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Our efforts, in part, define us

weakty.com

191–200 of 202 posts

Re: Our efforts, in part, define us

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find trying to hide and wash away emotions tends to be a dangerous strategy long term. I get that sometimes emotions are unproductive for the task at hand, but the longer you keep washing them away with "logic", the stronger they keep returning at inopportune times. The long term strategy that works for me is to acknowledge them, actually listen to them, but also recognize I have the ability to act despite them. Ea…

My use of "wash away" is more like "transform from unstated feeling to stated feeling with new analysis minimizing bias, for future decisions". It's not a suppression, it's a making stated what was unstated before. It's an attempt at self honesty.

Ah fair enough, that wasn't completely transparent to me.

"Fighting and hiding emotions is counterproductive if your goal is clarity and internal harmony" is a life-lesson that took me all too long to learn, so I'm a bit militant about pushing back on the "fight/hide/ignore" approach to this.

Re: Our efforts, in part, define us

#192
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After AGI? AGI is not a reality anyone of us will witness. Its a false promise in the current LLM market and we are as far away from it as we always have been... just listen to actual experts on the topic that dont profit from pushing a certain narrative.

Demis Hassabis is estimating 5-10 years to AGI, and is about the only person who's opinion on this I think is worth listening to. His/their (DeepMind) plan is to retain a pretrained LLM but add something like search around it (cf AlphaGo or AlphaFold). He does say a couple of "Transformer-level" major breakthoughs may be needed to get there, and is still only 50% confident because of AGI-requirements he may have miss…

LLMs can not reason. We'd need a very very different technology than LLMs to get there. Not to mention new "models" are basically old model agents with access to some more tools. Training actual new models is currently not cost efficient. Also LLMs plateaued, idk how Mr. Hassabis got to that conclusion but I call bs. A "couple" major breakthroughs can take 1000s of years.

Re: Our efforts, in part, define us

#193

I became a computer programmer because I want the computer to do things. I’m not a programmer because I wanted to program. Thus AI is incredibly exciting to me because it makes it easier to make computers do things.

I became a programmer because I like to write code. Having an llm write code for me is like building a robot that eats cake.

One does not have to be a carpenter to have furniture, and one does not have to become a software engineer to get computers to do things.

Unless you are into it, you’ll realize that it’s quite a grind and your time is much better spent getting somebody who is into it (and thanks to that became an expert to it) get computer to do what you want faster and better.

There’s nothing wrong with trying it, if anything to find out whether you are into it or not in the first place. If you stick to it, chances are you are into it—just like you don’t become a carpetner simply because you want to have furniture: perhaps that’s one of your initial impulses, but you are also mentally compatible with the process and tick some other boxes.

On that note, what does it mean to be “into it” when it comes to programming? What is a “good” reason to become a software engineer? To me, it’s about the inclination to tinker, the eventual payoff of the dopamine rush from seeing puzzle pieces fall together, and the desire to own the process, do things by yourself even as you stand on the shoulders of giants.

Between these things, LLM-driven development strikes me as somewhat weak on tinkering (there may be some, but less, and much less precise and deterministic), and very weak on the desire to do things by yourself. Of course, that shouldn’t invalidate anyone’s personal experience.

Re: Our efforts, in part, define us

#194
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would guess a lot of intrinsic motivation is driven a lot by hormones and things like dopamine release when you do something that is really interesting or exciting. I play tennis and absolutely love it, I will never make a dime from doing it, and that's totally okay with me. Things that are built with money are often done so for scale. Successful things that are built with money often also have people who have some…

Thanks for helping to refine the thinking. I guess the other side of the coin that would be make the paradox interesting is that, in the long term , it has to seem that most of the stuff built with money (but without intrinsically motivated managers) lose out to the stuff built on pure passion. After discounting for a heap of survival bias.

Yeah I guess it really depends on what the measure for success is. As with all things, the answer is probably that products that work really well or are beloved are often a combination of money and passion. Unfortunately, once the product/company reaches a certain threshold, it seems to get bought out and there is only money left, and thus it becomes crap.

Re: Our efforts, in part, define us

#195
post #190

I used to be very into photography before Instagram and smartphones inundated the world with easy acceptably good photos. I was into DJing when that meant buying vinyl and mastering the difficult art of beatmatching by ear before CDJs made acquiring music trivial and automated beatmatching made mixing easy. I was a game developer during the time when casual smartphone games came and ate so much time and attention tha…

You could still do all or any or none for your own joy.

The point is that most of my joy for these activities comes not from the sitting there doing the thing, but from sharing the result with other people. The human connection is the point.

Re: Our efforts, in part, define us

#196
post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Demis Hassabis is estimating 5-10 years to AGI, and is about the only person who's opinion on this I think is worth listening to. His/their (DeepMind) plan is to retain a pretrained LLM but add something like search around it (cf AlphaGo or AlphaFold). He does say a couple of "Transformer-level" major breakthoughs may be needed to get there, and is still only 50% confident because of AGI-requirements he may have miss…

LLMs can not reason. We'd need a very very different technology than LLMs to get there. Not to mention new "models" are basically old model agents with access to some more tools. Training actual new models is currently not cost efficient. Also LLMs plateaued, idk how Mr. Hassabis got to that conclusion but I call bs. A "couple" major breakthroughs can take 1000s of years.

