Asbestos, lead paint, cigarettes, heroin(perscribed generously for basically whatever the doc felt like), "Radithor" (patent medicine containing radium-226 and 228, marketed as a "perpetual sunshine" energy tonic and cure for over 150 diseases), bloodletting, mercury treatments for syphilis, tobacco smoke enemas (yep that was a real thing), milk-based blood transfusions.
Didn't understand those either and used the fuck out of them because "the experts" said we should.
This is why I believe we should only listen to amateur opinions on everything, experts simply lack historical credibility. For example I've recently purchased a healing crystal (half off) for only $5000 dollars! It cleared up the imbalanced energies my street guru told me about right away.
I would never have been made aware about the consequences of imbalanced energies in the first place if I had asked an expert instead. They probably wouldn't even suggest an immediate solution to the problem like my reliable street guru always does! Something to consider.
Ironically the street guru hucksters might have a better track record than the dangerous products mentioned above.
Less charitably, it's a mistake to imply that simply being a bigger corporation makes you go from street guru to "expert". Bigger company trying to make money off of you at any risk to you is just the same bucket at a different scale. In this context the other side is probably "expert consumer advocate" since that fits the idea above of these dangerous products advertised as cure alls.
It can be worse in terms of justice. You might be able to charge or win in court against a street hustler. Most people can't beat a big company in court. They usually won't even try.
I honestly agree with you in many respects, I'm simply spinning in some nuance to a topic I keep seeing.
The snake oil salesmen is productive precisely because the actual effects of the snake oil they are selling is unknown to the consumer they are introducing it to. There isn't easy answers to this, it's just a fact of life that we can try our best mitigate.
And apparently fish oil actually does help your brain. Weird world we live in.
So I think the focus on "experts" is actually a consequence of declining institutional credentialism. You didn't trust them for claiming to be experts, you trusted the institutions who called them experts and said you should trust them for that reason. But expertise implies competence not trust. Not everyone operates with good intentions even with the right credentials, including many institutions themselves.
Smoking cigarettes didn’t really matter for as long as we were regularly burning wood for fuel. Turns out just burning pretty much anything and breathing in the particles is really bad for you. Makes sense we didn’t realize it was bad until we stopped burning logs and coal for home heating and cooking.
Cigarettes actually are uniquely bad when it comes to lung cancer. Lung cancer was very rare in 1900 and before when everyone was still burning wood or coal for warmth and cooking. Lung cancer rates didn’t take off until cigarette popularity exploded after WWI.
Chewing tobacco also causes mouth cancer, so there’s more to it than just inhaling byproducts of combustion.
1) people smoked a lot more in the post WWI econ boom
2) additives or even just paper compound the negative effects of the smoke on the lungs.
like, firefighters - who usually have physical fitness requirements and don't smoke - see rates of lung cancer similar to moderate smokers, simply due to the higher volume of particulate and chems hitting their lungs.
it is dose-dependant, and firefighers who see more fires see more cancer. occasional tobacco pipe smokers in 1850 saw less lung cancer than 2-pack-a-day post-WW2 smokers.
Here’s an meta-analysis of 49 studies that shows no increase in lung cancer.
And of course it’s dose dependent. But newer studies show that years smoking is much more important than intensity when it comes to lung cancer risk. So smoking half a pack a day for 20 years is worse than a pack a day for 10 years.
Dry snuff comes with a 2-8x increase in oral cancer and a 10-12x increase in nasal and sinus cancer.
Tobacco is a carcinogen—even without additives. In addition to epidemiological evidence we have a plausible mechanism of action.
Alkaloids in the leaf convert into carcinogenic TSNAs during curing, aging, or drying. Tobacco plants absorbs heavy metals. And tobacco plants absorb polonium-210.
There’s a lot of misinformation and misleading interpretations out there that come from years of the tobacco industry attempting to create uncertainty. Especially with your firefighter myth, I think you might have got hold of some of it.
From what I remember reading chewing tobacco is orders of magnitude less cancer causing than smoking. So much so, that some groups see it as harmful to lump it in with smoking or vaping. If you really need some nic, popping a zyn is probably the least harmful way to get it.
Also scientists were recognizing the link decades before governments finally caved and regulated the industry and decades more before those industries were significantly curtailed by limiting advertising.
Then they bought a new brand name and started running the same playbook.
I didn't mention smoking cigarettes at all. I said people literally blew smoke up their ass. Huh, I wonder if that's where the saying came from, now that I think about it.
Steel has almost always (as in 99.99...% of the time) delivered to our expectations based on our understanding of it.
The cases where we built something out of steel and it failed are _massively_ outnumbered by the instances where we used it where/when suitable. If we built something in steel and it failed/someone died we stopped doing that pretty soon after.
To be honest, until a month ago, I hadn't even heard of TBPN or seen any of their content. But, seemingly, out of nowhere, they managed to get all the leaders in AI to appear in their programming.
The core of the information they present isn't much different than what you'd hear on Dwarkesh or other industry podcasts, the presentation is some weird mix of ESPN and Mad Money that I personally don't get, but maybe makes sense to a US audience.
I don't see why that is interesting to OpenAI, but maybe I'm missing something.
