ChatGPT, Neuralink, and Advice Against Procrastination – Live and Learn #6
Welcome to this edition of Live and Learn. This time with a list of the best textbooks, an animated video of why everything will be very different in the future, and a new podcast notes section. Enjoy.
✨ Quote ✨
Worship the time you have. Spend time on being weird because that means you're being yourself. Be kind to those who disagree with your weirdness.
– Tim Denning - (source)
Podcast Notes
Here's something I've been experimenting with: Listening to podcasts while taking notes. The edges are still a little rough, but you can check out the first few on my website.
Links
Everything might change forever this century (or we'll go extinct) by Rational Animations. AI has the potential to change everything. The accelerating technological progress of today is distinctly different from technological progress in the past. The main takeaway for me is that technological progress is growing hyperbolically (even faster than exponential). If you like the style of animation and voice, you should also check out the video on Grabby Aliens.
Building A Virtual Machine inside ChatGPT by Jonas Degrave. What happens when you ask ChatGPT to emulate a working Linux terminal? Turns out, it's pretty good at it. However, this raises the question: Is it only producing a best guess at what a terminal would look and behave like or is it actually trying to emulate one in its forward pass? One thing this shows for sure: The possibilities of tools like ChatGPT are mindbending already. And those capabilities will only expand more in the near future.
Neuralink Show and Tell by Elon Musk and the Neuralink team. Neuralink will have trials in human patients within the next year. They are building the tools for rapidly scaling up production. They also focus on an integrated and tight feedback loop between engineering, design, and testing, while trying to make sure that their product is perfectly safe to use. This presentation made me think about what's ahead. With brain machine interfaces and more advanced AI the future is sure going to be wild.
32 Powerful Ways To Stop Procrastinating by Niklas Göke. This post summarizes how to change your environment so that procrastination (or more generally bad habits) become harder, while good ones become effortless. It is very much inspired by the ideas from Atomic Habits by James Clear. The most important ideas for me: Anchor tasks, the 2-minute rule, a Tangent Bucket, and Decision Elimination.
A list of the best textbooks by Less Wrong. Learning things is hard, but working through good textbooks makes it easier. But how do you find good textbooks? This is part of the answer. On a related note, there is also this post on Hacker News, asking the same question. Cross compare the two and you'll find textbooks worth the commitment.
🌌 Midjourney 🌌
A little random, but Midjourney now has a --v4 option. It's better, even more photorealistic now.
Questions worth pondering: How can I use AI tools like Midjourney and ChatGPT and how are they going to impact the profession that I am currently working in as a whole?
🎶 Song 🎶
Day 5: For Carol by Tom Misch. This has been stuck on repeat on my headphones over the last two weeks.
I hope you found this newsletter useful!
Have ideas for improving it? Please let me know.
Cheers,
– Rico