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>Blockchain... NFTs >The problem is, the same dudes who were pumped for all of that bollocks now won't stop wanging on about Artificial Intelligence.

I was firmly in the camp that blockchain was not a viable solution to any problem, and that NFTs sound stupid. I think AI is much different than that list. So, there goes your argument?


> I was firmly in the camp that blockchain was not a viable solution to any problem, and that NFTs sound stupid. I think AI is much different than that list. So, there goes your argument?

Squares are rectangles. The existence of rectangles that aren't squares doesn't negate that.


Yeah that comparison doesn't pass the smell test. Blockchain/crypto were purely financial instruments and for better or worse, a new financial instrument is very different than a new tech innovation; tbh there was a thin veneer of tech when it comes to crypto/blockchain, but the magic was because of the money, not because of the tech.

AI is different because the magic clearly is because of the tech. The fact that we get this emergent behavior out of (what essentially amounts to) polynomial fitting is pretty surprising even for the most skeptical of critics.


You need to re-evaluate your logic here; if you were a Blockchain / NFT booster who doesn't believe AI is different you could argue you've disproved their argument. You have not.


I think the author is saying that a specific crowd, which happened to be very vocal and excited about web3 and NFTs, is also very vocal and excited about AI. In my personal experience they are right, a lot of the hustler types around me who were trying to get everyone to "invest" in digital land are now doomposting about AI.

It's not a very legible situation for people outside of the profession, and a lot of them believe it's just another grift that will blow up in a few years.


Except that at the time, every company was announcing that they are "doing Blockchain" the same way that they are now "doing AI"

NFTs was always stupid; blockchain (not crypto) has plenty of real world applicability


I hear your pushback, but that I think that's his point:

Even seasoned coders using plan mode are funneled towards "get the code out" when experience shows that the final code is a tiny part of the overall picture.

The entire experience should be reorganized that the code is almost the afterthought, and the requirements, specs, edge cases, tests, etc are the primary part.


This is always been the businessman's dream to write requirements and then coding becomes a mindless work but requirements and specs can never cover every small detail. Code itself is the spec but Business people just dont wanna write it. if you handle all edge cases and limitation in the spec, and then do the same in the code, you are just writing code twice.

This also completely ignores the fact that PMs and Business teams are generating specs by AI too, so its slop covered by more slop and has no actual specific details until you reach the code level.


would the ideal scenario be to get business and engineering writing specs together?


My theory is that even if the models are frozen here, we'll still spend a decade building out all the tooling, connections, skills, etc and getting it into each industry. There's so much _around_ the models that we're still working on too.


Agree completely. It's already been like this for 1-2 years even. Things are finally starting to get baked in but its still early. For example, AI summaries of product reviews, gemini youtube video summaries, etc..

Its hard to quantify what sort of value those examples generate (youtube and amazon were already massively popular). Personally I find it very useful, but it's still hard to quantify. It's not exactly automating a whole class of jobs, although there are several youtube transcription services that this may make obsoete.


I definitely didn't expect one-shot to mean "let it run itself in an indefinite loop"


Surely there's AI usage that's not morally reprehensible.

Models that are trained only on public domain material. For value add usage, not simply marketing or gamification gimmicks...


How many models are only trained on legal[0] data? Adobe's Firefly model is one commercial model I can think of.

[0] I think the data can be licensed, and not just public domain; e.g. if the creators are suitably compensated for their data to be ingested


> How many models are only trained on legal[0] data?

None, since 'legal' for AI training is not yet defined, but Olma is trained on the Dolma 3 dataset, which is

1. Common crawl

2. Github

3. Wikipedia, Wikibooks

4. Reddit (pre-2023)

5. Semantic Scholar

6. Project Gutenberg

* https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.00159


Nice, I hadn't heard of this. For convenience, here are HuggingFace models trained on Olma:

https://huggingface.co/datasets/allenai/dolma

https://huggingface.co/models?dataset=dataset:allenai/dolma


Of course my first thought was: Let's use this as a tool for AI searches (when I don't need recent news).


Never seen that one, thanks! Alt text: "Our brains have just one scale, and we resize our experiences to fit."

(And obligatory https://xkcd.com/1053/)


Wow, looks like a tremendous commitment and depth of knowledge went into this one-man project. I couldn't even read the whole write up, I had to skim part of it. I'm super impressed.


I know tomato (acidic) will make holes in aluminum foil but I didn't know more than that.

I guess today's my day: https://xkcd.com/1053/


>Cool people are largely perceived to be extroverted, hedonistic, powerful, adventurous, open and autonomous.


Guardian, fact-checking the paper with known cool people, suggests that they missed a key trait: "low-key"

https://archive.fo/cmP3O

(I disagree with their lists at the end of their article tho ;)


Subtract hedonistic and powerful.

I would say that adventurous, open and autonomous are three qualities that make a person interesting, as opposed to boring. They likely have entertaining stories and an approach to life that repels dullness.

And extroversion, though it doesn't have much bearing on being interesting, makes it a little more likely that I'd encounter them and get to know the three other qualities.


I noticed there's no word such as smart, bright, clever or wise mentioned in the sentence above.

Just an observation, nothing else.


the word cool is pretty much the opposite of bright so that tracks


What specifically do you mean by this?


I think he's riffing on the essential meaning of the word, e.g. a candle or a bright incandescent bulb cannot be cool- they're literally emitting heat.


That's exactly what I meant to say ;)


> Just an observation, nothing else.

I’m sure lol…


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