My earliest introduction to locusts was as a biblical plague. These Sunday school lessons did not include pictures. I always imagined some twisted diminutive demonic swarm of insects, and was disappointed to finally discover they were just grasshoppers.
There are a handful of anecdotes like this one that make me very hopeful for the future. In spite of everything, humanity is still achieving wonders:
The device, implanted in July 2023, records from the brain region that controls muscles involved in talking and translates these signals into instructions for a voice synthesizer. Within 30 minutes of it being switched on, Harrell could communicate again. “I was absolutely overwhelmed with the thought of how this would impact my life and allow me to talk to my family and friends and better interact with my daughter,” he says. “It just was so overwhelming that I began to cry.”
Agreed, I found this essay engaging and emotional. While I can see why the unusual style might not be someone's cup of tea, I don't agree at all with the criticism that this is bad writing. It had a Haruki Murakami ethereal feel that I am quite fond of.
Regarding other comments in this thread, the moral panic over AI writing has mostly passed me by. While I certainly have a philosophical preference for things written by an actual human, I don't care to invest the bandwidth in analyzing every single thing I read for hints of llm patterns. If I like it, I'll keep reading. If not, I won't. Sometimes discontinuing a piece of writing also aligns with obvious AI use, but that is generally a secondary issue.
Physical books are irreplaceable to me. I love the feel, the smell, and having a house full of them. Just went to a library sale this morning and got even more.
I also really need a break from screens, and reading a book is a great excuse to not be on my phone or watching tv.
It sounds like there wasn't really a counter narrative for the models to learn from. This feature of how llms accumulate information is already being gamed by seeding the internet with preferred narratives.
I'm not sure how many Medium articles, blog posts and reddit threads I need to put out before grok starts telling everyone my widget is the best one ever made, but it's a lot cheaper than advertising.
The majority of my encounters with West Coast Buddhism have been... off-putting.
Particularly in the SF tech scene, there is an unfortunate 'competitive enlightenment' vibe amongst many of those who profess to follow Buddhist teachings.
"Oh, you've only attained the second jhāna? I got through all four on my first try."
I am certain there are plenty of genuine and sincere practitioners out there, but my small sample has not included any.
Perhaps I'm getting the wrong impression, but it seems like this author is either ignorant of a lot of very successful contemporary scifi or is just taking a narrow view of the genre based on their own preferences.
AI and independent publishing certainly make it harder to sort the wheat from the chaff, but the ubiquity and convenience of aquiririg reading materials has never been better in all of human history.
I will never get caught up with all the scifi books I want to read, and nothing could make me happier.
"The researchers tested their framework on nearly 1,000 LinkedIn profiles to see if it could match them to accounts on Hacker News. These were profiles where the real-world identity was known to the team, who removed names, links, and other obvious identifiers from the bios.
The AI-powered framework successfully linked accounts with up to 67% accuracy at 90% precision, whereas the best non-AI methods struggled to succeed."
Many are complaining about banking app compatability, but I've never felt compelled to use anything other than my browser for banking. What's the big deal with the banking apps?
Am missing out on some huge advantage here?
"Excel's default behavior is to convert certain text entries into dates. It makes sense for general spreadsheet use, but not for geneticists. Genes, like Membrane Associated Ring-CH-Type Finger 1, are given alphanumeric symbols (MARCH1) as a shorthand for their full, complex names. When a scientist would input "MARCH1" into an Excel spreadsheet, the software would automatically interpret this as a date and convert it to "1-Mar"[...]For a long time, Microsoft's position was that this was a niche issue affecting a small number of users"
To be fair, this really is a niche issue. For all that I agree with the frustration for Microsoft's terrible behavior in so many other respects, it's hard to fault them for not being immediately responsive to something like this.
My physician prescribed Vitamins D and B12, so a quality Omega 3 is the only supplement I currently purchase.
After an absurd amount of trial and error with every over-the-counter, trendy supplement over the last couple of decades (and lord only knows how much money), these are the only ones that seem to make a subjective difference on my quality of life and an objective difference in my bloodwork.
This didn't seem especially controversial of a comment, and even here there's no end of the rotten attitudes for no good reason