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Ilya Sutskever: “If you learn all of these, you’ll know 90% of what matters”

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Re: Ilya Sutskever: “If you learn all of these, you’ll know 90% of what matters”

#81

Post by giantg2 »

soulofmischief wrote: post #50
brayhite wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a strangely narrow way of looking at this. Work isn’t the only responsibility. What is the correlation between taking a week away from responsibilities - work, family, etc. - and job satisfaction?

I assumed someone would retort with this angle, but I hoped people would interpret my comment charitably without me littering it with a dozen caveats. Of course work isn't the only responsibility. Of course some people have kids, pets, parents, medical conditions, etc. It's one week away from work. It can still be done. You weren't going to be taking care of any other responsibilities during your normal 9-5 hours, so…

"You weren't going to be taking care of any other responsibilities during your normal 9-5 hours, so that should have no bearing on the week you take off;"

Have you ever been married, had kids, etc? Pretty much any time I take off of work, it involves catching up on projects, chores, or parental responsibilities during the day. It seems the vast majority of people I've spoken to tell of similar situations.

Re: Ilya Sutskever: “If you learn all of these, you’ll know 90% of what matters”

#82

Post by msoad »

throwaway71271 wrote: post #35
rossant wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many pages is the spiral book?

360 pages, but also added the xLSTM paper https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.04517

xLSTM is really really hard to grasp. It's mind boggling how they came up with such a unique architecture. I read the paper multiple times and still not sure if I can say I understood it.

Re: Ilya Sutskever: “If you learn all of these, you’ll know 90% of what matters”

#83

Post by barfbagginus »

This has nothing on it about llms, where in context learning, retrieval augmention, tool using, and multi modality is really blazing ground. Ideally we'd have papers about these methods, because we need these tools to implement stuff, and they're changing how we do business.

Without in context learning, self critique and tool using, for example, it's easy to think that LLMs are stochastic parrots bound by their training distribution, instead of last mile learners that can adapt to out of distribution contexts. And business applications need RAG to overcome hallucinations. Without these concepts, I don't think people will really know 90% of what matters today, or be ready to take on what matters tomorrow.

I could be wrong here, with my focus on so many llm specific topics. Things like in context learning and RAG exist as engineering workarounds for LLM limitations. They are not definite paths to tomorrow's AI, which won't need our cajoling and hand holding. There's a possibility that we'll move past them, so more speculative and theoretical papers are better.

But I think there's also a possibility that the AI scaling is done for this AI bubble, and we're stuck with building larger scale systems out of imperfect buggy LLMs for the foreseeable future. In that case, maybe some next generation Zen of integrating LLMs into a working mind eventually emerges as a way forward.. so we should pay attention to engineering efforts around LLMs!

Re: Ilya Sutskever: “If you learn all of these, you’ll know 90% of what matters”

#84

Post by smeej »

cwillu wrote: post #63
smeej wrote: post #58

How long does it take to learn the prerequisites to learn these if you don't already have a CS background? Reading through the list, I can barely parse half the titles due to acronyms and terms I've never seen before. Would I be able to figure them out along the way? Or is there a body of knowledge this is assuming I should already have? (This isn't a criticism of the list, or even the idea of presenting such a list…

https://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/ (dead tree form: https://www.amazon.ca/Quantum-Computing-since-Democritus-Aar... ) is a soft'ish introduction to much useful background.

I think I may just need to accept that the work it would take to get to this level would mean a whole life change.

It's been 20+ years since I took calculus in high school, and I haven't taken a math or science class since. I reckon that puts me at least five years behind where I'd need to be to start this course and the listed ones.

Thanks for the recommendation, and helping me assess whether it's the use I want to make of my time!

Re: Ilya Sutskever: “If you learn all of these, you’ll know 90% of what matters”

#85

Post by aworks »

brayhite wrote: post #36
soulofmischief wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can't take a single week off of work during an entire year in order to advance your career, then you're satisfied with your current one. There is no need to direct negativity toward others for making time to learn. Carmack is in this position today because of such work ethic, not in spite of it.

What a strangely narrow way of looking at this. Work isn’t the only responsibility. What is the correlation between taking a week away from responsibilities - work, family, etc. - and job satisfaction?

So far, my 2 years of retirement are an experiment in discretionary time. I'm married but no children or pets in the house. So I have lots of leeway in what I do every day. Maybe I average 1-2 hours of responsible time. And there are constraints - health, energy, lack of ambition, family travel, Internet distractions etc.

But in general I can do what I want. This month, it's been relearning awk to do financial data analysis and reading the books of a British author, Diana Athill.

I'll say that my personal project satisfaction level is medium. Life satisfication has a major social component that provides meaning, though. Optimizing for both isn't necessarily easy even in retirement.

