestors and themselves."

(edit - certainly these goods may well have been produced through the oppression of other peoples elsewhere!)

If anything Mr Beast is an argument for not using YouTube. Alphabet is incentivised to keep him happy so that he doesn't move to X. I'm sure they consider his needs before they change their algorithm, at the expense of almost all other creators on YouTube.

The network effects of the platform are massive. 90% of that surplus can go to Alphabet and it still be a good deal for average creators. Mr Beast, you, me anyone can go and rent a server tomorrow and start serving their own videos. People still choose to go to youtube because there's just so much surplus value there.

As an analogy, economies can increase their GDP and inequality can also increase. Just because something is getting bigger doesn't mean it's getting fairer.

You may look at that and say well that's not fair, most of the benefits are going to Mr Beast - and they are, Mr Beast would have done very well in that scenario. But you're still better off than before. Are you better off relative to Mr Beast? No. But Youtube doesn't owe you that, that's not a reasonable benchmark. If it gets to the point that you're getting worse off, then maybe move to somewhere else, but expecting these places to be good for you in perpetuity is a mistake, and refusing to engage because you fear they won't be good for you in perpetuity is also a mistake. The total benefit of us all engaging makes the pie much bigger, and you almost certainly will get a bigger share of that than by refusing to partake in the pie at all.

Now you have to be a lawyer or work in finance to hope to even get a modest sized apartment in NYC.

Part of dealing with discomfort is learning what your limits are. No one should put themselves in a situation with you have a breakdown. I find that a small amount of stress in my life is good and results in growth. But a huge amount is overwhelming which leads to burnout.

Like let's put this in context: replace "being an introvert" for "your friend flies you out to the forest, and then happily announces we're going to be hiking 20 km back to town. You really need to challenge yourself!"

This is a grass is always greener take, and definitely not true.

"because our modern Western society values extraversion more"

Everybody throughout humanity has valued extraversion more. This isn't something new. Humans are social creatures and people that are more social will be more successful at life. This will never change.

"introverts are bad and need to grow up"

This isn't necessarily the case. However, introverts need to figure out how to navigate the world, even when they aren't interested in socializing.

I've worked with lots of introverts (I am a mix of both introvert and extrovert) in tech and it usually goes along with passive aggressive behavior (because introverts usually don't like confrontation) and other behavior that makes collaboration (which is needed in almost all business settings) a nightmare.

I could just as well say that extraversion goes along with overly assertive and aggressive behaviour and other behaviour that makes collaboration a nightmare - such as refusing to write documentation or write proper tickets because "we can have a meeting instead". But I don't - because everyone is different and you can't just generalise like that. Being an introvert doesn't mean you're bad at communication or avoid confrontation.

Also how do you reconcile what you're writing here with what you wrote less than a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42341572 ?

For example - I hate the modern office workplace 9-5 in-office bullshit. I know exactly what I want. I don't need to "grow" any more in this area. Can I do 9-5 in an office? Yes - but I fucking hate it and no amount of growth will change that. Why should I be forced to come into an office, for a job I do better at home, because Bob from management needs to be around people? I say to this - fuck Bob, Bob can go shit bricks.

Another example - I am very comfortable with living without any social media, or a smart phone, or a Tv, all at the same time. But, you don't see me going around forcing people into this way of being, and then when they find it horrible/stressful/uncomfortable saying "well maybe we are creating a society where everyone feels they have the right to not feeling stressed and uncomfortable, fuck your tv"

Instead - We are creating a society of non-thinkers, conformists, average-results-for-all, and dumb opinions like "well, I can deal with it - why can't you? Are you lazy/introverted/mentally-handicapped?"

I think challenging yourself is great, FOR SHIT THAT MATTERS. And only you can dictate what matters, fuck Bob or anyone else that tries to impose "what matters" on you.

The problem is, your statement sounds generalised to "challenge yourself in everything". I don't care for that, I care about challenging myself in a select few things of my choosing, I am my own man. I forge my destiny, I plow my path where I want to, not where society or Bob tells me.

------

And you know what the result will be for Bob and I?

Bob will not really grow as a person at all, his life will be all soft smoothed edges, not unique in any sense. Bob will be the same as everyone else with slight variations here and there, Bob will be boring, and at the end of Bobs life, on his deathbed he will say, "well, at least I didn't rock the boat!"

