Links

on the unexpected side effects of new technologies.

What a guy. Don’t chase streams, instead make things that you want to

delightful drawings using shadows of real objects to complete them

We are still figuring out the UI for AIs - making it invisible, zero-click, part of the main input.
Gives Copilot and lex.page as examples; that the bot shares the input box you are using.

Problems with prompt engineering like random phrases you need, that can break between versions.
Either due to dataset changes (like artist names in Stable Diffusion v2), or just other model changes.
And the general interaction pattern; i.e a chat vs a text generator in a document.

Language models hallucinate, and solving that is AGI-hard.

ChatGPT interacts in a conversational way. Meant to let it answer followup questions & challenge incorrect premises.
Interesting how significant the UI is for these tools.
Still a lot of echoes of earlier models - it will often erroneously bring up earlier lines from chat, there’s not real understanding of the conversation.

Contrary to Steven Pinker’s insistence that everything is getting better; Gallup poll of people in 140 countries indicates long-term decrease of quality of life for billions of people. Rising GDP doesn’t help you if you have chronic pain or not enough to eat.

probably time to learn about transformers

The downsides and risks of investing based on trends

Don’t multitask, batch small tasks, etc.

I had thought there was some large technical/scaling challenge (there still are), but much of this reads like plain old stretching too thin.

Australia abolished “statutory reserve deposits” in 1988, which were replaced with 1% non-callable deposits.

Went from nearly a third of Billboard 100 songs having key changes in the 90s, to none by the mid 2000s.
Attributed to the ease of transposing on computers, the general lack of melody in hip-hop, and the shift from making music horizontally (for a particular part) to vertically (layering loops in a DAW).

Stronger reading comprehension, and a sense of tactile information recall. The study was for scheduling, so makes sense that the spatial sense comes into it for day/month planning.

Paired with Socrates on the forgetfulness that comes with writing (on HN at the same time).

Probably yes

Ethics of the theft of artistic style.

Some variations, on the challenges of identifying speakers, noise, voice recognition (lot of people using Whisper now).
On perfect memory preventing you from escaping the past - getting caught up reliving things.

Tips on saying no to people

Very impressive examples. Continuing speech or piano after a 4s prompt.

Quality is a way of working, and affected by everything

big writeup about command palettes in UIs

Background on their short story, written by Wordcraft AI

large labelled audio dataset

ffmpeg parameter gui

We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about.

A random selection:

• not all life-changing advice is good advice
• An estimate is better than a guess. An measurement is better than an estimate.
• It’s never the money. (They will always say it is, but it’s not.)
• The best time to turn it on is before it’s ready. You’ll get plenty of data to finish it faster.
• Your positive mental attitude makes up for most of your shortcomings.
• Isolate. Isolate. Isolate.
• If it’s not written down, it’s not.
• The reason everyone we work for sucks is because those who don’t suck never call us.
• Almost anyone can do almost anything.
• Always take sides

Also related - my blog is a digital garden thread.

Explain text from papers or answer questions. Cool way to fill in gaps on unfamiliar topics.

From show HN

everything is complex

Some good proper web history, and then the rise of reverse order posts and things, rather than a random dumping ground of pages