This gets to the old saw, "knowing what question to ask is the most important thing". To the extent that LLMs can answer questions better than formulate which ones to ask, they may be inherently limited. We will see.
But it does seem they are good (to the extent that they are good at anything) at identifying the questions first if you ask them. It does mean you need an ok enough meta-question to start the chain of the reasoning, but that is the key insight of the recent wave of "reasoning models." First ask the LLM to reformulate the problem and structure an approach, or multiple approaches on how to address it, then have a second pass do just that.
Google search with less steps? Still a huge advancement, of course.
Wonder how much benefit a meta lang for describing these problems correctly for the LLMs to process into code, an even-higher level language perhaps we could call it English?
They linked to the same video, but to a specific timestamp within it - by adding '?t=325' to the URL, which tells Youtube to play the video from 5m25s rather than from the beginning.
It's still a theory. We definitely don't know the underlying mechanism(s) of action, and it's likely there's more hidden complexity there.
But rapid weight gain after weight loss (until you arrive somewhere near your old weight) is at least a well observed experimental effect. About 80% of people who lose weight, through any means, will revert back to their old weight.
i lost about 30 lbs a couple of years ago, white knuckling my way through starving myself on a medically supervised diet. within two months of going off the diet, i was back at the exact weight i started at, to the pound, and haven’t varied >2lbs since, no matter what i eat. consider me convinced on the setpoint theory.
There are lots of physiological parameters with set-points, such as body temperature. The problem for weight gain/loss is that instead of one set-point for body weight itself, you have maybe 5-10 set and operating points that are indirectly related to body weight, but not direct measurements of it. They don't all have to be "working right" to keep you healthy, but if too many become disordered at once, you're gonna have a problem.
Set-point theory is pretty much settled medical fact. The mechanism involves leptin, and you can easily see processes that defend bodyweight change in both directions. Though it will more aggressively defend weight loss than weight gain.
In addition prey animals will defend against weight gain more aggressively than non-prey animals. Which makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint. If a lion gets fat he doesn't have nearly as much to worry about than if a gazelle gets fat.
> Also it's hard to be against gambling if your state runs a lotto, which is gambling.
How so? Different kinds of gambling have different characteristics that could make them more or less prone to problematic behavior.
With the lottery, it's so boring and there's such a time lag between action and response that intuitively it seems like it would be harder to get addicted or harder for addiction to become really problematic.
State lotteries also run games like Keno, which run every 5-15 minutes. They have also started to run apps which have instant-play games, which are roughly equivalent to turning your phone into a slot machine. Keno and instant-play games still feel like chance, though, and the apps often have warnings and usage limits that the sports betting sites don't have.
>With the lottery, it's so boring and there's such a time lag between action and response that intuitively it seems like it would be harder to get addicted
Addictions don't reason. Win $10 and some people are hooked for life.
> or harder for addiction to become really problematic.
Example: a school teacher spending $200 a week on lotto tickets, not life devastating, but do we really want this in our society? This happens a lot.
Lottos just trick the people with less money into paying more taxes on the hopes of "winning it big!" It's essentially a hope tax for the lower and middle class. I can think of better ways of collecting taxes.
>> With the lottery, it's so boring and there's such a time lag between action and response that intuitively it seems like it would be harder to get addicted
> Addictions don't reason.
That argument was specifically based on how gambling feels and not reasoning.
Indeed, you can't argue state lotteries aren't gambling. But hey, there is a wide spectrum of how bad each form of gambling is, and lottery is very much on the lower end of it.
Very, very few people spend $200 a week on lottery tickets -- they spend a few dollars here and there a week. (Spending $200 is just silly and barely increases the chance of winning or return -- if someone can't see that, well, can't stop them from wasting money) Of course, I would like state lotteries to be further restricted, but that's still much much better than online sports betting -- people can lose six digits of wealth quickly, and that has a much bigger and immediate impact on lives than state lotteries.
> Lottos just trick the people with less money into paying more taxes on the hopes of "winning it big!"
How do you explain the school teacher spending $200 per week, then? The teachers here collectively own one of the world's largest hedge funds. These are very wealthy people.
It was the teachers themselves who told me, but sage advice in general. You're quite right that teaching does tend to an attract a crowd that are out to lunch.
Still, the portfolio is public knowledge, so we can also verify what they say. In this case a stopped watch is still right sometimes.
If you had asked me five years ago if I'd be regularly ordering from walmart.com instead of amazon.com, I'd have thought it unlikely. But here I am -- I don't have to worry about counterfeits as long as it's sold & shipped by Walmart, and I can get same-day delivery (usually within an hour or two) for the cost of a tip. Their inventory is different (many more consumer staples, at better prices; many fewer random long-tail products), but it's replaced maybe 1/4 of my Amazon purchases. I also order from target.com once in a while; I never ever used to.
Amazon has not lost, but it is definitely losing its unique edge.
I bought and returned:
- Meta Quest headset / it arrived in a shipping box that was dented, with the quests product box damaged, and when I went to try it the system wouldn’t launch apps
- a usb memory card reader that advertised support for older Sony memory sticks but wouldn’t read them
- an electric kettle that burned my hand to pour water out of at a normal angle for use and despite high reviews on the product page
Those are three examples in the last couple of months…
Worth noting that the comment you reply to calls out buying only "sold & shipped by Walmart" items, as opposed to those from other vendors like your case.
Fair. When I bought the item I wrote about, I had no idea it wasn't direct from Walmart. IMO, as bad as Amazon does, they make who you are buying from very clear.
Not in its current state. Thinking out loud, you could likely do this with the metadata stored on the photos. Desktop Docs does some metadata extraction and let's you add custom tags, but this is a good idea. Is that something you'd be interested in?
Yeah, I hadn't thought about their abandoned effort to scan every book and archived newspaper in the world in a while, but I bet they're regretting now that they didn't finish. A non-trivial amount of that physical media has been tossed or degraded by underfunded libraries since then. And it's more valuable to them now that it ever was.
