Your idea of there being competition for human relationships is super fascinating. In my own life, there are fun/easy relationships, and there are those which push me to think deeply and differently, for any number of reasons.
In that vein, doesn’t “competition for relationships” necessarily breed egocentrism above all else? The winning relationship will give you what you want, but not what is necessarily true…
In that vein, you might also consider that the commenters you’re replying to may be worth engaging intellectually with more deeply purely based on the fact that they’re presenting divergent views that are uncomfortable.
Based on how we’ve designed AI to date and how you describe it in terms of optimizing for self enjoyment for each individual (and difficult to argue most will choose that for themselves), it’s hard to see a world where AI can push productive conflict the way humans can.
Then again, I might just be a flawed human who doesn’t fully understand the point you are trying to make and is extrapolating from my own biases, flaws, experiences, and the limited sample size I have of your point of view.
The divergent views need to be backed by real reasoning, otherwise it's a case of giving value to an opinion just because it's different, not because it has actual value. I'll give you an example, I'd very likely get the same kind of haughty, a bit hurt ego response if I proclaimed that I don't believe that reading books has much value anymore. Which is something I also believe btw. The average human would immediately respond in the very typical, trained societal way via: "well, I suggest you start going to the library and start reading more and engaging with the material because you are clearly not understanding the value of reading." Such a response has nearly no value and comes from a biased position with no attempt to understand my position. They assume that they are correct while spending no energy on thought about it. It's typical of humans and AI is so much superior here.
I actually also disagree that AI cannot push productive conflict, surprisingly the first thing that AI was able to do very well was insults. Of course insults are not productive conflict but it was something I noticed and then I gave a voiced AI (elevenlabs) a big prompt about how it should please be critical, truth seeking, always thinking about how I might be wrong and suddenly I was getting a lot of pushback and almost human-like investigation of the ideas I was proposing. It was still too shallow and unable to evolve but it was giving me some real pushback. You also have to remember that the typical human criticism is always drenched in ego, greed, various self benefit calculations etc. To actually get constructive and professionally informed criticism is really hard to get from humans too, it's not like AI is in a bad spot even now. You basically have to pay somebody to get good human criticism because it's tiring to a human, it's work and it takes expertise. People on average are simply not doing this or doing it well.
I'm merely trying to see this whole AI situation as objectively as I can and likewise I try to see the value of humans as objectively as possible. Obviously humans have value, but many seem to like overestimating the value of humans a lot. We've been at the top of the food chain for so long, we've been the strongest species on the planet for so long.. we can't even think of a mental model where humans aren't inherently valuable. Similar to how people cannot think of how books couldn't inherently be of value. Because we were immersed for centuries in a system where books were the best way to get the highest quality information. Now suddenly it changed and people cannot grasp it, it's a non grata thought - simply an unwelcome thought.
But how can you ever have the confidence that your other options will continue to be worse over a longer time frame?
Almost by definition, if you are in the state of mind to consider suicide, you are probably not accurately and impartially weighing the question proposed — and that means it’s likely mostly independent of individual circumstances and values.
(This is different to how I felt when I was younger, and coming from someone who has had several people close to me feel that way at one point in their lives, and now living incredibly positive lives a few years after the fact)
I can see some limited circumstances where it is carefully and openly considered over a longer period of time — like a terminal illness, or unbearable and unsolvable chronic pain — but those cases are the minority by far.
> Almost by definition, if you are in the state of mind to consider suicide, you are probably not accurately and impartially weighing the question proposed
I just don't believe that. How did you arrive at that conclusion?
In a two party system, wouldn't any party, no matter how good, always be the second-worst party? Ranking parties in a two party system doesn't really give you much insight into their absolute "goodness level".
Yes that's sort of what I'm saying. There'll always be plenty of reasons to blame people for voting either party, because two parties is just not enough to expect any facsimile of moral flawlessness. It's too few samples, especially with median-voter.
That’s interesting! When you are referring to density, are you referring to average density within the event horizon? Isn’t most (effectively all) matter concentrated in the singularity? Would love to hear you elaborate on this thought further.
We can't really talk about what's inside a black hole. From outside, it has a volume and a mass, and that's all there is to know.
We can say that any particle inside the horizon is inevitably headed to the center. (That's why we can't say any more: no other information can escape.) That does lead to a problem in that all of the mass would be concentrated at a single point at the center, whose density is division-by-zero.
But I wouldn't put too much weight on that. We already know from quantum mechanics that there isn't really any such thing as a "point". The math is still a problem, but the solution almost certainly lies in that direction.
I am having a hard time reconciling the claim in the post headline with common sense.
