> Omg, I love how the first examples just show how easy you can fake things. Fake being at a party with your friends. Didn't make your bed, no problem, just fake it.
Well, that's like the entire point of social media anyway, isn't it? People there will _love_ this. Ugh ...
My secret hope is that this kills the influencer industry and gets things back to just ads. Just the ads happen to be fake people, instead of real people pretending to be ads.
that would be actually pretty cool and would cause more awareness for a lot of people. but something like this would go in both directions i am afraid, as with everything there surely would be people trying to do carbonmaxxing just for the sake of it, kind of like breaking a highscore. i am sure people like this already exist anyway, though.
Nice. This is exactly how I mostly use AI. Doesn't matter if it's code or an e-mail. I have the AI do the tedious work of ... well, uh, "working", and then ideally learn from it and then transform it into my own work, as I would have done it without AI, but just being much faster now. It also establishes a natural threshold of time/work ratio for me that keeps me from using AI for every little thing. Also it feels like I am learning something new with every prompt/response.
I like the concept, but I don't quite get what problem specifically this is trying to solve or what the main motivation here is. Have an all-compatible database that is essentially just SQLite plus some scripts?
Also those AI coded CSS gradient backgrounds got old really really fast. It kind of became a low quality indicator like Word Art or Comic Sans back in the day: You see it and immediately have a thought like "Oh, it's one of those." in your head. At least that's the case for me and basically everyone in my tech bubble ...
I got rid of mine for a year thanks to a comment on HN. The only reason it came back is because of my lack of discipline. It's bearable as I only notice it when I actively listen for it now. Anyway, I am sure this would just work again.
So there was a comment that claimed it was related to bad neck posture. Being a keyboard warrior in my late 30s at that time I suffered the same issue: Tinnitus and generally bad posture. I figured that even if that wasn't true, working on my posture might be a good invest either way. So a couple of YouTube videos later I started working on it. Turns out the process to straighten your neck - even after like three decades - with just some casual invest everyday only takes about a month or two. To my surprise the tinnitus was actually also gone.
As I haven't build a real habit around the exercises eventually a bad posture came back, and so did the tinnitus. Both are generally not as bad as they were before, though.
Reminds me of advise someone gave me. Deadlifting gets rid of back pain. So I don't have an insane amount of weights, but I have roughly 30 to 40lb I can deadlift at home, which does not sound impressive at all, but coincidentally, mundane tasks that would give me back pain no longer did. Also coincidentally, my ability to do pull ups went from 0 to several reps per day. When I stopped, the back pain came back, but now I just deadlift once a week, I picked a mundane amount of weight that is easy, I take my time unless I feel like I can do it quickly with the smaller amount of weight.
You don't need to lift 300lb or whatever and weightlift max to make your body more efficient, you just need to weight lift just enough that you find yourself somewhat getting tired, I don't even work out until I am tired sometimes, and it still feels like it does a lot for my body.
So I've come to learn that in general exercise is good for you overall.
Totally agree. I'll add as an aging "woke up sore" guy, side-sleeping with a knee pillow (just a regular pillow to prevent your knees from aching from pressure) was an enormous improvement.
I (lifelong side sleeper) started using a (dedicated) knee pillow about a decade ago and I am completely torn about them. On the one hand: amazing. Better spinal alignment, zero sensitivity or soreness where the knees meet, better sleep, easily the best $10 I ever spent. On the other hand: I can no longer tolerate the weight of my knees on each other for even a minute. Can’t sleep or even just side-lay for more than thirty seconds without a pillow or a folded blanket or something between my knees without it aching like hell and being too uncomfortable to bear. From speaking to others that adopted knee pillows, it seems to be the same: once you use them, you can never go back.
So now I marvel at how I used to be able to sleep without them and ponder over why we either have no fatty pads (or muscle, even!) on the inside sides of our knees or have reduced sensitivity in that region, since we’re clearly meant to be side sleepers (it’s the healthiest position, assuming you can find a rock or log to place under your head, or even just your hands folded together).
