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One core assertion seems less true every day:

> The intelligence (knowing what a "risk" actually means) still requires human governance.

Less and less. Why do you trust a human who’s considered 5000 assessments to better understand “risks” and process the next 50 better than the LLM who has internalized untold millions of assessments?


Why can’t they make a custom menu of my most used buttons? That would be real user customization, not a reel of my top listened songs. Or better still, let me make my own Player layout.

Today, I find the UI downgrade buries Offline, Playback, Settings, One more layer deeper, behind a circle that has the first letter of my username.


The entire argument follows from a single incredible, unsubstantiated assumption, that “creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists.”


I think this is substantiated, we absolutely desire our needs. I can't think of one single desire that does not demand satisfaction. Perhaps I am not understanding something.


It is not substantiated that all desires arise from an associated, achievable need.

I need food so I desire food and I eat to satisfy it.

I desire to have perfect love and relationships, but can’t seem to achieve it.

But if I cannot find a perfect slice of pizza, g-d exists and another world follows this one where the pizza is truly satisfying?

Believe whatever you like, but realize Faith is required for this to follow that. Logic won’t do it for you alone.


I see, the objection is specifically levelled at the mystic side of what he's saying. That's fair.


In the case that Lewis is alluding to (an unsatisfied yearning for spiritual fulfillment), the argument is tautological. If God is real in the way he imagines it, the presence of this spiritual yearning is a kind of evidence. If God is not real in the way he imagines, the presence of this spiritual yearning is evidence that the assertion is false.


Also: spiritual yearning can in fact be satisfied by spiritual practices. So the conclusion doesn't follow even if you accept his premise.


The context is that CS Lewis was a devout christian and evangelist, and is referring to spiritual desire.

I read "The Great Divorce", and interpreted it as metaphorical, in the "kingdom of heaven on earth" way. How honest work, faith, and openness are uplifting, vs getting trapped in psychological prisons.

But this quote refers to a literal afterlife. I don't know what to make of that.


Being attributed to CS Lewis I’d hope it’s more metaphorical than theoretical.


As an atheist, I'm mostly glad I never met the man. I think that if I had, remaining an atheist might be more difficult than it is. Even reading his works seems risky at times.

Not that his arguments are particularly rational, mind you. He was just that damned good.


Funny: as an atheist, I have no a-priori goal to remain an atheist. In fact I would love it if someone could come along and convince me that their religion was correct. Imagine how comforting that would be: the surety of an afterlife! Alas, it is not to be, because even written in C.S. Lewis's flowery language, it's all obviously bullshit. Reading Tolkein may make me wish I lived in Rivendell but it's never going to convince me to worship Eru Illuvatar.


I was a former atheist for over 10 years, and I also had a strong desire for Christianity to be true. I would humbly suggest that you simply ask God to give you the gift of faith. You might be surprised.


It does actually sound like you do have this a-priori goal. Additionally, it seems that you might have bad taste in literature.


> It does actually sound like you do have this a-priori goal

I don't wake up in the morning and say to myself "I sure hope I continue to believe that the Earth is round by the end of the day!" That's crazy: I have no vested interest in that belief. I believe the Earth is round because the evidence is overwhelming and the contra-evidence is unconvincing. I'm not worried that someone is going to come along and erroneously convince me the world is actually flat -- I trust my own judgement more than that. Unless, of course, the world actually is flat, in which case I'd want someone to convince me of it! It's the truth I have a vested interest in, whatever that truth actually is.

> Additionally, it seems that you might have bad taste in literature

It sounds like it's important to you that you make sure to not like mainstream things, so that you can look down on people who do. I encourage you to get over this. The more things you let yourself enjoy, the more fun you have in life. And you'll like yourself more too, knowing you're not being as much of a condescending prick. Trust me; I've been there.


If the top ten takeaways are ok using incredibly vaporous, non-sensical phrasing why would I dig any deeper?

“the number of AI incidents and controversies has increased 26 times since 2012”

Ok but how many “incidents,” also detectably fake deepfakes and call-monitoring inmates are top examples of misuse? Naive.

“BLOOM’s training run emitted 25 times more carbon than a single air traveler on a one-way trip from New York to San Francisco”

What does this mean? That sounds like a very small amount to me but the conclusion is that’s a huge environmental impact. No, I read, for the carbon cost of decommissioning one old jet, we can have a new LLM.


Not decommissioning one jet: just one fraction of a percent of one jet ride.

Honestly seems like a good tradeoff.


