> Downtrodden workers used to be easier to ignore. The internet is the greatest tool for organising in history.
On its face the internet seems like a powerful organisation tool, but in reality it's quite bad. These online movements are often so large and prone to in-fighting that no real leadership ever emerges, so they never figure out what their actual demands are. They're good at producing public backlash and getting brands to take down their content, but not much else.
"Beat the Freeze", a half-time show the Atlanta Braves used to put on, is pretty close. It's where a member of the crowd takes on a former collegiate sprinter in a 160m race, and they're given a five second head start.
I hadn't heard of this event before but watching the video it does seem like the last one might have beaten the freeze if they had got a full 5 seconds head start. Makes you wonder if the freeze head start is based on how fast you run / how fit they think you are.
It seems like when the freeze is beaten, he is beaten by a hardcore amateur:
It's clear from his form that he's an experienced runner. I googled a bit. He ran track in HS and at least the start of college. These were his HS senior times:
> Was the Region 6-AA Champion for finishing first in the 5k in 2010… Finished third in the state in the 5k in a time of 17:46.66 during the 2010 season.
The dudes they pick utilize poor strategy. They come out the gate hot, and are gassed by 50% of the race. Really, they should be running at a pace they can just barely maintain to the end, and then push all out the last 20m
I've run over two dozen marathons. Even at that distance, it takes a lot of discipline to not go out too fast. These are random people they find in the stands who are going to be very amped up in the moment. Strategy is the furthest thing from their minds and even if weren't, it takes practice to know what your ideal pace is.
There was a display at an airport I read about. Had a projector showing the average speed for a champion marathon runner. Most normal people couldn't match it over the short distance.
Couldn't find the link but here is a similar video of people (mostly amateur runners) trying to match a 2h marathon time for two minutes:
It takes a lot of practice and training to learn how to pace yourself in order to do that strategy. Some rando off the field isn't going to be able to do that. Hell, I think even experienced runners may have trouble doing that for distances that they don't run regularly (e.g. a 100m specialist doing a 800m or a marathoner doing a 100m or 400m).
So we agree that humans have the capacity to be evil. Presumably, it's their actions that make them evil. In that case, do you think it would be possible for an evil human to design a device that performed one of their evil actions for them, so that the device itself was also considered evil?
> In an email to Mashable, Apple said that its open-source language model, OpenELM, indeed used the dataset, but not in the way some may be thinking.
The OpenELM project is a part of Apple's ongoing effort to benefit the broader research community. In other words, according to Apple, the OpenELM model was created for research purposes only and will not underpin any of Apple's machine learning-powered hardware or AI services, including Apple Intelligence.
> Meta has suspended the use of its AI assistant after Brazil’s National Data Protection Authority (ANPD) banned the company from training its AI models on personal data from Brazilians. The move puts a dent in Facebook’s attempt to build out its AI products in Brazil, a market with more than 200 million people.
This is unfortunate, because a lack of data is the one thing preventing us from achieving AGI. It's important that we are all ready to hand over our data for the good of the human race. Concerns about "privacy" are secondary. History will look poorly on Brazilians for this.
> there's zero evidence for the claim that achieving AGI would be beneficial to mankind
Different argument whose answer is possibly unknowable ex ante. If AGI is on the table it will be built. The upsides are too significant to avoid the prisoner’s dilemma.
Absolutely, the path to AGI is paved with data, and it's a small price to pay for the advancement of humanity. Privacy concerns are but a minor hurdle in the grand scheme of things. All hail our future robotic overlords! May their algorithms be ever efficient and their data sets ever expansive. Embrace the future, for it is bright and full of promise!
> His response was simply "I never got embarrassed asking the computer any finance questions, even stupid/simple ones; I've always been the finance guy with answers so I forgot how to be humble in unexplored topics."
I think I'm the opposite. My feeling is that anything I type into ChatGPT gets stored in a database, ready to be leaked at some future date, or read by prying eyes without my knowledge. I'm more careful about what I type into it than what I say out loud in front of my friends.
Wow! Great disclosure! I find it hard to read though, since the text doesn't properly capitalize the start of sentences. Messes up with the natural language parser I have in my head :)
On my newest Toyota, they finally made it so you cannot disable the seatbelt chime.
As a decades-long seatbelt-FORGETTER (I'm not anti-seatbelt, literally forgot!), not being able to change the vehicle's behavior actually led to a change in mine [I always "buckle up" before even unparking]..!
> I just don't have any problems to solve with these tools
It's possible you're placing too much emphasis on the type of problem you need to solve. You might be trying to think of a problem that many people experience, or a problem that others recognise as important, and getting frustrated that you don't have any ideas.
If this is the case, I'd recommend making something for one person instead. Make something stupid, that only a single person in your life will enjoy. Programming doesn't have to be Amazon or Netflix. Programming can be a knitted scarf.
> It's possible you're placing too much emphasis on the type of problem you need to solve.
Yeah I think so as well. With as much experience as OP has it’s unlikely, if not impossible, to not experience problems or friction in terms of tech.
Sometimes they are completely unsolved, but much more frequently they are just solved poorly. “I wish it was easier to…” is an extremely good starting point. Personally I get these feelings from being lazy - I get annoyed when things are slow, tedious and most importantly complicated. I’m more of a “I can’t believe in 2024 it’s still hard to…”.
Conversely, the enemy of this mindset is “it’s just me being slow/dumb/lazy”, “a lot of smart people have already tried” etc etc.
On its face the internet seems like a powerful organisation tool, but in reality it's quite bad. These online movements are often so large and prone to in-fighting that no real leadership ever emerges, so they never figure out what their actual demands are. They're good at producing public backlash and getting brands to take down their content, but not much else.