Super confusing... seems like some sort of in with the VCs that can pull this program's guests was enough to create a new podcast that is now seen as influential. My best is, this was a side liquidity event for the openAI VCs that had somehow invested into the podcast, looking to get some money out of openAI stake.
Dwarkesh gets far more technical and in the weeds than TPBN. It’s very different. I can’t listen to TPBN though it seems fun but I’ll relisten to Dwarkesh episodes more than once.
I don’t know. I find him pretty hard to listen to. He has admitted that his show prep is AI produced, and I think the gaps in his understanding come across in conversation. I also find his child-like irreverence and familiar tone with his guests to be very distasteful. He also can’t drink a pint of Guinness and you just can’t trust people like that.
Did you listen to his interview with Amodei? The guy goes on about, “well don’t you know about such and such” or “yeah but an AI can’t learn like an intern…” like he’s trying to argue with him. Look, this is coming from a guy who hasn’t really done anything with his life other than be friends with people in San Francisco, talking to the head of a company that’s changing the way an entire industry operates. I think Dwarkesh just needs to shut up and listen. The total lack of respect puts me off.
Just based on the number of very prominent guests they get to do interviews, they clearly have a lot of viewers in influential tech/vc circles, even if their total audience size isn’t huge.
That's true, but a lot of these people are also competitors. I can't imagine it'll be attractive going to the OpenAI media channel to talk about Gemini or Grok.
OpenAI is the most well-capitalized startup in history, and simultaneously in the center of the most hated cycle in tech (AI) since the mechanized loom.
Isn't the arbitrage these guys ran using their VC connections pretty obvious? TBPN is one of the few professionalized-with-a-team media outlets that offers a positive view of AI vs. the doomer stance of all other media (by a factor of like 100 to 1).
Total audience size is irrelevant if a good percentage of the people in that audience are tech influencers/billionaires, regardless of how niche and mainstream-irrelevant outside of X that TBPN is.
Media properties, like sports teams, are different than other businesses. To the people who own them, influence can be far more important than cashflows. Hence why a surprisingly large percentage of 19th century newspapers in many countries are still under the control of the families who founded them (just look at the NY Times).
While acquiring a youtube channel with 50K subs for hundreds of millions is definitely dotcom bubble-esque nonsense and will be viewed as such looking back, it makes total sense to me why its happening.
I'm equally confused, but I think it's playing into the types of people who were previously into crypto or sports betting or prediction markets.
Every sports bar I go to, there's some middle-aged finance bro name referring to "Sam" like they're old friends or talking about how their NVIDIA stock is up. They're confidently predicting markets due to trends.
The stock market has been kinda monolithic the past decade or so. Things went up and down, but mostly in sync. AI represents a disruption; billion dollar companies can go to zero overnight and the right bet can be the next NVIDIA. So, this show matches that vibe.
Conspiracy theory: they recorded a guest with egregious dirt on OpenAI and this money is to bury it. I have no proof and it's implausible but it makes more sense than the stated reasons.
1- EmDash plugins are written in TypeScript, not PHP
2- EmDash plugins have a specific permissions model, where they need to explicitly request access to certain things.
3- WordPress plugins just invoke things. EmDash plugins have a defined API you use to talk to different capabilitites
4- Those capabilities are totally different, and at a different abstraction, than what WordPress provides.
Beyond the look of the admin interface and publishing flow, I don't see how this is a "Spirtual Successor" to WordPress at all. Its a CMS, designed from scratch, for a serverless world, using CF proprietary capabilities (D1 Databases, R2 for image/media storage, their workers for running things).
I thought about it for a moment, but the real reason I got the new M5 Pro with 64GB is to be able to run several large projects concurrently in Docker envs.
I didn't go for a Max chip because I value the better battery life on the Pro more than I value the additional GPU cores.
Personally, I think until the LLMs start to plateau, it will always be more valuable to run a frontier LLM vs just a very capable local LLM. I have no idea when that will happen, so I simply decided to not overbuy the hardware now.
Y'know, this is the one time that i thought lawyers wouldn't let it slide. I still don't understand why apparently there aren't _massive_ class-action (or similar) lawsuits worldwide against AI companies. LLMs are full on copyright-removal machines.
The api is never the bottleneck but how fast the cli provides context. So just by using ripgrep it will be faster than using grep. On top of this concurrent code search compared to sync etc
> I've consistently found Gemini to be better than ChatGPT [ because ] Google has crawled the internet so they have more data to work with.
This commonly expressed non-sequitur needs to die.
First of all, all of the big AI labs have crawled the internet. That's not a special advantage to Google.
Second, that's not even how modern LLMs are trained. That stopped with GPT-4. Now a lot more attention is paid to the quality of the training data. Intuitively, this makes sense. If you train the model on a lot of garbage examples, it will generate output of similar quality.
So, no, Google's crawling prowess has little to do with how good Gemini can be.
> Now a lot more attention is paid to the quality of the training data.
I wonder if Google's got some tricks up their sleeves after their decades of having to tease signal from the cacophony of noise that the internet has become.
Google's search is finely tuned to push you into clicking the link of who pays them the most. The search results are excellent quality for their customers. Your mistake is thinking you are the customer.