The utility of effective models (which can be used many times over) likely exceeds the utility of virtually any person travelling anywhere one time. That seems like a poorly thought statistic to mention. It makes me wonder if it’s misunderstood or misinterpreted.


Total passengers’ CO2/journey (KG) 292.50 according to https://applications.icao.int/icec/Home/Index

This is roughly a 400 mile car trip, or about a year of breathing.


Those are 100% not comparable metrics.

What you breathe out is mostly what you eat, and most of the carbon there is part of a continuous carbon cycle. A part of it comes from fossil fuels, mainly transport and energy to power the Haber Bosch (the source of most of (organic) hydrogen in your body).

LLM training process consumes practically only energy. As such, it could very easily be replaced by carbon-neutral sources (nuclear, solar).

All of the CO2 of a airplane flight comes from fossil fuels, and there is not viable technology to replace that yet.


not comparable from a climate change perspective, but helps put perspective into just how much CO2 that is. I disagree with you that it's unhelpful, context is always helpful.


> BLOOM’s training run emitted 25 times more carbon than a single air traveler on a one-way trip from New York to San Francisco

Less than the cost to send the SF Giants to play the NY Yankees then?

I wonder how many SF to NY carbon units Stanford expends each year to send their various sports teams out to do important work?

This game is fun!


I agree! So many more possibilities too, like for example rather than simply downloading and locally storing the movie Predator once I am forced to hunt down a provider who currently has it and stream it directly each time I want to watch it. Between google, the streaming provider, the cost of all the extra networking equipment required to support this data, and the extra cost on end-user devices themselves I wonder what the carbon cost of copyright is?


They are using it as an example but, if you take all of the training across all organizations it represents a huge carbon footprint due to training. Also, inference isn't exactly free either . Open sourcing your weights and putting them downloadable would get rid of that but on the other hand you have trade secrets that would make you not want to release your weights so inevitable another group will reproduce your weights and use more electricity.


I wonder how the carbon footprint of training every single large language model that exists today compares to the carbon footprint of a single day of global air traffic.


That question is unanswerable so its weird to wonder about it...


Is it? I wonder about unanswerable questions all the time.


What's answerable isn't even clear in advance most of the time, for many scientific, philosophical, and mathematical questions! Questions that are not obviously answerable often turn out to be really productive, important, or interesting, too.


I bet it's a smaller carbon footprint than dogecoin.


If any Spotify devs are here, please let me explore and add songs, artists and albums to my library without “hearting” it.

I often just want to follow up later by “adding to my library,” and it feels weird to “LOVE” it before ever hearing it. I really feel pain when I hear something terrible that I’ve already “liked” and consider the impacts to my algorithm.

Please distinguish between “like” and “save.”

A simple “plus sign” or really any other symbol that signifies “adding to a collection” without “liking” connotations (stars are out too).


I'm confused. I thought I missed something in the article. Why are we talking about Spotify in this thread? I'm all for your suggestions, I'm just confused how we got here. Haha. What did I miss?


This post is about how someone implemented the thing the author wrote about. So this comment-author hopes someone at Spotify will implement the thing he is now writing about in his comment.


While we have Spotify's ear: why is the default behavior to clear my queue if I play another song? It's especially an issue on mobile, where viewing a playlist or album means that an errant tap almost anywhere on the screen undoes all of my queueing so far. Just a toast with an 'Undo' button whenever the queue is erased would be plenty.


They used to have a separate star button in addition to the like button that was exactly that, but they took it out years ago. It would also add the song to a separate list in your library called "starred songs".

When they axed the feature, all the started songs got automatically added to a new playlist called "Star" that I still use today as a workaround, I just add new songs I enjoyed to it to keep track of them, and just throw it on shuffle when I'm not in the mood for anything specific.


What's wrong with a playlist: Saved for later?


Now that you opened this forum for Spotify feedback: If I do "like/heart" a few songs and then go to the Radio based on one of them, please don't show the songs I already liked in that Radio. I mean, I already "liked/saved" them, why are they appearing in my discovery phase?


I'd like to have a different tiny change in the "Song Radio" feature: if you start playing that playlist, skip the song it's based on if it was recently played or is currently playing. It's mildly annoying when you switch to that feature after stumbling across an interesting track and the first thing you hear is the same track again.


That's one of their best features!! I'm using discovery bcs I want to listen to tracks similar to the one i use as a basis. If they mix some of my liked tracks in there that are similar too (which they usually are), that makes it even more enjoyable. Idk about you, but I use Spotify to listen to good music.