Re: Ilya Sutskever: “If you learn all of these, you’ll know 90% of what matters”

#86

Post by cwillu »

deprecative wrote: post #68
cwillu wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found that the many of the relationships I'm most proud to have in my life are with those who had a reputation for being difficult and/or insufferable.

Weird flex but ok. I think though that there is some merit in being able to communicate with a difficult or insufferable person but I find no merit can exist in choosing to take pride in regularly willingly doing so.

The value is that reputations are rarely indicative of what they appear from the surface; a lot of the time the reputation for being difficult ultimately derives from challenging polite bullshit, and in my experience _that_ correlates to deep competence often enough to be worth investigating.

Re: Ilya Sutskever: “If you learn all of these, you’ll know 90% of what matters”

#87

Post by soulofmischief »

cwillu wrote: post #86
deprecative wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird flex but ok. I think though that there is some merit in being able to communicate with a difficult or insufferable person but I find no merit can exist in choosing to take pride in regularly willingly doing so.

The value is that reputations are rarely indicative of what they appear from the surface; a lot of the time the reputation for being difficult ultimately derives from challenging polite bullshit, and in my experience _that_ correlates to deep competence often enough to be worth investigating.

Yeah, it took years for me to understand that the only people telling me things like "You always want to be right," or "Stop questioning everything," etc. as a child, were in fact themselves narcissists, abusers and control freaks who despise resistance.

I don't mean to make it sound so one-dimensional or axiomatic, but at least in my particular life, this turned out to be the case. I maintain an extremely close group of friends, the only people I find myself having problems with are typically those with some sort of personality disorder or malevolent intent. And boy, do those people have mean things to say about me. :)

Re: Ilya Sutskever: “If you learn all of these, you’ll know 90% of what matters”

#88

Post by Woodi »

isaacfung wrote: post #64
Woodi wrote: post #57

On the related subject: any way to filter out anything AI/LLM related from HN ?

Write a chrome extension that prompts a LLM/uses a custom trained (BERT based) text classification model to filter the posts. https://github.com/thomasj02/AiFilter https://github.com/GoogleChrome/chrome-extensions-samples https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/en/tasks/sequence_c...

O, or maybe plugin with regexes will do for 90% use cases ? ;)

Re: Ilya Sutskever: “If you learn all of these, you’ll know 90% of what matters”

#89

Post by drivebyhooting »

digitalsushi wrote: post #80

oh man my cognitive dissonance is crazy cause i am easily in the top 50% percentile for being able to use popular LLMs but that reading list is outside my comprehension abilities. I cannot synthesize a thing I use

Do you use pencils? I doubt you can synthesize that.

Re: Ilya Sutskever: “If you learn all of these, you’ll know 90% of what matters”

#90

Post by soulofmischief »

giantg2 wrote: post #81
soulofmischief wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assumed someone would retort with this angle, but I hoped people would interpret my comment charitably without me littering it with a dozen caveats. Of course work isn't the only responsibility. Of course some people have kids, pets, parents, medical conditions, etc. It's one week away from work. It can still be done. You weren't going to be taking care of any other responsibilities during your normal 9-5 hours, so…

"You weren't going to be taking care of any other responsibilities during your normal 9-5 hours, so that should have no bearing on the week you take off;" Have you ever been married, had kids, etc? Pretty much any time I take off of work, it involves catching up on projects, chores, or parental responsibilities during the day. It seems the vast majority of people I've spoken to tell of similar situations.

Well, I have specifically avoided having kids at this stage in my life so that I may climb out of the poverty class first. I'm one abortion deep already. I was not as fortunate as 99% of the people in this little isolated corner of the internet.

I was homeless from 16 to my early 20s. I suffer from multiple traumas, both physical and mental. I have ADHD and bipolar disorder. I've had sciatica, degenerative disc disease, gout and other issues since my teens. Most days I can barely walk. When I do have kids, I'm not going to get to be the dad I want to be, running around and playing with them. My parents are abusive drug addicts who were not present in my life, so I was raised by other extremely abusive people instead, who kicked me out into the streets for being atheist. So malnourished as a child that my friends would make fun of being able to see the bones in my face and body. I spent years living homeless on scraps of food.

I have to advance my career. Every single thing is stacked against me, trying to make me fail. I don't get the luxury of deciding if I want to take a week off to do so. It's a matter of survival, and I have very purposefully structured my life in such a way that I have a shot in hell at one day raising a child above the poverty line.

Believe me, this is not a matter of me not empathizing with others or understanding the complexities of life. It's a matter of prioritization and commitment. If I can make time to learn, anyone can.

And on top of all of that, I do in fact have to provide for my sister and her four young, expensive children, because she doesn't have anyone either. I don't get much free time, man.

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