I mean your point isn't unfair, but the conversation so far os going something like

>"Other companies are following the example set, they fired 70% of people without damaging the company"

>"But isn't the company in shambles?"

>"Well sure, but that's for unrelated reasons."

Surely even if that's true these famously superstitious cargo-culting executives wouldn't want to follow that example?

That's true, let's think about it.

The brain is the most obvious cost center, consuming nutrients without doing anything to directly provide them. Legs move us towards food, but also away from it, so they're a wash. Eyes and ears are redundant with nose, in these lean times. Hands are essential to pick up food that's in a container we can't fit our face in. Mouth too. Digestive tract, on the other hand, is always complaining for more food and never generating any itself, so it has to go.

Once we've fired everyone but the C-suite, marketing, and accounts receivable, we'll have the most efficient, profit-center only company in existence!

Frankly, that doesn't need a robot, it needs a concert belt, maybe a hopper.

What did the false starts teach you? I have some stainless steel pans and sometimes they work great and sometimes they're just mysteriously sticky, with whatever I'm cooking bonding to the pan.

If it's happening only sometimes I'm not sure how useful this will be but these were where I had issues at the beginning - I'd looked up how to use them before buying them because I figured nonstick wouldn't exist if I could use them the same, but some information was misleading or incomplete. For example when cooking:

* You should preheat until you get a leidenfrost effect - get some water on your fingers and flick it onto the skillet, it should form droplets that bounce around without boiling off.

* Once this happens, immediately turn the heat to the lowest setting so the skillet doesn't get too hot (most instructions are missing this step and I didn't really expect the skillet would get too hot - stainless steel just keeps getting hotter at a temperature the teflon nonstick would maintain heat). Depending on your stove, the lowest might be a little too low and heat is slowly lost, this is something you'll eventually get a feel for.

* After getting the leidenfrost effect (maybe? not sure how important it is to wait until after), you have to add something (butter or vegetable oil, for example) to coat the surface and not only get a nonstick effect but also sort of buffer the heat. It's kind of like cast-iron seasoning, but extremely low-effort and you do it / clean it off every usage. Some of the things I'd read before buying said the leidenfrost effect was the important part for getting a nonstick surface without mentioning this stage, which led to a pancake that was black and stuck to the skillet on one side and still liquid batter on the other.

And when cleaning:

* I'd mentioned sausage and bacon above, these leave gunk that sounds kind of like what you described except a lot more of it. For some reason getting a wet paper towel and rubbing down the skillet (instead of putting water on the skillet directly) works really well getting almost all of it off, though it will take several of them.

* If there's still residue not coming off, something I got from reddit worked even where grease-removing dish soap didn't: Lightly boil baking soda in water in the skillet for about 20 minutes. Don't let the water boil off or you'll be left with baking soda gunk stuck to the skillet, you want it to dissolve and soak in the hot water for a while before emptying it and wiping it down.

* And lastly one of the side reasons I like it over nonstick while cleaning: The surface is actually smooth. When using a scrunge to wipe it down you can feel where there's still something stuck to the surface, while nonstick is rough even when clean.

Nah, you can rip the discs and sell them back/toss them.

You can also get discs from most libraries, book stores, many garage sails, ebay, for super cheap.

At that point, why not just pirate and cut out the used disk middleman since the original creators aren't seeing any money from the purchase at that point anyway?

Borrowing from libraries sort of gives money to the creators, since the libraries seem to buy + dump lots of copies. Buying used gives the libraries money, since they dump the copies at the used store.

Alternatively, be like me, and have a $100 budget for N ~= 20 BluRays/40 DVDs. 2-3 can be new purchases if used isn't in stock.

Lip service to the law, in theory purchasing used discs supports original sales of new discs, and I at least sometimes prefer the discovery experience of physical browsing.

I don't know how you'd prompt this, but if there was a clean example of an A.I. coming up with an idea that's completely novel in more than details, it would be compelling evidence that these next-token predictors have some weird emergent properties that don't necessarily follow from intricate, sophisticated webs of token-prediction.

E.g. "What might be a room-temperature superconductor" -> "some plausible iteration on existing high-temperature superconductors based on our current understanding of the underlying physics" would not be outside how we currently understand them.

"What might be a room-temperature superconductor?" -> "some completely outlandish material that nobody has studied before and, when examined, seems to have higher temperature superconducting than we would predict" would provoke some serious questions.

A fun experiment I've heard suggested is training a model on all scientific understanding just up to some counterintuitive quantum leap in scientific understanding, say, Einstein's theory of relativity, and then seeing if you can prompt it to "discover" or "invent" said leap, without explicitly telling it what to look for. This would of course be pretty hard to prove, but if you could get it to work on a local model, publish the training set and parameters so that anyone can replicate it on their own machine, that could be pretty darn compelling.

Why would it matter whether or not the robot looks something up if it makes a novel discovery?

Why would it matter that the discovery wasn't just novel but felt like an unconventional one to me, someone who is probably a total outsider to that field?

Both of those feel subjective or at least hard to sustain.

Look. What I'm trying to tell people is that the easy explanations for how these models worked circa GPT-2 is just not cutting it anymore. Neither is setting some subjective and needlessly high bar for...what exactly? What? Do we decide to pay attention to AI after it does all the above? That seems a bit late to the party for cheering on or resisting it.

Some new shit is afoot. Folk need to pay attention, not think they got it figured out already.

One thing that's disappointed me is that despite all the excitement over better and cheaper battery technology, you can't buy a cheapish drop in replacement battery for e.g. an old kindle that has more storage capacity than the OEM version.

I understand there's like all sorts of complexities in standards, form factors, voltage, wattage, etc, but I really wish I could upgrade my old devices like that.

By the talk of "ratios", it sounds like it's fine if your kid's friend comes over every day, but if your kid's four friends come over every day you could get in trouble.

"Simmering H20", for all that simmering isn't quite the same as boiling, is pretty clearly more or less identical to boiling water.

Which doesn't sound like a free market to me. Capping production to keep asset price high is one of the most straightforward default examples of market-distorting interventions there is.