I just disagree with both postulates, and that's fine. The author can go on thinking that life needs to be something specific in order for it to be desirable. I myself like being productive. I also like eating fast food every once in a while. I think I'd be able to go on living (with some happiness to boot) if I never had another productive day or another McD's burger ever again.

Life can be its own end. If we manage to end death by aging, someday there will be children who have never known another world, and they'll marvel at all the death-centric thinking that permeated the societies of their past.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45774459

Points: 5

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Earlier this year, I got back on Duolingo because my partner and her brothers were trying it out, so it was more a social thing than anything. I was on it for about a month before we all agreed that the quality was too poor and the pace too slow for it to be worthwhile.

Duolingo is a case study in a good-enough-to-ship product that needed improvements and instead got dark-patterned into something much, much worse than it had been previously. I'm sure there are many superior platforms for language learning online today. I've gone back to books and movies. I'm currently enjoying watching Blaise le blasé (a Quebecois cartoon) and reading Chair de poule (Goosebumps in translation).

I think that with my experience, I've had to recognize how fragile some of the most important incentives are. Like the safety that underpins trust. To have trust, it needs to be safe for people to be wrong. That means I often have to listen respectfully to views that I find abhorrent, in order to get to the point that I can share my own thoughts fully.

The person I was talking to is someone who cares deeply for me (and whom I care for deeply too), someone I've known for almost my whole life. He wasn't having fun contradicting me. In fact, it was making him visibly uncomfortable to do so. He was engaging in the conversation in good faith. He just doesn't have the foundation to understand what he doesn't understand. I'm optimistic that even though he came away still disagreeing with me irrationally, there is a chance that by exposing him to a fuller explanation, he'll seek out more information for himself at some point in the future.

Take the Tylenol thing. You can explain to one of them the scientific method, what a survey of studies is, why correlation often appears when there is no causation, etc. I experienced this last week: at the end of my explanation, the person (a 45-year-old) replied that he "simply disagreed."

The coal, the climate, etc. are all the same. There is a broad sense that because they've been convinced of the value of expanded oil drilling through lines like "Drill baby drill," their current perspective on it is of the same merit as actual scientific research.

Because the providers will act as a single tunnel that all content passes through before reaching the end user, the tolls they collect will be large. So, I don't doubt that there will still be opportunities for content creators to earn money as answer engines siphon off more and more of the web's traffic, but expect those opportunities to be broadly low-paying, falling decidedly in the "side hustle" category.

AI providers will want to incentivize content creation. There will still be a glut of ready providers, and little reason for providers to make anything but small, nominal payments.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45252565

Points: 1

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44878163

Points: 6

# Comments: 1

My own experience makes me lean toward thinking that the truth is somewhere in the middle in this situation, and that simulators like these will be valuable. I've been experimenting a lot with computer use on my website Bingeclock, passing through different prompts along the lines of "make a movie marathon based on X." The newest agents are consistently impressive, while also being consistently imperfect in surprising and interesting ways.

Whether or not all the labs are already running this kind of thing internally for themselves, you would know better than I. But it's an idea that seems very useful nonetheless. Congratulations on the launch!

This attitude provides a clue as to 1) the ways we're using LLMs now that will soon seem absurd (an LLM should never make writing longer, only shorter) and 2) the ways LLMs will be used after the novelty wears off, like interpreting loosely specified requests into computable programs and distilling overly long writing to maximize relevance.