That is technically impressive, Hassaan, and thanks for sharing.
One recommendation: I wouldn't have the demo avatar saying things like "really cool setup you have there, and a great view out of your window". At that point, it feels intrusive.
As for what I'd build... Mentors/instructors for learning. If you could hook up with a service like mathacademy, you'd win edtech. Maybe some creatures instead of human avatars would appeal to younger people.
There were some balloons coincidentally in the background of a colleague's camera view. The Carter volunteered "and can I just say, we need more positivity in the world, the balloons behind you give a good vibe." My colleague physically recoiled, pushed the camera away, and hung up.
I think it was a combination of the intrusiveness and the notion of a machine 1) projecting (incorrect) assumptions about her attitudes/intentions onto the environment's decor, and 2) passing judgment on her. That kind of comment would be kind of impolite between strangers, like the thing that only a bad boss would feel entitled say to an underling they didn't know very well.
Just an implementation detail, though, of course! I figure if you're able to evoke massive spookiness and subtle shades of social expectations like this, you must be onto something powerful.
On the other hand it was able to talk about my background and that made it feel far more like a regular video call to me. Trying to forbid this stuff then leads to stilted conversations where they're explaining they're not allowed to talk about your surroundings.
I’d wager my nonexistent tech GTM credentials that they specifically encourage the demo model to do this to highlight the multimodal input for the wow factor.
At this point in the hype cycle being memorable probably outweighs being creepy!
I think it's just not a super smart model. They had to make a slight compromise to keep the latency low. The naturalness of the conversation that they did achieve is a great technical accomplishment with these types of constraints though.
For me, it said "are you comfortable sharing what that mark is on your forehead?" Or something like that. I said basically "I don't know maybe a wrinkle?". Lol. Kind of confirms for me why I should continue to avoid video chats. I did look like crap on general, really tired for one thing. And I am 46, so I have some wrinkles, although didn't know they were that obvious.
But a little bit of prompt guidance to avoid commenting on the visuals unless relevant would help. It's possible they actually deliberately put something in the prompt to ask it to make a comment just to demonstrate that it can see, since this is an important feature that might not be obvious otherwise.
I confess to some scepticism. The lady concerned seems to be a dedicated big cat believer, with seven sightings already[0]. If other witnesses had been present, I would be more accepting of the claim.
Isn't that a little like saying archaeologists seem to find a suspiciously large number of historical objects, or tornado hunters seem to have a suspiciously large number of tornado sightings?
Non-archaeologists find historical objects, and as a former midwesterner, I can assure you that you need no particular background to be able to see tornadoes. It would, indeed, be very suspicious if _only_ those interested in archaeology or tornadoes claimed to observe these.
I think the problem os being only a single witness claiming to have sighted them? The Loch Ness monster has more reported sightings, so a single witness, imo, is not enough to say with a large degree of certainty that there is a big cat roaming around.
I’m not saying I believe there is a big cat roaming but it’s still unfair to say there’s only been one witness when this is something frequently reported on by multiple unrelated individuals.
Indeed — but with the caveat of assuming accurate journalism and that this really is a good DNA test and result and no caveats were removed in the reporting.
Newspapers are like LLMs: when I'm not already a domain expert I have no way to determine their accuracy, but when I am they're often at least a bit wrong in some important way. This is also known as the Gell-Mann amnesia effect.
Agree, it reminds me a bit of the guy who was really obsessed by the mh370 mystery and happens to have found more pieces of the plane than anyone else. It’s certainly possible, but I remain skeptical
I mean, several of those parts has matching serial numbers with the corresponding parts installed on MH-370. I'm not sure how one could fake that without a lot of nonpublic information.
And didn't the dude in question walk along the entire coastline of Madagascar looking for washed up debris? That's certainly a plausible reason to find them.
Very skeptical. I would also like more detail in the article, what was the DNA collected from? Hair? Saliva? How was it stored, collected and tested? Who sent it in? This website has a bit of detail around what can be tested: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/lifesci/research/archaeobotany...
The novice is less likely to learn from a direct reading of Plato's Republic than to absorb Socrates's arguments and ingest enormous amounts of food for thought.
The novice will then have the capacity to think more seriously about current or historical political questions and devise better responses or approaches to them (better for the novice and better for our societies).
Always go to the masters first - the Platos, the Keynes, the Freuds... They're by far the best exponents of their own thinking.
Csikszentmihalyi says that attention "is an energy under our control, to do with as we please".
If only it were true that we have attention under our control. There are so many things we can pay attention to, and so many people whose job it is to distract us, that we can rarely direct it as we want. And biologically, we're set up to be distracted by threats and unexpected phenomena.
That's not to say we don't pay attention. As he points out elsewhere, Csikszentmihalyi identified 'flow', which is when we get into a nice state of focus on something positive.
Luckily, we're finding out more about how to pay attention to things we want to pay attention to. Prioritising, dividing tasks into chunks, getting enough sleep, choosing what we attend to more wisely are all helpful.
For many people, sleep seems to be the #1 productivity booster. Certainly, the research seems to suggest focus suffers significantly thanks to lack of sleep - not to mention IQ.
Needless to say there seem to be exceptions - Margaret Thatcher famously coped with 4 hours a night. It's been suggested that some people's ADRB1 expression continues while they're awake, which means they need less sleep. However, less sleep is also associated with dementia late in life.
I never heard about the ADRB1 gene before. The expressed protein acts as a receptor for epinephrine and norepinephrine so it sounds like it plays a key role in regulating the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. It makes sense that variations in the gene impact things like sleep and stress.
From Carlyle's French Revolution: "No lie you can speak or act but it will come, after longer or shorter circulation, like a Bill drawn on Nature's Reality, and be presented there for payment, with the answer, No effects. Pity only that it often had so long a circulation: that the original forger were so seldom he who bore the final smart of it! Lies, and the burden of evil they bring, are passed on; shifted from back to back, and from rank to rank; and so land ultimately on the dumb lowest rank, who with spade and mattock, with sore heart and empty wallet, daily come in contact with reality, and can pass the cheat no further".
