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9mo ago
As a kid I had the vague impression that I wouldn't grow up. I just couldn't imagine being an adult.
I understood that I was growing up, every year the number on the cake gets bigger, but I couldn't get my head round the fact that one day I would be 18, or 21, or 30.
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10mo ago
Why are gays over-represented in the arts and creative fields? Even in tech, I go to an artsy coding meetup and it's hosted in an LGBT space. I go to a discord of people building interesting things and they're 50% furries.
I would presume there's a biological/psychological explanation, if the effect is even real, but it's hard to find good answers. My first guess would be the same loosening of priors that allows for creativity also loosens the heterosexuality prior; but then why gay and not bi?
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10mo ago
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Software is not abundant. Software is expensive. Software developers are expensive.
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Google and Facebook are not build on dirt-cheap software. They pay some of the highest salaries in the industry.
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Price is a negotiation. Say I sell a software product for $50/month. Either it generates more than $50/month value to you, in which case you buy it, or it doesn't, so you don't. How much it's costs me to deliver it is irrelevant to you. If you think you can get a better deal using a different product, then go do that. If enough people do that, I am forced to lower my prices, change my product, or go out of business.
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If software is that easy, you should start a software company.
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4mo ago
My feeling is that most kids' time is unstructured and not very valuable for learning. So if the choice is between an intensive chess program and the status quo, the chess program is a pareto improvement. If the choice is between an intensive chess program and an intensive Spanish program, then sure, there are trade offs. But most kids would otherwise be watching youtube videos or playing minecraft.
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5mo ago
I feel you and @f3zinker
I'm single and work remote. But I was actually NEET for a long time and my current situation feels so much better. While NEET I was so embarrassed I would dread meeting people in case they asked what I did for a living, which made the social isolation much worse. Every week as a NEET is a week down the drain. Now my bank account grows at the end of each month, my YoE grows, and I'll eventually get promoted without doing anything in particular.
This year I have made new friends. The more friends you have, the easier it is to meet people. It's an exponential relationship. But an exponential stays pretty flat for a while before it takes off, so you have to bear through the flat stage. I think you just have to pick something and just keep turning up. I go to tech meetups. I've got to know the regulars. There was a nerdy music gig a while ago, I asked a couple of them if they were interested and we went together. It was a success. There's another gig coming up and now more people are interested. At this stage it feels like I've got a growing group of people I know, with shared interests, that I can do certain social things with. At the very least, I know when I go a monthly meet up, I will see some friendly familiar faces and we can catch up. It did take about a year to get here.
I don't meet many women like this, it's true. But it does feel nice to have a semblance of a social life. I have pictures of me doing things for the dating apps, I have things to talk about on dates, and am slowing becoming a more interesting and datable person.
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1yr ago
A few months ago OpenAI dropped their API price, from $0.06/1000 tokens for their best model, to $0.02/1000 tokens. This week, the company released their ChatGPT API which uses their "gpt-3.5-turbo" model, apparently the best one yet, for the price of $0.002/1000 tokens. Yes, an order of magnitude cheaper. I don't quite understand the pricing, and OpenAI themselves say: "Because gpt-3.5-turbo performs at a similar capability to text-davinci-003 but at 10% the price per token, we recommend gpt-3.5-turbo for most use cases." In less than a year, the OpenAI models have not only improved, but become 30 times cheaper. What does this mean?
A human thinks at roughly 800 words per minute. We could debate this all day, but it won’t really effect the math. A word is about 1.33 tokens. This means that a human, working diligently 40 hour weeks for a year, fully engaged, could produce about: 52 * 40 * 60 * 800 * 1.33 = 132 million tokens per year of thought. This would cost $264 out of ChatGPT.
https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/11fn0td/the_implications_of_chatgpts_api_cost/
...or about $0.13 per hour. Yes technically it overlooks the fact that OpenAI charge for both input and output tokens, but this is still cheap and the line is trending downwards.
Full time minimum wage is ~$20k/year. GPT-3.5-turbo is 100x cheaper and vastly outperforms the average minimum wage worker at certain tasks. I dunno, this just feels crazy. And no, I wont apologize for AI posting. It is simply the most interesting thing happening right now.
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1yr ago
97th percentile means out of a room of 33 random people, you're the smartest. Does that feel right to you? In my school year of 200, there was one kid who was clearly the brightest. I could believe he was a 1 in 1000 intelligence = ~145 IQ. I think I was roughly second, so smartest 1 in 100 or 135 IQ. Yet this was a good school full of middle class kids, so the selection isn't fair. The hard part about building this intuition is getting an idea of what a room full of truly random people feels like.
(Also fixing broken machinery as an IQ test would bias against women, who have poorer spacial reasoning as a group. I think women outperform men on verbal reasoning, so you have to add some of that in.)
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1yr ago
Imagine a text-based 160 IQ AGI, akin to GPT-3, was introduced today. How much impact would it really have?
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Private sector in areas with low regulation would see incredible productivity gains.
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Public sector would continue to trundle along as is, completely oblivious to technological advances.
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Regulated industries would still be bottle-necked by the law and stuck waiting for the government to move, if they move at all.
It already is the case that you can get unlimited video entertainment for $10/month, while healthcare, education and housing costs continue to rise. AGI can't change the law or force itself to be used (unless you're talking about a different kind of AGI than I am).
I can imagine a world where most people's work can be automated, but for various reasons, it isn't. So I guess this is a vote for option 2, considering we're sort of there already.
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1yr ago
Your species is an immutable characteristic, so I would ask the professor about their attitude towards beastiality.
