I used to work with a brilliant asshole - he had this babyface but would constantly belittle his fellow engineers.
Everyone hated him but the CEO loved him since he thought he was their golden ticket to the promised land.
At some point he went with us to a shooting range for target practice, immediately after he developed a fascination for guns, he never threatened anyone, but one day he buys a Kevlar vest and tells all his fellow devs.
I live on the west coast in the US and the sheer variety of fresh produce would put any supermarket in the UK to shame, even Spain.
California produces 40% of the nation's veggies and fruits.
You nailed it - like posting on social media and getting dopamine hits as you get likes and comments.
Maybe that's what has got all these vibe coders hooked.
STFU Jensen, why don't you stop making circular deals and build a Fab with the 5 trillion dollars that you have - rather than having TSMC and Samsung make them?
Both have garbage content at this point - Coursera was great when they launched, top quality material and university-level instruction. Now it's just bottom of the barrel scraps.
YT has tons of quality instruction - hell nowadays I just ask an LLM to make me a course for whatever I wanna learn.
I tried that out in my field of expertise, to calibrate my expectations. ChatGPT invented multiple references to non-existent but plausibly-titled papers written by me.
I think of that when asking questions about areas I don’t know.
That was about 18mo ago, so maybe this kind of hallucination is under control these days.
I would use an agent (Codex) for this task: use the Pro model in ChatGPT for deep research and to assemble the information and citations, then have Codex systematically go through the citations with a task list to web search and verify or correct each. Codex can be used like a test suite.
My biggest issue with Udemy courses is that it's not easy to vet the instructor. User ratings are unreliable since beginners aren't really in a position to evaluate a teacher's expertise.
If Udemy's pitch were “Learn X as Taught by Notable People in the Field,” I would have signed up in a heartbeat.
Masterclass is really a scam in my opinion. Who needs them to teach about generic stuff, when what we need is how to be good like them, that’s why we pay for the course
This. Intro to X courses are better left to the manifold resources available on YouTube. Experts are for expert topics. As Liszt reportedly said when asked why he eventually accepted only advanced pupils: “Wash your dirty linen at home.”
Pretty much. This idea that you can never have done something and get something from a Masterworks is a bit silly. Inside the Actors Studio was great but essentially entertainment. As something that's likely to give any real insight into things you're missing, you probably need to have some experience first.
Notable people tend to teach on their own sites, or at least more specialized sites rather than generic sites like Udemy. Udemy would need to pay them instead.
It's not hard to look at each profile, most will proudly shout their top credentials as visibly and often as possible. "1M Subscribers on YouTube!" vs. "I worked in this industry for 10 years" is a pretty easy call. How much of this process should be spoonfed? Active engagement is required at some point.
Udemy functions as open market with the associated pros and cons.
> nowadays I just ask an LLM to make me a course for whatever I wanna learn.
That is an excellent way to trick yourself into thinking that you learned, when really you got fed bad information. LLMs are nowhere near reliable enough to use for this topic and probably never will be.
I guess it depends on what you ask an LLM to teach you. For certain subjects, I've found them to be a pain in the ass to get right.
For instance, I was hoping that I could use GPT to help me learn to fly a B737-800. This is actually less challenging than people think... if you just want to get in the air and skip all proper procedure and safety checks! If you want to fly a commercial plane like a real pilot, there is a ton of procedure and instruments to understand. There is actually quite a bit of material on this available online via flight crew operations manuals, as well as an old (but still relevant) manual straight from Boeing. So why rely on GPT? It's a bit hard to explain without rambling, but those manuals are designed for pilots with a lot of prior knowledge, not some goofball with X-Plane and a joystick. It would be nice to distill that information down for someone who just wants an idiot's guide to preflight procedure, setting the flight computer, taxiing, taking off, and performing an ILS landing.
Sadly, it turned out I really had to hold the LLM's hand along the way, even when I provided it two PDFs of everything it needed to know, because it would skip many steps and get them out of order, or not be able to correctly specify where a particular instrument or switch was located. It was almost a waste of time, and I actually still have more to do because it's that inefficient.
That said, I still think LLMs can be unreasonably good for learning about very specific subjects so long as you don't blindly believe it. I kinda hate how I have to say that, but I see people all the time believing anything Grok says. :facepalm: GPT has been a big help in learning things about finance, chemistry, and electronics. Not sure I would assume it could create a full blown course, but who knows. I bet it'd be pretty solid at coming up with exam questions.
Don't ask them to teach you, ask them to make a self-study syllabus/roadmap with online references. It's likely that it ingested the work of others in exactly this scenario, so it shouldn't confabulate as easily.
I'd say it's a subset of fact checking it. You can check facts without doing anything else, but doing something with the knowledge is inherently checking it. If the lecture presents some programming technique, and I implement it, I'll find out pretty quickly if it's wrong.
