> The Battle of Austerlitz was the decisive French victory against Napoleon
It didn't even catch that Napoleon was the leader of the French as described in the source snippet. And this was when it just generated text of similar size as the input. Based on just that paper I highly doubt that this method will generalize to creating entire books.
My point was that the text lacked coherence, that quote only makes it worse. If it can't even keep coherence for a single page how would it manage for a hundred?
Care to link the papers that makes you so sure that we will soon be able to generate whole coherent books? As far as we know you could just be an enthusiastic college student who knows nothing.
"You're confusing X with Y" uses a personal pronoun but I don't think I'd call it a personal attack—it's a common phrase in spoken English. Maybe "That's confusing X with Y" would be a modicum more polite, but only a modicum.
Please stop these low-information, bilious comments now. It's not contributing positively to sniff at others' lack of credentials and tout yourself. Experts are welcome here if they want to share their expertise, but just being dismissive isn't a good thing for any HN user to do, expert or no.
If you think A and I think B, I am allowed to say B without proving it to you. You can say that my claim is unsupported but by insulting me in a parallel thread you learn nothing. Be open-minded and assume that what you see in open is not everything primarily due to different compute capabilities available to different actors.
Above, AlexCoventry mentioned a paper. If you would like to find more, go to Google Scholar and find all papers which cite that paper. This would be just a part of the whole story since bigger datasets and models are not in open. The progress rate in this field is incredible.
> The Battle of Austerlitz was the decisive French victory against Napoleon
It didn't even catch that Napoleon was the leader of the French. And this was when it just generated text of similar size as the input. Based on just that paper I highly doubt that this method will generalize to creating entire books.
>> None of this is to say that weed can't be beneficial.
There might be a non-trivial impact of weed on climate change if weed consumers produce less kids which according to UNESCO is the best way to reduce your carbon footprint.
Depending on which ideology you follow one could also make the case that this happens in first world nation that already have a problem with lower and lower birthrates.
Of course. Because my definition of rich/poor is w.r.t. people around and not some world's mean/median. Many people in first world nations cannot afford to have as much kids as even 40 years ago.
Yeah, some rich people don't get why poor people want to have kids and pollute this planet (according to them). Fortune's list suggests that the median number of kids is 2-3.
I feel like it is hard for people to say what they truly love before they have at least $1M in their bank account. If you have FU money, your view on working at a FAANG vs building a startup can change. You will find it easier to know what you truly LOVE.
That assumes that the person doesn't change in the meantime. You might put your dreams on hold to solve the money problem, only to discover that you no longer have the energy or focus to accomplish what you could have in the past. End state: I wish I had done what I loved back then.
>> That assumes that the person doesn't change in the meantime.
In the meantime of what? I didn't suggest any action but merely suggested that sometimes money could clarify whether you do something because you love it or/and because you have to make money.
A remarkably large number of the most notable of those people came from wealthy families - that’s what allowed them the single-minded focus, instead of worrying about food and healthcare.
And a lot of them suffered in poverty to pursue what they loved. Is there survivorship bias there? Sure. You don't become great without taking some chances though.
If we want to equate them then we should aspire to write code that is meaningless while we are alive, while living our entire lives poorly or being completely ostracized in society?
I'm not sure the startup angle jives with the artist's.
Most of the code I've written in my life has been meaningless,
but yes I get paid well. The ostracisation happened to a lot of devs during high school through the invention of the wedgee.
I am a scientist and thousands of scientists and engineers use my work.
Most great artists, musicians, writers, theorists, scientists, teachers, and inventors would not need to struggle as much if they would have some money to cover their basic needs. They would just avoid bullshit gigs and do they stuff with a greater focus. And if having $1M in their bank account would stop them doing what they love, then it is quite possible that they didn't love it in the first place.
Artistic pieces or songs are generally a representation of an event, a struggle, or a state of mind - if you lead a cushy life then no, you're not going to have the same output than if you were living on the breadline. There's a reason that history is dotted with songs and pieces of art that were written during times of struggle.
Perhaps that gets at my intended point, which is that different people have different comfort and stability thresholds.
If someone doesn't feel comfortable leaving a job to bet on a startup project with 20 years of mortgage payments in the bank, it is unlikely they ever will.
1 million is 40.000 dollars per year indefinitely, by the 4% rule, with a small risk of ruin that you'll most likely see coming years in advance.
It should be possible to live in the Bay Area on that, given that the place still has cashiers, cleaning personnel and maintenance workers. It won't be a middle-class lifestyle, but you'd have to make _some_ sacrifices in order to indefinitely work at whatever you want in the most expensive place in the world.
Never having visited myself, this is what I don't get about the bay area. How is it still a functioning city? How far out do you have to live to be able to afford rent on a non-tech bro salary?
but why would anyone do this not making a stupid salary? i don't get the appeal why anyone would put up with that just to have the privilege of serving coffee to techies in a formerly cool city. (not to imply that techies aren't cool)
> It should be possible to live in the Bay Area on that, given that the place still has cashiers, cleaning personnel and maintenance workers.
There’s no reason pay for cashiers, cleaning personnel, and maintenance workers can’t rise, or to meet the demand of labor with a little bit of automation also. Making $40k per year as a cashier means $80k as a couple or roommates.
Why not? If you have a partner, you would be able to cover half a mortgage, and if not you can get a roommate. I know tons of people who aren't in tech that make ~50K. It makes sense because 50K is pretty close to the median per capita income in SF [1] and a starting teachers salary [2].
