> The researchers used microphones to record healthy and stressed tomato and tobacco plants, first in a soundproofed acoustic chamber and then in a noisier greenhouse environment. They stressed the plants via two methods: by not watering them for several days and by cutting their stems. After recording the plants, the researchers trained a machine-learning algorithm to differentiate between unstressed plants, thirsty plants, and cut plants.
This is interesting but obviously very different from the suffering that animals are experiencing.
My websites have this too with MDX, it's awesome. Reminds me of the old Bret Victor interactive tutorials back around when YC Research was funding HCI experiments
MDX & claude are remarkably useful for expressing ideas. You could turn this into a little web app and it would instantly be better than any word processor ever created.
Waymo has ~1000 cars. Uber has 8 million drivers. Worst case Uber will be acquired or merger or make a deal with one of the many AI driving startups.
I predict Waymo will have their own struggles with profitability. Last I heard the LIDAR kit they put on cars costs more than the car. So they'll have to mass produce + maintain some fancy electronics on a million+ cars.
This (particularly the figure 1 illustration) discounts the "distribution" layer for apps
Single app/feature startups will lose (true long before AI). A few will grow large enough to entrench distribution and offer a suite of services, creating defensibility against competitors
The distributors (eg. a SaaS startup that rapidly landed/expanded) will continue to find bleeding edge ways to offer a 6-12mo advantage against foundation models and incumbents
GitLab is a great example of this model. The equivalent bitter lesson of the web is that every cutting edge proprietary technology will eventually be offered free open source. However, there is a commercial advantage to purchasing the bleeding edge features with a strong SLA and customer service
The mistake is to think technology is a business. Business has always been about business. Good technology reduces the cost of sale (CAC) and cost of goods sold (COGS) to create a 85-90% margin. Good technology does not create a moat
Resilient businesses do not rely on singular technology advantages. They invest heavily in long term R&D to stay ahead of EACH wave. Resting on one's laurels after catching a single wave, or sitting out of the competition because there will be bigger waves later, are both surefire ways to lose the competition
There’s been a strong backlash to releasing AI models in my community particularly driven by EA and VC rhetoric that the potential risks far outweigh the benefits
This pushback seems quite surprising to me, since the same claims could be made for the internet, social media, YouTube, etc - the very technologies that put this group into power/wealth
My friends/family in India are far more pro-AI than friends in Silicon Valley / EU. And my artist friends seem to be more excited about it than my VC friends
I think subconsciously, a lot of people currently in power seem to be fearful - perhaps because their power/wealth/way of life will be threatened by a faster rate of change. While those in India seem to see universal translation / accessibility of global knowledge as an equalizing force
These are broad generalizations ofc. But it reminds me of the backlash against nuclear power (despite human life cost of oil/gas being way higher than nuclear) or the CEQA/environmental driven opposition to building more housing in California
I don’t know think individuals are ill intentioned in their focus on AI safety, but they sit in an echo chamber where this technology has more potential to harm them (they have a lot to lose) than benefit them (they are already at the top). So it’s natural to feel threatened and galvanize to slow down the rate of change
I tend to be quite dissatisfied by the current state of the world. Lots of violence (humans/animals), oppression, and gatekeeping of knowledge driven by our colonialist history. So I bias towards faster rate of change that could shift balance of power from western military-industrial complex to global south. AI excitement in global south excites me!
Creators are already curators. Musicians often don’t produce their own sounds, they curate and piece together samples. Designers and software engineers cut and paste from existing work.
The idea of a blank slate creator has been dead long before ML tools were introduced :)
Hey folks! I'm Ashu, the founder of Make School. We're building a new university based in San Francisco and just launched a new online course platform to share curriculum from our CS bachelor's degree for free online.
We'd love to get your feedback on the new course platform as well as the course itself. We're aiming to pair high quality videos with in-browser coding exercises for a combo passive / active learning course.
The platform was built on Gatsby in about a month. Personally, this was my first time writing production code in nearly 5 years, so feeling excited to have launched this :)
I was talking with my brother last night about online course platforms. I was arguing that there's plenty of graduate students or professors even in these times that would have the time and skill to host virtual lectures/classes and teach from a standard textbook if the price was right. This is opposed to platforms like udemy which aren't known for their quality nor academic courses.
But my brother argued that most inclined to make a course would prefer passive income from a prepared course. What are your thoughts on this? Personally I would pay a premium over udemy's already overpriced courses to learn how I would normally at university so long as I could attend live lecture conferences as needed if I needed to ask questions about the reading material or problem sets etc.
This would be a great justification to pause this trading for all clients. The challenge is they didn't limit access for institutional while limiting access for retailers. This discrepancy is core to the feeling that Robinhood is supporting the financial establishment over their community of traders.
Checks are, quite literally the least secure mode of non cash transacting. Yet the banking system is built in a way that checks are often either the fastest way to get someone money, or the only way certain merchants accept payment.
This technology should have been sun-setted years ago, and wire transfers should be free and instant.
