It's tough as a computer science professor from a related perspective. Lots of students arbitrarily hating anything AI related because of this, including all of the traditional techniques from the 60 years prior to the rise of LLMs and diffusion models, and others misconstruing or discounting any AI class that isn't LLM or diffusion related.

I never like to say technology is inevitable, as the inevitability argument is one of the best marketing tools major companies have to justify their poor ethics and business models (see: the gig economy founders, the "Momentum" mindset). It's clear, though, that there is quite a paradigm shift occuring.

As someone who researched AI pre-GPT to enhance human creativity and aid in creative workflows, it's sad for me to see the direction it's been marketed, but not surprised. I'm personally excited by the tech because I personally see a really positive place for it where the data usage is arguably justified, but we either need to break through the current applications of it which seems more aimed at stock prices and wow-factoring the public instead of using them for what they're best at.

The whole exciting part of these was that it could convert unstructured inputs into natural language and structured outputs. Translation tasks (broad definition of translation), extracting key data points in unstructured data, language tasks. It's outstanding for the NLP tasks we struggled with previously, and these tasks are highly transformative or any inputs, it purely relies on structural patterns. I think few people would argue NLP tasks are infringing on the copyright owner.

But I can at least see how moving the direction toward (particularly with MoE approaches) using Q&A data to support generating Q&A outputs, media data to support generating media outputs, using code data to support generating code, this moves toward the territory of affecting sales and using someone's IP to compete against them. From a technical perspective, I understand how LLMs are not really copying, but the way they are marketed and tuned seems to be more and more intended to use people's data to compete against them, which is dubious at best.

I think he's basically saying that it's racist to "artificially" integrate communities, because (I think he's saying) if they need to be integrated, then that's the same as saying that black folks are necessarily inferior. I don't think he's trying to say they're inferior, but that laws forcing integration are based on that assumption. So he can be well educated and successful because he isn't inherently inferior, therefore there is no need for forced integration.

... Which is such a weird stretch of naturalism in a direction I wasn't ready for. Naturalist BS is usually, "X deserves fewer rights because they are naturally inferior", whereas this is "We should ignore historical circumstances because X is not naturally inferior".

Start a game of monopoly after three other players have already gone around the board 10 times and created lots of rules explicitly preventing you from playing how they did and see how much the argument of "well, to give you any kind of advantage here would just be stating you're inferior, and we can't do that."

Man probably got angry at his golf handicap making him feel inferior and took things too far. Among other things.

The beatings will continue until ~~morale~~ productivity improves.

Edit: Sorry, morale is irrelevant.

It's also tough to reconcile that I may thrive in high pressure situations, but they're still exhausting and I don't like them, and definitely not being dependent on them to do anything. Medication helped the minute to minute, but the week to week is still a total blur.

Or, hourly = extremely high paid contract work.

I understand that he's placing these relative to quantum computing, and that he is specifically a scientist who is deeply invested in that realm, it just seems too reductionist from a software perspective, because ultimately yeah - we are indeed limited by the architecture of our physical computing paradigm, but that doesn't discount the incredible advancements we've made in the space.

Maybe I'm being too hyperbolic over this small article, but does this basically mean any advancements in CS research are basically just glorified (insert elementary mechanical thing here) because they use bits and von Neumann architecture?

I used to adore Kaku when I was young, but as I got into academics, saw how attached he was to string theory long after it's expiry date, and seeing how popular he got on pretty wild and speculative fiction, I struggle to take him too seriously in this realm.

My experience, which comes with years in labs working on creative computation, AI, and NLP, these large language models are impressive and revolutionary, but quite frankly, for dumb reasons. The transformer was a great advancement, but seemingly only if we piled obscene amounts of data on it, previously unspeculated of amounts. Now we can train smaller bots off of the data from these bigger ones, which is neat, but it's still that mass of data.

To the general public: Yes, LLMs are overblown. To someone who spent years researching creativity assistance AI and NLPs: These are freaking awesome, and I'm amazed at the capabilities we have now in creating code that can do qualitative analysis and natural language interfacing, but the model is unsustainable unless techniques like Orca come along and shrink down the data requirements. That said, I'm running pretty competent language and image models on 12GB of relatively cheap consumer video card, so we're progressing fast.

Edit to Add: And I do agree that we're going to see wild stuff with quantum computing one day, but that can't discount the excellent research being done by folks working with existing hardware, and it's upsetting to hear a scientist bawk at a field like that. And I recognize I led this by speaking down on string theory, but string theory pop science (including Dr. Kaku) caused havoc in people taking physics seriously.

