Christian Kothe @christiankothe@qoto.org

@simon Maybe the default prompt of these things should be written by a motivational speaker. Like, "You're extremely focused, you're about to do the work of your life, ..."

@BartWronski Yeah it's an interesting observation. There's a utility factor with mobile that's just out of reach for the mainly experience-oriented nature of VR. I was one of those 2011 VR nerds, and I was one of the 2007 AI nerds, the 2011 ray tracing nerds, etc. There's probably going to be a time (my nerd-self will say likely in our lifetimes) when you can get some neural implants and join some matrix-like social network, and that'll probably check the box of "I NEED that" for a lot of folks seeking those connections. It's clearly not the pair of googles and the motion controller though, and of course a scenario that seemed appealing 20 years ago feels increasingly dystopian these days.

@BartWronski Not sure about the next big thing, and the lack of a definitive killer app is perhaps a testament to the power of good old-fashioned screens to immerse our minds. That said, HL:Alyx was for the most part as immersive as it gets, and I've probably spend 100+ hrs randomly exploring in Google Earth VR, hours at a time - I couldn't imagine doing anything close to that with Google maps (or earth). Those 2 experiences made it worth the expense for me, and things like Eleven Table Tennis VR take it further yet (yes, one could go find a club for that IRL etc etc, but that's a lot of overhead in comparison).

If you haven't come across this nice science-related article: https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/01/the-key-to-fighting-pseudoscience-isnt-mockery-its-empathy/

Wondering if anyone out there is using LLMs are a proposal heuristic in NAS. Would seem fruitful (e.g. after fine-tuning on NeurIPS). Add in reinforcement learning for bonus points. It's not quite recursive self-improvement since re-architecting and retraining the LLM would be a slow, expensive, and human-in-the-loop step.

So I suppose Altman and Brockman are now going on to found NeXTAI, am I guessing that right?

So I guess that's one way to read the top-right corner of my desktop (hat tip to my wife). "It's 10:44PM. The year is 3500 RPM, and it is 62C outside." Pretty dystopian!

@simon Batch has been working pretty well for us for a long time and didn't feel too hard to configure. You can be fairly flexible re instance sizes and where they're coming from if you want. Fargate also works well and comes up faster, but you're more limited in terms of CPU/RAM sizing etc., plus you need to handle cases where an attempt failed etc. (if you're launching them on demand).

@erictopol Same here on 1st attempt, 2nd attempt was via myturn.ca.gov, and led us to a rural pharmacy that didn't have the new vaccines. 3nd attempt at CVS at least resulted in a cancellation notice 2 days prior. 4th attempt with CVS a charm.

@RIDDLES Don't slip on one of those!

After 20 years of copy-pasting greek letters from character tables I finally realized I can just install a greek keyboard layout 😅

In Python there's literal_eval, and then there's literal evil.