one thing it can be used for is ultra precise body fat estimation and localization. depending on your genetics you might be skinny fat but have alot of internal visceral fat that is very damaging to your health.
the state of the art is dexa scans but they can be off by 5+% and more error on the distribution of the fat
"We also haven't seen any bugs that couldn't have been found by an elite human researcher."
bro this is like the first gen, in two years they will iterate and get better. this is just like first gen video, text and image generation were crap but people saw the potential. i've been involved in natural language processing and TTS and in the span of 1-2 years we have seen some crazy innovation. now you can run really great expressive open source multi-lingual TTS on phones and edge hw like raspberry pi's. they have completely wrecked career prospects of voice actors and translators.
if i was a bad guy, i could spin up a 100 agents and find exploits faster than the number of elite security researchers on the planet could fix it. imagine getting the latest version of apple ios and have a new vulnerability within a few days to a week
Or the asymptotic curve is getting near the flatline stage. We simply don't know, because the first thing we'd need is evidence to support their claims.
Also, if you point any AI, doesn't have to be Mythos, at crap code it'll find stuff. I know of two carefully-written code bases that had a lot of AI analysis which found... nothing. Or at least no vulns, just minor issues in various places.
I know what you are going through and what helped me is taking extreme measures.
You have to first do a dopamine detox...you mention YouTube but it's usually a lot more than that. You probably addicted to a lot of other stuff (like porn, food, sugar, TikTok). You need to give your brain a break from the over stimulation.
what does this look like? get rid of all your electronics except what is essential. for me this is just my phone, kindle and laptop. as soon as I get home my phone goes in an electronic time lock box and its locked until next morning. on my laptop everything is blocked like YouTube and only the stuff essential is available (I'm on my Mac I use an app called SelfControl). get rid of your junk food and eat wholesome home made meals. replace YouTube with other interests you have always wanted to do preferably something that doesn't require electronics like drawing or reading or playing an instrument
After 30-60 days you feel a lot better and more at peace with yourself. at this point you have a decision to make, can I go back to where and keep it under control or do I need to make this the rest of my life. for me I chose an analog life and I avoid electronics as much as possible. I use instagram and YouTube but I have iOS timers on them so it's blocked after my allowed time runs out.
Agreed. I'm currently in a regressed state but a few times I've successfully done this and it changes life. Extremely locked down screen time rules are necessary - break the exciting loop of picking up your phone, eventually you'll re-associate the phone when each time you pick it up you're met with disappointment that nothing exciting is allowed.
Life just slows down in a way that allows you to appreciate little things, make better decisions and treat people with more empathy, read more, reflect on life, get better sleep. ADHD is easier to manage. Less decision fatigue and general mental fatigue (I personally feel that scrolling/youtube are not mentally refreshing and leave me just as if not more drained after).
The danger is in letting yourself slip. It's a very quick slope and brain chemicals are usually stronger than our willpower. Even knowing how much better life is during these periods, I'm still currently in a down cycle because I'm struggling to find the energy to make the right choices. Work can also be draining which takes away good choice energy later in the evening.
our company uses them LLM's extensively for coding and it was something that was optional the company paid for. we got training on how to use it and was told don't blame the LLM for shitty code, you're responsible for the work you push to the branch. most people ended up using it...our superstar dev uses it and he think he is way more productive with it.
I bought one bc I travel a lot and it's been a game changer for me. Both in terms of watching movies and also getting some work done.
Having the something similar to a multi monitor setup in a portable setup is amazing.
the negatives are the battery and the weight after couple hours. I can do a max of two 2-3 hour sessions per day and anything more would be pretty rough. Ideally I just do one 3 hour session and the rest on MacBook.
is it cool...yep! is it a necessity? nope. would I recommend it? nope. do I love it and use it a lot? yep
I can't wait to see what Apple does with this after 2-3 generations. i still think VR is looking for that killer app.
its been pretty much the same iphone for last 5 years...the only new innovation have been satellite texting messages, 120 hz screens and improved camera/cpu. yet Apple has continued to do well...i think your example of S curve and market saturation is fine but Apple has an entire ecosystem and is catering to luxury and high end market so the same rules dont apply (see LVMH as an example in luxury goods). they sell phones, tablets, computers, high end audio, watches, services and all these things just work well together. no other company on the planet comes close...other than maybe google.
While that is true in hindsight, we had different emotions when the phones 3 and 4 years ago actually came out. We were on autopilot because of all the innovation that came before it. We overshoot and then come back to reality. Also, I actually think Covid also masked a lot of deceleration due to the S curve topping out because it pulled in a lot of future demand. There are multiple reasons why the market demand is not going to line up perfectly with the actual products that launch each year.
anedotally this has held up in my social group. the people that i grew up with and went to school with...the ones that could delay instant gratification and had long term goals ended up doing pretty well in life. the ones that didnt have any plans and just went with the flow did poorly and just getting by.
also in my life i notice a big difference in performance from when i had goals/vision for my life vs. going through the motions.
IMO i think you need to have goals/vision/standards for all the important areas in your life (hobbies,partner,career,family,relationships)
Did you perform the marshmallow test on your friend as children? If not, I don't even know if you're really talking about the same thing, to be honest. The original study is such a weird and specific phenomenon to which a heroic effort of extrapolation was applied.