I'm not sure if it's relevant here, but I'd recommend taking a look at the book Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. I picked up the audiobook from my library and it really helped me understand myself, my development, and my parents a lot better and to have a healthier outlook on our relationship. I always understood my parents had their own baggage, but I didn't realize the specifics I could be on the lookout for, the specific reactions I'd had that could be linked to it, and how to move forward.

It could at least be a good start. Best of luck!

It depends what "From Scratch" means to you, as I don't know your level of programming or interests, because you could be talking about making a game from beginning to end, and you could be talking about...

• Using a general purpose game engine (Unity, Godot, Unreal) and pre-made assets (e.g., Unity Asset Store, Epic Marketplace)?
• Using a general purpose game engine almost purely as a rendering+input engine with a nice user interface and building your own engine overtop of that
• Using frameworks for user input and rendering images, but not necessarily ones built for games, so they're more general purpose and you'll need to write a lot of game code to put it all together into your own engine before you even starting "Making the game", but offer extreme control over every piece so that you can make something very strange and experimental, but lots of technical overhead before you get started
• Writing your own frameworks for handling user input and rendering images... that same as previous, but you'll spend 99% of your time trying to rewrite the wheel and get it to go as fast as any off the shelf replacement

If you're new to programming and just want to make a game, consider Godot with GDScript - here's a guide created in Godot to learn GDScript interactively with no programming experience. GDScript is like Python, a very widely used language outside of games, but it is exclusive to Godot so you'll need to transfer it. You can also use C# in Godot, but it's a bigger learning curve, though it is very general and used in a lot of games.

I'm a big Godot fan, but Unity and Unreal Engine are solid. Unreal might have a steeper learning curve, Godot is a free and open-source project with a nice community but it doesn't have the extensive userbase and forum repository of Unity and Unreal, Unity is so widely used there's lots of info out there.

If you did want to go really from scratch, you can try using something like Pygame in Python or Processing in Java, which are entirely code-created (no user interface) but offer lots of helpful functionality for making games purely from code. Very flexible. That said, they'll often run slow, they'll take more time to get started on a project, and you'll very quickly hit a ceiling for how much you can realistically do in them before anything practical.

If you want to go a bit lower, C++ with SDL2, learning OpenGL, and learning about how games are rendered and all that is great - it will be fast, and you'll learn the skills to modify Godot, Unreal, etc. to do anything you'd like, but similar caveats to previous; there's likely a low ceiling for the quality you'll be able to put out and high overhead to get started on a project.

I know it's controversial, but moving away from "guys" when I address a group and more or less defaulting to "they" when referring to people I don't know.

They was practical, because I deal with so many students exclusively via email, and the majority of them have foreign names where I'd never be able to place a gender anyways if they didn't state pronouns.

Switching away from guys was natural, but I'm in a very male dominated field and I'd heard from women students in my undergrad that they did feel just a bit excluded in a class setting (not as much social settings) when the professor addresses a room of 120 men and 5 women with "Guys", so it just more or less fell to the side in favour of folks/everyone.

Getting really speculative, but maybe Infinite Scrolling and similar UX design patterns. I think we learned it was dangerous pretty early in, but I have a feeling there isn't currently a widespread understanding of just how badly things like infinite scrolling shortcircuit parts of the brain and cause issues with attention and time regulation in large populations.

If I was more researched on it, I might include infinite short-form content feeds of almost any type to be honest, which may just be another way of saying social media.

I'll just add that routine is in itself a major challenge - for me, I don't have routines as much as I have laying things out in a way that reminds me to do things regularly. For my meds, I just take it once in the morning, but the one routine I try my best to maintain is flipping the pill bottle upside down. If it's upside down, there's a high chance I either took it, or forgot to flip it before bed, but it's a visual reminder so that I don't need to actively remember to take them on routine, but if I see the pill bottle in a state, I know what action to take.

That's probably one of the hardest things I've seen family members try to understand. I'm not trying to imply anything about you, this is just a related example, but I've had family members see my ADHD family members as just being lazy or intentionally ignoring things, or thinking they're just selfish or whatever. The problem is, even if it's beneficial, a part of ADHD is not having control over where your memory and focus is being put. You may want something, but that doesn't mean you'll sustain attention or effort to achieve it, and conversely you may place it in places you really don't care about to a very consuming degree...