One frustrating aspect to the study is that it was hard to determine whether they are comparing like for like per unit time. They say the “operation of a gas stove” and “running a generator” — but for how long? It doesn’t seem like they tested each of these things under similar conditions in their lab but rather relied on other studies for that data. Figure 2(b) right does seem to measure this but they haven’t labeled the chart with clear labels and the description is a bit ambiguous.
After reading the study, I think the issue is that the claim it is making is slightly different than the one in the headline. They are measuring VOC and ~PM2.5 pollutants, but gas engines (and gas stoves presumably as well) produce other pollutants like CO, which is what kills you of you run a gas generator indoors.
It’s likely selective factors being measured but on some metric the top engines produce outputs cleaner than air going in so I don’t think it’s all that improbable
> CO, which is what kills you of you run a gas generator indoors.
That's the proximate cause.
> They are measuring VOC and ~PM2.5 pollutants
Which aren't good for your lungs long term.
> the claim in the post headline with common sense.
If you can smell it, it's because little particles of it are in the air, so your scented products necessarily put PM of some size into your home. In other words you are polluting your home merely to produce an olfactory sensation. The lack of common sense in the market for these products has always baffled me.
You’re missing my point entirely. VOCs and PM2.5 are bad for you no doubt, which means this study is showing that these non combustible scented candles are producing measurable levels of dangerous indoor air pollution — we’re all in agreement there. That’s not at all what I meant by common sense and my comment was in no way intended to be a defense of scented products.
But the headline says “Scented products cause indoor air pollution on par with car exhaust”. This is not supported by the study. PM2.5 and VOCs are not the only forms of indoor air pollution. Combustion produces other deleterious byproducts that negatively impact human health.
Run a car in your garage for a day and run scented candle and tell me which is worse for you. That is what I mean by common sense.
I'm supposing that when people say "pollution" they most readily mean the PM and the VOC.
I highly doubt that if you were in a room that had /only/ a high concentration of CO would you describe it as "polluted."
Additionally any gas which displaces oxygen is lethal in a confined space. Shall we expand "pollution" to include those as well? Is nitrogen a "pollutant?"
Well said. I'm not the first to say it, but: common sense ain't so common.
Here's some recommendations from our household, related to my previous battles with mold-related illness:
RabbitAir hepa-level air purifiers. Pricey, but worth it.
Dr. Bronner's soaps. We use them for showering, washing hands and dishes. No dishwasher here; our son has taken responsibility for it, in exchange for our fascilitating his chess-oriented lifestyle.
7th Generation laundry detergent. Unfortunately, we have to use a public laundramat, so we're getting some of the polluted stuff washing through the machines' detergent/softener resevoirs, but the poor have no choice.
We keep the windows closed during rush hour timeframes, and I keep watch on wind directions and know where the fresh air comes from.
We also try to get out into green space away from traffic and get a walk in or just let the teens knock the soccer ball around a bit.
As someone who has started a company that I grew to over 350 people, I’d like to understand how you’d propose solving a problem we faced without ever discussing race, gender or diversity in the context of hiring.
The issue I faced is that monoculture in teams becomes increasingly self reinforcing over time to the point that it can be difficult to reverse, and then becomes problematic for hiring and retaining the best talent.
Two concrete examples here: An engineering team that was overwhelmingly men, and where we had difficulty retaining extremely talented women engineers because despite everyone’s best efforts they didn’t feel comfortable on the team. And an identical problem on our finance team, except in this case we lost a very talented man who didn’t feel comfortable in a team exclusively made up of women. In many cases, as you continue to scale the company and team, it can become more difficult over time to attract the top talent who often even self select out of the hiring process.
Putting yourself in my shoes, how would you solve for this?
The idea that people aren't comfortable on a team that doesn't have other people matching their immutable sex/race characteristics, and that we should encourage this fragility is insane to me.
If this is the starting point, then wouldn't small, diverse teams be totally dysfunctional?
I have no sympathy for someone who can't work on a team of people of the opposite sex. In fact, in multiple jobs I've been the only man on an all female team. Not once did it occur to me that that could be a problem.
There will always be friction between people, not even just based on physical attributes.. If a company/team doesn't have a subgroup/clique I can get along with the only thing the company can offer me is more standalone tasks/pay. They could try shuffling me from team to team hoping I click with someone assuming they are big enough to have multiple doing what I applied for but it seems hard to motivate the hire to notify you of the issue instead of finding a new job on the side and quitting.
Edit: I don't think trying to get all types of people like you're collecting Pokemon is the fix since then you get more cliques/unofficial teams which may or may not get along with each other. The best you can do is probably offer applicants to remain for a bit after the interview just chilling in the office, talking to people so they can see if they like the people but in the end it just doesn't work out sometimes.
