You’d be surprised! It’s all about supply and demand. You can get very common Ancient Greek coins from 300 BC (eg ~2300 years old) for $50 these days. For example:
Do you have a coin shop in your town? If you do they tend to have a bit of everything (though most likely a focus on coins from the country you live in) and should have a few moderately priced ancient coins to choose from.
I do, but they do not. I'm the Midwest, small towns, coin shops are just very specific pawn shops. They have a fine selection of silver and gold new coins. Thanks for the suggestion though! I may drive to the nearest urban center to look. I hadn't thought of that.
If you want to be sure it's legit, try the site vcoins - they have a good selection of shops specializing in ancient greek coinage, and they have a good reputation for vetting.
Is there any particular city state / public person your friend is fond of? I'd plug that in their search bar and see what comes up.
I would choose another gift. The trade in ancient coins encourages looters to dig up ancient archeological sites, destroying their value to archeology.
I understand rarity and all, but it's still strange that there are US pennies worth far more than these coins. It makes sense, but instinctively feels wrong.
I think it's one of those things where people love US pennies because it's what they know and or grew up with (and possibly got them into collecting) - at least in the US. I always got the impression that collecting ancient coins like this was much less mainstream than people collecting the coins of the country that they currently live in.
Yes, exactly. Relative to roman coins there are much rarer limited run coins or accidents that have a lot of value now. But there are also rare-ish coins that no one cares about, like things minted specifically for collectability, say some hypothetical, commemorative Princess Diana coin that got made and marketed to rip people off who bought into the idea it would gain value.
I believe every country has a business like that nowadays, or a side-business from the official Mint that makes coins. And it's not even about whether it would appreciate in value tbh, they are a good medium for collecting and encoding important events or celebrating something.
> the tendency for wages in jobs that have experienced little or no increase in labor productivity to rise in response to rising wages in other jobs that did experience high productivity growth. In turn, these sectors of the economy become more expensive over time, because their input costs increase while productivity does not. Typically, this affects services more than manufactured goods, and in particular health, education, arts and culture.
This is a really roundabout way of referencing the scene in Silicon Valley where he figures out the new algorithm while everyone else is having a side conversation about how best to manage the conference attendees.
I don't think so - hoards like this tend to get found often enough and as far as I know the market for these sorts of coins hasn't cratered in recent times.
I presume they would come with a certificate of authenticity from a respectable source. Also, it's not in the interest of an auction house to sell fake coins. I'd be much more skeptical if it was on ebay.
You used to be able to get uncleaned late Roman bronze coins from the Balkans for about a buck apiece in the early 2000s, so I’d guess they’d be maybe $3-5 each now. Then you get the fun of very carefully removing the encrustations to reveal the coin underneath. You generally ended up with a coin worth about what you paid for it, but it was fun.
I was similarly surprised recently when I found out you can legally purchase many ancient artifacts, like lamps, seals, and burial items. They're by no means cheap, but they aren't priceless treasures either. We've always mass produced stuff, and the museums aren't interested in most of it.
Supply and demand. In Europe or Asia it is very normal to find Gold or Silver coins, because they are Noble or semiNoble materials and do not degrade, or do it very little. For archeologists is not very valuable.
What is really precious for History is finding materials that usually degrade like cloth or wood or iron things from thousands of years ago.
An archeologist that finds a gold coin is like: Meh. if he finds wood from +2000 years, it will change her life. You will see her celebrating like an Athlete winning the olympics.
maybe make a metric of "count letter $L in work $word" - if you want to game it, you can choose words so that they are all tokenized into 1-2 tokens and each token has multiples of letter $L
And then use something like helloswag to measure how much you've lost on general text completion compared to a vanilla LLM with the same embedding size all dedicated to just the token.
You would have to train the new model from scratch since it would be all new token embeddings with whatever character encoding scheme you come up with. It would probably make sense to train the vanilla gpt from scratch with the same total embeddings size as your control. I would start with https://github.com/karpathy/nanoGPT as a baseline since you can train a toy (GPT2 sized) llm in a couple days on an a100 which are pretty easy to come by.
Now is the time when we have thousands of people laid off from other FAANGs looking for jobs. It seems to be slowly getting better, but it's still pretty far from when you can ask for anything.
Not really. You can say "I'd like to learn about X", and get a high level overview about the topic you're interested in. Then just ask more specific questions, just like you would do when interacting with a human teacher. Try it with Claude or 4o.
That seems very inefficient. And dangerous as it's well known that LLMs will hallucinate. When I want to Learn about X, I just take an introductory book, look at the table of contents and the description to know what it covers, then just read it. I then have several paths I can take to further my knowledge.
> Then just ask more specific questions, just like you would do when interacting with a human teacher
And no one interacts like that with a teacher, at least from what I know. They have a syllabus for a reason, and while they may answer an unrelated question, they expect you to master the fundamental that leads to it. If you don't they will point you to it, because the answer will be difficult to understand. It's like wanting to know how nuclear works without learning atom composition first.
I might be off-base here, but I get the sense that OP's dysphoria/ennui/ambivalence/Weltschmerz is less about what they're doing as an occupation and more other things that need to be explored more deeply. 27 can be a difficult age with many conflicting/confusing feelings and thoughts, and sorting some of those out might be the key. Again, could be way off-base here — impossible to know from a single short post like this.
I train and optimize large AI models for a small startup (50 people). I report to CTO (a cofounder), who's a very smart and reasonable guy. I have two group meetings a week, and occasional ad-hoc calls with my teammates. My teammates are great guys with similar backgrounds to mine (phds from top schools, in their late 30s/early 40s). I work remotely since 2010, never worked for a big company, changed a few startups in the last decade. My salary is 250k, but I used to make double that - I downshifted a couple years ago. Currently I'm enjoying 4 hour days on average: sometimes I wake up and don't feel like working at all, sometimes I want to get something done and I work for 8 hours straight, but it's rare. No one cares as long as I deliver good results, and I usually do (I have lots of experience in my field). Over the years I managed to save for a couple of real estate properties, and I got a bit of stocks (hand-picked). I could probably retire tomorrow, but I'm pretty sure I'd miss working. You could say I'm the opposite of being burnt out, perhaps I'm too relaxed, and I should be more ambitious, but I got three kids, so they keep me busy.
