All fair points, and I don’t deny predictive text generation is at the core of what’s happening. I think it’s a fair statement that most people hear “predictive text” and think it’s like the suggested words in a text message, which it’s more than that.

I also don’t think Turing Tests are particularly useful long term because humans are so fallible. We too hallucinate all the time with our convictions based on false memories. Getting an AI to have what seems like an emotional response or show uncertainty or confusion in a Turing test is a great way to trick people.

The algorithm is already a black box as is the mechanics of our own intelligence. We have no idea where the ceiling is for this technology yet. This debate quickly goes into the ontological and epistemological discussion about what it means to be intelligent…if the AI predictive text generation is complex enough where you simply cannot tell a difference, then is there a meaningful difference? What if we are just insanely complex algorithms?

I also don’t trust that what the market sees in AI products is indicative of the current limits. AGI isn’t here yet, but LLMs are a scary big step in that direction.

Pragmatically, I will maintain that AI is a different form of intelligence because I think it shortcuts to better discussions around policy and how we want this tech in our lives. I would gladly welcome the news that tells me I’m wrong.

Talk to anyone who consumes Fox News daily and you’ll get incorrect predictive text generated quite confidently. You may also deny them their intelligence and lack of humanity with the fallacies they uphold.

I also think intelligence is a gradient—is an ant intelligent? What about a dog? Chimp? Who gets to draw the line?

It very may be a very complex predictive text generator that hallucinates but I’m concerned that it minimizes its capabilities for better or worse—Its ability to maintain context and has enough plasticity to reason and change its response points to something more, even if we’re at an early stage.

First, we don’t understand our own neurons enough to model them.

AI’s “neuron” or node is a math equation that takes a numeric input with a variable “weight” that affects the output. An actual neuron a cell with something like 6000 synaptic connections each and 600 trillion synapses total. How do you simulate that? I’d argue the magic of AI is how much more efficient it is comparatively with only 176 billion parameters in GPT4.

They’re two fundamentally different systems and so is the resulting knowledge. AI doesn’t need to learn like a baby, because the model is the brain. The magic of our neurons is their plasticity and our ability to freely move around in this world and be creative. AI is just a model of what it’s been fed, so how do you get new ideas? But it seems that with LLMs, the more data and parameters, the more emergent abilities. So we just need to scale it up and eventually we can raise the.

AI does pretty amazing and bizarre things today we don’t understand, and they are already using giant expensive server farms to do it. AI is super compute heavy and require a ton of energy to run. So, the cost is a rate limiting the scale of AI.

There are also issues related to how to get more data. Generative AI is already everywhere and what good s is it to train on its own shit? Also, how do you ethically or legally get that data? Does that data violate our right to privacy?

Finally, I think AI actually possess an intelligence with an ability to reason, like us. But it’s fundamentally a different form of intelligence.

If others sing your praises, then you’re golden. To this day, I despise performance reviews and dread them every year and yet, every year they’re glowing reviews from my peers.

Being high-functioning often means you’re blind to your own contributions and more critical of your own work than others perceive. In time, I learned to accept the praise from others and blindly trust that things are ok even when every fiber of my being says I’m fucking up.

Sounds like you need validation more than anything. The points are bullshit if they don’t reflect the effort. Unfortunately, the corporate world is full of bullshit metrics to gauge productivity. I felt this at the bottom and nothing changed moving into “senior leadership”. It’s all bullshit and I encourage everyone to collect a paycheck and just go home.

I tell anyone entering the job market or is a young professional that absolutely no job is worth losing yourself over. Your skills change over time and will never leave you completely. I’m a competent designer, a reasonable developer but the most marketable skill that I didn’t actually develop until my late 20’s was soft skills—mostly developed by gently explaining to tech illiterate coworkers why what they wanted developed was impossible, impractical or just a bad idea.

I did this by treating every coworker as if they were the client. Be polite, professional and let them know that you want to solve their problems. It’s sounds stupid but people just put their guard down if you lead with, “I’m here to help you”. You can then have more honest conversation about all the bullshit keeping you from doing your job, provided it’s phrased as matter of fact and sprinkle in niceties.

The cruel irony is that this same disposition that started as a way to make me a more effective developer ended up pushing me into a position where I don’t get time to develop.

Over the 16 years since graduating, I learned that defining yourself by your career is often a trap. At least it doesn’t sound like you’re getting deep satisfaction from your work.

I burnt myself pretty bad going into the field thinking I was perusing a passion career and just kept getting kicked down for 5 years chasing a passion career until I found a work environment that paid decent and valued work/home life balance. In school I thought I’d never sell my soul, but now I’ve been working with the same people for a decade now and pretty happy about it, even with if the actual work is utterly boring.

Unless you’re a fortunate few that are truly passionate, driven, and lucky enough to land a career that fills your entire bucket, look for a job you can tolerate BUT with group of people that support you and your growth. In the end 2 years in is a drop in the bucket and you’ll see your career change directions over and over. You can always learn new skills or relearn them, so if this new job is something different to get you out of a slump, I say go for it. No one can answer for yourself but you.

The point is not to say all is lost so fuck it, but to highlight that maybe there are systemic issues with an unregulated free markets. Networks have consolidated into a handful of streaming services to a point where there are really no other options for consumers.

