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Do you pick more ambitious ones? Do you try crazy things that you wouldn't have dared before? Do you try all sorts of different ones in parallel? Do you pursue projects that can make you money? If so, do you ever validate or jump straight in?
There's learnable truth. Eg.: Water is made of 2 hydrogen and one oxygen. The universe is 13.7 billion years old. Dinosaurs roamed freely and ruled this planet once. We evolved from single cell organisms and therefore each and everyone one of us here today is a de facto winner of trillions of chance events: the genes that make us triumphed through countless generations, people who had to meet met, wars that killed millions did not kill our ancestors (or not in time), therefore rendering an incalculable number of alternate scenarios pointless and meaningless , because we are fucking here, breathing, living, loving, working. That sort of stuff. It's incredibly humbling and deep. But at the same time, that's all learnable. You need a brain and a textbook and you get this knowledge instantiated within said wet neuron-meetloaf.
But there are (in my view) deeper or at least just as profound truths. Truths that you can only experience. For example: What it feels like to hold a child for the first time in your arms or to be absolutely shit scared when they are hurt at any point in their lives. What it means to a parent's heart when their kid smiles at them with glowing beautiful eyes and gives them a "running-hug". How it feels to stroke and smell your dying parent's hair the last time as you kiss goodbye to them. What it takes to keep a friendship alive throughout 30, 40, 50 years. These are all truths that are just as foundational, just as wonderful as the others above. For this kind of knowledge however there is no shortcut. No amount of reading, watching, listening will allow you to understand what it is like to care for a child, to lose a parent, to have a 30 year old friendship.
Sadly it seems to me, that there are fewer and fewer people who advocate for both kinds of truths. As if these two kinds of truths were incompatible... Or if it made sense to focus on only one of them..
I think this is nonsense . They are not only not incomparable but both equally necessary for becoming a well rounded human. Embrace them both and give the middle finger to anyone who dares to belittle or diminish the importance of either.
First of all, most of us spend about 30-40 years of our life to even find out what are we optimizing for. AKA we don't even know what the f we want. Often this involves going down the wrong path for years (or decades) finding yourself in a miserable state (mid or third life crises come to mind).
Second, our constraints change all the time over our lifetime. We get more (or less) wealthy, we get more (or less) time, we achieve more (or less) overall freedom to pursue our goals, etc...
This whole thing seems a bit hopeless: shooting blind at a moving target with a gun that is running out of bullets (like most guns - what a metaphor). On top of all of this, there's one constraint that's only ever getting tighter: time. You are not getting more of that shit ever, despite what some Silicon Valley anti-ageing-cryogenic nutcase is telling you.. Entropy moves in one direction and it's not in the direction of youth.
There are people who genuinely enjoy not knowing where they are heading; and that's totally fine! However, for the rest of us, the recipe for a good life seems pretty straightforward:
1. Find out what you're optimizing for in life quickly (but ideally after you turned 30). Make it concrete and short. Make it fit into two sentences, at most. Spoiler alert: roughly 90% of art that was ever generated on this planet by humans is trying to tell you that the answer is NOT money, fame or power. So take a hint!
2. Once you have your target, map out your constraints. What are the things that hinder you in getting to your goal? Which are the 3 biggest ones? Which one can you reduce the easiest? Know that, and whenever you can, work on moving that in the right direction.
Btw, at this point it might feel like the universe is mocking us... Even working on your constraints is a constrained optimization problem on its own FFS. But constraints and removing them are vitally important. The difference between getting to your goal with and without some constraints can be decades. I.e. you can either enjoy the life you wanted for yourself for a few decades, or barely just get there to then suddenly die.
3. Remind yourself every single day of 1. and 2. Then zoom out and do the work that moves you to 1. while respecting 2. The rest will follow. It's not in your control at this point, so chill the f out and enjoy the nice moments you get on your way to the minimum (or maximum - depending on how you set up your optimization problem).
Alternatively you can just become a devout Buddhist and realize that it all starts and ends with "wanting stuff", then try to deprogram 3.5 billion years of evolution in your monkey brain and simply not want things...
Well, true self-driving is still isn't here as it turned out to be waaaaay harder than ppl (i.e. the optimistic experts working on it) ever thought. That is not to say progress in this space isn't amazing and ongoing. And it's not to say true self driving will never arrive.
Nonetheless.. Do you see any resemblance with today's generative AI craze? People pivoting their careers to become professional doom sayers envisioning mass unemployment and civilisational collapse (even extinction)? Ppl becoming AI experts and "AI guys" to tell us about this brave new world we are all about to face where Everything will be different. And they really mean Everything!!! With a capital E! Are you scared already?
While some genuine experts in this field think that LLMs are THE thing that will take us to AGI plenty of them think they are just stochastic parrots. Ppl in the latter camp don't make it to mainstream news and don't shout as loud as the doomsayers but they are there (as they were 5 or so years ago with self driving) and they might be right again..
Generally speaking, if you see a product or marketing person (or basically anyone without a PhD in ML) change roles to become an "AI guru" tweeting and posting every single day about the latest GPT tools and how you'll be replaced by a bot in a year, then maybe just ignore them..
Who knows.. Maybe displacing billions of workers will end up being pretty hard and it will take some time..
Here's our view:
GPT4 will transform the internet in many ways. One of which is the trust we have in our social interactions online.
How can you know, that you're not talking to (or arguing with at 2am) with a bot, trying to sell you something or recruit you for a cause? In a few months you simply won't be able to tell the difference.
This, on top of the well known pitfalls of existing social networks (gaming our attention with divisive content to sell ads to us) made us think: what if we had a social network with the following properties?
- All users are ID verified. - All users pay a monthly (1$ or so) fee.
These two conditions would already result in:
- No need for ads or gaming your attention or selling your data. - No bot generated content. - Healthier more humane discussions.
We think, there's a huge qualitative difference between having ALL your users verified vs only some of them.
Thoughts?