RANDOM FACTS
I think he’s a genius because he’s solved a huge problem, which is that writing is really lonely. And it’s brutal to sit down and be by yourself and write. He eliminated it, first, by the dictation, by having the typist. And now he’s totally eliminated it by having a roomful of people. It’s a hell of a lot more fun than sitting alone in a room and feeling depressed
Like, wow, an AI that can write a Reddit comment! Well, there are millions of Reddit comments, which is precisely why we now have AIs good at writing them. Wow, an AI that can generate music! Well, there are millions of songs, which is precisely why we now have AIs good at creating them.
Call it the supply paradox of AI: the easier it is to train an AI to do something, the less economically valuable that thing is. After all, the huge supply of the thing is how the AI got so good in the first place.
Policymakers want wealth-flation (assets go up) but not pleb-flation (because that leads to unrest and protest)
More recent efforts to optimize The Pile (and its relatives) for language model training arrived at the same conclusion: more web text makes the model smarter. This is counterintuitive: doesn’t the median quality level of web text pale in comparison to hand-picked high quality text corpora? The answer seems to be diversity: web text, for all its failings, has nearly every conceivable usage of language
In May of last year, Andrej Karpathy tweeted his view of the sufficient conditions for good datasets, and so strong models: ‘Large, Clean, Diverse’.
jobs like generating AI content, developing AI agents, integrating OpenAI/ChatGPT APIs, and developing AI apps are becoming the rage. But by far the #1 use case? Chatbots, with the # of jobs related to developing chatbots exploding 2000% since the release of ChatGPT and the OpenAI API. If there is a killer use case for AI today, it’s in developing chatbots.
There is a long tradition of this: The first automobile (pictured above) looked like a horse-drawn carriage without the horse, early telephones looked like telegraph systems, early movies looked like filmed plays.
YouTube became one of the biggest winners of Web2 because it broke this skeuomorphic mold by being the first video-hosting service to go all-in on user-generated content.
To my pleasant surprise, most of the job categories actually had an increase in the number of jobs since ChatGPT was released, with the exception of 3 categories that had large declines in jobs.
The 3 categories with the largest declines were writing, translation and customer service jobs. The # of writing jobs declined 33%, translation jobs declined 19%, and customer service jobs declined 16%
A single layer perceptron (SLP) is a feed-forward network based on a threshold transfer function. SLP is the simplest type of artificial neural networks and can only classify linearly separable cases with a binary target
But, then, perhaps the Genoan was like those clever men who never know more than they need and believe only what it is in their interests to believe
The thrill of winning is in direct proportion to the effort I put in before. I also know, from long experience, that if you make an effort in training when you don’t especially feel like making it, the payoff is that you will win games when you are not feeling your best – Rafa Nadal’s memoir
“With GrubWithUs we learned that friction can kill marketplaces. On eBay, you could have 300 sellers who were listing the exact size of shoe you were looking for, and you would have to sort through ratings, comments, shipping information to find exactly what you need. We wanted to remove that friction from the experience. And since we’re an authenticated marketplace, people could trust that they would receive exactly what they ordered,” says Lu.
Pluto takes 247.94 Earth years to orbit the Sun. According to my calculations, the Plutonian year that started on July 4, 1776 will end this year on June 12, 2024
Google groups users based on their past behavior to predict what they want. Think about it like Amazon’s “other shoppers also bought”. Multiplied by hundreds of billions of searches, strong patterns emerge
The heavier an animal, the easier it dies from a fall. You can drop an ant over 15,000x its height (~1,250 feet) and it won’t die. Squirrels can be dropped 150x their height. Humans die around 10x our height. If you drop an elephant just 1x its height (~10 feet) it dies.
The bigger you are, the harder it is to reproduce, gestation times take longer. Ant eggs hatch within a couple weeks of being laid. Humans take 9 months. Rhinos 17 months. Elephants take nearly 2 years.
When you read biographies of people who’ve done great work, it’s remarkable how much luck is involved. They discover what to work on as a result of a chance meeting, or by reading a book they happen to pick up. So you need to make yourself a big target for luck, and the way to do that is to be curious. Try lots of things, meet lots of people, read lots of books, ask lots of questions.
just get 1% better at whatever you’re working toward each day and you’re guaranteed to make progress
…there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing – not much, but enough that they miss fame – PG
There are five types of time:
1. Micro Time (sub-second)
2. Engagement Time (Seconds)
3. Business Time (Minutes to Hours)
4. Strategy Time (Days to Weeks)
5. Big-Thinking Time (Months to Years)
Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous: “You can’t think your way to right action; you can only act your way to right thinking.”
