The number of people on Social Media that don't read past an article's headline is enormous, they are convinced by basic false headlines like "George Soros paying for mind control chips in Covid Vaccine" and it's astonishing. "I saw it on the internet so it must be true" used to be a joke when I was a kid and now its actually true for massive numbers of people.
>One consequence of GPT-3 is that I am now highly sceptical of the human provenance of any HN comment on an article about GPT-3
This likely isn't a bad thing. As more and more generative models come out it's likely that a majority of web based discourse will be bots. This is already a major issue on Twitter and being able to pick out real comments will probably be an important skill going forward.
>If anything, GPT-3 is too tied to the real world. Like a search engine, it can quickly find the answer to almost any practical question. What we're trying to figure out is if it can do anything else.
I disagree, for what it is GPT could still be incredibly powerful. No person can hold all of human knowledge in their head but could GPT reasonably approach that and be able to answer almost any question that Humans have already answered? That would be incredible imo. It's Google on steroids. All the worlds information queryable in plain "english".
It's not at an all powerful Oracle that we can ask about how to perfect Fusion power or build Warp Drives but it can still do some incredible things.
> It cannot be emulated in an environment that's secluded from the world or even in an environment that is exposed to a carefully selected slice of the world.
This has always been some kind of anthropomorphic argument to me that I don't think holds. The hard problem of consciousness isn't solved and to make such bold claims like we cannot possibly create intelligence without it having full awareness of the world seems unsupported imo.
>Low birth rates may be exacerbated at the moment by the economy, but people's preference for their careers and the quality and availability of modern entertainment (why raise kids when you can travel, binge watch shows on Netflix, play video games, etc.) are more probable causes
Your comment fits your name, it is callous, lacking empathy and painfully out of touch. The idea that Netflix is the reason people aren't having kids in simply absurd...
It is a fact that as men and women become more educated and start earning greater incomes, they have fewer offspring. This trend has been observed on every continent.
Greater incomes give one access to more of the finer things in life, which distracts from family planning. For better or worse.
>men and women become more educated and start earning greater incomes, they have fewer offspring
How can you get this close
>Greater incomes give one access to more of the finer things in life, which distracts from family planning
And still come to the wrong conclusion.
I promise you that high school dropouts with 5 kids are watching more netflix and playing more video games than a couple with graduate degrees from Stanford.
Between increasing economic uncertainty, student loan debt, no mandated maternity/paternity leave, no sick leave, no vacation time, etc. etc... Is it any wonder Millennials aren't having kids?
Sure but that's not addressing his point which is most of the ideas being funded are uninteresting and aren't really moving the ball forward. Instead they're doing some kind of rent seeking.
I don't think it's rent seeking by definition to modernize a product and/or make it more accessible to people. The fact of the matter is that there is a tremendous backlog of legacy industry/infrastructure that needs to be modernized. There is plenty of opportunity in doing so to democratize access to services that are currently inaccessible to most, which is more or less the opposite of rent seeking.
You can also just not do a shitty job of modernizing an old thing, and end up creating a product like Netflix that front-end devs fawn over, learn from, and emulate. It doesn't have to be uninteresting.
Netflix was started in 1997. This conversation is about companies started a decade ago versus now. The rise post 2010 startups seems much more focused on creative interpretations of laws instead of actual innovation. The whole gig economy is a way to circumvent employment laws.
In reality, 'just new web frontends on existing industries' describes the majority of the demand for software development right now. It's not good or bad, though some of the actors and some of the businesses will be good or bad. It's not boring or interesting, though some of the applications and implementations will be boring or interesting. It just is.
>I don't think it's rent seeking by definition to modernize a product and/or make it more accessible to people. The fact of the matter is that there is a tremendous backlog of legacy industry/infrastructure that needs to be modernized
Out of all the VC money raised in 2019 how much was for this and how much was for things like Quibi, We-Work, gig economy, etc. ?
Just want to point out that many of the complaints in the comments here are US specific. At many PhD programs in Europe for example you are considered an employee of the university and not a student, this often comes with full benefits: salary, bonuses, vacation time, pension, etc. Academia in the US in particular is falling into disrepair.
As someone very pro-vaccine, what are the risks of doing this? Is the worst case scenario you get the vaccine and not a placebo and it does nothing? Are there real health risks to doing this?
Vaccines in general have the potential to produce what's known as "antibody-dependent enhancement", where the disease will be even worse for you than if you didn't have a vaccine. Researchers don't think this is a factor for coronavirus vaccines, but if they're wrong it wouldn't have been detected in phase 1 and 2 studies.
The podcast Science Vs. described one patient who received an experimental vaccine and had severe (but not life-threatening) fever-like side effects including fainting, nausea/vomiting, chills, and lethargy/weakness:
> When I woke up, I woke up this was at noon the next day, I had to get up to go to the bathroom, on the way there I felt really nauseous and actually ended up throwing up in the bathroom and then I just collapsed. I remember waking up on the floor, though, and looking up and seeing the underside of the kitchen table, which was a very confusing sight
So by taking an experimental vaccine you're risking these sorts of side effects. In this particular study there were 45 participants and 3 had severe side effects of this nature.
Is there a standard set of potential side effects?
Lets say some of these potential vaccines are effective at producing an immune response enough to provide protection from Covid infection, is there a level of side effects that would cause a vaccine to fail clinical trials?
The number of people on Social Media that don't read past an article's headline is enormous, they are convinced by basic false headlines like "George Soros paying for mind control chips in Covid Vaccine" and it's astonishing. "I saw it on the internet so it must be true" used to be a joke when I was a kid and now its actually true for massive numbers of people.