From the article: "A conversation with Stewart Brand, one of the most influential thinkers and pioneers of our time, still known for his 1968 creation, the Whole Earth Catalog. We talk to him about his latest project: a book, being publicly drafted online, entitled 'Maintenance: Of Everything'"
I just finished the book. It's a great memoir, nicely blending her personal and professional lives. It has many deep "lessons learned" from a laser-focused science career filled with hardships and obstacles. (For details, see the reviews in the linked page.)
Karikó's straight personality, humbleness and extraordinary determination shines thorough the pages, and gives true inspiration to science fans.
> scientific evaluation shows that it's like: writes a program 80% of the time, the program compiles 20% of the time, the program works 5% of the time.
I could swear I saw this the other day but I couldn’t find it in YOShInOn, here is an older paper which gets results like this for C/C++ but does a lot better with R, see Figure 1
The results of this kind of eval could be across the board, you could pick out a set of examples worse than what I said (Games, C++) or pick one out that is really good (Algorithms, Ruby)
which showed some pitfalls…. In some case the LLM could say which project the source code was from which meant it had seen it in the training data and the code ought not to be in the test data.
Does anyone have a clue why Booking is not paying since many months? Their revenues are growing, and claim to have technical issues with processing the payments. But to me it sounds strange that a critical technical issue with payments needs many months to fix. Any insights?
It's called theft, but now they do it to the hoteliers as well. That's why after booking.com has scammed me with their car rental service, I always opt to pay at the property, even if it's a bit more expensive.
I was really hoping someone would reproduce the tests and validate the claims from Microsoft's "Sparks of AGI" paper [1]. This video just does that (and more).
Let me provide one imporant quote from the video (from 18:50):
"I personally reproduced every single example from Microsoft, and while all the capabilities of GPT-4 were not necessarily over exaggerated, but the difference between GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 does feel a bit over-inflated [...] one of my quibbles with the Microsoft paper: they give the impression that GPT-4 is an even bigger step for AI than I think is realistically true."
You're spot on, I think. This is already happening, and disintegrates society. There are countries where an analogue version of this is already implemented: fake parliament with fake opposition, fake government, fake media, fake prosecutions, fake health care system, fake education system, fake state functions. By fake I mean: it looks like a real one, but it's real goals and purposes are very different from what is officially advertised.
It's scary to think about how AI will boost the already way too effective politics of "fake".
I live in Hungary, where I have this feeling of "fake state" getting stronger and stronger every year. I'm sure there are other similar countries.
One recent example: our education system has been neglected for long. Now, that we have an inflation of ~25% (inflation of food is around 50%), teachers literally can't make ends meet. They started to fight for themselves, and instead of taking the problem seriously, the government fights back with its power. (E.g. by firing or silencing teachers who demonstrate.) Teachers are leaving for other jobs in huge numbers. The buildings of even some of the best schools in the country are in catastrophic shape, on the brink of causing major damage to those inside. All this, because it is not a real priority to have good schools. This is only advertised, but it is a lie. The whole education system is gradually shifting into a mode of "baby sitting" kids while the parents work.
Another example is the prosecution system. Interestingly, they are very quick and effective in investigating the smallest wrongdoing if it helps those in power. If the investigation would hurt those in power, they very quickly abandon the investigation with funny and obiously fake reasons. Again: the prosecution system looks like a real one, but it's not. It has purposes different from what is officially advertised.
The closest advisor of the prime minister openly said this week, that "if you control the media, you control the thoughts of people". This, sadly, seems to be true. It really seems that the point of the government is not to run the country decently, but only to fake it. And it works.
This is a great piece, revolving around finding satisfaction through scaling down desires, instead of accumulating more of wealth/success. The claim is that good feeling attached to success is almost always ephemeral. The text draws a rich context by providing many scientific, cultural/historical and religious references. The author also provides some kind-of-practical advice, distilled from their own life:
