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What's stupid in my opinion is this idea that the LLM can't be used to write good code. Like you use it for throwaway code.

I use LLMs heavily, bit it doesn't diminish the quality of my code at all. If anything it raises the quality. Because I keep it on a tight leash and make sure every like of code is what I want it to be. If you let the thing run wild for hours and barely glance at the result sure you'll be producing slop. But there's nothing stopping you from being more involved using it as a tool rather than a slave, and getting great results that way.


I have 50 agents watching blurays for me 24/7

Tokendealers love that.

Some people manage to go through the whole education system without learning much, others go through exactly the same program and learn a ton, way more than required.

Guess which of those people say education is a waste of time.

Basic Education is about bringing the average up, make sure everyone can read and do basic math etc. Beyond that it's the same thing just at a higher level. Most people who graduate with a bachelors of computer science or similar won't be great programmers. That's why we call them great, they're better than the rest. Most people don't have greatness in them. No amount of education can change that. Those who do have what it takes will naturally succeed because that's who they are. They will study and do the required material and when they're done with that they will spend their free time learning even more because they want it. Some will do so even without a formal education but I don't think that's the case for most.

If you manage to go through 3-5+ years where your only job is to learn stuff, without learning stuff, then you have no one to blame but yourself.

And if you can do it without going to university, go ahead. I'm pretty sure the failure rate for that path is a lot higher but it's certainly an option.


Another reason it's irrelevant is you just don't need the accel. Flooring a Tesla is fun once or twice, but if you floor it every chance you get I don't want to be your passenger. It's neither comfortable nor safe.


Good for safety and smiles though


Welcome to literally all industry.


Hasn't happened yet.


Unless the pay is crap I'm sure lots of people would be interested.


I take both. 500-1000mg acetaminophen, 200-400mg ibuprofen. Usually helps for headaches which I get frequently. I only take them for the worst headaches though, so probably once every couple of weeks on average.


Yeah if I need to I take both also. In addition I be sure to have a caffeinated drink also as caffeine has been shown to both speed the absorption and boost the efficacy (5-10%) of paracetemol over a multi hour period. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17442681/


I was approached on the street by a girl working for a marketing company, wanting me to start a subscription for $20 a month to Save the Children which I think is a pretty well regarded charity. We hit it off and met up later and I asked her about the job. For each person who signs up, she would get about $60. So that's the first three months of my subscription in her pocket. Furthermore, her employer would fly them around the country, staying about 2 weeks in a city, living in hotels and expenses paid. This girl did not even have a home, she lived permanently in hotels paid for by her employer. And of course the employer needs some profit on top, so I'd estimate that's at least like 3-6 more months of my subscription going towards her employer/expenses.

I wonder how many more of these private companies exist to just siphon off these donation streams? The charity itself may be efficient, but how many private companies provide goods and services to them for a healthy profit?


There are many.

But it's reductive to the extreme to

1) group charities as "charities" when large "nonprofit / ngo" term is more suitable.

2) assume that wasteful _free_ money to a charity makes the charity less good. If a third party takes 90% of the money they raise and gives 10% to the charity, then that's free money for the charity. It's deceptive, and they are cutting a huge profit on the back of the good work the charity does, but that does not mean they are complicit, necessarily. The charity would have to sue that third party company to shut them down, and for what? Do reduce their own project budgets and also lose the money?


The third party is working with the charity(or ngo or whatever). The charity is essentially paying them for marketing, using a huge chunk of the money people think they're giving to charity. The charity is complicit in this deception, and the third party presents themselves as volunteers "Hello, I'm with Save the Children, we do bla bla bla look at this picture of a starving child would you be interested in helping us by giving money every month to give this starving child a better life?"

They don't tell you they're paid to be there. They don't tell you the first year of payments goes directly to a private company.

I looked up Save the Children in some charity index thing a while back and it was listed as something like 94% of the money they receive goes to the stated cause which I doubt includes these marketing costs. You could say this is still worth it because they increase the amount of money the charity receives even if a lot of it goes to the company. But it doesn't seem right to me, not when they deceive people this way.


The charities sign a contract with the third parties unfortunately - eg they have permission from the charity.

Here in Europe oxfam for example uses some of these private companies and they get the first year of donations and from the 2nd year it goes to oxfam itself.

Apparently the average person cancels donations after 2,5 years so for a zero marketing budget (for oxfam) they make 1.5 year x your donation.

When I first found out I was disgusted and some majors in countries in Europe have tried to ban such "paid charity workers"... (They tend to operate near train stations etc.


The world is an awful place, but just think of all the paid advertising companies that are _not_ making donations to charities of any kind.


The company isn't donating anything. They're doing the opposite, taking a significant chunk of people's donations.


Or - making sensational statements gets attention. A dangerous tool is necessarily a powerful tool, so that statement is pretty much exactly what you'd say if you wanted to generate hype, make people excited and curious about your mysterious product that you won't let them use.


Much like what Anthropic very recently did re: Mythos


Think about all the possible explanations carefully. Weight them based on the best information you have.

(I think the most likely explanation for Mythos is that it's asymmetrically a very big deal. Come to your own conclusions, but don't simply fall back on the "oh this fits the hype pattern" thought terminating cliché.)

Also be aware of what you want to see. If you want the world to fit your narrative, you're more likely construct explanations for that. (In my friend group at least, I feel like most fall prey to this, at least some of the time, including myself. These people are successful and intelligent by most measures.)

Then make a plan to become more disciplined about thinking clearly and probabilistically. Make it a system, not just something you do sometimes. I recommend the book "the Scout Mindset".

Concretely, if one hasn't spent a couple of quality hours really studying AI safety I think one is probably missing out. Dan Hendrycks has a great book.


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