My friends all hate AI; I just joined an AI startup

I know people who write with styluses on touchscreens, or take photographs of handwritten notes for just that reason.

A lot of that was just propaganda, like the famous ghost city subway station story which then turned out to just be basic planning https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/rest-of-world/chin...

The protests in HK weren't due to failing economic conditions either. And having been to HK recently, I can tell you it's far more developed than it was before being repatriated.

China obviously has problems like any human society, and it's far from perfect. However, they demonstrably have not had the kinds of economic crashes we have in the west and the standard of living keeps rising steadily. And here are some numbers to put things in perspective.

90% of families in the country own their home giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans. https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/03/30/how-peop...

Chinese household savings hit another record high in 2024 https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-jone...

Social mobility in China being far better than in the US https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/18/world/asia/ch...

The typical Chinese adult is now richer than the typical European adult https://www.businessinsider.com/typical-chinese-adult-now-ri...

The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w231...

From 2010 to 2019 (the most recent period for which uninterrupted data is available), the income of the poorest 20% in China increased even as a share of total income. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.DST.FRST.20?end=2019...

I have and, Microsoft aside, it all works great. Don't need search engines anymore, AI does all my research now and produces better information anyway.

I do not understand small engines, but I would've thrown away a perfectly good honda 4 stroke this summer if I didn't have an LLM to help me with the diagnosis.

(And I only reached for the LLM after working through all the flowcharts and tables in the shop manual, reading relevant parts of two engine repair books, and watching a bunch of youtube videos.)

It's especially awesome in domains where:

1. you personally don't have the time to learn,

2. you can trivially evaluate the output ("does engine go brrrrrr or brr-splaugh-crunch"), and

3. there are no bad outcomes; or, there are bad outcomes (destroy engine, hurt myself) but you can augment with ground-truth ("do X as suggested by nlp machine but follow shop manual for doing X").

It was a 3B or 8B model too, so I probably burned more energy on unnecessary oil changes than on running the llm inference.

Say what you will about LLMs, and dear god can the claude-style harness outputs be annoying in the workplace. But they're great tools for accelerating the sorts of ultra-narrow-path learning curves that commonly pop up in tinkering/hacking/similar sorts of activities.

(Also, people without critical thinking skills believing everything they read pre-dates LLMs by thousands of years. This was a widely discussed problem with popular media consumption in the USA during the several years preceding the invention and popularization of LLMs (say 2015 to 2021). There's a different, more fundamental educational diagnosis for that problem, which LLMs may exacerbate, but which they did not cause and cannot cure.)

I've done 35,000+ Anki card reviews over the years, and I strongly suspect that most of the obvious and encouraged ways of using Anki are counterproductive. (Full disclosure: The following thoughts are heavily influenced by using Anki for language learning, and may not fully generalize to subjects like medicine.)

- Use Anki as an "exposure amplifier", not a database of raw facts to memorize. Think "tampering with the relative frequency of input to your brain", not "I will memorize every fact."

- Automate card creation as a much as possible. This will almost always require custom tooling. Card creation is part of the learning process, but you still want to automate everything you can possibly automate. Imagine tools to turn ebook highlights into cards, or to turn entire movies worth of subtitles into listening cards.

- Delete cards ruthlessly. If a card makes you say "Ugh", just delete it. If you're automating as much of card creation as possible, and if you're treating Anki as an "exposure amplifier", then deleting cards is cheap. And a significant amount of review pain comes from a small minority of the cards. Cull them, and reviews start to feel like popping bubblewrap, and not like getting a root canal.

- Prioritize large context and small active recall. For language learning, you might capture several sentences of context from a book or web page you're reading. Read or ignore the context depending on your mood. The active recall portion of a card significantly boosts how much you retain. But oddly, it seems OK to make the active recall portion really small. Try hiding half a word, or a single preposition in a phrase. For passive cards, just boldface an interesting expression in context, and mark the card as passed if you mostly understand it in that context.

- Introduce new cards slowly. Total review burden will stabilize around 5-6 times the number of new cards you learn a day. So 10 cards is a good default, and 20 is a significant commitment.

- The critical window seems to happen around 20-30 days after you introduce a card. This is when either your memory magically "consolidates" somehow (and formerly challenging cards suddenly become blindly obvious), or when a card enters repeated failure territory (and should thus be deleted ruthlessly). You could probably do just fine if you auto-suspended any card that you successfully recalled after a 20- or 30-day gap.

Also, this kind of tooling is the sort of thing you could just vibe code these days. If you do, make the "Delete" button really big.