How do you sustain yourself while writing full time?
Gwern
Patreon and savings. I have a Patreon which does around $900-$1000/month, and then I cover the rest with my savings. I got lucky with having some early Bitcoins and made enough to write for a long time, but not forever. So I try to spend as little as possible to make it last.
I should probably advertise the Patreon more, but I'm too proud to shill it harder.
It's also awkward trying to come up with some good rewards which don't entail a paywall. Patreon and Substack work well for a lot of people like Scott Alexander, because they like writing regular newsletter-style updates but I don't like to. I just let it run and hope it works.
Dwarkesh Patel
Wait if you’re doing $900-1000/month and you’re sustaining yourself on that, that must mean you’re sustaining yourself on less than $12,000 a year. What is your lifestyle like at $12K?
Gwern
I live in the middle of nowhere. I don't travel much, or eat out, or have health insurance, or anything like that. I cook my own food. I use a free gym. There was this time when the floor of my bedroom began collapsing. It was so old that the humidity had decayed the wood. We just got a bunch of scrap wood and a joist and propped it up. If it lets in some bugs, oh well! I live like a grad student, but with better ramen. I don't mind it much since I spend all my time reading anyway.
Oasis (the Minecraft world model) can serve about 5 players on 8 H100 in real-time at 20fps in 360p. This is a much more capable model with two orders of magnitude more context. They pretty much say it can't be played real-time, which I read as they generate less than 15fps@240p on 8 GPUs. Probably why they talk so much about using it for AI training and evaluation rather than human use. There is a distilled version that works in real-time, but they don't show anything from that version (which is a statement in itself).
For reducing the price, ASICs like etched may be the way forwards [1]. The models will get bigger for a time, but there may be a lot of room for models that can exploit purpose-built hardware.
Embodied cognition is a core theory for AGI; this would enable a vast array of bodies, environments, and situations, that high level of diversity can empower AI adaptability.
For a straightforward example, this could help Waymo rehearse driving in various cities and weather / traffic settings
They don't give much info on parameter count, etc so it's hard to say concretely: Oasis (AI Minecraft) apparently runs on a single H100 [1], but this is presumably much larger — both due to higher fidelity, and due to the 60s context window instead of 1s context window for Oasis. But in 5-10 years regardless of what it takes to run now, the price will drop massively, and my bet is this would be playable in real-time. Context length will be solvable simply by increased VRAM (i.e. an H200 has 141GB per GPU, vs 80GB for an H100). Although Google is probably running these on TPUs, TPUs should follow a similar trajectory.
In the intermediate term my guess is that this kind of world model will be useful for training 3D model generators, so that you can go from sketch -> running in-engine extremely quickly.
That's the rational response, but in practice what we saw is that anyone who questioned the Covid vaccine was instantly labeled anti-vax. It didn't matter if they were fine with all other vaccines. It didn't matter if they just had Covid or had a complicating pre-existing condition. Anything less than full acceptance was shut down as anti-vax. They ruined the anti-vax label which was previously useful.
Can you explain what you mean by "people who aren't against vaccine technology?" I'm not sure I follow given that RFK has explicitly said he is against vaccines and that no vaccines are safe and effective. [0]
===In July, Kennedy said in a podcast interview that “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective” and told FOX News that he still believes in the long-ago debunked idea that vaccines can cause autism. In a 2021 podcast he urged people to “resist” CDC guidelines on when kids should get vaccines.===
===“I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, better not get them vaccinated,” Kennedy said.===
===That same year, in a video promoting an anti-vaccine sticker campaign by his nonprofit, Kennedy appeared onscreen next to one sticker that declared “IF YOU’RE NOT AN ANTI-VAXXER YOU AREN’T PAYING ATTENTION.”===
==guilt by association to mislead: "appeared onscreen next to"==
It was something produced by his own non-profit. Do you not think it is fair to associate him with the non-profit he founded and ran? He has had no trouble associating himself with the organization. I feel like we can make the same association without misleading anyone.
This is still just a deflection from the question of what "people who aren't against vaccine technology" even means. Can you please define it? I am having trouble seeing the difference between being anti-vaccine and being anti-vaccine technology.
NOTE: The comment I originally responded to has since been edited.
