Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–264 of 264 posts

Re: I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel

#261

Post by munksbeer »

wpietri wrote: post #237
nl wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can tell someone in native on LessWrong by their ability to use incredibly obtuse language to say simple things. It's just in-crowd signalling. > cunningham-esque laws Cunningham's Law states "the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer." > post-dwarkesh clout He went on the Dwarkesh podcast. That's maximal in-crowd for some AI-pilled people.

> You can tell someone in native on LessWrong by their ability to use incredibly obtuse language to say simple things. It's just in-crowd signalling. Do you have a sense of what shapes this? There are so many people in that orbit whose writing I find both exhausting and suspect. I work hard to write clearly, which forces me to think a bit more clearly. The in-group thing makes sense, but there's an element of oblique…

> Do you have a sense of what shapes this? There are so many people in that orbit whose writing I find both exhausting and suspect.

I'm not remotely from that scene, and I only really discovered it was a "scene" a few years ago, having managed to live out quite a nice life, even in tech circles here in London, without knowing this type of thing existed.

So, my take might be extremely wrong, but also, extremely simple:

They are just humans being human. Human's love an in-group. It starts at the play ground in school. Making in-group talk, making fun of out-group people. In that scene, in-group and out-group swap daily. Anyway, this just continues on throughout life, no-one is really immune. People see the LessWrong crowd ("scene") and are seduced by it, and signal that they are in that group by adopting the same language. This just perpetuates.

Re: I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel

#263

Post by artyom »

doginasuit wrote: post #149
artyom wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leaving AI completely aside, it still amazes me that people finds "novel" the idea of removing highly-paid white collar intellectual workers (software developers or otherwise) completely out of the loop. No-code platforms date back to the 80's. Getting rid of engineers in general is even older [*]. Even relational databases and SQL were initially promoted as "ways to get rid of those expensive programmers to access y…

Marketing about a more efficient product that requires fewer engineers is obviously not new. The idea that human engineers are obsolete is pretty new, that's the claim that is getting pushback.

I understand that but I think it's in direct proportion of the money being raised, spent and thrown around, including the price tag, to replace such engineers. The more money you ask for, the wilder the claim needs to be.

Re: I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel

#264

Post by cure_42 »

jaggederest wrote: post #176
cure_42 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They still can't. But very smart humans constructed ways to use the monkeys with typewriters (with a statistical advantage) to find correct answers to problems where they already knew how to verify the answer.

Which problems are not amenable to that approach?

Unfortunately, most problems aren't.

You need a problem where you both know what the solution looks like or can otherwise very quickly and efficiently determine that a solution is correct, but at the same time can't work out a correct solution with a similar amount of effort/time/cost as it took to determine how to verify a solution.

Most problems don't match that criteria. You usually either have a problem with a known method of solving, or you have a problem with no clear way of verifying the solution besides the act of finding the solution itself which would involve in some way proving it is correct, or you have a problem where verifying a solution takes a very long time or has a high cost or even can't be done more than once, so you need to try to determine the best solution without being able to actually test or verify.

Basically all problems just don't fit the "hard to solve but easy to verify" criteria to a degree that makes llms a good fit. On the other hand, there are so many problems that even a tiny fraction is a relatively large number.

Post reply on HN