I’m not sure compelling & bountiful AI films and interest in older films are mutually exclusive.
A flood of high quality AI content might devalue it as it becomes too normal, familiar or expected. In a strange way, this might reinvigorate interest in back catalogs.
Also, some content is truly timeless regardless of its production quality. Our kids have the world’s content at their disposal and their favorite is currently Tom & Jerry episodes from the 1960s. Go figure.
A flood of content has actively devalued media even before AI.
In the era of "the cinema has fewer screens than an AI character has fingers", "big media" -- movies and TV -- were cultural touchstones. Everyone knows Luke Skywalker, the Brady Bunch, or the Jaws theme as baseline references, even if they've never seen the corresponding media.
Now, even before the AI boom, we've got so many choices that we're all in independent fandoms with less and less "common currency". If I made a joke at work about dressing up as a human-sized NEC PC-9801[0], what are the odds any of my co-workers will get it?
AI would accelerate that process. You'll have a thousand niche movies a week all sliding through the local cineplex. There might be fifteen people who ever pay to see "Dragon Locomotive Mechanic Samurai Warrior XVI: Return Of Admiral Becky", and will anyone want to talk with you about it after you leave the cinema?
I was initially very excited because this data is not nearly as it should be, especially historical forecasts. However, your pricing model seems to seriously limit the potential uses.
I would imagine that most people who have a serious interest in weather forecasting and would be target users of this service don’t think in terms of number of points but rather in lat/lon bounds, resolution, and number of hours & days for the predictions. I imagine they would also like to download a GRIB and not a CSV.
Your pricing for any large enough area to be useful presumably gets somewhat prohibitive, eg covering the North Pacific (useful for West Coast modeling) at 0.25 deg resolution might be ~300k data points per hour if I am doing my math right?
This is really great feedback. The truth is that the pricing model is being figured out, so if you have a specific type of use in mind maybe we could figure out what works best and it might become the actual default pricing model.
I tried to tie the pricing with the amount of processing that the API needs to do, which is closely related to the number of grib2 files that the API needs to download and process in order to create the response. And it doesn't change as much wether I extract 1 point or 1000 points. But I thought I had to draw the line somewhere or nobody would ever pay for anything because the freetier is enough.
But I might make it same price for maybe chunks of 5000 or more points.
From the line of business I come from the main usage is actually to extract scattered coordinates (think weather where specific assets are, like hotels or solar panels or wind farms) and not whole boundaries at full resolution but it makes a lot of sense that for other types of usage that is not the case.
It is definitely in the roadmap to be able to select based on lat/lon bounds and even shapes. Also to return data not as timeseries but the gridded data itself, either as grib2 or netCDF or parquet or a plain matrix of floats or png or even mp4 video.
Shoot me an email and I'll reach out when I can implement selecting based on bounds.
Out of the top of my head, re-slicing into grib files for the response is probably a big lift but some of the other formats like maybe netCDF or geoTIFF or just compressed array of floats might be a nice MVP.
In California specifically, IOUs like PG&E run off of a cost plus model on T&D and make no profit on generation (legacy of Enron) - surprise surprise T&D is growing by a CAGR of ~12% every year. Abhorrent set of incentives and the CPUC generally rubber stamps all of it.
> PG&E reports it made a $2.24 billion dollar profit last year — a 24% increase from the year before.
> In a call with investors, PG&E credits last year's rate increases with boosting its bottom line and said it expects to remain profitable through 2028.
> "Shareholders are pocketing money based on record rate increases," said Mark Toney, executive director of the non-profit TURN, the Utility Reform Network.
> Toney said PG&E is planning to ask state regulators to approve more rate hikes in the future.
> "PG&E has currently sitting on the desk of the California Public Utilities Commission, no less than 12 separate proposals for increases – twelve," he said.
In that vein, doesn’t “competition for relationships” necessarily breed egocentrism above all else? The winning relationship will give you what you want, but not what is necessarily true…
In that vein, you might also consider that the commenters you’re replying to may be worth engaging intellectually with more deeply purely based on the fact that they’re presenting divergent views that are uncomfortable.
Based on how we’ve designed AI to date and how you describe it in terms of optimizing for self enjoyment for each individual (and difficult to argue most will choose that for themselves), it’s hard to see a world where AI can push productive conflict the way humans can.
Then again, I might just be a flawed human who doesn’t fully understand the point you are trying to make and is extrapolating from my own biases, flaws, experiences, and the limited sample size I have of your point of view.