The book I have on how to sleep properly says that on your side you hook your big toe around the Achilles' tendon of the other foot, this offsets the knees.
But it also said to sleep on the floor, and no thanks.
I also hear that resistance bands as gimicky as they sound, they can be helpful especially for the elderly who have lost mobility, physical therapists on YouTube will say things like: elderly people who cannot go up or down the stairs after using resistance bands find they've regained mobility.
So don't ever sleep on exercise, my biggest take away is you don't need to be a super weight lifter or whatever, you just need to do enough every week that it keeps your body going.
I'm 43 and do mostly stretchy band exercises for upper body workouts to help my neck, shoulder, and arms where I have chronic pain. Takes up very little space, I can do 5-10 minutes throughout the day, and 20 minutes after doing a few sets my pain is much better.
You can actually build some muscle this way - nothing impressive, but way more than I had when I wasn't doing any upper body work.
You have me a good idea. My granny can barely walk. She recently started getting constant alarms on her apple watch about Atrial fibrillation - poor cardiovascular shape.
Excruciating exercising with resistance bands is something she could do too - already started her on doing simple biceps exercises with small weights.
The more weight the better. There is an expression: break your comfort zone. But more important is an (almost) perfect exercise technique. Then resistance training makes unexpected wonders in all ages.
Agreed, bad posture (not just neck but in general) can cause both tinnitus and RSI-like symptoms in my experience and I have been able to tackle both with proper exercising.
Where I don't agree is the following:
> Turns out the process to straighten your neck - even after like three decades - with just some casual invest everyday only takes about a month or two.
While you can make progress quickly (in the sense that your symptoms become less severe), fixing your posture usually takes much, much longer than that. In fact, if we're being honest here, it's never a one-time fix that you do for some $TIME and then stop doing. The reason being that forces & activities that cause or exacerbate bad posture (sitting, carrying a back pack, sleeping on the side, various sports, doing no sport at all, wearing shoes with a high heel drop, …) are not a one-time thing, either. They act continuously, and so "fixing your posture" must be a continuous life-long activity, too.
It's because of fascia. Special cells called fibroblasts continuously create long fibers forming your fascia. So if you are sitting there with a hunched back, it will eventually stay that way with enough time as your fibroblasts form your fascia into that form.
That anecdotally matches my experience thinking about it.
After my initial hearing damage from someone clearing a rifle before everyone put on hearing protection it took a while for it to attenuate to background noise but flares beyond that volume. Things that certainly avoid flares is when I have a good sleeping setup where I avoid being crumpled or my neck kinked. I have good posture in general but sometimes weird working locations, off site meetings, hackathons, etc would lead to my tinnitus getting worse.
I chalked that up to being physically tired from travel and lacking sleep (both of which seems to also increase my tinnitus)but when reflecting back I don’t recall having much Tinnitus when my son was a newborn through a one year old and I basically slept walk that whole year.
I think on the count back the neck posture and likely the muscles in my neck and head lacking tension is what is keeping it from being worse.
And so was I when I first read about it! I just looked for random YouTube videos that walked you through exercises of how to get rid of your neck hump and bad posture. Most were a mix of exercises that had you basically do the opposite, like lay on your back with a rolled up towel under your shoulders and push your head on the ground, or some general posture exercises like pushing your shoulders back and tense up your neck in a straight position.
I'd recommend to look those up for yourself, as I am terrible at explaining and not a professional, haha. I can't give any specific recommendations as I simply can't find them anymore. But trying to look for them made me realize again just how many there are ...
I can give another recommendation; while you may feel the effects in your neck, it can start well further down from your feet up. Do calf/thigh stretches, tilt your hips "back" (tense your buttocks, do kettlebell swings, dead lifts, squats), shoulder exercises (rows), etc.
You can often tell when people have a desk posture from their hips being tilted backwards and/or pot bellies (even if they're not overweight).
