Dwarkesh has a CS degree, but zero academic training or real world experience in deep learning, so all of his blogging is just secondhand bullshitting to further siphon off a veneer of expertise from his podcast guests.
Better to be honest than say nothing, plenty of people say nothing. I asked a polite question thats near-impossible to answer without that level of honesty.
I teach and mentor lots of folks in my world. What I don’t do is feign expertise to rub shoulders with the people doing the actual work so I can soak money from rubes with ad rolls.
Japanese actually has a much smaller set of phonemes (~half as many as English), resulting in extensive homophones. When combined with its greater tendency toward ambiguity, correct use of pitch can actually have a larger impact on intelligibility, as compared to many other languages.
Nice theory, but my experience is exactly the other way around.
Even after several years of learning Chinese I still had trouble communicating with Chinese people, especially those who had no experience talking to foreigners. When I arrived in China and asked the way to the university I was going to (which was close by and very famous) they just didn't get what I was saying. In the end I had to show them the written word.
I don't speak Japanese, but when I arrived and said the name of the city and they immediately understood where I wanted to go. After my experience with Chinese I was flabbergasted that that went so smooth.
I blame the tones in Chinese (which I admit I'm not very good at)
You might have been trying too hard with tones and the stilted speech didn’t help with understanding. My first trip to China before I spoke Chinese well enough…the Beijing taxi drivers, you needed to speak more naturally for them to get you, not more correctly. You were better off talking like a farmer than trying to talk like a broadcaster.
I think that you are right that your problem must have been caused more by the Chinese tones than by any other characteristic of Chinese, and perhaps also from some of their consonants that do not have a straightforward English equivalent.
On the other hand, the Japanese pronunciation is one of the easiest in the world to learn, even taking into account the subtleties of pitch.
I speak Japanese and am fully aware of the dynamic you describe, having experienced it many times, first hand. I’ve also been truly misunderstood as a result of the wrong use of accent, difference in dialect, etc.
This all being said, after this interaction, I imagine you would have trouble in any country, with any language, because you seem quite insufferable and boorish.
No, he’s an overblown hack who is pandering to the elements of his audience that would share those views about Nazism and China. Should many someday see through the veil of his bullshit or simply grow tired of his pablum, he can then pivot to being a far right influencer and continue raking in the dough, having previously demonstrated the proper bona fides.
His recent conversation with Sutton suggests otherwise. Friedman is a vapid charlatan par excellence. Dwarkesh suffers from a different problem, where, by rubbing shoulders with experts, he has come to the mistaken belief that he possesses expertise, absent the humility and actual work that would entail.
Yup, Dwarkesh needs to broaden his intellectual scope, and the Sutton interview completely exposed the echo chamber he's been inhabiting. There is no certainty in science, and I don't think building 'AGI' will be any exception.
The solution to this if you want less specification in advance is to simply ask Codex a series of leading questions about a feature of fix. I typically start with something like “it seems like X could be improved with the addition of Y? Can you review the relevant parts of the codebase in a, b, and c to assess?” It will then do so and come back with a set of suggestions that follow this guidance, which you can revise and selectively tell it to implement. In my experience, this fills the context with the appropriate details to then let it make more of its own decisions in a generally correct way without as much handholding.
That’s how the game is played. We should be grateful for all the competition that is driving these improvements, not whinging about the realities of what companies have to do to contest each other’s position.
What does a Starlink installation cost (upfront and ongoing) to service 3000-5000 daily users at expected speeds?
Don't forget to price in the costs of installing and maintaining a WiFi network that works consistently in a metal ship whose interior is composed from prefab metal modules. (Hint: every cabin, every space, has one or more APs).
I haven't done the math, and I'm sure they profit on the offering, but I doubt it's as egregious as these replies make it sound.
(I thought about this a bit when I was on a cruise that offered Starlink this past summer.)
Edit: also don't forget that everyone gets free WiFi, it's just that internet access is restricted for guests who don't pay. So it does need to support the ship's full complement and passengers.
Presumably they maintain all those wifi access points regardless of whether or not anyone buys the wifi package. That lets the cruise app work. And the staff use wifi too.
I’m sure servicing thousands of people via starlink is expensive. But the cost is amortised over the number of people using it. Thousands of users should make internet access cheaper, not make it more expensive.
They also don’t provide “normal” internet speeds. I was usually getting about 20kBps - which is painfully slow. I tried to have a zoom call on the one day I paid for internet, and every minute or two we would get a latency spike of 10+ seconds. Those latency spikes went away on other days, but the speed never improved much.
The ship I was on is apparently quite old by modern standards. Maybe they don’t have enough starlink satellites installed or something. (It was definitely starlink). But if that’s the case, it makes the price they’re asking all the more outrageous. For $50/day I could probably bring my own starlink satellite on board and it would come out cheaper.
That is very different to my experience using it on the ship we were on. I was able to stream TV shows in full quality with no issues, took phone calls from work a few times over WiFi too.
I have never used Starlink otherwise and, frankly, expected much worse service - especially on a cruise ship.
I'd definitely be unhappy paying $50/day for what you described. But I paid less (there was a discount for buying a package ahead of time for my family's devices) and got better service it sounds like.
IIRC the cost of Starlink for ships is actually very high. Starts at $5k per month for a commercial vessel I think. Can’t imagine what it is for a passenger ship, but Musk is making his money to be sure.
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