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I'm OK being left behind, thanks

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Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#361

Post by topaz0 »

redm wrote: post #3

I agree with the sentiment of this article. Sadly, I'm still disagreeing while crypto kiddies are driving past me in lambo's. If its the future of money, yes we'll get there eventually, but like every technology shift, there's a lot of money to be made in the transition, not after. * * I sold all crypto a few years ago and I'm a happier person :D

Others are pointing out that many also lost money, but I think we can say something even stronger, which is that the people that got rich only did so by taking the money of the people who lost money on it. If it's the future of money, you'll be able to buy in at a stable valuation, neither winning nor losing in the transition -- that's kind of a key property of money.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#362

Post by irusensei »

jghn wrote: post #104
wolframhempel wrote: post #50

There's value in being early - in the right thing. - If you'd invested in Bitcoin in 2016, you'd have made a 200x return - If you'd specialized in neural networks before the transformer paper, you'd be one of the most sought-after specialists right now - If you'd started making mobile games when the iPhone was released, you could have built the first Candy Crush Of course, you could just as well have - become an Acti…

A friend told me about bitcoin in early 2010, back when the coins were effectively free. I laughed at the idea and called it stupid. I still think it's stupid, but I'd be a whole lot richer if I went along with it at the time!

IMO the only way you'd be rich with bitcoin would be if you forget about your coins and reminded of it years later or if you were a hardcore "fix the money fix the world hodl" believer.

Otherwise you would most likely have sold during one of huge crashes or values, attempted trade and lost it all, invested into the new shitcoin NFT or whatever or just got hacked along the way.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#363

Post by davebren »

adriancooney wrote: post #81
nehal3m wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your analogy that calculator would only produce a correct answer 80% of the time, and plausible looking but incorrect ones the other 20%. If that were the case I’d hire pen guy.

What's the error rate of the pen guy? Also, if your AI has a 20% error rate, you're not holding it right. You need to spend more time keeping it on rails - unit tests, integration tests, e2e tests, local dev + browser use, preview deployments, staging environments, phased rollouts, AI PR reviews, rolling releases. The error rate will be much closer to 0%.

How does a phased rollout improve LLM error rates exactly?

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#364

Post by mmmore »

One hidden premise of this is "AI tools are not useful now, even if they might be in the future." For example:

> Few are useful to me as they are now.

Except current AI tools are extremely useful and I think you're missing something if you don't see that. This is one of the main differences between LLMs and cryptocurrency; cryptocurrencies were the "next big thing", always promising more utility down the road. Whereas LLMs are already extremely useful; I'm using them to prototype software faster, Terrance Tao is using them to formalize proofs faster, my mom's using them to do administrative work faster.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#365

Post by [deleted] »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #236
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost everyone chasing those returns would be better off investing in index funds.

Index funds give you something like the expected value over a huge class of possible investments. What you aim for if you want to invest early is rather a probability distribution of - get rich with a small (but nevertheless realistic) probability p - get something between little, nothing, and loosing a little bit with probability 1-p This is a very different offering than the profit probability distribution that ind…

[deleted]

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#366

Post by erikerikson »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #209
wolframhempel wrote: post #50

There's value in being early - in the right thing. - If you'd invested in Bitcoin in 2016, you'd have made a 200x return - If you'd specialized in neural networks before the transformer paper, you'd be one of the most sought-after specialists right now - If you'd started making mobile games when the iPhone was released, you could have built the first Candy Crush Of course, you could just as well have - become an Acti…

> - If you'd specialized in neural networks before the transformer paper, you'd be one of the most sought-after specialists right now > - If you'd started making mobile games when the iPhone was released, you could have built the first Candy Crush I disagree: Concerning the first point: how neural networks are today is very different from how they were in former days. So, the knowledge of neural networks from the pas…

I can confirm your response to the point you can first

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#367

Post by sd9 »

coldpie wrote: post #310
sd9 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, maybe empathise was the wrong word. I certainly empathise with the feelings, I just struggle to see how people cannot use it to get more done. I'm also daydreaming about other careers instead of doing something useful.

> I just struggle to see how people cannot use it to get more done. To be blunt about it, there's a decent chance I'll be quitting this job later this year, largely because of the AI push. I just hate these tools and I do not want to work this way. Losing an employee is a pretty big cost to the company. I guess the AI stuff is probably worth it to them, but there's a downside to it, too.

Yeah I agree with you, and I think a lot of people feel the same. It's totally different now and it's not what I signed up for. Maybe I'll get used to it, idk.

I hope everything works out well for you.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#368

Post by bitwize »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #241
locknitpicker wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Feels like a false equivalency. It's clearly a textbook example of survivorship bias. In the 90s the same argument was directed at this new thing called the internet, and those who placed a bet on it being a fad ended up being forgotten by history. It's rather obvious that this AI thing is a transformative event in world history, perhaps more critical than the advent of the internet. Take a look at traffic to estab…

Internet is something new. By definition llm coding isn’t doing anything you couldn’t have done already. Once the agents aren’t writing a human syntax based language but are spitting out opaque functions in binary machine code, then they are doing something new and compelling imo because there are real performance gains with that.

No, this is wrong. AI has drastically shortened the time and effort between idea and implementation. The upshot being, that not only do you get things done faster, but things you wouldn't otherwise countenance doing are now within reach.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#369

Post by 1PlayerOne »

al_borland wrote: post #357

I prefer to move slower. I've accepted that I'm not going to create some unicorn startup (that was never an aspiration). As an employee at a company, my goal is to focus my time learning the things that are relevant to my job and that will be useful for 10 years, not 10 weeks. Chasing every new tech will lead to burnout and disillusionment at some point. AI probably isn't going away in the same way NFTs largely did,…

Same situation here, Copilot the only available option. But I get the feeling of things moving ahead...

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#370

Post by mahemm »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #352
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What you aim for if you want to invest early Sure. I’m saying someone pursuing that portfolio will probably end up underperforming an index. Most new early-stage VCs do. > get something between little, nothing, and loosing a little Broadly speaking, when your investment outcomes don’t differentiate between anything and zero, you’re mostly going to get zero.

> I’m saying someone pursuing that portfolio will probably end up underperforming an index. This holds if you consider "underperforming" to be a comparison of expected values. On the other hand, if you consider "probability of getting a really huge payoff" to be the measure by which the investments are compared, the index fund is the one that looses in the comparison.

Would you be comfortable using this same logic to invest most of your net worth in lottery tickets/betting on black in a casino? If not, I'd be curious to hear what is different in that for you.
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