Very much so. Also applies to other exercises, for the back, joints .. if you make it a habit, you can do a lot of helpful things for your body, when you wait for something and can resist the urge to pull out your phone to distract yourself.
For me it was related to some benign brain mass'es arm touching my ear nerve. This causes me some hearing loss, and also it was causing tinnitus. However I realized tinnitus directly correlated with my blood pressure. So If I control my blood pressure I don't have it.
Bad posture, and perhaps even more importantly, sitting is a really, really bad thing. There is a reason why taxi drivers have massively shorter life spans than the general population - sitting all day and the following poor circulation is one of the worst things you can do to your body.
By the way, do you have any youtube videos perhaps saved that you followed?
The taxi driver claim is not really supported by any evidence. There was an article going around in 2024 claiming something like "taxi drivers die at 68", but the study it referenced had all kinds of methodological problems and was not actually designed to estimate occupational life expectancy.
"Sitting" is just a stand in for "having a sedentary lifestyle". Anyone who doesn't exercise will have these issues.
jealous. i've had tinnitus ever since i had memories. my literal earliest memories are laying down when i was put down for a nap and vividly paying attention to the sound. dunno if i was born with it or had some crazy ear infection or what but ive just given up that anything can be done. i'm fortunate it's not all bad but i can't sleep without a fan.
i sometimes get sad that i genuinely don't know what no sound is like. i've never experienced true silence :/ when im super tired i get some weird auditory effects like the tinnitus sound gets super choppy almost like a rumbly gating flutter like the tubes deep in my ear are spazzing out as im drifting off to sleep. im probably gonna die idk
I'm lucky in that I learned to ignore it over time, so I'm not too bothered by it when I go to sleep. But when I'm particularly mentally exhausted it's much louder than even my retro fridge. Got a noise combo too, as my eyesight is also full of TV static.
Sadly there is - as far as commonplace medicine goes - very little knowledge of what causes tinnitus and doctors have dismissed me multiple time with a consternated shrug.
> Turns out the process to straighten your neck - even after like three decades - with just some casual invest everyday only takes about a month or two
Could you provide some detail? Even YouTube links would be helpful.
Mine is pretty light and I am sure it's neck related because I can change its frequency by moving my neck. However this doesn't mean everybody has this.
> Some in <country> have X, while other friends in <city> have Y
Cool. What's your message here, though?
I got 10GBit/s down and 1Gbit/s up fiber in a medium size city in Germany as a non-enterprise customer. I even went to buy a capable router and SFP+ network cards for our main PCs and NAS to be able to enjoy it fully. A friend in Poland (close to the border near Cottbus) doesn't have an internet line at all and always relied on mobile data until they got their Starlink setup just recently.
Cherry picking and trying to make a point is cool until it isn't.
I have doubts in their reservation process, though. I signed up for the controller reservation as soon as it started (after they just gave the first batch to scalpers) and it was mentioned that they prefer genuine accounts. My account is over 22 years old at this point and has regular transactions going on. Countless games with countless hours, almost daily activity. I even got the Index back in the day and still use it.
Anyway, upon registration I was informed that my account was "not eligible". You are welcome, I guess.
This has been my dream ever since. Instead of encoding "all the knowledge" into those parameters, how about just making a model that has the same size, but all (or rather most) it does is reasoning? Just give it the ability to browse the net (e.g. language specifications, documentation and best practices) and just have it do its thing. Why does my coding agent need to know the population of New York, know a cheese cake recipe or the general lifespan of an ostrich? Just give it the bare minimum knowledge to think and reason about, and let it figure out the rest.
Sadly that's not how LLMs work, since all they do is "token prediction". At least the models we have to today ...
I think this is a well known concept, which we can't deliver yet. LLM/transformer give us reasoning engine as a byproduct of its design, but it is quite ineffective. If we can distill reasoning, if reasoning can be achieved without general knowledge, it will be a very effective machine.