Parent was writing about a university LECTURE which is different from a TEXTBOOK (which is different from primary sources), so yeah, consulting other sources is checking the facts.
Oh I see what you're saying. It was slightly ambiguous.
But in any case, I didn't read a single textbook at uni; it was all lecture notes provided by the lecturers (fill-in-the-gaps actually which worked waaaay better than you'd think). So the answer is still no - I didn't fact check them and I didn't need to because they didn't wildly hallucinate like AI does.
You should have a mental model about how the world works and the fundamental rules of the context where you're operating. Even though you might not know something, you eventually develop an intuition of what makes sense and what doesn't. And yes, that applies even to "university lectures" since a lot of professors make mistakes/are wrong plenty of times.
Taking an LLM's output at face value would be dumb, yes. But it would be equally dumb to take only what's written on a book at face value, or a YouTube video, or anyone you listen to. You have to dig in, you have to do the homework.
LLMs make it much easier for you to do this homework. Sure, they still make mistakes, but they get you 90% of the way in minutes(!) and almost for free.
I don't think it's (necessarily) equally dumb. Maybe if comparing LLM output to a book chosen at random. But I would feel much safer taking a passage from Knuth at face value than a comparable LLM passage on algorithms.
I was being facetious but am now extremely curious about large portion of the knowledge obtained by subject matter experts in any given field has never been published - this is not only strange to me in the small but you are claiming that this is large portion so I am wondering if you have any example(s) to share?
Academics, whose entire careers are based on publishing knowledge, only publish a fraction of their total knowledge obtained over their career. Estimates are that only 10-20% of all knowledge is explicit.
That's true, but they are also a) a lot more expensive and b) unlike LLMs, the vast majority of professionals have family and friends and need sleep and food, and as such are not available 24/7/365
Nah they have definitely reduced massively. I suspect that's just because as models get more powerful their answers are just more likely to be true rather than hallucinations.
I don't think anyone has found any new techniques to prevent them. But maybe we don't need that anyway if models just get so good that they naturally don't hallucinate much.
Not in my experience. For example models often say "no you can't do that" now whereas they used to always say you could do things and just hallucinate something if it was impossible. Of course sometimes they say you can't do things when you can (e.g. ChatGPT told me you can't execute commands at the top level of a Makefile a few months ago), but it's definitely less.
> They're just not as egregious.
Uhm yeah, that's what I'm saying. The hallucination situation has improved.
I don't know much about Coursera, but Udemy has always been quite bad since I remember.
Most drawing/painting courses are taught from people who are juniors at best. The quality is laughable compared to what you can get for free from Marco Bucci/Sinix/Proko channels. And honestly, even those high-quality videos won't teach you how to draw anyway.
That being said, I didn't realize how bad Udemy art courses were when I got started. I think that's a life lesson for me especially in the era of LLM.
It will be a garbage app that most likely will not work, considering the historical incompetence of the Indian government's expertise in all things tech.
I am pretty certain Apple and Samsung will pay off someone in the government.
You are confounding intent with the implementation.It might be a garbage app to start with, but there is no opt out for the users. Given the payoff and endless iterations resources will be thrown at it and it would eventually get better.
> Given the payoff and endless iterations resources will be thrown at it and it would eventually get better.
Allow the user to download and install it if it turns out to be great. Do not shove things down people's throat against their wishes, like an authoritarian govt. Otherwise you start to resemble Stalin's Soviet Union.
Right! It's a known fact that good rulers are creating death camps, doing multiple acts of genocide and multiple unprovoked military invasions to the neighbors.
Are saying Kim Jong Un is a good ruler as well? He ruled country during nuclear missile production.
You should praise Hitler as good ruler as well as stalin.
The nuclear missile was developed under Khrushchev, who was actually decent.
Stalin brought back the Czarist internal passport system, Russian chauvinism, racial discrimination and prison slavery, enriched a new oligarchy, his police killed most of Lenin's politburo and thousands of other good Communists on false charges, and he almost lost Moscow to a fascist incel armed with Panzer IIs, despite the superiority of the Red Army. Also he sold out revolutions in Spain, Greece, China etc. in pursuit of trade deals with capitalist countries that hated the USSR. The great achievements of the Soviet people and their planned economy were made in spite of Stalin's corrupt and oppressive mis-leadership.
On the matter of India. Stalin also betrayed the Indian revolution by trying to sabotage Bose, ordering the CPI to collaborate with British imperialism, and murdering founders of the CPI like Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, Abani Mukherji and GAK Lokhani.
Stalin ended socialist affirmative action programs (Korenizatsiya) that benefited Soviet minorities in education and local leadership. Russification policy and Cyrillization of local languages were enforced under him. Local Communist leaders who resisted the Russian chauvinist policies, like Fayzulla Khodjayev (the "Uzbek Lenin") and even the leaders of independent Mongolia, were dragged to Moscow and executed, which was a complete violation of socialist legality. Numerous Soviet minorities, from Chechens to Koreans, were forcibly deported to barren lands in Central Asia to make room for Russian settlers. NKVD records show that hundreds of thousands of forcibly migrated peoples died due to lack of food and shelter in the resettlement areas.
