I don't agree with the person above you in as much as the way they are doing it is very individualist "vote with your wallet", and yes, you're right that it's very ineffective.
The more effective way is to form a group, call it a "club" or whatever, that does it. The group can then advertise to other people and get more people to join the club. Eventually, it becomes large enough to gain political power. This is called "unionizing" — people with a shared interest joining together for a common goal. Eventually you get large enough to hold the corporations over a barrel, either through strikes or a mass disinterest in buying products, etc.
The only reason we have a 40-hour work week is because of unionizing, it's a very, very effective tactic that is severely underutilized.
(Anecdote) Best job I ever had, I walked in and they were like "yeah, we don't have any training or anything like that", but we've got a fully setup lab and a rotating library of literature. <My Boss> "Yeah I'm not going to be around, but here are the office keys" don't blow up the company pretty much.
To be honest, I do find most manuals (man pages) horrible to quickly get information how to do something and here LLMs do shine for me (as long as they don't mix up version numbers).
For man pages, you have to already know what you wants to do and just want information on how exactly to do it. They're not for learning about the domain. You don't read the find manual to learn the basics of filesystems.
> Dozens of apps, thousands of lectures, and it turns out its not really a silver bullet.
I mean, you say that, but I did mandarin for maybe 6 months, I did reviews for maybe a year or two on and off, I haven't done a review of mandarin for 8, 9 years now and I can still recall quite a bit of it. So for me it's worked quite well.
IDK, I kind of agree with Mao insomuch as people should do a certain amount of research before spouting off on subjects they don't understand. Otherwise you've just got reams and reams of people waffling about things they actually, do not know about.
"Unless you have investigated a problem, you will be deprived of the right to speak on it. Isn't that too harsh? Not in the least. When you have not probed into a problem, into the present facts and its past history, and know nothing of its essentials, whatever you say about it will undoubtedly be nonsense. Talking nonsense solves no problems, as everyone knows, so why is it unjust to deprive you of the right to speak?"
Yeah, not surprising from the "power flows from the barrel of a gun" guy. So what it boils down to is "unless you agree with me, you will be deprived of the right to speak".
And that's the problem. "Do your research before spouting off" is good in principle. But it gets weaponized via "if you don't agree with me, you obviously haven't done your research", and used to silence anyone who disagrees.
We have to put up with uninformed opinions, in order to leave space for dissenting views.
> We have to put up with uninformed opinions, in order to leave space for dissenting views.
I think your comment is great at conflating "allowing criticism against the government and speech on a sidewalk" with "disallowing unconsidered speech in certain private spaces because of the danger that some kinds of information has". You're very clumsily conflating two discrete things here.
First, you assume that people spouting complete nonsense without investigation into something can be productive. I fundamentally disagree with this, based on experience. I have encountered people with what essentially were delusions of grandeur — they had very limited and grossly incorrect physics knowledge, with no mathematical foundation, and they stated that they saw falsities in Einsteininan Relativity. They then proceeded to argue that, were Einstein alive, they would be entitled to a debate with him, as would presumably everyone else with misgivings from ignorance. They had absolutely no understanding of what Relativity was, no understanding even of what an electron is, and the entire discussion of trying to explain anything to them was essentially a complete waste of time, as they had neither the mathematical basis, nor the understanding of physical law and experimentation, to understand the vast amounts of evidence in support of Einstein's theory of spacetime and relativity. Every single sentence out of their mouth was either mildly incorrect waffling from ignorance, or complete and utter nonsense.
I for one, do not think that this debate was productive, and they argued that me finishing on the note that they should, in fact, avail themselves of the knowledge of physics so that they can understand the tests that have been done for themselves, was an "argument to authority". From the outset, there was absolutely no possibility of meaningful debate, because they had chosen to remain ignorant despite the internet being flooded of places where they could learn even a modicum of basic knowledge. This is what it means to "do research" and "learn". I argue based on these experiences that you do, actually, owe people around you to learn about something before spouting inane garbage on the matter.
Secondly, I argue we can allow dissenting views without leaving room within society, for popular subjects of misconception, such as holocaust denial or the hundreds of right wing grifters trying to sell people on the idea that vaccination is evil, to be given platforms.