Maybe, but that does that devalue the positive progress today?
I understand what you're saying, people framework hop and what's popular does change frequently, but we're not all using Frontpage still, are we? That process of changing to something better (as evidenced by TFA) has value in itself.
> I understand what you're saying, people framework hop and what's popular does change frequently, but we're not all using Frontpage still, are we?
yeah, we switched to WordPress. I am glad we didn't follow up on our web agency 5 years ago to switch to gasby. Our wordpress is still running fine. I am glad we are not considering switching to Astro, since wordpress will still be there in 5 years.
Will WordPress be there in 5 years? Regardless, it has a cost.
It's hard to compound a conversation about cost on the backdrop of agencies. A lifetime ago I worked at agencies that predominantly leaned on WordPress. WP is a complex, dynamic webapp, running 24/7. A long history of security holes both in itself but more in the fleet of community plugins that agencies install by default, and the "one click" hosting software they lean on (cpanel et al) to avoid hiring actual operations teams all cause problems. Deployments are objectively awful and demand scrappy maintenance work over an amount of regular server time.
Once a static Astro site is built, that HTML is static and safe, forever. Cloudflare, AWS, Github, and a hundred others will host it for you, for free. Just pay for the domain.
We charged clients £100pm+ just for treading water with WP and there wasn't profit in that. WP does allow clients to make changes themselves but in my experience agency clients need brand and graphics support. The cost of updating a website is insignificant to regular graphics work.
I can't say what sort of client you are, but we're looking at a cost saving of £6k in five years by not having some underqualified junior babysit a server.
The output is better on Astro too. Usually. I'm sure an agency could find a way to make an awful Astro site.
> Will WordPress be there in 5 years? Regardless, it has a cost.
WordPress will probably be around in 5 years, but I don't think anyone can say that the plugin ecosystem and open source community that WordPress heavily depends on would, especially with what has been going on in the past months.
React itself doesn't have many dependencies at all, but nobody uses React in isolation because it's only a rendering library / data flow; React was never pushed as a full framework.
Have you ever tried to move $10MM between jurisdictions before? It's much easier when you can put it in a box that looks like, weighs as much as, and actually is a piece of cloth inside of a box, and then open the box up wherever you want it.
(To be clear, the banana piece specifically is probably a bad artwork to use for financial engineering purposes, but for the art market as a whole these dynamics add a lot to the prices near the top end)
I wonder that too fwiw, what's the exact mechanism with this banana NFT-purchase by which elicit money (from who (?)) is now being laundered as legal income (of who (?)). How does the process work?
Again, I have no clue whether this banana falls into this category, but generically and hyper-simplified: you have dirty money in a high-scrutiny jurisdiction, you buy a piece of art for $10MM, you move that piece of art to a more permissive jurisdiction and sell it for $8MM. That buyer gets a good deal and you just mostly cleaned $10MM for 20% in one transaction, which you can then layer into its now-local (permissive) economy for further cleaning before pulling it back out, apparently legitimately, to whatever jurisdiction you want.
You've avoided an international (currency) transaction of $10MM which would be flagged by pretty much every authority with oversight. Just two high-value domestic art sales, which happen all the time.
Any examples of this happening? Famous artwork being bought in us (high scrutiny preusmably) then sold in , i don't know, Switzerland (low scrutiny presumably). And then repatriated!!
Seems a lot of steps on the way.especially in crypto era.
Anyway, would love to see some real examples here. Why can't it just be exuberance, pumpanddump if we want to be cynical.
It came from an art sale… you can go read an article about it in the news, in fact, and sure you may think it’s ridiculous but that’s just because you’re uncultured and don’t understand Fine Art. People are demonstrably willing to pay millions for bananas on walls.
Obviously it attracts some attention (we’re here talking about it), but a whole lot less than a wire transfer of $10MM out of the country which would trigger SARs at several levels.
Ah so why do the sale at all then? Why not just deposit $10MM in cash at the bank and say it was from an art sale? Something is missing in your explanation.
> Just finished Theft of Fire by @Devon_Eriksen_, and it was a great read — hard SF by a retired engineer. If his About page resonates at all, you will probably enjoy it: https://devoneriksen.com/about
https://www.statista.com/chart/30815/top-destination-countri...
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