What are you going to do? Read a book? Go back to DVDs? They can afford the relatively few people willing to take an all or nothing proposition to squeeze consumers for all they got. They are also really good at lobbying to keep the law on their side to keep it that way.

Good concept in theory but consolidation of streaming services to a handful of providers in an $88 billion dollar industry means the reality for most is that you can culturally isolate yourself by not consuming or seek illegal means of getting your entertainment.

Voting with your dollars works for mom and pop shops, but a loss in viewership due to changes in fees was calculated and note in the ledger.

It’s the difference between single-payer systems run by the government and private, for-profit commercial plans. I’m happy to see this carried out on an executive level since an actual law regulating private insurance would be a shit storm in congress. Remove the profit motive from insurers and the shift quickly moves towards real-world evidence and health outcomes rather than profit margins.

I can also attest to hearing “eggs in a basket” and “toad in a hole” growing up. My son has just dubbed the dish “egg bread” and requested it almost daily. He also calls fried eggs “dip eggs” and boiled eggs “shape eggs.” He was probably 3 when he solidified these terms, but they have all stuck, 6 years later.

Obviously the insurance company actually dictates your healthcare and the prescriptions you receive, not your doctor. If you have great insurance, more physicians and treatments will be covered. Under insured is just having insurance that doesn’t cover your treatment.

Anytime a drug comes to market, manufacturers need to make sure drugs are covered by insurers. So, pharma companies go out to the “payers” (it’s what’s we call them at work) and vie to get a good position on the payer’s “formulary” (the list of drugs covered by insurance).

In this negotiation, you have things like “prior authorization” where the prescriber needs to make a case to the insurance company before a drug can be prescribed. There’s also different tiers for a class of drugs. This means the payers allow certain drugs to be covered only after a patient steps through other (cheaper) treatments. If it’s not covered, you can pay out of pocket but none of this shit is priced for an individual.

There’s a cold calculus on both sides where the pharma company has sunk $300 million to $5 billion dollars to bring a drug to market that can sometimes take a decade to go through clinical trials and receive FDA approval — they need to charge a lot to recoup their investment and hopefully become profitable. Meanwhile, insurers have a population they need to cover and a set pool of money and they don’t need a new $50,000 therapy when there’s a generic that will treat 80% of patients. The other 20% can jump through the hoops or get stuffed…

PSA from someone who works in the industry. Drug manufacturers offer “patient assistance programs” where people who are under insured or uninsured can receive treatments at a discount or sometimes free. They are not broadly advertised and I had no idea they existed until I started working in the space. Just search the drug + patient assistance or financial assistance.

Also to state the obvious… The US healthcare system is fucked — mostly insurance companies but also pharmaceutical companies and hospital systems in the US are all doing everything they can to increase their profits at your expense.

1. Hospitals and pharma set high menu prices in order to negotiate with insurance companies. 2) Insurance companies make money by NOT paying. So you’re fucked unless you’re fortunate to have a cushy white collar job with good benefits. The people that get fucked the most are the ones that can’t afford the premiums

Meh, I opened Reddit just to lurk on the only subreddit I would post on. Recap for that community reminded me it was all one big circle jerk… but now with more advertisements.

Yep, I spent a month refactoring a few thousand lines of code using GPT4 and I felt like I was working with the best senior developer with infinite patience and availability.

I could vaguely describe what I was after and it would identify the established programming patterns and provide examples based on all the code snippets I fed it. It was amazing and a little terrifying what an LLM is capable of. It didn’t write the code for me but it increased my productivity 2 fold… I’m a developer now a getting rusty being 5 years into management rather than delivering functional code, so just having that copilot was invaluable.

Then one day it just stopped. It lost all context for my project. I asked what it thought what we were working on and it replied with something to do with TCP relays instead of my little Lua pet project dealing with music sequencing and MIDI processing… not even close to the fucking ballpark’s overflow lot.

It’s like my trusty senior developer got smashed in the head with a brick. And as described, would just give me nonsense hand wavy answers.

Joe Pera Talks To You

This is what I thought as well. Creaming butter and sugar properly gives the cookie better structure and spread less.

The butter also needs to be the right temperature before baking—chilling dough is sometimes needed. Also regularly scrapping the sides of the bowl while mixing is important to have a nice homogeneous cookie without gobs of dry flour or butter.

Maybe kids have a leg up on the boomers that only had slide rules growing up, but I believe that tech literacy is much lower than people realize. Beyond the bare minimum of using email and browsing the web, most people generally just don’t aren’t using computers in a deep way, including kids that just grow up consuming content on tablets. Touch screens actively obscure the complexity of computers to make them more intuitive.

This research was published nearly 10 years ago but I it’s relevant today: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/

I’ve definitely seen GPT-4 become faster and the output has been sanitized a bit. I still find it incredibly effective in helping with code reviews where GPT-3 was never helpful in producing useable code snippets. At some point it stopped trying to write large swaths of code and started being a little more prescriptive and you still need to actually implement snippets it provides. But as a tool, it’s still fantastic. It’s like a sage senior developer you can rubber duck anytime you want.

I probably fall in the minority of people who thinks releasing a castrated version of GPT is the ethical approach. People outside the technology bubble don’t have a comprehension of how these models work and the capacity for harm. Disinformation, fake news and engagement algorithms are already social ills that manipulate us emotionally and most people are too technologically illiterate to see how pervasive these problems are already.