There are people who engage in debate, not truthfully, or honestly, to discuss ideas and learn, but instead to spread their misinformation, hoping to catch people in the crowd that they can profit off. I assert that this is one of the reasons why a myriad of right wing ideas are taking hold right now. Vaccine denialism, holocaust denial, transphobia, etc. are rife — because it comes down to scientific misinformation and profit. People who are already ignorant, finding that it is monetarily fruitful to spread this ignorance in the name either of ideological malfeasance (such as in the case of transphobia — one big example being the christofascist Heritage Foundation injecting millions of dollars into the UK) or just purely out of self-interest (Jordan Peterson being a notable name there).
And all of it is remedied through people who are misinformed of the scientific evidence "shutting the fuck up and learning". The root comes from people abusing platforms to spread their ignorance, and then people parroting that without research. I think that there is room for people to say whatever they want in a public space (in a shopping mall, on a sidewalk), but I do not believe that it is right nor in the best interests of society, for these people to be given room by universities, by public theaters, or by online platforms. These people feed off waffling in front of an audience, only way that we can beat this epidemic of literal bullshit is by denying them that audience, starving them of social oxygen and saying "no, learn more before you deserve a space to speak publicly about this".
It's entirely realistic. Shutting down people who waffle on with no investigation is very easy just by asking how they reached those conclusions and asking to see the data. For the private venue sphere, it's entirely reasonable to collectively deplatform people who spread misinformation — just look at what happened with Richard Spencer after one or two venues cancelled on him.
It starts with having a spine. Which, I get many people aren't used to having, sure, but.
> What's the best way to study them, are there rules for it?
The best way to study is to make a basic card and just start doing it immediately. A lot of this is individual so using other people's tips isn't going to work (although if you really wanted to do this, you would have very quickly learned by now that there's a whole industry of blog posts and youtube videos and Opinions on how to optimize your deck if you really need that, and there's a whole industry trying to sell you on things to buy to Optimize your Learning Experience). The thing is, overthinking isn't going to work here.
Just make a 2 field note, like the default, and start adding words and doing reviews. You'll very quickly find out what information you find yourself wanting to remember when you're sat there writing sentences in the language, you'll also find out what you find interesting to learn that helps you learn. After the point that you are actually learning, it's really easy to add fields to a note or to switch note types.
Not only are there literally a ton of docs that come with Anki that go over the best way to deal with Anki for learning, but making the deck as you go is ideal for your situation because you're building memory. Inputting sentences and words or whatever you find meaningful to remember into the deck is also building that memory. Spending hours reading blog posts and figuring out which service to pay for, uh, is the opposite of learning.
This might sound harsh, but it literally comes down to "you have to walk to learn how to walk, you have to pedal to learn how to ride a bike". Spending hours or weeks or months deciding if you want to do training wheels or not, what height you want the bike seat, route planning, finding the best bike and the best seat — none of that is riding the bike, all of it is based on preferences that you won't have until you've ridden your first bike, and every inch of it is overthinking and procrastination. Nobody can tell you, beforehand, what the best way to ride a bike is, and that information is meaningless to you until you are physically riding the bike. Nobody can tell you what riding a bike is like and there is no way to learn outside of you physically sitting down on the bike, and pushing off, and pedalling — which is something you can do with a 20$ bike that you found at goodwill. You can, however, find yourself wasting hours or weeks or months thinking about riding a bike and never doing it.
> I'd rather just buy a pre-made bike from a store.
Right, but if you were going to do that... you would have done it already, if you catch my drift. Like I said, there's no shortage of blog posts, youtube videos, literal documentation on the Anki website, pre-made decks, etc. available. It's a bit like trying to optimize before you've even started writing code — you don't know what the hot paths are yet, and nobody can tell you without a profiler. You don't know what your preferences are in learning are yet, and nobody can tell you until you try. When you have a solid idea of what you prefer, then people can start giving you recommendations :)
Inputting words is part of using Anki, and a big part of solidifying your knowledge. Why should you listen? Well, even though I haven't reviewed mandarin in literally a decade now, and I've had essentially no IRL use for it, there's still words and phrases I can recall at a moment's notice. The software is unbelievably powerful.
As others have mentioned, there are premade decks but most of the practice of using Anki comes down to preference, so the premade decks may not fit your style of learning at all.
