As someone who researched AI pre-GPT to enhance human creativity and aid in creative workflows, it’s sad for me to see the direction it’s been marketed, but not surprised. I’m personally excited by the tech because I personally see a really positive place for it where the data usage is arguably justified, but we either need to break through the current applications of it which seems more aimed at stock prices and wow-factoring the public instead of using them for what they’re best at.

The whole exciting part of these was that it could convert unstructured inputs into natural language and structured outputs. Translation tasks (broad definition of translation), extracting key data points in unstructured data, language tasks. It’s outstanding for the NLP tasks we struggled with previously, and these tasks are highly transformative or any inputs, it purely relies on structural patterns. I think few people would argue NLP tasks are infringing on the copyright owner.

But I can at least see how moving the direction toward (particularly with MoE approaches) using Q&A data to support generating Q&A outputs, media data to support generating media outputs, using code data to support generating code, this moves toward the territory of affecting sales and using someone’s IP to compete against them. From a technical perspective, I understand how LLMs are not really copying, but the way they are marketed and tuned seems to be more and more intended to use people’s data to compete against them, which is dubious at best.

Not to fully argue against your point, but I do want to push back on the citations bit. Given the way an LLM is trained, it’s not really close to equivalent to me citing papers researched for a paper. That would be more akin to asking me to cite every piece of written or verbal media I’ve ever encountered as they all contributed in some small way to way that the words were formulated here.

Now, if specific data were injected into the prompt, or maybe if it was fine-tuned on a small subset of highly specific data, I would agree those should be cited as they are being accessed more verbatim. The whole “magic” of LLMs was that it needed to cross a threshold of data, combined with the attentional mechanism, and then the network was pretty suddenly able to maintain coherent sentences structure. It was only with loads of varied data from many different sources that this really emerged.

My guess was that they knew gaming was niche and were willing to invest less in this headset and more in spreading the widespread idea that “Spatial Computing” is the next paradigm for work.

I VR a decent amount, and I really do like it a lot for watching TV and YouTube, and am toying with using it a bit for work-from-home where the shift in environment is surprisingly helpful.

It’s just limited. Streaming apps aren’t very good, there’s no great source for 3D movies (which are great, when Bigscreen had them anyways), they’re still a bit too hot and heavy for long-term use, the game library isn’t very broad and there haven’t been many killer app games/products that distinct it from other modalities, and it’s going to need a critical amount of adoption to get used in remote meetings.

I really do think it’s huge for given a sense of remote presence, and I’d love to research how VR presence affects remote collaboration, but there are so many factors keeping it tough to buy into.

They did try, though, and I think they’re on the right track. Facial capture for remote presence and hybrid meetings, extending the monitors to give more privacy and flexibility to laptops, strong AR to reduce the need to take the headset off - but they’re first selling the idea, and then maybe there will be a break. I’ll admit the industry is moving much slower than I’d anticipated back in 2012 when I was starting VR research.

I think he’s basically saying that it’s racist to “artificially” integrate communities, because (I think he’s saying) if they need to be integrated, then that’s the same as saying that black folks are necessarily inferior. I don’t think he’s trying to say they’re inferior, but that laws forcing integration are based on that assumption. So he can be well educated and successful because he isn’t inherently inferior, therefore there is no need for forced integration.

… Which is such a weird stretch of naturalism in a direction I wasn’t ready for. Naturalist BS is usually, “X deserves fewer rights because they are naturally inferior”, whereas this is “We should ignore historical circumstances because X is not naturally inferior”.

Start a game of monopoly after three other players have already gone around the board 10 times and created lots of rules explicitly preventing you from playing how they did and see how much the argument of “well, to give you any kind of advantage here would just be stating you’re inferior, and we can’t do that.”

Man probably got angry at his golf handicap making him feel inferior and took things too far. Among other things.

I really want to see if worker owned cooperatives plus AI could do help democratize running companies (where appropriate). Not just LLMs, but a mix of techniques for different purposes (e.g., hierarchial task networks to help with operations and pipelining, LLM for assembling/disseminating information to workers).

It is real, you just have to have sufficient funds already to be able to pay someone else to do the active part of the income and make sure they are earning less than their worth so that you can pick up the excess. Most effective if there are many layers in between, so that the income becomes increasingly passive as you move up the chain, so that those under you have something to strive for, because you don’t want to be in charge of hiring all of those people, so you hire people to hire those people, each taking a cut of the value along the way.

But don’t worry, the American Dream™ is that, as long as you keep working about 10 layers deep in value cuts, eventually you might be able to get into layer 3 or 4 and get your kid into the job early so that they can get to layer 5 or 6, and maybe they’ll have enough money to get their kid to 6 or 7.

Canadians still feeling scorned after eliminating FPTP was a big election point, only to have it fizzle away when third parties clearly started garnering too much support (not that I think it was ever really in the cards regardless) and concerns about proportional representation being too supported by the other parties.

I get both sides of the argument here. I think we need to have this big reaction because companies have held so much power over employees for so long - I’ll avoid ranting about worker-owned cooperatives here - but the past few years I’ve surprised myself by moving into a bit of a “slippery slope” camp with these things. Not to say it shouldn’t happen, but that we need to be prepared for the follow-up.

Hopefully related example, in education: There were some really big push backs recently where I am over bad treatment of the students in highschool, all legit. The school board ignored it for a long time, it got bad, they finally took it seriously. Then they overcorrected and stopped believing teachers at all and started jumping straight to firing at almost any complaint. Then students started weaponizing complaints, and now teachers are getting fired for trying to enforce deadlines and for giving low marks because students are complaining about how deadlines, grades, and meeting grading requirements are detrimental to mental health and well-being, and now there are a bunch of these students from this board in my university classes failing hard and filing complaints about courses being too difficult and other things despite them having glowing reviews just a few years prior.

I guess what I’m getting at: I think it’s fair for someone to choose not to hire people like this because it’s possible that the people willing to stand up and make an important fuss over these things might not know where the line stands between a worthwhile complaint and a non-worthwhile one, and might make a company look badexternally even though it’s doing good internally, just not to someone new to the workforce’s expectations.

I also think it’s fair to go the opposite direction, because ultimately we need major change in the way companies/everything are structured that lead to these nasty layoffs and poor conditions and if someone does raise issues where there aren’t, hopefully we are prepared enough and in the right enough to take it seriously, but weather it and act in everyone’s best interests.

That too, and I can really efficiently manage the items going into bags given I backpack my groceries and want pretty specific configurations…

Totally agree. I forgot about those, as I’ve only encountered the weighing ones once in the past very long time and it was a mess, I can totally get hate if weighing ones are the only experience with them.

I almost exclusivity self-checkout for groceries, and it had drastically sped up my checkout time as most people in my area opt to use traditional checkout and the stores are still keeping lots of lanes open (just closing the express lanes). The last 3 times I’ve used a non-self checkout, each time I was double charged for items or didn’t have reduced prices applied and didn’t notice because I was bagging.

This isn’t a informed statement just a hot take, but maybe capitalism wouldn’t be so evil if everyone tipped into the growth end of Maslow’s before turning insulin into high-end consumer goods.