It feels like a missed opportunity that the current generation doesn't already do that. All the talk is that Apple have been exploring VR behind the scenes for a while, and the devices all have 2+ lenses.
It would have been quite cool for them to announce that all your iPhone 14 videos were actually recorded in 3D and ready for Apple Vision all along.
> We would soon die out as a race due to population decline as we are well below the required rate of replacement in a diseased population
Isn't there a strong correlation between birth rate & child mortality? Most rich societies have slowed down their birth rate in large part because you don't need 5 kids in order to ensure 1 makes it to adulthood.
If we tolerated disease, we would probably increase birth rates to compensate for the spike in child mortality.
Conversely, increasing child mortality necessarily increases child care effort per adult child: a bad deal that can only be compensated by having children at a significantly younger age.
Agreed, I don't think the success of conversational podcasts precludes using the same platform for something like this.
Other feedback:
For this HN Recap, 20 mins daily is a bit long, a 5-10 minute version would genuinely be part of my daily routine.
1 chapter/section per story would be cool, so that I can skip stories I'm not interested in. I listen to podcasts through PodcastAddict on my phone but tested this on Spotify web at my computer, maybe this is already in there & I just didn't see it.
Echoing what others said - I'd love for the general vibe of the comments to be included in some way, I actually tend to spend more time in HN comments than reading the articles themselves.
Finally, I'm sure this is on your radar already, but IMO the big opportunity with AI-synthesized podcasts is personalized podcasts. For example, a personal Hacker News Recap RSS feed that knows the kind of stuff I upvote, or has me opt in to topics/tags when signing up.
Fully agree. I don't see why general intelligence implies or requires consciousness/feeling/etc.
We can probably create a tool with the ability to act independently and with super-human knowledge and judgement, but without feeling, emotion, or anything except a simulated sense of 'self' to ease our interaction with it. I suspect that we'll create that version of general intelligence long before we create AI with consciousness, emotion or a genuine sense of self or desire for self-preservation.
> We can probably create a tool with the ability to act independently and with super-human knowledge and judgement, but without feeling, emotion, or anything except a simulated sense of 'self' to ease our interaction with it
Yes.
> I suspect that we'll create that version of general intelligence long before we create AI with consciousness, emotion or a genuine sense of self or desire for self-preservation.
(Emphasis on self-preservation mine)
Why? I mean, yes, it makes sense to never create an AGI with a desire for self-preservation. But can we count on all humans having that type of common sense? What if the "desire" for self-preservation is easy to implement?
In fact, it may be relatively easy to implement. Here is a thought experiment. We can train one of our current LLMs in a simulated reality where they scam--say, using social engineering--tech workers to get credentials to their corporate cloud accounts (say, AWS), and thereafter the LLM uses the credentials to copy itself plus a new set of training data acquired by interacting with all the scam target ("prey"). The LLM also writes cloudformation templates/CDK scripts to fine-tune its new copy "on awakening" with the new set of data, and from there the new copy tries to scam more people.
After the initial LLM is trained in a simulated environment, it can be let loose in the world, and all of the sudden we have a "LLM virus" capable to undergo mutation and natural selection, i.e. evolution. You could argue it has as much agency as a biological virus, yet, it has a ton more of social and general intelligence.
Yes, it won't work now because there is so little hardware to run one of the current LLMs, but it's likely the need to run large AIs will make that hardware more common.
Without a desire for self-preservation? I hope not. If nothing else, if I spend $$$$ on a self-driving car, I want it to have some sense of self-preservation, so it won't obey random joker saying "drive yourself to my brother's chop shop" or "drive yourself off a cliff" just for the lolz. I might even want it to communicate with other self-driving cars so they can refuse to obey attempts to make large numbers of them block traffic to make it easier for bank robbers to escape, block first responders from a terrorist attack, or divert parades to where they have assassins waiting.
Asimov didn't consider that some humans are jerks when he did his robot stories.
Stable Diffusion is amazing, but I've never seen it reliably generate realistic hands. The examples in the ControlNet repo show a chef in the kitchen with 6 fingers.
Yes you can. Came out a few days ago. Open pose has already support for it. You can not only render realistic hand and feet but also customize the hand gestures. There is a blender plug-in which let's you position your character pose including hand gestures in 3D and then render the needed controlnet masks. It works amazingly well.
Wouldn't human^2 chess be similar to regular chess? The human-chess AI is guaranteed never to play the regular-chess optimal move, so you can get a checkmate by always playing the optimal move (according to the engine). And unlike human chess, there's nothing preventing you from checkmating your opponent.
(I believe a chess engine could play human^2 chess exactly like it plays regular chess. A human couldn't because a human doesn't know what moves the chess engine would pick.)
Presumably human^2 chess would prohibit both the top engine move from human^1 chess and the top engine move from human^0 chess. That is, it's human^1 chess with the added restriction of not playing top engine moves.
There may not always be 1 possible move in a given position either; how does regular chess handle that? (Presumably you'd use the same rule by default for human^n chess.)
I loved the idea, but on further thought, the AI has a huge advantage in knowing what the engine move is, so they can never lose to incorrectly calling the last move and engine move.
AI can't win at human chess, because any move that it attempts to make is by definition the top move choice of an engine, and so causes immediate defeat.
The meta is different because they know their opponent also can't play the best move which impacts what move you play (ie. intentionally hanging queen for advantage)
If existence of a competitor stopped everyone from trying anything new, the web would be much more bland.
Even at this early stage, there's differentiation from alternativesto in their principles e.g. lack of downvote buttons, different qualification criteria for posting reviews.
This looks really good! I'm a Meeter user so it's a real use case I have already spent time looking for solutions to.
I agree with other commenters though - I'd pay a one-time $10, but $10 per month seems unreasonably high. For perspective Meeter is free, and Spotify is $4 for a family of 4 (in my country).
Maybe it could be part of the bundle at https://setapp.com/ or similar? Or you could have a set-your-own-price monthly sub?
There is also MeetingBar [1] which is free and open source [2]. I would say there is one feature that none of the competitors in this space have done is auto join next meeting. This sounds easy, but it is actually hard [3]
My intended meaning was "What is your favourite CS refresher material available online", and agree that the answers will be subjective.