I’m in agreement with the blog post. I’ve been treating AI more like a tool and less like a science experiment and I’ve gotten some good results when working on my various side projects. In the past much of my time was taken up by research and learning the various little parts of how everything works. What starts as a little python project to play around with APIs ends with me spending 5 hours learning tkinter and barely making any API calls.
LLMs have finally freed me from the shackles of yak shaving. Some dumb inconsequential tooling thing doesn't work? Agent will take care of it in a background session and I can get back to building things I do care about.
I'm finding that in several kinds of projects ranging from spare-time amusements to serious work, LLMs have become useful to me by (1) engaging me in a conversation that elicits thoughts and ideas from me more quickly than I come up with them without the conversation, and (2) pointing me at where I can get answers to technical questions so that I get the research part of my work done more quickly.
Talking with other knowledgeable humans works just as well for the first thing, but suitable other humans are not as readily available all the time as an LLM, and suitably-chosen LLMs do a pretty good job of engaging whatever part of my brain or personality it is that is stimulated through conversation to think inventively.
For the second thing, LLMs can just answer most of the questions I ask, but I don't trust their answers for reasons that we all know very well, so instead I ask them to point me at technical sources as well, and that often gets me information more quickly than I would have by just starting from a relatively uninformed google search (though Google is getting better at doing the same job, too).
A little late, but this is something that I've been considering a lot lately. When there's a limited resource (funding) how do you determine who will receive it?
For something like this I think a citizens assembly[1] may work best. Take all artists receiving funding and are NOT up for renewal. Select a number of them randomly to form the assembly. This assembly then reviews submissions from artists up for renewal and determines if they meet a minimum standard for funding to be renewed.
I grew up in an area known for coal and logging. Ever since I heard of sequestration brought up I thought the area sounded perfect for it. Fell (maybe mulch) the trees, kiln dry to remove weight/moisture, and toss them down a mineshaft.
It always felt a bit peotic to 'reseed' a coal mine
Kiln drying is an interesting idea to speed it up and prevent premature rot, but might offset some of the carbon impact since most industrial kilns use fossil fuels directly or upstream if electric.
Maybe it would be more effective to drop wet lumber off in the desert for a few years by rail before moving the dry lumber to permanent underground storage. This assumes two stages of transport to and from the desert would cost less carbon than transport to a kiln and then to storage.
I’m not convinced that the wood even needs to be dried before burying, though.
Ehh if you are just going to bury it kiln drying wouldn't really be that helpful. Wood in open air will dry out pretty well just sitting for two years. Commercial wood is only really kiln dried so that nobody has to store it for a year or two first and they can sell it before as much of it warps and twists due to being cut while green which makes less of it able to be sold. With a large enough pile, even if it is left uncovered, only the top couple logs or boards will get wet from the rain and if a small percentage of it rots or grows some fungus, well it wasn't there to get built into other things anyways so it doesn't matter.
So he burned his relationship with an organization that he was a recognized member of. An organization where he was on the advisory board and had some control in steering, for what exactly?
Just another transphobe thinking their definition of a word is a silver bullet against someone's way of life.
If I do something good because it makes me feel good, is that a selfish action or is it feedback from my 'innate human tendency'?
We are social creatures. Seeing our social group benefit is a hardwired desire, and it makes us feel good. Being recognized as a valuable member of the group also feels good, and double-dipping on the dopamine hit is what motivates people towards contributing.
Googling the TFlops as an estimate of power shows a roughly 12x improvement on the H100 over the 4090. A single 4090 takes 160 hours so a single H100 should take about 13 hours.
AWS will rent a p5.48xlarge instance of 8xH100 for $31.464/hr. That will take roughly two hours and cost around $60 bucks.
Assume I'm off by an order of magnitude, this is still a reasonable cost to recover key infrastructure. If the $60/endpoint stands then it would be reasonable to recover workstations this way
Only for versions of encryption that was done before the attackers update their encryption key. Not saying it's not a win, but just a temporary one for hacks using this specific version
But for anyone that is affected and refuses to pay a ransom, this is a potential win for someone with the prowess to do it. Then again, would someone with that prowess have gotten attacked like this? chicken meets egg??
I'm curious to see if this will work like the author intends. I feel like this idea works great in an office environment but won't translate well to a digital space. The biggest reason being that there is no 1-on-1 or group interaction, everything is broadcast out to the entire "office" and that influences people's behavior.
I like the intent though, and I agree it's something that could be beneficial if it works as hoped. Even if it doesn't this might give the author or someone else the idea of a different version that may work better
Author here: Agreed that there's certain dynamics that are different in public social web spaces compared to an office, honestly I am curious if the "online->action" barrier to be overcome with an extremely loose association (in this case: enjoys donuts), so we'll see!
Reading the post, I initially thought you literally went and got donuts and drove around to drop them off to local people in your fediverse. That would be a really cool way to meet people for those working from home, but obviously it would be logistically difficult.
I agree with you that it probably doesn't quite work the same as a 1-on-1 or group interaction since it's all public. In some ways it reminds me too much of the pandemic era where we'd have a "party" over zoom. It never felt quite as authentic as a real party where you could chat directly with a coworker off to the side and really be honest about without worrying about other people listening in.
reply