I mean, I don't live in SF so maybe I'm off base. But my impression is that even with a roommate you're looking at $1500-2000/mo. That's oppressive on $50k/yr.
Even assuming 0 tax we're talking more likw 2200-2600 and there are gonna be some taxes, especially in CA.
Assuming this is investment income of course, and not just spending down the principal, which obviously wouldn't work.
So probably under 2k, and it's not fun money, it's everything but housing starting with food and transportation.
Doable? I guess. Fun? Eye of the beholder, I'd say. And that's assuming kids don't enter the picture, say goodbye to every part of this plan if they do.
I wholeheartedly agree 50K is a miserable salary in the Bay, but the original premise was $1M in the bank:
>I feel like it is hard for people to say what they truly love before they have at least $1M in their bank account. If you have FU money, your view on working at a FAANG vs building a startup can change. You will find it easier to know what you truly LOVE
The question wasn't if you can retire, or live of the investment income, but one of perceived finical security.
If someone is too afraid to try working at a startup with $1M cash in the bank, it is unlikely they ever will.
Even if someone has kids and family, $1M provides a huge buffer to find a new job if the startup doesn't work out. Maybe 20 years is a stretch, but I am utterly baffled that other posters think this would only cover 2 years of spending...
True, 1M in savings gives you ~40K per year to live off. This wouldn't be sufficient in SF, but given that you're basically retiring at that point, you might as well buy a home somewhere else and then you'd be able to live comfortable off of that.
I'd say it's less about the number in the bank account and more about the perceived safety you feel. Similar to the lower two layers of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. If you don't think that the worst outcome of pursuing something you truly love is manageable, you're less likely to put yourself up to that risk.
In US this might correlate more strongly to the numbers of zeros in the bank account or the salary difference to similar workers at FAANG. But feeling of safety is subjective and depend a lot on the environment you're in so I don't think that's universally the case.
> I feel like it is hard for people to say what they truly love before they have at least $1M in their bank account.
[edited to protect your feelings]
Are you saying that simple introspection is hard? I completely disagree, because separating extrinsic motivation (I do this for money) from intrinsic motivation (I do this for fun) really isn't that hard.
What you're saying basically amounts to "people are blinded to what they love by their need for financial security". This may be true on some level, but anyone can see through it with a modicum of introspection. Or am I giving the average person too much credit?
I'm not the original commenter, but I think you are vastly oversimplifying the situation. Most jobs are not black and white in one category or the other. There are people who will never be completely happy with any job, and there are local maxima, where one might not reasonably expect a better fit to exist.
>Or am I giving the average person too much credit?
Another consideration is that this is an irrelevant question for your average person, or even 99.9% of the population.
Not to start an argument, but that could also be because HN doesn't automatically notify you of replies. I'm subscribed to the email notifier, but that was created by a third party and I doubt if a majority of the users know about it.
Thanks for the links! I am aware of the Buffet's bets but I did have a feeling that some VCs can be quite profitable especially the ones which invest in future government contractors and/or future surveillance facilitators.
This is basically my biggest critique of PG and various other YC leaders. Many of the conclusions, while likely be probably being more "right" than "wrong" in virtue, are derived from intuition and observations, not evidence based. It's even more ironic, given how much emphasis the firm places on evidence based thinking of its portfolio founders versus anecdotally thinking.
Great example:
"One quality that’s a really bad indication is a CEO with a strong foreign accent"[0]
The danger is that I think pg has been "right" about so many things that every time he pontificates about something it's treated as dogma. So when he's "wrong", it'll be ignored. Impressionable people (which likely fits the characteristic of many young tech entrepreneurs) will therefore be lead astray.
Probably not very. I get the distinct feeling that the last few essays were very light on content/interesting insights, and did well on name value alone.
Would be interesting to actually test that to be honest. Get Paul Graham to set up another site under a fake identity, post the next say, three essays there, then submit 'em to HN under the same identity and see the stats.
In some cases it’s because the territory is mostly mapped by his previous work. “Novelty and Heresy” was a belated sequel to “What You Can’t Say”, for instance.
OTOH, seeing pg write essays again pleases me in much the same way that one might be pleased if their favorite long-defunct rock band started recording a new album.
Can confirm. When I mentioned to my professor at a small university that the registrar's office made a mistake on my record, he just said let's talk a walk and we walked to the registrar's office. They were all polite to him (and he was to them). The issue that the registrar's office had told me could not be fixed right away because blah blah blah got fixed right away.
This worked for me as a student at UT Austin (population in the low 40ks) in 90s/00s: be polite, ask for a change. Most administrators don’t care what your story is (so I never bothered to explain mine), but they do understand the system isn’t perfect. EDIT: and they really want written documentation.
The most powerful agent is the one which manages to confiscate our only real asset - our time.
Trump is pretty good at it with all the controversies he is generating.
AI-assisted systems will be targeted at maximizing this interaction metric. You are slowly cooked by your favorite entertainer of the day to be then fed with an opinion which you take as your own. It is not novel at all.
This. Fact-checking is more time consuming than making things up. So they can drown out the fact checkers easily. And the facts are often uncomfortably murky. Whereas the lies build loyalty and belonging, an ideal basis for a movement.
"We interviewed Elena, a geophysicist, about the different ways scientists collect data about the planet we live on and the cosmos it's situated in. On the other side, Bob from the internet offers his theory about the earth being flat".
More seriously, we are almost about to
i) Generate a good book using a short intro.
ii) Generate a meaningful video using a few photos and a basic text scenario.
Which makes us closer to generate movies on demand (say in 2025) and then good luck to people claiming that the current progress in AI is a bubble.