SquibblesRedux

In a sense, Aldous Huxley explored these ideas in his novel "Brave New World." [0] The novel describes a world were there is a rational order to human society, which has been engineered to be "optimal." A very good read I highly recommend.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World

Crypto: The only way to win is not to play.

I was not making an argument that the economy is zero-sum, or that Musk or Bezos did not build wealth. I merely pointed out methods they used to build their empires. For example, Musk did take advantage of government incentives, sidestepped regulations, etc.

Again, I never claimed there was any sort of zero-sum transfer of wealth. I'm simply pointing out there are varied ways to build up wealth; people have various opinions about those ways. It's right to call out misconceptions or outright falsehoods, but it's also good to understand what leads people to form or accept those misconceptions in the first place.

Musk got a huge leg up through the government, whether it be tax credits, incentives, side-stepping regulations, etc.

Bezos ran at a loss for so long it drove out actual and potential competitors.

Most (or all?) of the recent titans seem like each has his own company town. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town )

While their activities certainly fall in the realm of capitalism, and are just blips at longer time scales, it certainly feels like capitalism has been a bit under the weather for the past couple decades.

Regarding the money invested in AI, it all gives me "irrational exuberance" vibes.

And don't forget:

"hi" and "hello" are not the same.

Sam explains the situation on Mike Peace's channel here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyrFgOMfsmM

(Mike is another wood turner.)

Can fully AI‑generated code be copyrightable? Is there evidence that the leaked code was AI-generated?

I would argue that no app/website should be selling itself to kids. No corporation should be trying to tether its ARR to children's attention.

For me, AI tools act like supercharged ... search and auto complete.

I think that is a fairly good definition of what an LLM is. I'd say the third leg of the definition is adjustable randomness.

Just like in "I, Robot?"

I tend to see humans as just another animal species, subject to pressures similar to those of other mammals. Whenever disease comes up it seems like vaccinations are the only factor discussed.

Can anyone here speak to other factors (at a macro scale) that influence human health over large spans of time?

Well, Palantir was taken.

As an official greybeard who has written much in C, C++, Perl, Python, and now Rust, I can say Rust is a wonderful systems programming language. Nothing at all like Perl, and as others have mentioned, a great relief from C++ while providing all the power and low-level bits and bobs important for systems programming.

It looks nice. The movement is smooth and elegant. However, I really don't understand what the essential play loop is supposed to be. Is this about graphs? Calculus? Physics? Am I solving puzzles? Taking quizzes?

The challenge with long form texts is that they are so often picked apart, each piece quoted and analyzed on its own, without regard for how that small piece fits into the whole, often veering from a far more nuanced argument or portrait of life.

Something I very much like about poetry, is that so much wisdom can be condensed into such succinct language. We fill the gaps with our own experiences, not relying on the author to lead us step by step. And I see poetry proliferating in modern times in song. (How else is a poet to earn a living?)

There frequently are reminders of who we are, where we come from, and whence we always return. Life is a wheel. From Black Sabbath:

   They say that life's a carousel
   Spinning fast, you gotta ride it well
   The world is full of Kings and Queens
   Who blind your eyes and steal your dreams
   It's Heaven and Hell, oh well
   And they'll tell you black is really white
   The moon is just the sun at night
   And when you walk in golden halls
   You get to keep the gold that falls
   It's Heaven and Hell

I just asked ChatGPT-5 to "give me a 16x16 PNG icon of an apple" and it did exactly that. It looks good, too.

Not that I don't recognize the inherent limits of LLMs, but there are as many edge cases covered as are found in the training sets. (More or less.)

Has the XDG Base Directory Specification been adopted by an official standards committee? In my previous life, calling something a standard carried a great deal of weight. For example, contracts could mandate compliance with standards.

Having built apps and CLI tools for macOS, the author's post certainly makes sense to me. Calling something a standard without backing from a standards committee seems odd, however.

At the risk of sounding dismissive -- this is all drama that amounts to nothing more than Internet entertainment. Legitimate claims of harm should be heard in court. Legitimate scientific debate should be hashed out at conferences or in peer-reviewed journals. Drama posted to an audience of 8 billion people, hosted in personal blogs and on YouTube videos, seems like soap opera entertainment at best and childish behavior at worst.

Just my humble opinion as a bystander looking in.

Another way to think about it is how interesting it is that humans can be so easily influenced by strings of words. (Or images, or sounds.) I suppose I would characterize it as so many people being earnestly vulnerable. It all makes me think of Kahneman's [0] System 1 (fast) and System 2 (slow) thinking.

[0] "Thinking, Fast and Slow" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow

This is another great example of how LLMs are not really any sort of AI, or even proper knowledge representation. Not saying they don't have their uses (like souped up search and permutation generators), but definitely not something that resembles intelligence.

Fun game!

