A few times per year I similarly have a conversation with my wife at night (lastly about a hair type) and the next morning a corresponding ad was presented at her at Facebook (shampoo). Only her Android phone was at the room (open, logged in Facebook in Chrome, no app).
I definitely believe they hear us but they trigger the action with care and selectively, so as not to get caught (eg to low tech people, when the ad is very relevant to the need etc).
I am astonished that nobody had ever done a reverse engineering research yet.
Define grim? Surging stock market, reduced inflation? 4% of the global population producing 75% of Nobel prizes ( half of which are immigrants), robust high tech manufacturing? Robust agriculture that was recovered from the first round of tariffs? Increased housing stock stabilizing prices? The Chips act and infrastructure bill that would have accelerated strategic manufacturing growth? Clean energy investments that would have given us more power for AI.
A degree is worth almost $1MM in lifetime earnings (for men). So yes, compared to no degree. A more fine-grained analysis seems difficult, and one could imagine the conclusion is dominated by which specific schools and specific degrees you are comparing.
This should have been common practice since well before AI was capable of presenting convincing prose. It also could be seen as a corollary of Paul Graham's point in https://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html . It's also an idea that I was raised to believe was explicitly anti-bigoted, which people nowadays try to tell me is explicitly bigoted (or at least problematic).
It sounds like you are asking whether anti-cloning or anti-piracy measures would survive in today's world, and that's something of an ugly arms race. The publishers know whatever scheme they put in will eventually be defeated, but most of them just want to deter piracy for a limited period after the release date.
The Microsoft easter egg is from an earlier era where things aren't so ugly. The Cutting Room Floor has more easter eggs of that nature, for example:
Social media in general (including HN) is heavily fictional and somewhat deluded compared to reality.
Case in point just the last month: All of social media hated Nintendo’s pricing. Reddit called for boycotts. Nintendo’s live streams had “drop the price” screamed in the chat for the entire duration. YouTube videos complaining hit 1M+ views. Even HN spread misinformation and complained.
The preorders broke Best Buy, Target, and Walmart; and it’s now on track to be the largest opening week for a console, from any manufacturer, ever. To the point it probably outsold the Steam Deck’s lifetime sales in the first day.
> In contrast language models are trained over trillions of tokens comprising the entirety of human knowledge.
Not even close! At best it's a small subset of the internet + published books. The vast majority of human knowledge isn't even in the training sets yet.
I would question the use of a model fed everything, though.
during covid i would post all sorts of made-up stories in r/relationship_advice just out of boredom/for the fun of creative writing. once the post stopped getting comments, i’d delete it/my comment history and write another one. i got quite a lot of karma, some awards, and a real dislike for the term “red flag” after ~six months of this
When it comes to divisive issues such as DEI, a way to bridge the beliefs of both sides is to not engage with far side of either spectrum but rather deploy something that unite people like the European declaration of human rights. The far left would loose the ability to address past injustices, and the far right would have to agree with the enforcement of equal rights over personal belief, but the general concept has a very broad appeal to both left and right wing voters.
The guy also had explosive and a triggering device in his car! It's a good thing for him police didn't seize his air-bag as evidence. (Being sarcastic.)
Reflective listening. The ability to hear people deeply is a powerful way to connect with people in a world largely absent of authentic personal connection.
I grew up in a very blue-collar / rural / "redneck" kind of environment and started wrenching on cars with my dad in his shop working on race cars from just about the time I was born. Now I'm no professional auto mechanic, but I have a modest amount of knowledge / skill / aptitude / whatever for working on cars and other mechanical things.
I did two years of welding in high-school. It's not a skill I use very often, but I'm glad I have at least the basics down. It could come in handy one day.
I started dabbling in hobby electronics as a small child and while I'm not professional electronics technician or anything, I can solder reasonably well and know my way around a multimeter / oscilloscope / etc. and can do some electronics repair and construction.
And in my years as a volunteer firefighter, I got my Firefighter Instructor certification and taught some certification classes, which has been valuable in terms of learning content delivery and being comfortable in front of large groups. Being a firefighter was also just generally valuable in terms of learning to be more confident / self-assured and having a stoic approach to high stress situations.
Second thing I do is block the TV access to internet after I do one firmware update.