“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
In practicing a skill in the initial stages, something happens neurologically to the brain that is important for you to understand. When you start something new, a large number of neurons in the frontal cortex (the higher, more conscious command area of the brain) are recruited and become active, helping you in the learning process.
The least and most successful among the Italian Americans were the most ardent admirers of Mussolini’s revolution; the least and most successful among the Irish Americans were the most responsive to De Valera’s call; the least and most successful among the Jews are the most responsive to Zionism; the least and most successful among the Blacks are the most race conscious.
Your body is in elimination mode in the morning and drinking water kick-starts your body’s functions and assists in the elimination process. This helps you to feel energised and replenished ready for a great day
Tom Hanks on acting: Hit the marks and tell the truth!
out of the three core layers of internet stack – naming (DNS), transportation (TCP/IP) and application (HTTP), naming is at the very start of the stack
On February 22, 2024, the closing price of the Nikkei Stock Average surpassed the record high of 38,915.87 yen set on December 29, 1989, the peak of the bubble economy. This was the first time in 34 years
Scientific literature shows that adults who exercised for at least 30 minutes a day slept an average of 15 minutes longer than those who did not exercise [19]. Other studies have shown that physical activity can help to reduce sleep disorders, such as insomnia, daytime sleepiness, and sleep apnea [15,19,20]
Amateurs have a goal. Professionals have a system.
Doing the same thing every day seems easy but it actually isn’t
If you don’t believe in God, it may help to remember this great line of Geneen Roth’s: that awareness is learning to keep yourself company. And then learn to be more compassionate company, as if you were somebody you are fond of and wish to encourage.
What does “tape out” mean in chip manufacturing?
The term “tape-out” is used in chip design to signify the completion of the design phase and the start of manufacturing. Originating from older days when the final design was written onto magnetic tape and sent out for fabrication, the term has endured as a symbolic milestone
I should make sure that I’m sufficiently exhausted from working that no one can keep me up at night. That’s really the only thing I can control. – Jensen Huang
We’ve since come to understand that actual biological neurons are substantially more complex than our early models of them, and neural networks have virtually no similarities to the design of actual brains. For instance, the common locust uses a single neuron for implementing its collision detection while flying. This is done through complex dendritic integration, which cannot be represented by our simplified neuron models with linear summation.
Participants who were genetically biased not to have a tend-and-befriend response got the biggest health benefit of being prosocial. The scientists speculated that caring for others can jump-start the oxytocin system, even if you have a genetic predisposition that makes a tend-and-befriend response less likely.
A great surprise that emerges from the genome revolution is that in the relatively recent past, human populations were just as different from each other as they are today, but that the fault lines across populations were almost unrecognizably different from today.
I think as technical people we have a strong bias to put up code or papers or the final thing and feel like things are mostly self-explanatory. It’s there, and also it’s commented, there is a Readme, so all is well, and if people don’t engage then it’s just because the thing is not good enough. But the reality is that there is still a large barrier to engage with your thing (even for other experts who might not feel like spending time/effort!), and you might be leaving somewhere 10-100X of the potential of that exact same piece of work on the table just because you haven’t made it sufficiently accessible
Morgan Housel gets his best ideas while walking. In an interview, he said, “If I ever get some sort of writer’s block, or I’m just trying to think an article through, I go for walks. I go for two or three walks per day, and that’s where all of the writing happens, and I usually take notes when I walk.”
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I think the most interesting part of the paper is the finding that walking improves creativity not due to environmental stimulation, but due to walking itself. Whether outdoors or on a treadmill, walking improved the generation of novel and appropriate ideas. Surprisingly, this effect extends to sitting after a walk
One ought to go too far, in order to know how far one can go.
I don’t, for the record, think we are at an iPhone moment when it comes to virtual reality, by which I mean the moment where multiple technological innovations intersect in a perfect product. What is exciting, though, is that a lot of the pieces — unlike three years ago — are in sight. Sora might not be good enough, but it will get better; Groq might not be cheap enough or fast enough, but it, and whatever other competitors arise, will progress on both vectors. And Meta and Apple themselves have not, in my estimation, gotten the hardware quite right. You can, however, see a path from here to there on all fronts
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