Stalin also said "I drink in the first place to the health of the Russian people because it is the most outstanding nation of all the nations forming the Soviet Union"
No. UPI. It's an initiative by the Indian government.
It's controlled by the RBI, just through a complex public-private corporate structure through NPCI.
UPI is much larger and more international than PIX. It's currently processing iirc something like 200 billion transactions. UPI is also used in several countries, France being among the most recent examples.
As such UPI has a broader scope than PIX and requires a public-private corporate structure with stakeholders from both sides.
But this is off topic. The competence of the Indian government to at the very minimum partner with Industry shows that such software preloaded on phones is a threat to the civil liberties of people that the State shouldn't encroach on. This is a violation of individual privacy.
All that couldn be as simple as educating people that there is no such thing as "digital arrest".
You are just telling the whole world about the average IQ of an Indian and how they believe in foolish things like "digital arrest".
And an app doesn't solve that. Digital literacy is a need for today, but the entire country is getting the latest smartphone, with dirt cheap data and zero knowledge of how to operate and own that technology.
Presumably the point is what they wrote, e.g. "an app doesn't solve that. Digital literacy is a need for today"
Not saying I agree or disagree but your reply comes across as passive aggressive to me. Not that the parent post makes pleasant insinuations either, to be fair...
When we're struggling with literacy itself, and people have lost huge amounts of money, and there have been several suicides linked to these scams, digital literacy in a passive mode is unlikely to work.
Bangalore is supposedly the most digital literate place in India. The data below speaks for itself.
Aggressive measures then might be justified.
It's very easy to make virtuous comments without knowing anything of the ground realities.
How do you think operators built a database of spammers?
I've been reporting spammers since 2005, since DND rules came into place.
Only in the last year have I seen the spam slow down. Earlier operators would dismiss the complaint saying to it was a "transactional communication," now it's logged with TRAI and the operator and they have less room to manipulate the complaint.
The TRAI DND app, on IOS, generates a pre-formatted SMS which is sent to the operator on the standard number 1909.
The Sanchar Sathi app sends it to a DOT entity which then routes it to the operator while updating the govt database of reported spammers and scammers. The options are much extensive than just a spam call/sms.
You can report that the individual was impersonating a public official etc while you can not do than at all with the TRAI DND app.
I suggest you try out the platform on their website first before commenting further.
So the problem was not with the app but with how the information was routed at the back end. The back end of the 1909 system could have been modified to write the data to a central registry as well.
RBI pushed an entire new second level TLD to India’s entire banking system with a 6 month deadline. It was a botched rollout but now every bank in India is using .bank.in, despite two of India’s largest bank owning their own TLDs (.hdfc, and .sbi).
It was a very insecure rollout with zero customer awareness, but it happened and almost every large bank moved. Sometimes silly pronouncements do result in silly change.
I don't think the government is going to treat it like a local district website. IRCTC, UPI, e-Filing portal seem to be working fine for the most part, so pretty sure they can make this work eventually.
IRCTC is a private company.
UPI isn't government either.
Which e-filling portal is working nicely for you? My ITR was stuck for more than a year because some lame ass dev couldn't show proper error message other than suggesting that something needed to be done by my bank (which wasn't the case and only a year later did I decide to dig into th3 dev tools).
To praise Indian government is the most unlikely thing one should be doing for their mediocrity at developing things.
Same is the case with Aadhar, Digiyatra, etc. My government is hella incompetent at safeguarding data and privacy (unless it's their own data). And this app is 100% going to be a huge security hole on every device.
> It will be a garbage app that most likely will not work, considering the historical incompetence of the Indian government's expertise in all things tech.
Wait until "they" outsource it (on the pretext of national security interests) to countries that have deep talent in cybersecurity (like the US/Israel/Russia/China).
Well, the last 5 years or so is the epitome of a bull market.
Did the paper say the same set of people consistently beat the market over long periods of time or did it say at any time about 10% of investors happen to beat the market?
6 year time period between 1990-1996. Would have been interesting to see how these results would have fared across the 2000 crash.
But I don't think the paper claims that they beat the market. What they are concluding is that you can classify investors as skilled and unskilled, with the skilled group able to achieve returns consistently. But whether those returns can beat the market, they say the evidence is limited.
Quite a coincidence - last week I was speaking to a parent at my kid's school, he's a scientist and works for a Chinese biotech firm. He told how he has clients in China, who want to change the color of their eye or eliminate deafness in their child.
In the same breath - he told me how all his friends who are similarly PHDs in biotech are seeing their research grants cut and not finding opportunities because of the anti-science stance of the current administration.
Fuck off ..you're 10 person startup with an MVP and no revenue stream needs customers first..
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