> If astronomers announced that a large asteroid might strike Earth in twenty years, and that we currently had no way to deflect it, nobody would respond by saying, “Come back when you already have the rocket.”
I don’t think the analogy fits, for a couple reasons.
1. People not wanting to know whether they have Alzheimer’s is because of the fear of a fate worse than death — living with Alzheimer’s.
2. People not wanting to know whether they have Alzheimer’s is not the same was not wanting a way to detect it. As you said, being able to measure it may help lead to a cure/treatment. I doubt people are against improving detection — they may just not want the detection to be applied personally.
Cure is the wrong word. Alzheimer’s can be best described as a failure of a system and "debris" accumulates faster than it can be "cleared". There are many moving parts and everyone is unique about the cause of their system failure.
Wrote up my current systems understanding here https://metamagic.substack.com/p/the-alzheimers-equation, but it makes clear why treatments that target only one variable are mathematically doomed to fail to work on everyone and why there will never be a single "cure". It explains without needing to read 10,000 papers why we keep getting research talking about treatment X helps in some, but not all cases or symptom Y is associated in some, but not all, etc.
This is some personal opinion that I would bet the vast majority of Alzheimer's researchers would not actually agree with. The current consensus is that Alzheimer's is a particular disease, or a cluster of similar diseases.
I'm not saying your wrong, just that the level of confidence in your assertions is not warranted.
After spending years tracking through the genetics, conditions, lab work, research papers and seeing individuals years into the condition, this model is the best I have and explains everything I currently know. Why the cluster of conditions result in the same outcome, why some treatments help some folks, but not others.
But that is sort of the point of science, you take all the evidence you have and create a hypothesis and iterate as you get more evidence. If I find evidence that suggests something else then I will be happy to tweak or abandon this. My level of confidence comes from the existing evidence and lack of evidence otherwise.
Amateur's asserting their opinions as facts isn't great, but epistemologically it's no worse (and systemically, like less harmful) than when the experts do it.
Saying that experts are less likely to do X doesn't say anything about the relative harm of their doing so. If some rando on the streets is shouting their opinion about what causes Alzheimer's and asserting it's God's Own Truth, it's going to cause less overall harm that a carefully worded (but equally wrong) statement from an expert. (And the fact that we tend to hold experts in higher regard is the reason we should be more concerned about them stating their opinions as facts than about amateurs doing the same.)
The medium feels wholly immaterial in this case. The words reach your brain, and then it's up to you to think about them, imagine the scene, process ideas. Audiobooks let the narrator add inflection, which maybe takes a slight load off you, but I don't see the big deal. I've read lots of fiction, and listened to a lot on road trips, and I don't feel like my comprehension suffered in either case compared to the other. The important thing is you can have the same level of conversation about the material - I don't believe all this woo about reading being the only pure and intellectual way to process information.
The problem is that most LLM models answer it correctly (see the many other comments in this thread reporting this). OP cherry picked the few that answered it incorrectly, not mentioning any that got it right, implying that 100% of them got it wrong.
You can see up-thread that the same model will produce different answers for different people or even from run to run.
That seems problematic for a very basic question.
Yes, models can be harnessed with structures that run queries 100x and take the "best" answer, and we can claim that if the best answer gets it right, models therefore "can solve" the problem. But for practical end-user AI use, high error rates are a problem and greatly undermine confidence.
The magic of LLMs is that one llm can learn everything and then we can clone it. However, if we don't know ahead of time which one will be the best one, then we should probably keep a lot of version with real (mathematically calculated) diversity. Ironically, the DEI peeps were right all along.
My understanding is that it mainly fails when you try it in speech mode, because it is the fastest model usually. I tried yesterday all major providers and they were all correct when I typed my question.
Nay-sayers will tell you all OpenAI, Google and Anthropic 'monkeypatched' their models (somehow!) after reading this thread and that's why they answer it correctly now.
You can even see those in this very thread. Some commenters even believe that they add internal prompts for this specific question (as if people are not attempting to fish ChatGPT's internal prompts 24/7. As if there aren't open weight models that answer this correctly.)
As someone that hosts and co-hosts several game nights (once or twice a week, most weeks), the key is to try to feel out the group, and if necessary/helpful/desired, send out "how to play" videos in advance (if they prefer learning that way vs. live).
But yeah, see if the group wants to learn a new one vs. playing one they already know.
When I set up games for my coworker group, I always send out new options along with a number of games we've already played, and let them pick. (More times than not, they pick a new game.)
When I host games with my family, I always bring a bunch of games, both new and already played, and let them pick (these are usually much lighter [easier] games). I'll sometimes suggest a new game if I think they'll like it, and they usually do. The key is to get to know what the group typically enjoys.
Board games are my favorite way to accomplish two things that I find hard to do as an introvert that works from home:
1. Getting off screens
2. Socializing
But it still also accomplishes one of my favorite things to do: thinking — specifically problem solving and optimizing.
And, as an introvert, socializing actually naturally is secondary in our group, but that’s ok — a good heavy heads-down board game (think 3-5 hours) is still quite enjoyable in the presence of other human beings. A bit of a lost art in the day of the “black mirror” (cell phones).
