The idea here is, one can pick the slides they want and arrange them into a sequence right in the URL. This way, there is no registration, no user data collection, no persistent state even. You just pick the slides, teach your material, and move on.
It's very raw, I still want to add a convenient sequence constructor, a "blank" slide so you could display your own content in it, and a similar quiz page. But I already used some of the slides for teaching, students seem to like them.
Hopefully, I'll have the rest done by the beginning of the spring semester.
The most interesting thing in this whole picture is not AGI, it's how the collective intelligence works. CEOs claim the AGI is near because that's how they manipulate the public. But the public knows that it's only a manipulation. So how come the manipulation is still possible?
Sunk cost fallacy? What percentage of the public has actually invested the billions/trillions and is now demanding something to show for it? I'm not sure the average joe wants copilot in their outlook, but sure as hell someone wants it in there
Because "the public" isn't one person or even one cohesive group. Some see the manipulation, and point it out. Others don't see it, or ignore it when it's pointed out.
And why ignore it? Because they don't want to believe it's manipulation, because it promises large numbers of dollars, and they want to believe that those are real.
because people hedge their bets almost always. basically how likely something is vs costs vs what everybody else is doing vs how you are personally affected.
So in case of the current AI there are several scenarios where you have to react to it. For example as a CEO of a company that would benefit from AI you need to demonstrate you are doing something or you get attacked for not doing enough.
As a CEO of an AI producing company you have almost no idea if the stuff you working on will be the thing that say makes hallucination-free LLMs, allows for cheap long term context integration or even "solve AGI". you have to pretend that you are just about to do the latter tho.
Fun fact, there were no commercials in the USSR. No TV advertisements as a genre, so nobody knew how to make these. And one of the first Soviet commercials I saw was already during perestroyka, and it was about Lada. It was 15 minutes long, and it featured a line (sorry, may be misremembering it a bit) "if your brand new car doesn't start, no worries! Just take a 10mm wrench, and tighten the battery bolts. See how easy it is!"
The Fiat 124 was actually a pretty good car for its era. Russians improved its suspension, refitted the engine, and messed up the hydraulics. Still, pretty good car for the 60s. And then, they continued to produce the same car with miniscule modifications until 2010s.
That's the problem with authoritarian regimes. You can buy a plant by a fiat (pun intended), but you can't make a decent car by a decree.
They could have done much better if it was a priority. The priority however was tanks, nuclear submarines and missiles. Up to 25% of GDP was outright wasted on the military.
Not within the socialist system, there was absolute zero incentive to do a quality job. Sometimes there were incentives to do more on the quantity (see "udarnik") with moderate success but these were detrimental to the quality.
There are plenty of activities that are essential for engineering but not a sort of engineering themselves. Like writing documentation, or communicating requirements to your colleagues. Making instructions and operational procedures. Management. Accounting. Marketing. What makes making software an engineering discipline and making coffee not? Where is the line and why we presume we should be behind that line?
Well, yes, but after the 75 years, don't you think that "too young" argument is getting old? Nuclear energy, medical imaging, and the space part of aerospace are all younger than "software development". These are all mature industries highly codified, and they also all also encompass software development among other things. Could it be that software development isn't an engineering discipline at all but a supporting activity?
Writing isn't an engineering discipline. And all industries rely heavily on writing. Could it be that writing software is just writing for computers and as such could only by codified within another engineering discipline and not by its own?
> Writing isn't an engineering discipline. And all industries rely heavily on writing. Could it be that writing software is just writing for computers and as such could only by codified within another engineering discipline and not by its own?
I think this is a very good point!
If you are writing the control software for a rocketship's avionics, you probably need to have some understanding of aeronautics, control theory, signal processing etc. Ultimately the act of writing the software is merely an expression of all the math and theory that you have spent a lifetime acquiring.
Inversely, the engineer who is speccing out the control software for a nuclear reactor is essentially writing the software for it. It's just in human readable format such that the human journeyman who's actually slinging the code can implement it. By the time the code is being written, the engineering work has been done already.
Programming is much closer to bricklaying or assembling or machining. Software engineering is much closer to architecture design, and does not involve a lot of code writing.
Most of the startups actually plan to survive for more than 2 months. And it makes total sense to think about scalability, reliability, and performance while it's still possible to change your whole stack every other week. Not forgetting about other things such as securing your cash flow, growing your talent pool, protecting your IP, etc. Finding a good balance between multiple focii is exactly the job for a founder. Of course, it's a hard job, that's why we don't see many successful startups to begin with.
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