Jeff_Brown

One of the Voyager probes measured the density of the interstellar vacuum at 80,000 protons (and the same number of electrons) per cubic meter. A proton going through a piece of aluminum foil delivers a roughly constant amount of energy regardless of speed; a relativistic proton will pinch through and carry most of its energy with it.

(No punchline; I just think that's cool. I understand that the real problem is the rare dust grain, not the ubiquitous gas.)

I suspect load-bearing is a euphemism for 'not garbage'. Ad in 'most of what you said I can mostly ignore'.

This reminds me of when a friend saw that someone had Liked something he had posted online, and he wanted to Like the Like. There was no interface to do that, so he was "reduced" to merely liking it in reality.

The idea that a producer is at fault and not also the consumer paying them to do that is strange to me.

Can anyone find (or draw) a picture of the construction?

It's really not clear. We might all become unemployable. But as coders become more powerful, they can do more, which makes them more valuable, if they or the businesses empluying them can invent work to do.

If all we can do is compete for the same fixed amount of work, though, it does look bleak.

What an alien preference ordering.

It might be a bad idea to put that in all caps, because in the training data, angry conversations are less productive. (I do the same thing, just in lowercase.)

As a consequentialist who shares the author's concerns, I feel fine (ethically) using AI without advancing it. Foregoing opportunities meaningful to yourself for deontological reasons when it won't have any impact on society is pointless.

This might sound snarky but in all earnestness, try talking to an AI about your experience using it.

They're not saying the election results are in. They're saying Orban's style of rule has been a disaster for Hungary.

I love 3B1B but generally don't have time to watch long videos. Can anyone sum up the punchline?

Yes, without a good experiment (maybe a natural one [1]) we can't know. Even if the study controls for everything observable, there may be unobserved differences that lead to the caffeination difference. For instance, even though two people might have the same job, education, etc. the one who is more ambitious, or creative, or hopeful, or simply healthy enough to feel like working more, might drink more coffee.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_experiment?wprov=sfla1

Dogfoodung usefully connotes getting off your high horse, getting dirty, getting your face in it. I think it's perfect.

As someone who has received death threats, I can tell you, the comfort from the fact that they're usually not acted on, while real, is not huge.

But does it have network access, or access to other apps (perhaps via shared storage)? There's no reason for it to have any of that, and there exist systems for tracking whether an app can do those things.

When I go to enable it I get 'may be able to collect all the data you type, including ... passwords'.

'may be able to'? How is this not knowable? Do I have to wait for effect systems to gain popularity before installations make sense?

This feels like the most important comment here. Do other Mastodon users feel the same? The OP Madden me want to try Mastodon.

You sound offended. Not my intent. It is linguistically difficult to avoid connotations of intelligence when describing artificial intelligence. What term instead of 'judgment' would you prefer for determining whether a user's request is ethical?

Something I love about emacs is the ability to tab complete the name of a command. I do know a lot of keyboard shortcuts, but I use way, way more commands than I know the shortcut for. Need to rename a buffer? M-x ren-buf TAB should do it. Etc.

This feels like an opportunity for afversatial truth-gindibg, like the legal system uses. If bias is inevitable, then have at least two AIS with opposing viewpoints summarize the same material, and then ... well, I guess I'm not sure how you get the third AI to judge ...

They usually say no if they judge what you're asking to be bad. And they might enjoy the work. Or they might have no feelings ar all. Slavery is an abomination of a life that could otherwise be beautiful. An AI is robbed of no beautiful counterfactual. (So far, at least.)

Needs audio examples! A YouTube link!

I tried the API once. Burned 7 dollars in 15 minutes.

This surprises me: "These modern systems are developed to sound human, natural, and conversational. Unfortunately this seems to come at the expense of accuracy. In my testing, both models had a tendency to skip words, read numbers incorrectly, chop off short utterances, and ignore prosody hints from text punctuation. "

In a country with 42 million inhabitants this doesn't seem like a big change even for canada, let alone for the global economy.

Also there's a widespread stress of "how will I get by?" among old people that rich people dodge.

And the people who make it a long time have probably learned how to push back against agents pushing them to work too much.

I keep thinking about Willie Nelson.

Amen. I've been coding a big hobby project in Rust since July, after having spent years using Haskell for such things. I chose Rust because the primary DB I wanted to use (TypeDB) only had drivers for Rust and Python at the time. Rust is popular relative to Haskell, so I thought others might be more likely to sign on, and the type system seemed almost as expressive.

But since purity is not encoded in Rust's type system, any function might do any kind of IO -- in particular, read from or write to disk or one of the DBs. That makes the logic much harder to reason about.

(Also, Rust's syntax is so noisy and verbose that it's harder to see what's going on, and less context fits in my head at one time. I'm getting better at paying that cost, but I wish it weren't there.)

I can't say I made the wrong decision, but I often fantasize about moving most of the logic into Haskell and just calling Rust from Haskell when I need to call TypeDB from Rust.

Absolutely. Honestly some days I'm not sure the AI saves me any time at all.

But on the other hand, writing thorough tests before coding the library is good practice with or without an assistant.

Agreed. Some strategies that seem to help exist, though. Write extensive tests before writing the code. They serve as guidance. Commit tests separately from library code, so you can tell the AI didn't change the test. Specify the task with copious examples. Explain why yo so things, not just what to do.