JKCalhoun

I'm by no means taking the side of the AI companies, but it's possible that Anthropic "added value" to the data they harvested. Stealing that does seem kind of uncool.

Regardless, it was always inevitable—will continue to happen.

Legal, illegal…

The word I would use is inevitable. It reminds me of the (PC) clones wars…

It is. Similar bikes are $40 on Amazon.

I helped a friend's mom set up a new TV she bought and was unable to get the TV to "come online" without 1) giving it network access and 2) setting up an account. Only then would the TV give access to the inputs.

I remember the Computer Recreations column in Scientific American on busy beavers back in 1984. I was too young then to really appreciate it. (I really miss that column—and the Amateur Scientist.)

I found it here (page 19) https://wkbpic.com/wkbx/SA/1984/1984-08-01.pdf

"You know how they deal with crime down there?" Crosby asked me.

"Nope."

"They just don't have any crime down there. 'Papa' Monzano's made crime so damn unattractive, nobody even thinks about it without getting sick. I heard you can lay a billfold in the middle of a sidewalk and you can come back a week later and it'll be right there, with everything still in it."

"Um."

"You know what the punishment is for stealing something?"

"Nope."

"The hook," he said. "No fines, no probation, no thirty days in jail. It's the hook. The hook for stealing, for murder, for arson, for treason, for rape, for being a peeping Tom. Break a law—any damn law at all—and it's the hook. Everybody can understand that, and San Lorenzo is the best-behaved country in the world."

"What is the hook?"

"They put up a gallows, see? Two posts and a cross beam. And then they take a great big kind of iron fishhook and they hang it down from the cross beam. Then they take somebody who's dumb enough to break the law, and they put the point of the hook in through one side of his belly and out the other and they let him go—and there he hangs, by God, one damn sorry law-breaker."

Cat's Cradle

"My counter argument is that you only need 1% of the population to be bad apples…"

"For all those reasons, you need surveillance to catch criminals and restore trust…"

We're making a huge assumption here that surveillance takes it down to less than 1%. You'd hate to be trading freedom for nothing at all.

"I saw the references to AI making lives easier, but VSauce advocating for sending his child to a school removed from computers."

(Whoever VSauce is) sure, we can embrace the useful applications of AI but still want to learn (want our kids to learn) with our hands, with books, from experiments.

No contradiction there.

I'm getting old and I am enjoying a new, electric pedal-assist bike. But that's not what I would want my preschool kids out there learning on. (Is that analogy crap? Maybe you get the idea anyway.)

"anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity"

It's a good thing I love Baseball, McDonald's and God, yessiree.

Did they update the title?

Guess I'll have to write another game… Bummer.

I agree that your two examples don't stand up to scrutiny.

There is historic precedent for blaming immigrants (as an example, or just others, if you like) for one's woes. So on one hand you have well-known "playbooks" that don't require some secret meeting of a cabal.

That aside though, even if actors don't collude, if they're each throwing a lot of things at the wall, they may well all arrive at the same things that seem to "have stuck". It's as though there are universal fears and even prejudices among populations of people.

Not for me, still in Camp-Teensy.

The first ESP32 board I worked with had some damn WiFi stack running in the background—not nearly as "bare metal" as I had come to expect from having just stepped out of the Arduino world.

(I've since learned, from an LLM, ha ha, how to turn that off if you don't need it.)

Oh, thank god, TVs are less expensive.

;-)

See ya, I'm time-traveling back to the 70's, ha ha.

"If it was, we'd just build smaller and have houses."

Someone needs to tell the big developers. They keep turning out McMansions (and somehow selling them?).

There's no profit in building smaller.

Transportation has got cheaper? That seems at odds with what I'm seeing (although I was only 12 years old 50 years ago).

"…not because they are racist/prejudiced or whatever…"

Perhaps wealthy actors (or those representing them) are attempting to distract the aggrieved—focus their anger toward some non-wealthy group.

Despite my ignorance on what would be involved, I like to fantasize that companies like Apple (who own their own chip design and hardware) can put these ternary pack/unpack operations in hardware with a single instruction for each (and also instructions for performing the various matrix convolutions using ternary numbers) so that we can get on-device LLMs.

I suppose with the recent quantized Bonsai models we're already seeing on-device LLMs for phones and the like… But I (again, forgive my ignorance) assume that there is an order of magnitude or more in performance sitting out there if we get custom hardware instructions.

"I'll be calling a "ternary digit" a "trit", like a "binary digit" is called a "bit"."

And missed it by one letter. <jk>

Yeah. Also tried not aging.

But, seriously, I know I am an ass throwing any shade on a very cool game—I suppose I'm more or less putting the idea out there that, hey, as everyone around here gets older, do you find these "stress games" less fun than you used to?

(I suppose even Nethack might seem like a chore these days, but I haven't fired up an old game in some time now.)

If competitors are not raising prices dramatically, then they're eating that loss. Steam should follow suit—at least with something like a loss-leader model.

When I rewrote/released an old shareware game to Steam some years ago I made just enough money to buy a Steam Deck. Since then OLED Decks came out and I'm jealous.

(With the prices of the new Steam Decks, I'm wondering now if there is instead a way to retrofit my old Deck with an OLED…)

Funny to see this as well as the Gaussian splat cathedral on the HN front page at the same time.

While the Gaussian splat is impressive, I kinda still dig the wireframe…

HR, it turns out, is not there for the employee's benefit. (I found out the hard way.)

Not sure it's still virtue signaling when you sacrifice your job. That might actually be virtue.

I wonder though, what counts as actual virtue for some people.

Ads, obviously.

I understand Meta has an ad business as well—but no one I know uses their sites.

I suppose the takeaway for me is: don't serve up SEO shit.

Cool. But, yeah, no, too stressful.

Give me a relaxing game. (I'm getting old.)

I'm in the midwaste. Love to know where you bowling alley is!