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1yr ago
plant machete
This installation enables a live plant to control a machete.
https://www.dwbowen.com/plant-machete , with video
I like his other works too, such as telepresent wind https://www.dwbowen.com/telepresent-wind and, of course, fly revolver https://www.dwbowen.com/fly-revolver
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4mo ago
I also find the dimming and scrolling to close the pop up very annoying. I would rather have a regular pop up I could reflexively close. Instead, I see the dimming, scroll further to close the damn thing, then scroll back up and find my place.
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4mo ago
That first point reminds me of the thesis of this article
For example, much of contemporary feminism actually reads like an attempt to hook the horse of the patriarchy up to the junker of gender egalitarianism. The patriarchy was bad, as the story goes, so we got rid of it and had the sexual revolution instead. Then the sexual revolution turned out to be a catastrophe of abuse, disgrace, and regret. By the time we realized it, however, “consent” was the only language of sexual ethics available to us at all, so these were problems that we largely had no name for.
[...]
Slowly, and probably unconsciously, we took the existing material of gender egalitarianism and cobbled together a jugaad patriarchy that pretends not to be one. The jugaad patriarchy is less efficient, less humane, and less conceptually coherent than the actual patriarchy it replaced. But if it affords us an atmosphere in which men are terrified of the consequences of sleeping with women they’re not married to, perhaps it’s better than nothing.
http://www.thetruthcounts.com/blogtraducciones/2018/11/14/jugaad-ethics/
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7mo ago
AFAIK they do, but the report frames it mostly negatively:
Some dating apps and websites include features that allow users to ‘unmatch’ with or block other users. While these are important safety features that are intended to protect individuals from being contacted by problematic users, unfortunately they can also be used by perpetrators of DAFSV to remove evidence of violence and abuse, specifically conversation histories that can support reports of DAFSV to the platform or law enforcement. Alternatively, perpetrators can also delete their own account on the dating app or website to remove evidence of their conversations with victim-survivors.
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11mo ago
Kamala will just implement policies that give current big players a regulatory moat
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1yr ago
So perhaps the point of Plato's cave is to pose the question of whether the prisoners are not just only experiencing a 'flatter' version of reality, but whether they are fundamentally less able to perceive things in 'higher' reality.
IMO it's not so much that the cave-dweller is physiologically unable to perceive Truth, in the way that those cats can't see horizontal lines, but about the mind-constraining effects of socialisation/indoctrination/brainwashing that is an inevitable and necessary result of growing up inside a culture.
Once the cave-dweller is shown the outside world/Truth, he recoils. We like to imagine that upon seeing Truth, we will not only recognise it, but accept it. But Plato is right. The cave is comfy and familiar, and besides, all our friends and family are there. And once the ex-cave-dweller accepts the Truth, and returns to the cave, he finds himself mocked and ostracised.
Those who take the red pill often don't end up saving the world. They might end up poor and mad, like Ignaz Semmelweis or van Gogh.
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1yr ago
Are you reading it right? The numbers in parens are the differences.
E.g. looking at 'The primary reason I interact with Aella's web presence is a (dimly) conscious desire to do something sexual with her.'
The male average is -0.33 (between neutral and somewhat disagree)
The female average is -2.21 (disagree)
The 'bang a hot 15yo' is -0.5 male, -2 female
So both of these questions are disagree, but women disagree harder.
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1yr ago
Indeed the exact question is
Yksi elämäni päätavoitteista on ollut tehdä vanhempani ylpeiksi
Good sample size too of >1000 for each country.
Also:
The main mode in EVS 2017 is face-to-face (interviewer-administered). An alternative self-administered form was possible but as a parallel mixed mode, i.e. there was no choice for the respondent between modes: either s/he was assigned to face to face, either s/he was assigned to web or web/mail format. In all countries the EVS questionnaire was administered as a face-to-face interview (CAPI or/and PAPI); in Germany, Netherlands, Iceland, Switzerland, Finland, Denmark, and Latvia additionally self-administered mode (CAWI/Mail) was used.
Interviewer administered questionnaire would surely bias the subject towards more socially acceptable answers. A few countries (including Finland) had some people self-administer. So might we expect those countries to answer slightly more honestly? Perhaps they controlled for this somehow.
https://europeanvaluesstudy.eu/methodology-data-documentation/survey-2017/full-release-evs2017/
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3mo ago
"If only you knew how different things could be" . My favourite version has a different image with the same quote, but I can't find it. Hope, optimism, imagination are powerful forces and the meme triggers all of these for me.
And unrelated, but I find there's something profound about this meme.
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6mo ago
Afaik this is what Benjamin Franklin did. Gifted money to Boston in his will but declared they couldn't touch it for 100 years while it was invested.
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8mo ago
Start an ambitious project and work on it a little every day. Attempt to do something hard. Aim for mastery. Study a subject deeply, or seriously pursue a hobby, or create your own works of art/writing/code.
When I have my bases in life covered, I paradoxically feel unfulfilled. I need to feel like I'm making progress towards something to feel satisfied. Oddly I'm not sure the specifics of the goal matter, just the feeling of progress towards it. I guess it's why MMORPGs are so addictive.
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1yr ago
Here are some examples
You can do a lot with intelligence. By inventing Bitcoin, Satoshi is worth billions, all while remaining anonymous and never leaving his bedroom. What could a super human intelligence do?
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1yr ago
I think I broadly agree. As it stands today, many (most?) organisation are horribly inefficient. But what this does is raise the ceiling of maximum productivity. We might be entering a world of hyper-startups, a world where a single guy can write code, write marketing copy, produce art assets, provide customer support, etc, and create more value than a competitor deploying 1000x more resources.
A police probe has been opened, as is "normal procedure", but yes, no mention of the offending player.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-67261168
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