Here are my server and client configs needed in case someone comes across this from google. It sets up sinks and sources, so you can just mute it, but it would just play automatic from logon:
Needed on Server and Clients is an override to a) fix my domain users having the same cookie if its stored in default location and b) make sure the server only starts when the network is REALLY up - the normal network online is a system service only and thus you cannot check for it in a users service. In my case the server runs under a domain users profile.
[Unit]
After=user-network-wait.service avahi-daemon.service
[Service]
# this changes the location of the cookie because i use roaming homes for domain clients and each machine would have the same cookie
ExecStartPre=/bin/bash -c 'systemctl --user set-environment PULSE_COOKIE=/run/user/$(id -u)/pulse/cookie'
~/.config/systemd/user/user-network-wait.service
[Unit]
Description=Wait for Network Connectivity
[Service]
Type=oneshot
# This pings your LAN router and creates a network-online file in /run to pick up
ExecStart=/bin/bash -c '[ -f /run/user/$(id -u)/network-online ] || (until ping -c1 10.126.0.1 >/dev/null 2>&1; do sleep 1; done; touch /run/user/$(id -u)/network-online)'
[Install]
WantedBy=default.target
you can play with the latency_msec, journalctl will tell you the lowest fragment if you just put 0 or 1ms here. It needs to be a multiple of that minimum, just experiment. Im fine with this even though 12ms would also work in my lan, but its more stable across the wifi bridge.
The sap_address on the client may work to select the right multicast address even though its actually for the SAP announcements but don't count on that, i have not tested multiple streams so far and would not use "magic" solutions like SAP on the server (and they didn't work in my case and seem pipewire-only). Right now the client seems to pick the right stream - experiment ;)
The sink in my case is a module-combo, just check with pactl list sinks which sink you want the stream to play on. Note that this is not some application you can dynamically assign to other sinks!!
For LAN, if you run openwrt just enable igmp_snooping and multicast_querier on the softwarebridge (Luci --> Network --> Interfaces --> Tab Devices) and maybe Multi to Uni in your wifi advanced settings. I dont use this though as my wifi is another vlan or WDS-bridged so i stay out of these problems mostly.
There are more advanced settings possible with openwrt, including having working igmp_snooping on the hardware switch, if you are interested frequent my documentation (german) on Krei.se as i will write a guide for this sometime lol (or just ask me by DM). Its possible to run this ms-exact with clean network in any case, there is no need to install extra software or clog unused ports with multicast-traffic. If you are perfect about this the music will flow like water through your LAN only where its needed.
This is the kind of reason why I will never use AI
What's the point of using AI to do research when 50-60% of it could potentially be complete bullshit. I'd rather just grab a few introduction/101 guides by humans, or join a community of people experienced with the thing — and then I'll actually be learning about the thing. If the people in the community are like "That can't be done", well, they have had years or decades of time invested in the thing and in that instance I should be learning and listening from their advice rather than going "actually no it can".
I see a lot of beginners fall into that second pit. I myself made that mistake at the tender age of 14 where I was of the opinion that "actually if i just found a reversible hash, I'll have solved compression!", which, I think we all here know is bullshit. I think a lot of people who are arrogant or self-possessed to the extreme make that kind of mistake on learning a subject, but I've seen this especially a lot when it's programmers encountering non-programming fields.
Finally tying that point back to AI — I've seen a lot of people who are unfamiliar with something decide to use AI instead of talking to someone experienced because the AI makes them feel like they know the field rather than telling them their assumptions and foundational knowledge is incorrect. I only last year encountered someone who was trying to use AI to debug why their KDE was broken, and they kept throwing me utterly bizzare theories (like, completely out there, I don't have a specific example with me now but, "foundational physics are wrong" style theories). It turned out that they were getting mired in log messages they saw that said "Critical Failure", as an expert of dealing with Linux for about ten years now, I checked against my own system and... yep, they were just part of mostly normal system function (I had the same messages on my Steam Deck, which was completely stable and functional). The real fault was buried halfway through the logs. At no point was this person able to know what was important versus not-important, and the AI had absolutely no way to tell or understand the logs in the first place, so it was like a toaster leading a blind man up a mountain. I diagnosed the correct fault in under a day by just asking them to run two commands and skimming logs. That's experience, and that's irreplaceable by machine as of the current state of the world.
