You because you didn’t have to come out of pocket the high cost of a down payment, handle maintenance costs, deal with the risk of mortgage default if you lost your income, deal with the possibility (and thus hold insurance for) of liability if someone is injured and sues, or lose out on the opportunity cost of money spent on the house versus what else that money could have purchased. To say nothing of you don’t know what their interest rates are, how property taxes or cost of home owners insurance may have changed (in the U.S. your escrow payments change often if taxes and insurance change) or how liquid the house is (ie could they sell if they needed to and at what discount to the market value).
Oh, and don’t forget that they’re paying interest on the mortgage and that - when adjusted for inflation - the actual increase in value versus what they’ve paid in in mortgage interest over the years is probably far less than the non adjusted gains it looks like.
It’s pretty easy to demonize owner landlords when you’ve always been a renter because you think only about a monthly payment. I’m not going to tell you that’s it’s a relative luxury to be fixated on one simple payment each month, but it’s also not the case that owning a home as an individual is some kind of pot of gold.
An owner that values their tenant and keeps their rent flat isn’t a saint. But they’re also doing a good thing in a time when they could be - by account of this thread - exploiting people for as much as possible. We don’t need to order them a parade, but it might be worth broadening your understanding of what the cost of a home is before you blanket assume they’re worthy of scorn.
Seems like I struck a nerve in some way? It's 2024 and you can call a man a dog to his face or even stomp on his blue suede shoes, but as soon as an argument has a walletary impact, the response is swift and lethal.
Maintenance is just not an argument. Unless you choose – yes choose – to rent to destructive tenants, or in other ways are irresponsible with your property, maintenance cost is a tiny fraction of what you get from rent. The same for insurance, taxes, etc that you list. Nobody is unaware of these costs.
With that said, I'm not demonizing over these landlords. I'm sure they're fine people and could be worse like you say.
A renter should not be any more grateful to the landlord than a worker should be grateful to the shareholder for paying their salary. It is an exchange. I do think it is better when homeowners at least rent out their property instead of just letting it rot abandoned like many choose. The most decent thing of course would be for them to sell property they don't need and we wouldn't be living in this dystopia from the beginning.
The youth of the industrialized nations are vanishing on a grander scale than ever seen - for petty gains to a few. And those gains will be short lived when the economy folds in on itself due to the impossibility for productive people to have a home. In the end you cannot have an extremely highly skilled workforce that is needed to sustain a modern economy, while at the same time keeping them dumbed down enough to accept total life long exploitation and their own genetical extermination.
> A renter should not be any more grateful to the landlord than a worker should be grateful to the shareholder for paying their salary. It is an exchange.
All true, but there can be a lot of "quality of life" variance in how that exchange is implemented in practice. I've been a tenant a couple of times and now had a couple of tenants myself. Landlords can make things more or less difficult while offering the same agreement, and tenants can make things more or less difficult while complying fully with the same agreement.
I'm grateful whenever someone chooses to do better than the bare minimum required by the agreement. If anyone reading this takes good faith for granted, I urge you to at least read horror stories on reddit.
The finding on simpler prompts, especially with GPT4 tracks (3.5 requires the opposite).
The take on RAG feels application specific. For our use-case where having details of the past rendered up the ability to generate loose connections is actually a feature. Things like this are what I find excites me most about LLMs, having a way to proxy subjective similarities the way we do when we remember things is one of the benefits of the technology that didn’t really exist before that opens up a new kind of product opportunity.
The point of the punishment is to tell you how much we don’t want you to do it. You get life for murder because we really don’t want people killing people. Fleecing them out of money is bad, but we can (literally) print more of it. Once someone is dead we can’t bring them back.
Your analysis is flawed because you’re looking at the problem from the vantage of collective outcomes. A murderer is one person who is making a decision to take an action that can end one or many lives. You want them to weigh that heavily as an absolute cost (I will go to prison forever if caught) not some relative cost (well if I just murder a little then I’ll only get a little punishment).
> Fleecing them out of money is bad, but we can (literally) print more of it. Once someone is dead we can’t bring them back.
The math of my argument was that with money, you can save lives, i.e., prevent people from dying. I don't believe the govt can print as much as it likes without hurting the economy (and thus people) in some other way.
The core of my argument is that defrauding billions of dollars causes deaths of dozens of people indirectly. Is that better than directly causing a death? I am not accussing anyone; just asking what I think is an interesting question.
