PostOnce

With a byte you can keep track of 256 things, with two, 64k things, or with a byte you can issue one of 256 commands, etc.

Of course, now we'll use a dictionary of objects with various properties to keep track of a bunch of 'true'/'false' strings...

We collectively act like RAM is free and so are cycles

Tangent: I abandoned C and then later Windows as a consequence of Charles Petzold's* book on win32 programming, the fact that so much bullshit boilerplate was required to get a GUI up on a OS literally named after its GUI windows...

*Fwiw I like his books, I just didn't like the way Windows wants me to do things then

Is cloning Manim "innovation" now?

Plenty of open source is updated every day.

You had no problem taking advantage of Manim to profit, but when it comes to returning the great favor done to you by Manim being open source, you don't care?

Okay.

This post is timely, considering reddit is going to start requiring login for old.reddit.com which they announced in the past few days

There are far fewer of those than there used to be, because games take longer to develop now.

Nintendo has been the only one really good at that, and even there, they're slipping.

For example, the Switch 2 has been out for a year and has no exclusive Mario or Zelda games yet. They announced another Zelda remake.

One of the selling points of consoles is the secondhand market, and the physical games.

If digital only, then consoles have fewer differentiators to PCs, and PCs let you play online without a subscription.

It's not a given, but it's a plausible future that steam boxes outsell playstations, and that Sony loses its lucrative cut of game sales because people moved to PC since there was no differentiator for consoles other than extra hassle and costs compared to steam.

Suppose Anthropic trained only on data they paid to create, and not the internet or stolen textbooks.

It would still be extremely difficult to muster any sympathy for an organization whose MO is to go public not to honestly raise capital to fund growth and development, but rather to dishonestly leave someone else holding the bag, in some cases involuntarily as their retirement funds are passively invested.

And even supposing they were honest and didn't have an IPO, it would still be extraordinarily difficult to care about their misfortune, because "consolidating all thought-work into the hands of those few who can afford frontier models and datacenters and power plants" is also a special kind of misanthropy.

And even if that were not the case, they're filthy rich already, so who gives a shit if the Chinese companies prevent them from becoming quadrillionaires? :)

Lots more fun stuff on the rest of the channel https://www.youtube.com/@will_it_work

Hacks, on hacker news. I love it.

They have a finite # of employees, a finite budget, and a finite amount of time.

Hobbyists do not. ROI is not a factor.

New govt scrapped it.

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/510439/smokefree-genera...

It already is our families. We don't have healthcare. We live in rentals that enrich others. We take rented scooters to work. We have no retirement funds or futures.

Live in slavery and be happy? Hold a sign no one reads? Own nothing? Feel no peace, have no medicine?

I don't condone it, but I understand it.

I believe there's still the possibility for us to fix things in peace, but I can see why others don't.

The entire point of AI is for it to do shit autonomously?

The whole point is that the users can have it doing shit for them instead of them having to babysit the computer.

The fact that users still have to sit there and argue with it erodes their value proposition. The proposition you can pay fewer salaries.

The US interferes in the rest of the world 24/7 with tariffs on allies and preemptive bombings and undeclared wars and kidnappings of heads of state, etc.

Would it be immoral to interfere, or would it be more immoral not to interfere and to let that situation continue?

There is an argument to be made either way.

Active and beautiful, I can start reading without having to scroll down, which I have to do on the AP site.

I miss when the web looked like this, and pages were documents instead of applications.

We built the wrong web, we needed two, one for documents, and one for applications, but we built this rube goldberg contraption instead.

I love the software look so much though! I never did like the blurring of textures :)

They're both beautiful in their own way, the darkness and glow in the hardware versions, some certain pixellated charm and roughness in the software version

"More Doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette."

I'll take my information from a neutral third party, thanks.

I personally felt the book deal version was dumbed down. The OG which is still free on the scp wiki is amazing.

The free version has the character drink "apocalyptically strong coffee" to cope with the orientation process.

In the print version, it's just strong coffee. The original literary vibe was incredible.

All of it is free here: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub

What about every other system where we rely on parents to parent?

Kids can turn apple juice into wine in their closet

they can drive their bicycle to a drug dealer

they can rub a butter knife against the sidewalk until it's pointy

Do we need govt AI cameras in kids closets and on their bicycles? How do we verify they're cycling somewhere safe? How do we make sure they're not getting shitfaced on bootleg hooch they made with bakers yeast and a latex glove?

Companies stopped training people many decades ago, they expect you to arrive on the job trained now.

i.e. they shifted the cost of training from the employer to the employee.

What makes you think that will suddenly reverse course, or that society will suddenly start to care?

People want the cheapest, fastest shit possible. Companies too, generally.

Sick to death of it. The work is still there.

I can only work so many hours in a day on a contract, but with a product, I can work 3 hours and sell it 200 times, or license it and make money forever.

My customers have said to me point blank "I hate SaaS" and paid me anyway. They've said everything is "so easy with GPT and all now", and paid me anyway.

I think I have a chance.

Maybe I'll be proven wrong and my AI-using competitors will eat my lunch.

Or maybe, I'll drown them and Claude in complexity and attention-to-detail.

We'll see.

Lots of different companies argue with the AI for some time before they call me, but they always call me.

They'll never be able to explain what they want to the AI, and even if they could, it couldn't solve the problem anyway.

Nevertheless I'm not going to be contracting much longer, I'm writing software by hand to compete with the garbage shat out of Claude's VibeCloaca. I already have customers, I just need to ... tune a few things before I scale, so that I don't have any customer support problems at scale. :)

But you're also in the tiny minority of Apple customers, because most people who need 512GB of RAM are not looking at Apple products.

A consumer computer company is not going to push people towards building a miniature HPC cluster. Closest we'll ever get to that is multiple GPUs for video games.*

*Nvidia is no longer a primarily consumer company, so all the other GPU stuff is no counterpoint

Let me rephrase it for you:

"We both want a docile American public who go along with our desires so we can achieve goals that may be contrary to the interests of the American public."

[flagged]

Beginning to wonder if convenience is the root of all evil, and not money. Money's just a proxy for convenience.

More of us should learn to do things the hard way more often, and to be familiar with less-convenient things. There are life-changing advantages to doing things the hard way at least some of the time.

Since when has war been waged according to the whim of a corporation?

The tools will be used however the government wants them to be used. The government makes the laws and wages the wars, and the corporation will follow the law whether it wants to or not.

So either you are willing to work on a tool that is not under your control, or you are not.

My take is that none of the AI companies really care (companies can't care), they just realize that if they go down that road, public opinion will be so vehemently against AI in all forms that it will be regulated out of viability by the electorate.

Also, if AI exists, AI will be used for war. The AI company employees are kidding themselves if they think otherwise, and yet they are still building it (as opposed to resigning and working on something else), because in the end, money is the only true God in this world.

Their side of the story is that they want to flag people as "too risky to be allowed to use AI"?

There's a problem here, right? Who else might want to flag you and lock you out of shit? Is this the new normal?

Will they flag Republicans / Democrats / Catholics / Buddhists / People Of Any Particular Skintone / People with Blue Shoes Who Are Exactly 5'9 / ????

The corporations are out of control. We should bring them to heel.

We should also resist and refuse to comply with these totally arbitrary requests we don't have to comply with.

The entire US economy right now is propped up by the idea that we can pay ZERO attention to detail and have the AI do all the work, isn't it?

Very often the financial constraints are merely a euphemism for greed.