Some amount of knowledge is required for reasoning. Maybe such model can dynamically knowledge domains to have taxonomy. For example, model can't effective reason about development task, if it has no knowledge about development best practices. But population of New York or recipies can definitely be loaded run time with tools.
>Some amount of knowledge is required for reasoning.
This is the root of problem. If you think about STEM universities, they don't really teach you things you need in the real world. They teach you what you need to know in order to go out there and accumulate the necessary information which can then be used to solve problems. Giving a person access to the internet or a super powerful calculator (like Mathematica) won't mean that they can do anything useful. They need tons of experience to use these tools in an effective way. That experience is basically all that implicit adjacent knowledge that we pick up along the way getting our degrees. And LLMs pick that up during pre-training. Drop this part and the outcome will be worthless.
Take mathematics as an example. Humanity has found math notation, which allowed to express math rules — distill them to the core. Before math was expressed in prose — a very inefficient way, very similar to current LLMs.
In my school, math teacher was giving me prose, which I was converting to math notation. I could argue, that this prose→reasoning conversion is not required at training, and can be obtained at inference time with search tools.
Yup, you still need knowledge. Even if you have access to all the data and tools, you still need to know what to search for, what tools to use and to understand what the user is asking.
Our computers can already do everything, have access to all the tools and information, yet they still need a human/intelligence to use it and apply to specific problems.
Even defining the problem requires knowledge.
As for the tools, if the model has access to 1000 tools, how would it know which one to use if it doesn't have any knowledge itself?
What if I ask for "table tennis spin" it had a "magnus effect calculator", how would it know to make the connection between the two?
Model can use tools to get that knowledge. In your example, read Wikipedia page about table tennis. Imagine a reasoning engine with a big enough context, that knows nothing. A path built from first principles to understand "table tennis spin" — does not look very long for me.
How would it know about Wikipedia and when to use it? From the tool description? If we had 100k such tools, then that wouldn't even fit in the context.
This is only one example, plus if the topic is more complex, maybe it had to search/learn everything (what is table tennis, what is spin, what is a human, what is a ball), etc. So it would be like spawning a baby human, have it spend an (instant) life learning about the world before providing an answer. Maybe this could work in 10 yesrs, if models get stronger with huge context lengths and almost instant data retrieval. Is it the best way to go about things though? Most animals have most of their core abilities embedded in their DNA and "instincts". A cat doesn't have to learn what a bird is in order to hunt it, it's already "embedded" in its neural pathways, or even deeper, at a full-body level. Those type of systems are a lot more efficient than the learned ones. Maybe the best future AI, will have everything already embedded, instead of just being a strong reasoning machine. All AI responses should be instant and like "reflexes" instead of reasoned steps.
Imagine you only know how to cook (use fry pan skill) and know how to cook omelette (recipe). You get the task to cook doner kebab. How many Wikipedia pages do you need to read to get a good understanding? I guess its max 5.
I think grounding your abstract problem to an example makes it more trivial, than it sounds in general.
> How would it know about Wikipedia and when to use it?
2 general concepts "You have to get good understanding of subject area before you do actions" + "Wikipedia is a good source of knowledge of subject areas" will get a model there.
> spawning a baby human, have it spend an (instant) life learning
Humans spend 99% of their life on boring repeating tasks, not learning anything, just navigating on heuristics.
(what is turkish)->(parse lots of potentially relevant/irrelevant context because I have no way of knowing which if any of this informs the doner kebab before I've looked at it)
>dish made of meat
(what is meat) -> (parse lots of potentially ir/relevant context because I don't know if the specific origin/chemistry/mechanics or whether maillard reactions are important before I learn about them)
>cooked on a vertical rotisserie.
(what is a rotisserie) -> etc etc etc
Seems significantly less efficient than just having the various (how to cook > meat, tools > rotisserie, how to cook > seasoning > tomato; lettuce; cabbage; onion with sumac; fresh or pickled cucumber or chili; various sauces, etc) just already built in to the weights.