An LLM by itself can only regurgitate reasoning and/or reasoning steps from the training set, but I think that adding search on top of it gets you much closer. You're basically talking about the possibility of searching through all possible sequences of reasoning steps that an LLM could generate, and picking the sequence that actually works. DeepMind did it for AlphaGo and AlphaFold - I would not bet against them.

When Hassabis says it'll take 5000+ people 5-10 years and maybe a couple of Transformer-level breakthroughs, then he's clearly not talking about just adding search, and everyone realizes that things like continual/incremental learning are also required. I'd guess that Hassabis has a pretty good idea of what's missing from LLMs and needs to be added to get to AGI.

I really would not dismiss Hassabis. He is a lot smarter than you or I, and has won a Nobel Prize for his application of AI to science, as well as stunning the machine learning community with AlphaGo (most had thought beating Go would take another 10 years).

I think there are better long term approaches to super-human AI than building upon LLMs, but just as a cog is not a car, there is no reason it can't be a part of a car.

Re: Our efforts, in part, define us

#198
post #83

At some point -- sometimes early, often too late -- we realize we're going to die. Our time is finite. We have only so many days to do anything, let alone something that matters. Meaning is found in how and why we spend that time. When we're fooled into believing money matters more than time, we trade far too much of the latter for the former. Worse, we can mistake the monetary value of our time for its actual value,…

I know that one day I'm going to die, but it's just incredibly difficult to find meaning in life. The more I try the more I fail and the more depressed I get. I can't find meaning in work because toxic corporate environment is what pays most. I can't find meaning in hobbies because the mind just gets bored of them at some point, whether it's productive hobbies or doomscrolling. I can't find meaning in other people be…

Did you always feel this way? If not, how far can you trace it back? I don’t have any particular expertise in the subject, just curious and willing to listen if you’d like to talk it out.

Re: Our efforts, in part, define us

#199
post #83

At some point -- sometimes early, often too late -- we realize we're going to die. Our time is finite. We have only so many days to do anything, let alone something that matters. Meaning is found in how and why we spend that time. When we're fooled into believing money matters more than time, we trade far too much of the latter for the former. Worse, we can mistake the monetary value of our time for its actual value,…

I know that one day I'm going to die, but it's just incredibly difficult to find meaning in life. The more I try the more I fail and the more depressed I get. I can't find meaning in work because toxic corporate environment is what pays most. I can't find meaning in hobbies because the mind just gets bored of them at some point, whether it's productive hobbies or doomscrolling. I can't find meaning in other people be…

It is interesting to read what you wrote. Some points as a reaction:

"I know that one day I'm going to die". Yes, and most people ignore it and push this insight away. You know who deals with this topic over and over, that is Buddhism. You might be open to investigate what they have to say. The rest of what you wrote also reminds me of what Buddhism has to say.

"I'm completely clueless what I could potentially change while there's still time. And the worst part is, compared to most of humanity, I'm very privileged."

Again, as I understand it, the buddhists think our live as a human is like a very fine boat, very precious. The Buddhists think we needed many lives to get to this point in the Karma circle. Sounds stupid, but just think how long evolution took to create you, how many of your parents and anchestors had to have how much luck, and voila, here you are! Bummer, not? And you know, just for a short time, and then what for. So the Buddhists think, you have kind of an obligation and responsibility, to make good use of this precious boat. They say, yes, it is urgent, not much time left.

For you it is meaning (maybe). For other it is happiness. For others yet something else. What is wrong to spend a whole life about what would or could be meaningful, or maybe there is nothing, or maybe there does not need to be something, or maybe there is something. Nothing to loose, not. Btw, here is a story I heard from Ken McLeod online in a talk:

It goes like this, a sage is sitting on the side of the street, and Alexander the Great comes along with his army. He sees the sage, and asks him, what do you do the whole day? And the Sage says I am contemplating/meditating/do nothing (I forgot the detail), and Alexander shakes his head and says, what's the point of that. And then the sage asks Alexander, and what do you do the whole day? And Alexander says, I am building an empire! And the sage says, but what for?

So if you haven't found meaning for yourself, at least you are honest about it, and maybe you know already what you are looking for.

The above mentioned Ken McLeod has written a book about Buddhism, that puts it into the context of our Western culture. I once gave a copy to a Chinese, and she said after reading it, the concepts are easy to understand, but hard to remember. For me it is the other way around, very counter intuitive to understand. I gave the book someone else too, and when she saw the book she said, "ah, you are a searcher". Maybe I am, and so far I haven't found anything better or a contradiction in it. So that is my best lead so far, maybe you would find it worthwhile to look into this area too (the book is BTW "Wake Up To Your Life", there is also a web site with lot's of transcribed talks: https://unfetteredmind.org/).

(disclaimer: meditation can be also potentially harmfull, as e.g. "terrifying" thoughts could be even more amplified and leading to a real or deeper crisis.)

Anyway, good luck (to everybody).

Re: Our efforts, in part, define us

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know that one day I'm going to die, but it's just incredibly difficult to find meaning in life. The more I try the more I fail and the more depressed I get. I can't find meaning in work because toxic corporate environment is what pays most. I can't find meaning in hobbies because the mind just gets bored of them at some point, whether it's productive hobbies or doomscrolling. I can't find meaning in other people be…

It is interesting to read what you wrote. Some points as a reaction: "I know that one day I'm going to die". Yes, and most people ignore it and push this insight away. You know who deals with this topic over and over, that is Buddhism. You might be open to investigate what they have to say. The rest of what you wrote also reminds me of what Buddhism has to say. "I'm completely clueless what I could potentially change…

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