If you haven’t tried getting into board games lately, I highly recommend it. If you don’t know where to start, I’d be happy to offer suggestions!
As a college student without too much spending money, what’re some board games I should check out? I have wingspan, catan, and azul and wanna expand my collection with other must have games
BoardGameGeek is the place to read up on games before buying them.
On the 'without spending money' front, depending on the city where you live, there often are board game cafes where you can go to rent games and play over there.
More economical if you are playing the game once or want to try out different games. Also very good if you struggle with learning rules from the rulebook.
Also agree with the other great suggestions in the sibling comments.
One thing that would help if you could figure out the types of games you and your group might enjoy — or the type of group you and your friends are.
If you think you’d enjoy deeper strategy games, start with some of the popular games in the “strategy” category on BGG, looking for light to medium weight (1.5-2.5) to start out, working your way up the scale (to 3.0, 3.5, and 4.0).
If you’re more into the social/party type games (those are always more fun in larger groups), look at the party category. I particularly enjoy social deduction games in the right group, and those are usually big hits with older kids / younger adults (though I still enjoy social deduction games and I’m quite beyond “younger adult”). :)
One good example is One Night Ultimate Werewolf.
One tip: if you’re interested in trying out some strategy games that are a bit out of your price range, check out boardgameoracle.com and add price alerts on a few games you have your eye on. Many great board game sites run good deals (gamenerdz.com is one of my favorites), so you can often get good deals on games if you’re patient.
If you ever get to the point where you’re looking for something with a bit more depth, and are ok spending money, but you want the money to go a long way, Age of Steam is one of the best bangs for your buck.
It’s basically a system that has a library of probably close to 200 maps, where each map can change the game quite drastically, by tweaking several rules, in addition to a different map of course.
It’s currently my #1 game, and you could repeat plays with it without it getting old, assuming others enjoy the mechanics of game (route building, auction/bidding, tight economy).
I want to recommend a game you can pull out and explain in a couple of minutes that everyone tends to enjoy. I've played many a board games with people and this one has had unparalleled success in terms of enjoyment and replayability across broad audiences
It's called "So Clover!" and it's a word association themed game where each person gets four pairs of words, you write a one word clue for each pair, and then the rest of the group has to work backwards to figure out the original orientation of your cards (the cards themselves each have four words as well)
For a nice entry game for a group setting, I recommend Carcassonne. It has a simple and engaging basic gameplay with a surprising amount of depth, that can easily be scaled up and down in complexity depending on your group's preference and experience level by simply adding more pieces/mechanics.
Carcassonne is also really nice with children. You can start them on just the "puzzle" aspect on attaching matching tiles, without scoring.
Our oldest child is now capable of the base game, and I can still make it interesting for me by going for secondary objectives, such as filling difficult gaps ;-)
Very clever to introduce it to kids as purely a puzzle game! I'll keep that in mind.
When my girlfriend and I play, we sometimes give unofficial bonus points as compensation for suboptimal plays that fill out unseemly gaps that would otherwise stay open. Makes for a nice, aesthetic endstate board without handwringing over your score :b
Does your school have a board game group? If so, consider joining it to expand your effective collection (and perhaps your social group).
If not, maybe there's an adjacent group that might also be willing to entertain board games, or it's a group you could found. My college had a gaming, anime, and chess group which anchored my social experience.
My only complaint re Stardew multiplayer is because the clock doesn't pause in menus, conversations etc like it does in singleplayer, the game gets a lot less relaxing and more rushed. I wish the day would just be 25% longer when playing in co-op.
Get a 1830 variant (e.g. 18Chesapeake) and Age of Steam. Also any Splotter game (Indonesia just got a new printing). A new Brass will come to Kickstarter very soon, that could be a good choice. A pax game would be good to, Pax Pamir 2ed is a good choice.
Sushi Go is fun and compact. Dominion if you have friends that like to optimize. Uno is a good one for the road. Even a regular deck of cards is great once you learn a few samples games.
+1 to pavel_lishin's Splendor suggestion. There's also Splendour: Duel [1] which is a more complex version of the game designed for 2 players.
Another quick, low-complexity game that is easy to teach & pretty good fun is Century: Spice Road [2]
Chinatown [3] (re-themed as Waterfall Park [3b] ) is a simple highly interactive game that is basically 100% negotiations between players who are trying to make real estate deals with each other. Can be played in 90 minutes, including rules explanation, plays up to 5. For a more complex asymmetric game that's more focused on engine building, with a healthy dose of negotiation, check out Sidereal Confluence [4].
For more complex games that take a bit longer to play to teach and play, that are largely focused on players doing their own thing ("multiplayer solitaire"), building their engines without much negative player interaction, check out Ark Nova [5] or Terraforming Mars [6]. These might take 3-4 hours or so to finish, provided there's an experienced player to teach everyone the rules.
For another moderately complex strategy game with a little more player interaction, check out Brass: Birmingham [7]. Takes around 4.5 hours to finish a 4 player game, including the rules explanation. If you have a group that enjoys complex strategy games and wants something with spikier negative player interactions, where one player's actions can completely wreck another player's plans, check out Barrage [8].