Yes, but still "how to cook" is not atomic. It involves knowing how to move stuff, how to measure, what "cooked" looks like in different environment (i.e. different lighting) or variations in ingredients, how to recover from specific failures (i.e. a good cook can fix accidentally adding too much salt, by counter-balancing with an ingredient that absorbs the extra salt). And this is only one skill.
It's a bit how deep image neural nets work, where simply detecting shape primitives is not enough, the net is also the connection and relation between those primitives.
Even saying, the AI should just have the "cooking" or "coding" skill, trivializes the problem.
> Humans spend 99% of their life on boring repeating tasks
But we are also non-stop unconciously learning about the world non-stop, from the analgous stream of inputs and seeing the immediate result/feedback. Even looking at static picture is like over-training a specific dataset.
Just boiling water would be difficult. Do I just add heat until I see bubbles? Or should I have a world model in which I understand that boiling water will be of varying temperatures at varying altitudes and given different liquids.
Because if the recipe just says "boil for 10 minutes" but the thing being cooked really needs a temperature of 212F for 10 minutes, the thing isn't going to be cooked if you're not actually at 212 for 10.
It probably can't use all the truth in its content window, not yet anyway.
E.g. you put a graph in its content window, and you ask it to find a Hamiltonian cycle, can it do it?
Probably this could be a next step in the future for more powerful AIs, a layer that abstracts the facts in its content window away, and a layer that solves this types of abstractions.
This is me vibe-splaining something I don't know a lot about, but I doubt there is such a thing.
If "all the knowledge" is what our models now do, what exactly would be the most extreme "none of the knowledge +search" ?
> language specifications.
It would load in all the knowledge to figure it what "language" means, then it would continue trying to decode what "specifications" means.
That might sound absurd, but to figure out the population of New York It's either: Just going to google it, or derive from primary sources.
But how is it ever going to interpret the primary sources? It needs to understand the question, how complex a question is, and how complete an answer is and how things relate. Thats just _too_ much language.
There might be a way to compact this down into a LLM-native language such that the request of `the population of New York` or `use best practices` is encoded without our messy human language for a reasoning model to work with, but the encoding itself has to be done by the "all the knowledge" llm. Now it seems we just rebuild something related to MoE with extra step afaict.
Basically: you can't teach people to think without giving them some facts and ideas to think with. It's like trying to teach woodworking without giving the students any wood.
No, but you could teach them rapid skill acquisition first, then the basics of woodworking, and they'd be off. They could then apply the same approach to machining. Instead, people absorb the meta-skill through osmosis. The first thing we should teach, starting with reading, is how to learn.
It would also reduce training costs to nothing. Current methodology requires continual retraining to scoop up new facts. If you can do a one time "this is how to think" - that could conceptually work forever, just plug in a new database layer that can be queried as required.
But isn’t that what “training” is anyway? They train LLM today like that and the database becomes the parameters. You can post train on smaller corpus for purpose-built stuff.
Couldn't you build some internal knowledge that would stay and you could teach a model this way. A very fast local memory of some sort. You could also specialize model this way so it is very skilled in your domain. The more you use it, the smarter it gets. I guess the problem is for the model to decide whether the information stored in memory is sufficient or not.
You could, but it's driving in the wrong direction to try to build that knowledge into the model weights because you'll always run into a capacity limit sooner with a small model than with a larger one. The thing the model is specialised for is linguistic understanding and the reasoning process itself, and you max that out at the expense of domain-specific knowledge. If you take "as few weights as possible" as a given, I think the interesting question is how small you can make the model with externalised memory. The openclaw and hermes people are all over this sort of memory problem: using the local filesystem or a local database of some sort is exactly a "very fast local memory" where the more you use it, the more knowledge it gathers. Whether that translates to it being "smarter" is a deeper question than it looks.
Well, that's like the entire point of social media anyway, isn't it? People there will _love_ this. Ugh ...
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