NeatNit

You might know Robert Miles from his appearances in Computerphile. When it comes to AI safety, his videos are the best explainers out there. In this video, he talks about the developments of the past year (since his last video) and how AI safety plays into it.

For example, he shows how GPT 4 shows understanding of "theory of other minds" where GPT 3.5 did not. This is where the AI can keep track of what other people know and don't know. He explains the Sally-Anne test used to show this.

He covers an experiment where GPT-4 used TaskRabbit to get a human to complete a CAPTCHA, and when the human questioned whether it was actually a robot, GPT-4 decided to lie and said that it needs help because it's blind.

He talks about how many researchers, including high-profile ones, are trying to slow down or stop the development of AI models until the safety research can catch up and ensure that the risks associated with it are mitigated.

And he talks about how suddenly what he's been doing became really important, where before it was mostly a fun and interesting hobby. He now has an influential role in how this plays out and he talks about how scary that is.

If you're interested at all in this topic, I can't recommend this video enough.

A woman is out shopping, and suddenly spots her husband. As she's about to say hello to him, she notices the man is filthy: his clothes have stains from spilt food and drinks, his face and hands are dark with mud and grime.

"What happened to you?!" she asks, skipping the hello.

"Oh, it's nothing, don't worry about it..."

"What do you mean don't worry about it? You're dirty like a pig! At least go home and shower!!"

"No, I can't... There's something I have to do. Sorry, honey, I'll see you later tonight."

"Well at least tell me how you got so muddy!"

"I really can't tell you. It's nothing, I promise."

The woman starts getting angry. "Listen to me. Either you tell me what's going on, or go home with me right now to wash yourself!! If not, I'm packing your things and kicking you out!"

The husband thinks about it for a while, then makes a deep sigh and says: "Alright... I'll come clean."

I know that DNA encodes proteins. Truthfully, everything besides that (including 'what are proteins') mostly wooshes over my head, but that's not relevant because whenever I search this question I never even find it addressed anywhere.

The human body has, among other things, two hands each with five fingers, with a very particular bone structure. How are things like that encoded in DNA, and by what mechanisms does that DNA cause these features to be built the way they are? What makes two people have a different nose shape? Nearly everyone in my family has a mole on the left side of their face, how does that come about from DNA?

I'm sure there are many steps involved, but I don't see how we go from creating proteins to reproducibly building a full organism with all the organs in the right places and the right shapes. Whenever I try to look this up, all of these intermediate steps are missing, so it basically seems like magic.

As I said, any explanation will most likely go over my head and I won't be able to understand it fully, but I at least want to see an explanation. I'll do my best to understand it of course.

I joined Proton just a few days ago, and I'm paying for it so I can use my custom domain.

I watched this interview and it raises a huge question for me (link includes timestamp): https://tilvids.com/w/q1mZzv6eq3iULLmGdV6w6M?start=6m20s

In this interview, Andy Yen says about gmail et al "there's no such thing as a free lunch". Then, in nearly the same breath, he boasts that most Proton users don't pay, they use the basic service for free because that's all they need.

So my question is: if there's no such thing as a free lunch (which there isn't), how come Proton can offer it?

Hope these kinds of questions are allowed here. On this occasion I'm just looking for a straight answer.

For a university course I need to install ROS - software for doing robotics stuff. Specifically, I need ROS 1 - which is no longer being updated, as ROS 2 is now the focus. The installation instructions are here: https://wiki.ros.org/Installation/Ubuntu

The instructions from the course material say that only Ubuntu 18 would work, though the ROS wiki says Ubuntu 20.04 is the target. Either way, it doesn't seem to be available for Ubuntu 22.04 and therefore Linux Mint 21, which is what I'm running.

The course instructions generally gives 3 options:

1. Install ROS on a VirtualBox virtual machine
2. Install on Windows using WSL
3. Install on a real Ubuntu 18 system

Right now I'm going to use VirtualBox to get started, but I'd really prefer to run it natively and I'm worried about performance. Is there a simple way to download and run software intended for Ubuntu 20.04 on Linux Mint 21.3?

Edit: thank you all for the great suggestions! I got stuck on an unrelated problem (ran out of storage space) but I'm sure your suggestions will work once I fix that. Forgive me for not replying individually, you're all awesome and I don't have anything to add other than "thank you" :)