This probably doesn't help "without spending much money"! One trick is to find or create a regular board gaming group where everyone brings along different games. That way if, everyone buys a new game or two every year there's a lot of variety without everyone needing to buy heaps of games.
This is the kind of positivity that I love finding find once going down the rabbit hole of board games today.
So make amazing suggestions in this list, including two of my favorites: Terraforming Mars and Brass Birmingham.
Just chiming an opinion that Brass Birmingham is high on the complexity scale for beginner board gamers. Or more specifically, high on a frustration scale because there are so many placement restrictions that there are often only 1-2 legal moves to play and figuring out what they are is quite a challenge for people playing the first time. (From experience that we as well as several others we know had on their respective first times)
> Brass Birmingham [...] there are often only 1-2 legal moves to play and figuring out what they are is quite a challenge for people playing the first time.
Also, some of those legal moves will set up a board state that the player taking a turn immediately after you can exploit for a lot more benefit than you got, so not only are the legal builds hard to identify for new players, half of those legal moves are also traps! If new players aren't comfortable learning the hard way, the player who is teaching the game can always call these out, explain what is going to happen & give people the opportunity to redo their move.
An alternative strategy game that is less complex than Brass is Friedemann Friese's classic Power Grid (2004) [1]. It has some of the same elements (network expansion, building stuff to make money) and parts of it are highly interactive (auctions!) but it is less complex and doesn't feature so many negative player interactions. The main down side of Power Grid is that some of the "admin" rules are pretty fiddly, but provided there is an experienced player to teach the game & be responsible for the admin, players who are learning don't need to care about the details.
Yeah, this shouldn’t even be on HN, or Washington Post for that matter.
There are going to be countless people that think AI is using their voice. Humans share remarkably similar voices, but obviously you can’t copy that (other than impersonations, obviously).
Unless there is evidence that a company intentionally went after a specific human voice to train their AI, there’s no reason to report on these people claiming AI is using their voice.
Maybe if it’s someone with a very distinctive voice. But this guy, as the OP said, just has a “generic podcast guy” voice.
You absolutely can copy that, it’s called voice cloning and you can do it on as little as a few seconds of audio. Once cloned, you can generate audio with that voice, saying whatever you want it to.
To be clear, I mean someone can’t file a lawsuit against someone else for sounding like them.
Of course you can have an AI target someone else’s voice. My point is that unless there is evidence it was intentional, it’s silly to claim that just because it sounds similar to a human’s voice, that means it must’ve been intentional.
I kept listening waiting to hear the voice that was supposed to sound like him, and never did.
Was it the first one (I heard three different voices during the clip)? That one is considerably deeper than the podcaster's voice, and has different tones, too. It definitely wasn't the last one, that one was much higher pitched (and then a female voice in the middle).
Feels like a big stretch, to say the least. But I can tell a big difference between the two.
Ultimately, it's like some of the music copyright lawsuits, where they're suing over chord progression. There are a billion voices on the planet -- any AI generated voice is going to sound similar to someone else's real voice (and again, I don't hear it at all in this case).
EDIT: So it's the third voice apparently. The pitch is close, but the tones and accents still definitely feel "off" enough that it doesn't sound like they were intentionally going for this guy. It still feels like a stretch to me, but not as much as the first voice did.
The clone start at 39:42. The match is 100x better than what David Greene claims (although I know Chris's voice much better). I don't see (hear) how you not hear it., I've been listening to Chris Fisher for 20 years and that clone fooled me.
It’s the voice after the woman indeed. I think it’s very close, didn’t understand what happened the first time I heard it. And this was 2024, they found many funny examples and they get better and are even better copies.
I’ve been noticing a slow decline in my iPhones ability to autocorrect or hit the key I wanted to hit (it’s already made two mistakes just typing this out).
I thought it was a “me” thing, and “there’s no way a feature like autocorrect or key sensing would regress”.
I suspect it is because snow storms are fairly rare or at least random and quite a few people do not a) realise they have not done much of any physical exercise for ages b) think shoveling snow is easy, try to do it fast and take too big loads into shovel (which you can with snow, but not with sand). For older people this might mean overexertion and possible seizure, if their cardiovascular health is not well either.
Solution: don’t be a hero. Take breaks. Take smaller shovelfuls. If the first ten shovelfuls are hard, how hard is the 1000th going to be? I live in Finland, are fairly fit and quite strong, but shoveling the car out of thick snow for half an hour is pretty hard work for me. For an older person, it must be double as hard.
> If astronomers announced that a large asteroid might strike Earth in twenty years, and that we currently had no way to deflect it, nobody would respond by saying, “Come back when you already have the rocket.”
I don’t think the analogy fits, for a couple reasons.
1. People not wanting to know whether they have Alzheimer’s is because of the fear of a fate worse than death — living with Alzheimer’s.
2. People not wanting to know whether they have Alzheimer’s is not the same was not wanting a way to detect it. As you said, being able to measure it may help lead to a cure/treatment. I doubt people are against improving detection — they may just not want the detection to be applied personally.
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