"Doing well in life," "delaying gratification," and "long-term goals" are about as far from concretely measurable traits as you can get.
What about a person who always waits to buy games on sale, but has experienced food insecurity and won't pass on free food, even if it's unhealthy? I could go on... there are countless variables when trying to evaluate those traits. What this study is saying is that extrapolating such broad strokes from small indicators is probably not a smart move.
Life can be a lot like a hologram, where the little things show the whole picture.
The marshmallow test is not really testing hunger or self control. It tests how willing people are to align with authority/the bigger picture.
The ideal participant isn't someone doing the calculus that 2 > 1. It's someone who recognizes that they are being tested, and cares about that more than any number of marshmallows.
The question isn't "how hungry am I?", but "what does adult attention mean to me?".
And that's why all of this stuff will stop replicating eventually, why new psychotherapies revert to the mean - it doesn't have the same amount of meaning for the test-givers after decades of trials.
> The marshmallow test is not really testing hunger or self control. It tests how willing people are to align with authority/the bigger picture.
I feel you're making the exact same mistake as the original researchers.
The marshmallow test is a proxy, but it's impossible to say what it's a proxy for in any given individual. One kid will wait because they're scared the researcher will be angry if they don't. Another kid will wait because they recently learned what marshmallows are, and they actually really want to eat two. A third will not wait, because they've never seen a marshmallow before and would rather try one first before getting two.
... and I guess another question is, how stable is this trait?
E.g. if we got really used to telling 12 year olds that the marshmallow test finding indicates that the ability to put of immediate rewards for larger later rewards is really important, could you effectively get (slightly older) kids to learn to delay gratification more, such that their performance as small children matters less?
Or (more likely) if you raise a generation with more distracting technology, can you destroy a whole generation's ability to patiently wait for a larger reward?
Could go either way in my social group. Some folks hit ivy and then ended up at mediocre tech jobs anyway, others hit ivy and struggling to find work. Others went with the flow and still made it to the same mediocre tech jobs. And the ones who failed through school and barely made it through community college have successful small businesses because they were charting their own path the whole time.
But what were they doing when they failed school? I feel like there are the Bill Gates, skipping school kids. And the ones I went to school with who just smoked, drank and hung out at the park.
I suspect the outcomes were fairly different although might both fit under your same category.
Bill Gates could drop out of college and skip school because he had wealthy family that would have supported him if things went poorly. Poor people do not have that option, so when they skip school, they instead get labeled truants and harassed by the state.
> And the ones who failed through school and barely made it through community college have successful small businesses because they were charting their own path the whole time.
By definition, it sounds like these folk were able to delay gratification quite well.
Maybe it depends on how you look at it?
If gratification is "working on my side project instead of finishing homework due tomorrow" then it wasn't delayed much, they were gratified the whole dang time!
IMO you do not. I know many people "doing pretty well in life" who are opportunistic rather than goal-driven, and having goals for your partner/family/relationships sounds to me like a recipe for disaster
In regards to the first part of your post, being opportunistic and goal-driven are not necessarily opposites. A person who is both has a plan that they follow by default, but the flexibility to turn on a dime if a better choice opens up.
The second part I partially agree with. But establishing a routine like meeting some friend every Thursday evening, that can be good.
Many years ago, I recall reading in _Columbia History of the World_ that the ability to live in cities, that is civilization, began when people preserved their seed corn so that they could have multiple harvests during the growing seasons.
What I remember is that they summarize this as "Delayed gratification is the root of civilization."
And while this is pretty early in the history of the world book, I read no further because I doubted I would find anything more insightful in the subsequent hundreds of pages.
...
Years later I tried to find that quote and I could not. I still believe it is a valuable insight though even if I hallucinated it.
Agreed. For me the real question isn't whether being capable of delaying instant gratification leads to better outcomes, it's if the marshmallow test accurately measures susceptibility to pursuing instant gratification in the cases that matter.
Like, I've never liked marshmallows. A second marshmallow would have been uninteresting to me. And even if it were I could totally see a kid going "eh, it's just a marshmallow, I'm going to just eat it now and then go think about something else".
Being able to delay instant gratification for greater rewards is only valuable in cases where you actually care about the reward. Someone who applies it everywhere regardless of interest level is just min-maxing life, and it wouldn't surprise me if obsessively min-maxing even little details doesn't correlate with better outcomes.
pretty cool...but when it comes to batteries what matters is scale and total cost. it doesnt matter if the elements are cheaper, are you introducing a product that is significantly better or cheaper that the current status quo (see the rise of LFP)?
can you use existing factories and manufacturing techniques or do you need to invent or build those. we've started hearing about solid state batteries about 15 years ago and we still dont have any at a big enough scale. if solid state batteries do takeoff it will probably takeoff first in electric aviation and supercars which can hide the cost due to a more expensive products and the need for higher density
what i was thinking as well... i love these performance improvement posts but at the same time had to think what kind of choice was it to originally reach for python in the first place if the task was to do a lot of heavy concurrent task management???
the state of the art is dexa scans but they can be off by 5+% and more error on the distribution of the fat
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