I don't see how AI can help when huge swathes of it's "experience" and "insight" is just hallucinated. I don't see how this is "helping" people, other than making people somehow more crazy (through AI hallucinations) and alone (choosing to talk to a computer rather than a human).
There are use-cases where hallucinations simply do not matter. My favorite is finding the correct term for a concept you don't know the name of. Googling is extremely bad at this as search results will often be wrong unless you happen to use the commonly accepted term, but an LLM can be surprisingly good at giving you a whole list of fitting names just based on a description. Same with movie titles etc. If it hallucinates you'll find out immediately as the answer can be checked in seconds.
The problem with LLMs is that they appear much smarter than they are and people treat them as oracles instead of using them for fitting problems.
Maybe I read too much encyclopedia, but my current workflow is to explore introductory material. Like open a database textbook and you'll find all the jargon there. Curated collection can get you there too.
Books are a nice example of this, where we have both the table of contents for a general to particular concepts navigation, and the index for keyword based navigation.
Right! The majority of any 101 book will be enough to understand the jargon, but the above poster's comment looks past the fact that often knowing what term to use isn't enough, it's knowing the context and usage around it too. And who's to know the AI isn't bullshitting you about all or any of that. If you're learning the information, then you don't know enough to discern negatively-valued information from any other kind.
I thought it's clear from my comment that I don't rely on AI for information but to find out how to even search for that information.
> The majority of any 101 book will be enough to understand the jargon
A prompt is faster and free, whereas I'd have to order a book and wait 3+ days for it to arrive otherwise. Because while libraries exist they focus on books in my native language and not English.
> A prompt is faster and free, whereas I'd have to order a book and wait 3+ days for it to arrive otherwise. Because while libraries exist they focus on books in my native language and not English.
Hot take: I think piracy might literally be better than AI.
> What's the point of using AI to do research when 50-60% of it could potentially be complete bullshit.
Because if you know how to spot the bullshit, or better yet word prompts accurately enough that the answers don't give bullshit, it can be an immense time saver.
> better yet word prompts accurately enough that the answers don't give bullshit
The idea that you can remove the bullshit by simply rephrasing also assumes that the person knows enough to know what is bullshit. This has not been true from what I've seen of people using AI. Besides, if you already know what is bullshit, you wouldn't be using it to learn the subject.
Talking to real experts will win out every single time, both in time cost, and in socialisation. This is one of the many reasons why networking is a skill that is important in business.
> The idea that you can remove the bullshit by simply rephrasing also assumes that the person knows enough to know what is bullshit. This has not been true from what I've seen of people using AI. Besides, if you already know what is bullshit, you wouldn't be using it to learn the subject.
Take coding as an example, if you're a programmer you can spot the bullshit (i.e. made up libraries), and rephrasing can result in entire code being written, which can be an immense time saver.
Other disciplines can do the same in analogous ways.
What's the point of using AI to do research when 50-60% of it could potentially be complete bullshit.
You realize that all you have to do to deal with questions like "Marathon Crater" is ask another model, right? You might still get bullshit but it won't be the same bullshit.
I was thinking about a self verification method on this principle, lately. Any specific-enough claim, e.g. „the Marathon crater was discovered by …” can be reformulated as a Jeopardy-style prompt. „This crater was discovered by …” and you can see a failure to match. You need some raw intelligence to break it down though.
Without checking every answer it gives back to make sure it's factual, you may be ingesting tons of bullshit answers.
In this particular answer model A may get it wrong and model B may get it right, but that can be reversed for another question.
What do you do at that point? Pay to use all of them and find what's common in the answers? That won't work if most of them are wrong, like for this example.
If you're going to have to fact check everything anyways...why bother using them in the first place?
If you're going to have to fact check everything anyways...why bother using them in the first place?
"If you're going to have to put gas in the tank, change the oil, and deal with gloves and hearing protection, why bother using a chain saw in the first place?"
Tool use is something humans are good at, but it's rarely trivial to master, and not all humans are equally good at it. There's nothing new under that particular sun.
The difference is consistency. You can read a manual and know exactly how to oil and refill the tank on a chainsaw. You can inspect the blades to see if they are worn. You can listen to it and hear how it runs. If a part goes bad, you can easily replace it. If it's having troubles, it will be obvious - it will simply stop working - cutting wood more slowly or not at all.
