Aside from the better versions of what AI is visibly doing now (software dev, human language translation, video gen, etc), many of the AI bears are dismissing the potential impact of hooking AI up with automated experimentation so it's able to generate new types of data to train itself. The impact on drug discovery, material science, and other domains are likely to be very significant. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold is just a glimpse of this future.
Completely agreed. It won't even displace the people who were diligent in all of those crafts. It will supercharge them. And there will be novel combinations producing new services/products. It's going to be great.
"automated experimentation so it's able to generate new types of data to train itself"
AIs don't understand reality. This type of data generation would need a specific sort of validator function to work: we call this reality. That's what "experimentation" requires: reality.
We already have this right now, with the AI training ingesting AI crapgen, with StackOverflow posts no longer happening. That would seem to point to a degrading AI training set, not an improving one.
A number of startups are working in verifiable domains where they can provide realistic data. This is an interesting thread from one of those startups: https://x.com/khoomeik/status/1973056771515138175
Side note: I happened to look at the SO "Community activity" widget earlier this week and was quite surprised to see just how far engagement has fallen off. I don't have historical entries to reference but I'm _fairly certain_ there used to be hundreds of thousands of users (if not more) online during the middle of an average work day (I'm in America/New_York) and there are currently ... 16,785.
Not really. One is a conscious design choice for what you choose to build as your ethos or Magnum Opus or what have you. And the other is a consequence of dealing with hard techincal engineering and scientific matters. :)
Very nice. I'd suggest adding another deluxe bundle for non-Guitarists without the guitar theory. I'd pay extra for the ear training + the base package.
He's a professor at Caltech and did Nobel laureate-level work. He might be less productive than his prime and still be competitive with other professors, particularly since he brings deep understanding of the history of approaches in his field.
> I would much rather participate in a community of professionals who've organized themselves around sufficiently overlapping shared intents
I thoroughly enjoyed my involvement with early (US) Ruby and Rails folks from the first Rails conf to _why's unusual entertainment to Matz's calm and humble demeanor. People bounced ideas off each other and just enjoyed coding up interesting things. Dave Thomas and the Pragmatic Programmer group wrote what many of us used, not so much _why's guide which was still a fun read. I moderated a Ruby panel at the old Odeo HQ just before they pivoted. I didn't know the group gathering at that Ruby SF meeting would include not only Twitter but Github founders as well. At the time, tweets seemed pretty absurd to some of us but guess what happens when you try out ideas in a community that was into exploration?
I mean, it's usually preferable to be part of an ingroup than of its outgroup, sure. Otherwise, what value in the distinction? But the iron law applies here, too.
I wouldn't be so quick to claim Twitter, either, even among zero-interest-rate phenomena more generally. It might be easy to forget these days, but that's been harmful to society on net since long before Musk bought it.
I think you're missing my point. The early Ruby and Rails community I remember was a collection of very smart and explorative programmers who wanted to build cool stuff with this interesting language. People were trying out DSLs -- sure they could've used LISP -- but Ruby's metaprogramming was inviting and was a reason for the succinct Rails syntax which was a selling point compared to say Java's cumbersome approach.
The speed of trying stuff out (even if it wasn't super efficient) why startups used it. So it was a community of highly productive people sharing their love of building new things. That's my memory of that time period.
I'm not missing your point, but I don't see where it constitutes the counterargument that context and framing suggest you mean it to be.
What you're describing here is your perspective from within the small and insular group busily developing and advocating new technology, always focused on the next new thing that was cool and interesting and succinct and powerful. What I'm describing is my perspective from well outside that pale. Both can be true at the same time.
Then maybe you shouldn’t generalize your one viewpoint to say that early Ruby/Rails was not a worthy community for professionals or of use to people who practice jointly valued skills like entrepreneurship.
It’s also odd to see your long rant of whimsical vs professional when some of the most well-known companies were built with that community of so-called non-professionals. We have a difference in opinion on what constitutes “professional”.