Disagree on that - Radio is not just for discovery but also for easy random playlist creation.


Valid. One way around it would be to create a "Follow Up" or "In The Queue" playlist that you add it to. Obviously not as easy as just a + button though.


You can swipe songs to the side to add them as next up


I like how Instagram has solved this. You can like a post but you can also save it for later viewing or showing to someone else.

Spotify should totally have a save to library function but also a heart function that trains their personalized mixes for me. I’ve just stopped looking at my library for my music catalog. Every album I like goes into a “favorite albums” folder. It shooldn’t have to be this way.


And I would wish so much for a button "play next", that makes a song play directly after the current song (and then proceed with whatever was scheduled before).

I often browse spotify while listening. If I find something I haven't heard for a long time, I often want to directly listen to it, but not cut of the current track.


Another thing that bothers me, in Spotify and pretty much everything else: you can't add playlists to other playlists. Like union directories. The most important thing is that it's a link, so every list updates whenever I update the included one.

If there's a program with this type of functionality, lmk.


I don't really understand how that is useful but if you need to do it manually you can just shift click all the songs and add them all to a playlist on the desktop app


Yeah, I get why it wouldn't be. I just have a peculiar way to organize my music.

I know I can do that, it just doesn't sync when I change another list, which breaks everything.


You can use the Spotify Smart Playlists feature to do this. I used to do something similar before giving up. It's clunky, but it works. You basically set it to pull all new songs from the feeder playlists into the accumulation playlists, every night.


I can't find an official feature, you mean this?

http://smarterplaylists.playlistmachinery.com/


Oof! They used to have this for Songs, then they removed the feature, and I lost the major way I used Spotify. I used it to make sure I could listen to music offline while traveling and it was an infuriating few flights before I could download everything again.


This kinda sounds like a use case for a playlist to me.


I think their idea is that you don't have/shouldn't want a personal library because everything on Spotify is your library.


If there is a feature I want to see on Spotify is a easier way to see my friends playlists.


I'd be happy with just being able to consistently access my own playlists and currently playing queue on Android. I swear it's a coin flip whether the button appears or not.


Qualitative data can be valuable data, even in this quantitative age.


Tough choice between Soap and hot takes on HN :P

However, near-instant access to the entirety of humanities’ collective information vs a dishwasher? I’m fine washing dishes by hand.

Mapping a novel virus genome and formulating an RNA-based vaccine in mere weeks vs “look how many dams and bridges we can build”?

You know what happens when you compound incremental progress? Huge advancements.

Progress is real, and it’s only getting faster as exponential tech from the past few decades is just now hitting “whole numbers” and converging.

Of course, it’s not fundamentally inevitable, but the future is decided by the possible-ists.

Please take the time to read the latest works by Diamandis and Kotler, Kevin Kelly, Steven Pinker, and Harari.

I cannot imagine your perspective will still be the same after so much history, theory, and real-world examples beyond the point by point counters you’re receiving as replies.


For professional development, I highly suggest a Kolbe A index assessment to better identify your natural energies for “doing things” (working style) and learn to harness those rather than force them to comply with external notions of “how it should be done.” I have considered mine daily for 7 years.

It seems you are actively exploring the type of job you direct your attention towards and (hopefully) derive fulfillment from, which is way more tractable than your conative personality.

Potentially more helpful categories than “problem solver” and “indie/ maker,” which are certainly not exclusive, might be these job types: producing, improving, building, or thinking (source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20130502173937-15454-there-ar...).

Good luck!


The article was a good read, thank you for sharing. In the Wealth Dynamics profiling, I am a Mechanic (really close to be a Creator), so that would mean that I am more of an Improver, but my process of improving is through the process of Thinker and Builder. Basically, taking what already exist to create something that would be better down the road. Would that make sense?


Yes, these are also not exclusive and many jobs evolve, of course. If you think up something people want and build it, you might then spend time improving it. Or you might let others do that while you go back and build something new again.

You get to choose what you do. And as another commenter suggested you get to choose your values too.

Use your time.


When I owned a Saab I loved it. The folks over at Taliaferro made it easy to own and between them and another local mechanic, I never had repair issues. AFAIK, they are still doing high-performance tuning with custom-parts manufacturing. https://www.genuinesaab.com/


You still get media queries.

You get 1 class apply to many nodes relationship.

You only write the css once more (or never again if you use tailwind or tachyons) and reuse it many times.

More thoughtful reply to similar question from Adam Morse of tachyons: https://github.com/tachyons-css/tachyons/issues/12#issuecomm...


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