The situation with an LLM is completely different. There's no way to tell that it has a wrong answer - aside from looking for the answer elsewhere which defeats its purpose. It'd be like using a chainsaw all day and not knowing how much wood you cut, or if it just stopped working in the middle of the day.
And even if you KNOW it has a wrong answer (in which case, why are you using it?), there's no clear way to 'fix' it. You can jiggle the prompt around, but that's not consistent or reliable. It may work for that prompt, but that won't help you with any subsequent ones.
The thing is, nothing you've said is untrue for any search engine or user-driven web site. Only a reckless moron would paste code they find on Stack Overflow or Github into their project without at least looking it over. Same with code written by LLMs. The difference is, just as the LLM can write unit tests to help you deal with uncertainty, it can also cross-check the output of other LLMs.
You have to be careful when working with powerful tools. These tools are powerful enough to wreck your career as quickly as a chain saw can send you to the ER, so... have fun and be careful.
The nice thing about SO and Github is that there's little to no reason there for things to not work, at least in the context where you found the code. The steps are getting the context, assuming it's true based on various indicators (mostly reputation) and then continuing on with understanding the snippet.
But with LLMs, every word is a probability factor. Assuming the first paragraph is true has no impact on the rest.
> This is why you hear political podcasts talk about “the Austrian painter” or “midcentury Germans” and not the common names by which those things are known. Gotta keep that sweet YouTube monetisation.
I've never heard anyone on youtube or on a podcast use terms that referred to the Nazis without directly calling them Nazis, and it hasn't had an effect on their monetization. I wonder what kind of media you're consuming that put you in contact with people who would use euphemisms for this sort of thing?
Exactly which platforms will penalise namedropping Hitler varies and it varies by circumstances, but this is a real thing as far as I can tell, on tiktok and also on YouTube videos algorithmically flagged as "intended for children" (regardless of whether they are or not).
>But have you ever really thought about what that means for individuals? The cost of dialysis is nearly 1% of the entire federal budget. Put into simpler terms, for every $100 Americans spend in taxes, approximately $1.00 goes toward paying for dialysis.
Damn, that's such a shame. I wish that the US would reduce defense spending and spend more on dialysis.
Military spend is only 13% of total federal spend.
Healthcare is 26%.
At a certain point, unquestionable military superiority provides more utility than keeping old people alive, and more like surviving instead of living from my grandparents’ experience with dialysis.
Not that current US military spend is ideal, but neither is current healthcare spend on the healthcare and population it is spent on.
> During adulthood, the fat cells themselves just get larger.
While true, it's also important to note that the lifetime of a fat cell is around ten years. Maintaining a decent diet for around ten years (no mean feat!) should be sufficient to leave you bereft of the actual adipose cells.
I also wonder how this intersects with transgender stuff — there's a reason why HRT is referred to as "second puberty", as it resets and changes a lot of underlying biological mechanisms and produces a lot of interesting epigenetic effects (While it does boil down to "replacing the sex hormone", both estrogen and testosterone have major effects on the body's immune system, etc. — actually this is one of the reasons I suspect that there's such a high comorbidity of autoimmune diseases within transgender people pre-HRT — their immune system is all out of wack! Mine calmed down a lot after starting and a year in I no longer get seasonal allergies). There's a huge lack of data in this regard though because transgender bodies are generally not felt to be worth studying outside of "health risks", even though there's a huge amount of information we could glean about how everyone's* body functions from it. Personally, I wonder whether second-puberty "resets" what the body decides is the baseline for fat storage.
* — and for anyone in doubt, we have around 90 years of HRT now that shows it's essentially completely safe (outside of the mid-80s when the estrogen being given was synthetic and non-bio-identical, and outside of the health risks of various things for trans women changing to be roughly equivalent of cis women's health risks).
The more effective way is to form a group, call it a "club" or whatever, that does it. The group can then advertise to other people and get more people to join the club. Eventually, it becomes large enough to gain political power. This is called "unionizing" — people with a shared interest joining together for a common goal. Eventually you get large enough to hold the corporations over a barrel, either through strikes or a mass disinterest in buying products, etc.
The only reason we have a 40-hour work week is because of unionizing, it's a very, very effective tactic that is severely underutilized.