In one of my 300 level poli sci classes, literally one of the first things the professor said is that in politics, everyone running for office is a power-hungry narcissist. It’s only a slight exaggeration.

That type of person is at every level of politics. I’d wager that if you could get data on the real motivations of every person who has ever run for office, you’d probably see the same amount of those people at every level, from school board to president.

And it’s not an open palm gesture, you point only your index finger up. Otherwise it looks like you’re just waving at someone

I like the idea of never referring to it again

I don’t agree that ChatGPT has gotten dumber, but I do think I’ve noticed small differences in how it’s engineered.

I’ve experimented with writing apps that use the OpenAI api to use the GPT model, and this is the biggest non-obvious problem you have to deal with that can cause it to seem significantly smarter or dumber.

The version of GPT 3.5 and 4 used in ChatGPT can only “remember” 4096 tokens at once. That’s a total of its output, the user’s input, and “system messages,” which are messages the software sends to give GPT the necessary context to understand. The standard one is “You are ChatGPT, a large language model developed by OpenAI. Knowledge Cutoff: 2021-09. Current date: YYYY-MM-DD.” It receives an even longer one on the iOS app. If you enable the new Custom Instructions feature, those also take up the token limit.

It needs token space to remember your conversation, or else it gets a goldfish memory problem. But if you program it to waste too much token space remembering stuff you told it before, then it has fewer tokens to dedicate to generating each new response, so they have to be shorter, less detailed, and it can’t spend as much energy making sure they’re logically correct.

The model itself is definitely getting smarter as time goes on, but I think we’ve seen them experiment with different ways of engineering around the token limits when employing GPT in ChatGPT. That’s the difference people are noticing.

I live near the former Holmdel Bell Labs complex. It’s an amazing building. It was sadly left in disrepair for decades until a developer bought it a few years back and turned it into a corporate office space with a mall at the ground floor. I got my Covid shots there.

Someone close to me is a HS teacher. During covid, the schools changed their policy from “no phones in class ever” to “you can have your phone in class but you’d better only use it to help with classwork or in an emergency.”

They’ve been trying to reverse the policy back to how it was, but it’s hard to get all the kids to believe that they can’t do this anymore. They don’t take the threat of punishment seriously because everyone is doing it now.

Even if you manage to deal with the phone issue, the school gives kids chromebooks now to do their work on. The student wifi network seemingly has no restrictions, since the teachers sometimes need to have them watch something on YouTube or Netflix.

So kids, during class, watch Netflix on their Chromebook instead of paying attention.

Wefwef/voyager works well as a mobile interface. It only has an iOS style interface now, but it’s really good, and they’re working on an Android skin if that’s a dealbreaker

I’ve been practicing this. In 30 years when computer input is primarily voice and touchscreens, we’ll be the only ones left. It’ll be like knowing how to use Morse code with a wireless telegraph.

I promise I wouldn’t lie about this incredibly lame claim to f lame

I’ll let you know when I figure it out

True story: I created this meme on r/adviceanimals back in the day. It had a ticker I made at the bottom of the image that’s been cropped back out (it was Reddit-themed and specific to the memes happening at the time so it makes sense someone cropped it at some point)

Thanks for the tip! I’ve been looking for something like that. It’ll save me a lot of frustration

I’m working on a similar project right now with zero coding knowledge. I’ve been trying to find something like langchain all day. I built (by which I mean I coached GPT into building) a web scraper script that can interact with the web to perform searches and then parse the results, but the outputs are getting too big to manage in a hacked together terminal interface.

How are you doing the UI? That’s what I’m finding to be the biggest puzzle that isn’t fun to solve. I’ve been looking at react as a way to do it.

Well you managed to get the username [email protected] before me, so that’s something

https://www.youtube.com/@aidanamerica/ (YouTube uses @ names now)

@aidanamerica — still trying to find a niche (or at least people who want to see me talk about the varied things I’m interested in)

I create stuff but I’m too afraid to share it with people online because no one wants have someone’s YouTube video shoved at them. Except I also tend to write long, pointless comments like this one, so I guess I am a creator.

I think we’ll see a variety of servers with different funding models, similar to how radio and tv stations in the us can have a variety of funding models. NPR has a network of member stations that all carry their content (if the stations want, or they can get content from another station, or they can make it themselves).

Threads is an example of a federated service with a corporate funding model. I definitely think it’ll survive since they have as much money as Facebook wants to sink into it.

But we’ll probably also see servers that run on donations by a dedicated community.

If Threads is the NBC/CBS/ABC of the federated landscape, then those small servers will be like public radio stations, which operate on donations and the occasional government grant.

I think there are people who would chip in a little bit to fund a non-commercial server just the same as there are people who chip in money to NPR.

What part of threads could they even argue was stolen from Twitter? It’s an open source protocol plus Instagram logins. You think Facebook needed to hire people to tell them about how to post text on the internet?

Gpt4 is not good at writing code. I think it’s because it has a lower token limit. Ask Gpt 4 to write out detailed specs for the code you want, then copy and paste that into a Gpt-3.5 session and ask it to write the code

And if it gets cut off, paste in the last line it output successfully and ask it to continue with the line following that one. Then just copy and paste the blocks together