The entire point I'm making is that, however well that community may have fulfilled those roles for people embedded in the social context of its ingroup, it did a lousy-to-failing job of the same outside that circle.
Agreed. His first position on lockdowns is a GBD talking point that is strongly opposed by Sweden vs Norway through mid-2021 (the end of major vaccine rollout) when they had different positions on lockdown but shared many other characteristics. Sweden had 10x more deaths during that time period, about 1200 extra deaths per million people. It also completely ignores the morbidity introduced by all the extra cases while focusing on non-COVID morbidity.
That vaccines never did anything to prevent transmission is a pretty ridiculous contention for the initial wave.
That vaccines posed more of a danger to most of the population compared to COVID-19 itself is also ridiculous. The US had the largest vaccination drive in its history in early 2021, peaking at 3.5 million jabs per day in April. Excess death dropped dramatically throughout the rollout and kept falling past mid-2021.
Of course it was tested for preventing infection. It was tested for that as well as efficacy against severe disease:
"Efficacy against laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 (with an onset of >= 7 days after receipt of the second dose) and against severe COVID-19.. was assessed among the participants 12 years of age or older."
https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa2110345
You seem to be conflating the vaccine having efficacy against infection and whether a vaccinated individual who still catches COVID-19 (since protection against infection is obviously not 100%) can transmit it. The efficacy against original COVID-19 strain infection was high (91.3% for the Pfizer vaccine).
Your first link speaks to the situation of a breakthrough infection being further transmitted. Since it wasn't clear HOW MUCH it curbed infection (under non-ideal/trial conditions), quarantines and caution were reasonable.
Here's a chart that showed the original test results across a number of vaccines. The efficacy vs infection dropped quite a bit with variants though the efficacy vs severe disease holds up better:
Do you know why it's "laboratory-confirmed"? Because they didn't test anyone until after symptoms showed.
Your confusion here is exactly what I'm talking about. The press release didn't conflate SARS-CoV-2 (the virus) with COVID-19 (the disease, as defined by a combination of symptoms and the virus). The line you quoted is measuring people who got sick, filtering out those who got sick due to a different virus, it's not measuring people who were infected. They didn't test all participants, so they couldn't make any claims against infection.
Edit:
> and whether a vaccinated individual who still catches COVID-19 (since protection against infection is obviously not 100%) can transmit it.
Getting infected does not mean you caught COVID-19, it means you were infected with SARS-CoV-2. You didn't get COVID-19 if you didn't get sick. Treating the two terms as the same thing is a media conflation people have just accepted, and an annoyance I have to explain every time this comes up because Pfizer was using the correct definitions in that press release.
Yes, you are correct that I should’ve said symptomatic infection (or COVID-19) because they were only trying to power the study for what they needed to clear EUA and not measuring ability to block transmission. The second paper I linked made the same mistake in its table header.
I’d love “informed voters” though from what I see of social media, it does anything but inform through its creation of cliques and upvoting based on popularity, not veracity or even reasoned argument.
One example is the switch to paid blue checkmarks on Twitter. Prior to the switch, there’d be some semblance (not great) of debate on comments. Now, all the musk fans and RW-oriented subscribers completely dominate so all you see in response to a Dem or “RINO” tweet is reflexive comments calling the OP lies, incorrect whataboutism, conspiracy theory of the day, etc, with more reasoned fact checking buried way down.
This is particularly pronounced with any tweet about the Trump indictment with little discussion of the substance of the indictment. The crackpot hypothesis/meme of Paul Pelosi’s attack being a gay love spat is another example. The participants didn’t even want to read the police report before moving on to another conspiracy theory about the report’s generation. Reasoned discussion would be great. It’s just not happening.
That's probably because for the years prior the same people were bashed into the ground for their beliefs. Now that it turns out it's more true than not, they're probably mad.
