I am in the same situation as you (pre-ordered from Germany, no delivery date yet). In the mean time I have just listened to the audio book on Spotify.
mofeien
Karma: 13
We actually did have a post the other day reporting positive results of LLM use for education. The linked Harvard study contains a prompt that I was easily able to adapt and use with some fun and engaging results (just tried it on myself, not with students). I think suggesting a constructive approach like this for the (secondary) purpose of education could have been added in the discussion with the principal to make it seem less cynical. Also, training disadvantaged locals in LLM use for educating and as a side effect empowering them to also use the LLM tutor for themselves to learn about new topics in an engaging way could even be a benefit to themselves in the short to medium term.
Thank you for the retroactive feature request!
These days, I’ve left both traditional and roam-like note-taking apps behind because they all left me with collections of half finished notes on ideas/writings that I would seldomly revisit again. Instead I started to just use Anki for all my note-taking. It’s not made for this use case, but it is part of my daily workflow anyway and it solves my biggest problem of stale notes by making me revisit them regularly.
With Anki I record any fleeting ideas as standalone notes, without an “answer” component. Later, when these note come up for review I spend a few moments to refine each idea. This keeps the notes dynamic and evolving. If the idea turns into something promising, I’ll add an item on my normal ToDo list for some dedicated in-depth exploration of this idea. Conversely, if the idea seems like a dead end, I’ll suspend it so it is not shown anymore during review.
The feature I’m missing most is being able to easily link to related notes. Anki’s notes can be grouped into decks, and tagged, but I find jumping to the note browser and entering search terms cumbersome.Example of the note-taking workflow: I have an idea of an Anki feature which would automatically link related notes to each other, and e. g. show the links at the bottom of each answer card. I suspect that text embeddings could help there. So I add a note “Using text embeddings for automatic Anki note linking” to my Ideas deck. The next time this card is shown during review I might edit it to add “Implement as an Anki plugin that will regularly run on and update all notes in the collection” and the next time maybe some thought about an implementation detail like ”? how to make sure that the links it placed in the note by the plugin are ignored for embedding purposes”.
Three years ago I also felt very anxious about the possibility that everyone I loved could be dead in a few years and managed to disconnect emotionally from it after a while, which helped. I focused on other things than AI risk afterwards. Recently I decided that I no longer just want to sit and watch, and instead want to Actually Do Something About It.
Engaging with the topic again also brought the anxiety and grimness back, this time more concretely and viscerally than before. Two things helped me the most to not despair, while at the same time also not denying my feelings and instead channeling them into resolve:
Reminding myself that the world is Dark, not colorless as part of re-reading the Replacing Guilt sequence (there is also a nice podcast reading of it). See the recent post Distilling Replacing Guilt for an overview of the sequence.
Talking to other people about it, in real life: Participating at PauseAI PauseCon last month and meeting lots of people who model the desire and calmness to effectively engage with the issue, in order to increase the probability of the counter-possibility of everyone not dying within a few years. And also hosting an event at my home for my friends to introduce them to AI X-risk as well as to recent developments, and then giving us space to talk about each of our personal experiences and thoughts.