In the old days, code reuse was an aspirational goal. We had collections of functions, libraries, etc., but the overhead of reusing specific lines of code, or patterns of lines of code, was too burdensome to be practical. Many tutorials have been published on how to create a tower defense game, meaning there are tons of sample code out there for this domain.

I would ask that given the amount of source material available, when when ask an LLM to generate code, is this really "AI" of any sort, or is it really a new kind of search?

Indeed, it's nothing but function fitting.

But always remember, "Do not use a propane torch indoors."

https://www.cdc.gov/parasites/baylisascaris/resources/raccoo...

I can say what not to do -- Do not ever work to strip others of their free will.

I have been around quite a while. I remember rotary phones and party lines. I have seen a lot and done a lot. I have lived through many “the sky is falling” events. I offer my unvarnished insight, take it or leave it.

This is not me “thinking about” or “supposing” — I speak from experience working with many federal agencies (including NIH) and U.S. universities.

- I have watched formerly objective journals slide down the slippery slope of editorializing, to the point of questioning the reliability of the studies they publish.

- I have talked with prestigious professors who were quite distressed about their universities (yes, plural) being bought out wholly by foreign interests.

- I have had frank discussions with researchers saying it’s not about the science or the mission - it’s about the money.

- I have had frank discussions with senior government leaders explicitly explaining how they (often unlawfully) manipulate the system to line their pockets.

- I have seen so much government funding denied because the lead was not the right sex or did not have the right color skin. (Having been on the inside of many source selection events, it most frequently boils down to favoritism and kickbacks, with ideology being the excuse for the outcome.)

- And pharmaceutical companies, like Novartis? I have watched their drug pushing in person, calling on doctors offices, borderline bribes, and strategies such as a pharmaceutical sales team wining and dining a doctor, using fine food and pretty women to push their wares. (It takes quite a bit of self control to avoid going on a long diatribe about how positively evil the pharmaceutical companies are.)

The whole damned system is corrupt to the core. The root of the corruption is not ideology — it is money. Ideology is the veneer applied to make change palatable to the public. Congress discreetly turned a blind eye until the problem got out of hand. Gerrymandering and winner-take-all politics distorted the proper functioning of Congress. Runaway inflation was the first time the structural problems significantly leaked into the public eye.

Taxes are levied on the American people and collected under threat of violence. That money should first and foremost go toward our collective safety and common defense. Instead, there is a long line of people, hands out, asking "How much will you pay me to not riot in the streets?" The whole system has gone off the rails. Competition for resources, which are no longer so abundant, breeds conflict. Congress has had decades to correct course. They did not. Why? Because nobody is willing to compromise. The incessant argument of “I am right and you are wrong” has lead to a significant cultural shift, which is what we are experiencing now.

What is happening at NIH and NSF has nothing to do with line items or ROI. It is about being swept up in a large cultural revolution precipitated by economic mismanagement and inflamed by a strategy of gradual Orwellian newspeak that has been spreading since the 1990s.

Although there are minor fluctuations in the US debt load, the mean is clearly going up without bounds. Interest creates an exponentially worsening problem with increasing competition for resources. Competition for resources breeds conflict.

Congress' lack of will to compromise leads to winner-take-all scenarios with wild swings in policy.

Language such as "deeply basic facts" and "blatantly irresponsible" is part of the problem. I am as guilty as the next person for experiencing heightened emotions and using adverbs carrying negative connotations that lack denotational substance. However, my experience has been that the storms are best weathered by calm, consistent, and persistent actions or behaviors.

I'll drink to that!

Seriously, it feels like society has drifted too far away from the idea of small, local communities. So much of modern life separates people either physically or technologically. Though I would like to blame modern marketing and consumerism, I think these problems have been brewing for centuries.

From a sociological perspective, I do see the benefits of small conservative communities that effectively serve as a guarding or protective mechanism, shielding the more vulnerable from potentially destructive influences.

I have found LLMs to be "good enough" for:

- imprecise semantic search

- simple auto-completion (1-5 tokens)

- copying patterns with substitutions

- inserting commonly-used templates

The financial position of the US is precarious, at best. I seriously doubt there is any painless way to correct course, as Congress seems to have lost the ability to compromise. Looking into the future, the US will go the way of the former Soviet Union if it does not take corrective action.

Is the current situation the only way, the best way, or even a good way to address the country's economic position? That is a matter of perspective. As is always the case, people will take sides. The unreasonable people (on any side) will refuse to compromise and spew inflammatory rhetoric, most often in defense of their own self interests and at the expense of others' interests.

I believe that the most sensible approach is for all parties to adhere to a metered diligence, always being mindful that the country is a collective of disparate interests. The whole point of a democracy is that through all the ups and downs, things work themselves out eventually. Sometimes there are setbacks and other times there is progress.

Things may seem chaotic, but this too shall pass.

Can one simply stick to vodka, skip the potatoes, and reap all the benefits?