Don’t do the cleaning and leave a medium review that politely says you were not informed of cleaning policy beforehand. Host has no way to penalize you (outside of a bad review) and you can respond to their review (if they criticize you) saying you were not informed at booking. Keep your review and response cordial and any future host evaluating you will assume that the past host was weird. There’s no way anyone can verify the claim by the other host that they articulated the cleaning policies.
I’m not equivocating AI to these inventions, but imagine if this dour, pessimistic outlook greeted electricity, the combustion engine, the car? New things aren’t immediately valuable and come with all kinds of tradeoffs. We would hardly recognize our lives without these things now and - even though they come at great cost - no serious person would have given that progress up.
It’s fair that “we” (the collective human race) have been too optimistic about new things and too sanguine about the cost. That’s why climate change is as bad as it is. That’s why having everyone plugged into social networks makes us sad.
This constant stream of pessimism that started in the 10’s for everything (tech, any institutions, the world) etc is just so..small seeming. Complaining like this makes none of these things better and the ideas expressed in this piece are far from unique. So as criticism goes it fails to even meet that definition.
So why even do it? To feel cool I guess to other people who think being pessimistic about everything is cool?
We’re coming up on a decade plus of this prevailing dour attitude and not a single bit of it has helped forestall anything. Maybe we try a new approach where we treat new things as things to be improved when they’re at the beginning (and therefore most able to be shaped). Maybe we try being cautiously optimistic?
If you look at the history of these inventions, you'll find that the people who've been working on them recognized the limitations at the heart of these criticisms. Even today, it's more a question of tradeoffs where we try to minimize the negative impacts. But if you look at the tech world, there is no such philosophy. It's all about growth, being barely legal, and trying to ignore the negative aspects. All the points listed in the article is true, but there's been no answer other than "give me money".
> Am I out of touch? No. It's the children who are wrong.
Maybe the reason people are pessimistic about technology is because it sucks. You note that it started in the 10's and I'm inclined to agree (the 90's were amazing for techno optimism), so what changed?
Opinion based: It's the focus on growth and not bettering the service. Even Apple who has been constantly focused on experience is trying to lock users in with "We know better than you" as an explanation. Windows XP, 7, and even Vista, has tried to provide an operating system so that the users can utilize their tools. I'm not against business trying to make a profit. I'm very much for it. But more often than not, engaging in a transaction with tech companies feels like doing shady deals in a dark alley, wondering if you're not selling your soul.
> I’m not equivocating AI to these inventions, but imagine if this dour, pessimistic outlook greeted electricity, the combustion engine, the car?
It did — all of those inventions had their fair share of opponents. Some of the naysayers simply didn't like change, while others had a pretty good understanding of the negative side effects of mass adoption. https://dangerousminds.net/comments/100_years_ago_some_peopl...
One piece of advice, I found myself this person once - it’s the road to burn out city to be the critical path answer to everyone on the team’s challenges. You sound like someone who is very generous with your time and support. In my experience once people have found a critical path there is no point at which they “stop.” This isn’t because they’re trying to hurt you, they’ve just found the answer so to them it doesn’t seem wrong.
It will take even more of your time, but you ought to consider practicing giving less answers and asking more questions of those who seek your help to try to help them unpack the issues themselves. It will feel more tiring at first, but you’ll gradually help the others learn and also create a small bit of friction that will encourage them to try their own solution or two before seeking you.
Management asks are separate/ they can actually reward you with compensation and promotions for this extra work. But the team asking for help won’t stop when you get more comp unless you start teaching that you’re not the answer.
Still there for me. Kept meaning to spend the boot up time to migrate to Swift but have always been more keen to just get going. Now finally feeling a bit “forced” as I want to tap into Swift only things like widgets and live activities.
Having done some of this myself, I’m curious your results on fine tuning vs embeddings. I’ve found the latter much more performant, but perhaps I’m thinking about fine tuning wrong.
I used fine tuning to approximate my style. Which is especially important around my logging style as I tend to break it down in to sections, and it is stream of thought writing, example of what I mean is here: https://www.github.com/justinlloyd/retro-chores. In my logging and journals I'll crank out anywhere between a couple of hundred words and a few thousand words per day. I used embedding for adding new knowledge.
I also did a little work in letting it scan through my notebooks (they are OneNote and you can access and search via a Python API) via keyword search because it can point directly to something I've written in the past, and not just rely on model weights.