I, and others like me, will grow, in a unique sense, jagged edges, sharp incline and deep depressions. I will say when I die "I wish I leant even more into rocking the boat, capsizing it, just to see what would happen"

My father in law seems unable to sit queitly in group settings. He performs too much small talk in my opinion. And it seems merely to fill the silence since they are often the same questions day in and day out. Either his memory is very bad, or he's not actually listening, just wanting to make noise. I've given up wasting my breath (re)answering the same questions. It seems he doesn't truly care about what others think, say, or feel... otherwise he might work on committing answers to memory. And even when folks start talking, he interrupts a lot... I truly hope it's not poor memory.

Huh? What a strange thing to say. Yeah, sure, you can't have that right exactly, simply because life is too unpredictable and from time to time stressors will come up, but surely someone has the right to build for themselves the conditions that minimize their stress and discomfort. Not wanting to be purposefully stressed and discomforted by others seems perfectly reasonable.

>The danger to never feeling challenged is that you don't grow. You get stuck in a rut and everyone passes you by.

Perhaps, but surely the choice of whether to live like that is the prerogative of each person.

I'm hesitant to share my diagnosis with colleagues. I've been able to develop coping mechanisms and I feel like it doesn't impact my day-to-day. I don't want to cause disruption for those around me. I do have a friend with much more severe dyslexia and she does get the help she needs to be productive.

I wish we could discuss these labels at work without baggage. It's all about consideration. Forcing everyone around you to change their behaviour around you to make yourself feel more comfortable is not being considerate. On the flip side enforcing strict working policies that prevent people from participating in the workplace is also not considerate.

There's a kinda funny extra level to labels and preconceived notions in that one: "sister" is a cover story for his female duplicate who was created from a tech/magic mishap early in that comic.

Complex corporate structures enable plausible deniability. The CEO of GFS probably didn't know what was happening, but also probably didn't want to know whilst enjoying the low fees charged from the recruiters.

It's literally managements job to be aware.

Imagine if a crossing guard waves cars through an intersection as children crossed and goes "Well, you know, I wasn't driving the car".

Wait, you can just use a unit-less value?

  UK Govt Official Weight Form
  Weight: well-nourished

It's interesting that this paper doesn't contradict the conclusions of the Apple LLM paper[0], where prompts were corrupted to force the LLM into making errors. I can also believe that LLMs can only make small deviations from existing example solutions in creation of these novel solutions.

I hate that we're using the term "reasoning" for this solution generation process. It's a term coined by LLM companies to evoke an almost emotional response on how we talk about this technology. However, it does appear that we are capable of instructing machines to follow a series of steps using natural language, with some degree of ambiguity. That in of itself is a huge stride forward.

[0] https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/gsm-symbolic

That being said, I do think that LLMs are capable of “verbal reasoning” operations. I don’t have a good sense of the boundaries that distinguish the logics - verbal, qualitative, quantitative reasoning. What comes to my mind is the verbal sections of standardized tests.

Well, if you do all that, would you say that the system has a whole has 'reasoned'? (I think ChatGPT can already call out to Python.)

You can believe it what sort of evidence are you using for this belief?

Edit: Also, the abstract of the Apple paper hardly says "corruption" (implying something tricky), it says that they changed the initial numerical values

The only thing that does is the benchmark that introduces "seemingly relevant but ultimately irrelevant information"

Anthropomorphizing computers has been happening long before ChatGPT. No one thinks their computer is actually eating their homework when they say that to refer to the fact that their computer crashed and their document wasn't saved, it's just an easy way to refer to the thing it just did. Before LLMs, "the computer is thinking" wasn't an unuttered sentence. Math terms aren't well known to everybody, so saying Claudr is dot-producting an essay for me, or I had ChatGPT dot-product that letter to my boss, no one knows that a dot product is, so even if that's a more technically accurate verb, who's gonna use it? So while AI companies haven't done anything to promote usage of different terms than "thinking" and "reasoning", it's also because those are the most handy terms. It "thinks" there are two R's in strawberries. It dot-products there are two R's in strawberries. It also matrix multiplies, occasionally softmaxes; convolves. But most people aren't Terence Tao and don't have a feel for when something's softmaxing because what even does that mean?

They still can't think outsider their box of datasets