If I sat down to read just the Dutch East India Company pages myself, at two minutes a page, eight hours a day, five days a week, it would take me about 70 years. And that’s before the newspapers. My homebrew AI lab got through the entire archive in a single twelve-hour overnight run.
Makes me wonder how much the author himself learned about the Dutch East India Company. I suspect very little, if anything. Something about these exercises reminds me of junk food: empty calories and all that...
Surely more than if they read nothing at all because most of it would be tedious drudgery of minimal value.
>> Makes me wonder how much the author himself learned about the Dutch East India Company. I suspect very little, if anything. Something about these exercises reminds me of junk food: empty calories and all that...
> Surely more than if they read nothing at all because most of it would be tedious drudgery of minimal value.
It's an archive. It's all "tedious drudgery" until you figure out the value.
Sometimes figuring out the value means reading things until notice something, which could be a pattern or something dispersed.
I'm sure that if he didn't do what he did, he would lear about Dutch East India Company so so very much.
Remember that even junk food is more food than junk and you can survive on it for years.
Probably a lot. I’ve never learned about so many disparate subjects as I have over the last two years with LLMs.
Why is it always these supremely weak arguments and rationalizations against LLMs that come from people that have been intelligent, at least based on their comment histories, for so many years. It’s radicalizing me. I want a data center everywhere and I want tokens to be so cheap they’re like electricity or water.
> Why is it always these supremely weak arguments and rationalizations against LLMs that come from people that have been intelligent, at least based on their comment histories, for so many years. It’s radicalizing me. I want a data center everywhere and I want tokens to be so cheap they’re like electricity or water.
What do you think the impact of "tokens to be so cheap they’re like electricity or water" will be? I think people who are intelligent and don't have their heads stuck in the sand see the implications of that. Why should people with money pay people to for intelligence, when they can buy machine intelligence very cheaply?
I guess it will free up smart people to finally take jobs that don't use their intelligence, or sit around scraping by on minimum-wage-like UBI (if we're so lucky).
Soon they might be as cheap as electricity, even if token price doesn't change
Learning "about" a subject and actually learning a subject are totally different things.
It’s just a matter of what you focus on don’t kid yourself. These things are reading more papers than you can ever read compiling them and then giving you that information along with sources. It makes learning everything better.
At school i was made to read all of shakespeare. It wasnt about passing tests. Any LLM can read shakespeare and pass a test. I was made to read shakespeare so that i would appreciate language in the hope that i would strive to improve my own. That still counts.
I am a soldier and language is vital in every day of my job. Tone, word choice, cadence ... all of it conveys meaning in a way that an LLM simply cannot. Soldiers will not follow an AI up a hill, nor will they follow those they know use AI to pretend they understand a subject.
Want to sound smart? Watch blackadder. Want to win no-win aguements through wit? Watch Archer. Want to inspire your troops to do somthing unpleasant? read and watch shakespeare. An LLM can teach you nothing that really counts.
None of this is relevant to the argument above. There is no reason to believe these archives are equivalent to Shakespeare even if one were to agree with you that Shakespeare is that important to read.
> An LLM can teach you nothing that really counts.
Nothing you wrote supports that argument.
None of us can read everything. None of us can even read every novel published in a single month. So we filter. One way an LLM can teach you is as an excellent way of filtering information and give you a chance to read what really counts.
Ya. Try reading a few hundred pages of historical documents. Expertise does not come from the facts that an LLM can so easily integrate. It comes from understanding the mindset of the people who wrote those pages. Do it properly and you should start to speak and write like those people. The path to becoming an expert on the East India cannot be shortcuted via an LLM.
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If you believed the things you said, you would have left out that last sentence.
"OP has a point" turned into "they are the same".
I didn't mean to upset you, piratebroadcast. Like so many of us, you scratched a technological itch, and that is fine. However, now that AI tools have supercharged us, these scratches are easier to scratch, and their outcomes, made public, flood the aether.
The aether is 99% garbage thanks to entrepreneurs big and small, so anyone scratching any kind of real itch and posting it online improves SNR, ever so slightly.
You're missing the actual point sorokod has.
Specifically that these rabbit holes are useful to bring people to all sorts of new discoveries and skills.
It is important to point out that that's a real risk with such AI use. Of course, it is also true that it would likely not have happened at all otherwise. Both things can be true at the same time.
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Oh I just realized that you're the actual author and this is not the only super-thin-skinned comment.
Man. Why do be like this.
I think the author learned a lot in the process. It exactly served the purpose of diving down rabbit holes.
Possibly, yeah, but the reactions here do not look like the learnings have been long-term-stable building blocks, tbh.
But anyway.
I am curious what else will show back up again when other people decide to hook up a clanker to one of the many piles of historic (and current) data we do not have the manpower to process for.
If OP followed the ideas of sorokod, there would have been no learnings at all.
If you know what you're looking for in it, you're not obliged to read a book in order either.