TomSwirly

And the New York Post is not a reliable source.

There are over a million dead in the United States for whom your statement is not true.

"Long COVID"

which is completely real and scientifically verified, despite your scare quotes.

I might add that nothing in your link claims that Gulf War Syndrome is psychogenic.

No, brand-new homes - see my other comment.

There is a huge housing crisis in the Netherlands, so people purchase homes before they are built, and sometimes a group of people get together to build homes that way.

In order to do this, you need to have all your permits in order. Unfortunately, the energy companies announced out of the blue that they didn't have enough energy to accommodate all their new obligations...

Why would anyone out of the blue willingly make their personal area worse?

Because infrastructure has go somewhere.

The Netherlands has this issue: everyone resists any energy infrastructure in their area. Now there are many people who own new houses who can't move in because there's no electric power for them. Nuclear power is impossible because of NIMBY, so 85% of the energy is fossil fuel based.

"Woah, there pardner."

Cutesie error messages aren't funny even the first time, and by the tenth time they are wildly annoying.

if you just create an account

"Just"

How is it clear that coding assistants have an upside for anyone past a complete beginner?

So far, the utility on existing codebases is less than zero.

continue to improve quadratically

Using what metric?

I did not miss the full context.

"Deemed" in particular doesn't require any sort of reasoning or argument for the company to make any decision it likes. And "appropriate" is not a synonym for "necessary".

"Why did you sell my data?" "We deemed it appropriate for the purposes of providing the Services to you."

What's your legal refutation to this under US law?

(In the EU, this whole clause would possibly be unenforceable from the start, but I know a lot less about EU law.)

The phrase "in any way that Vultr deems appropriate" does not encourage a narrow read.

It is a wildcard that allows them to do whatever they want with the data and then argue, "We deemed it appropriate."

You missed the "in any way that Vultr deems appropriate" clause. This is a classic weasel phrase which means they can do as they please.

"Why did you sell my data to an AI company?" "We deemed it appropriate."

There is also the sublicensing clause, which means they can sell it to anyone, and "process, adapt, [...] modify, prepare derivative works", which has nothing to do with hosting, but allows them to change your data and reuse it for any purpose they "deem appropriate".

This is a truly, truly terrible idea. It adds several failure modes, some subtle so you can go a long way in a state of error, just so beginners can type `python` instead of e.g. `python3.10`.

Many developers, not just me, have a similar setup: we use virtual environments everywhere, and if you aren't in one, `python` doesn't even resolve to a symbol.

If I want to write a quick script with no dependencies, I directly call `python3.xx` on it. Otherwise, I create a virtualenv.

Yes, it's a bit harder for beginners, but from a huge amount of experience helping people who are starting up in programming, people have little issue in following a few more instructions. What demolishes beginners is getting into a bad state where nothing works and you don't know why.

A system where musicians are not adequately compensated will always be more attractive to the listener.

If you're under the impression that your average musician gets any significant money on streaming, this is not so.

I know a lot of professional musicians who make a living from their craft. Their income sources are touring, Patreon (or the like), Bandcamp, and then streaming.

Oh, people at the top rake in big bucks, but most of the money that streaming distributes comes from people who play music all day long based on recommendations, or tags.

I met one person who makes a living on Spotify. He has literally thousands of tracks labelled "smooth jazz" and makes a steady income entirely from people who type "smooth jazz" into Spotify and then leave the program running. He isn't ripping anyone off - his tracks are unmemorable but competent and fit the bill. But this isn't really doable for people who think of their music as creation and not a commodity.

If I like an artist, I buy their tracks outright, often on Bandcamp. Quite often I buy their whole catalogue. Thing is, if I buy a $10, 10-track album on Bandcamp, the musician gets between $8.50 and $10, almost immediately. But if I play that same album 10 times on Spotify, they get $0.30, eventually. I'd have to play that album 300 times to get the same payout to the artist, and it's extremely rare for me to play albums that often, and never in one year.

That is a good summary, but of course, there is "cheating" to do the infinite amounts of work required in a finite time!

The board appears as if there exist at any time infinite levels of cellular automata going all the way down running things. In fact, they only compute one level deep and then short-circuit to using the "hardcoded" rules of Conway's life, and simply pop up the higher or lower levels on demand.

Requiring infinite amounts of information to explain a finite universe? Occam's Razor comes down pretty hard on the side of "no".

People have tried to explain the universe with cellular automata and so far none of these systems has even been consistent with our current observations of the universe, let alone predicting some new behavior that would allow us to prove or disprove that the theory was true. (If your theory doesn't predict anything new, it's not a new theory at all!)

Requiring infinite recursion of cellular automata would seem to make the whole problem much harder...

Does work on FF, MacOS 14.3.1 (Sonoma :-/)

(Some extensions conflict with some webpages, too...)

One day we will get it together so every computer program works on every computer, if we don't collapse our ecosystem first.

I expected to be downvoted! It's a grim idea, that this is there is and there isn't some huge prize of "a whole galaxy" a thousand years down the line.

I would have resisted it when I was a kid, myself.

About fifteen years ago, I made an attempt to figure out how much it would cost to set up a self-sustaining colony on Mars. My target was a Mars that could make its own pressure suits because terraforming would take centuries and making your own pressure suits is a precursor to that.

I realized that you had to essentially re-invent almost every industrial process humans have today, from baking to smelting steel, because all of them rely on unlimited, free air, and large quantities of cheap water.

You need to recreate most of the chemical industry, just to create new computer chips, each one of which relies on hundreds of chemical compounds available at very very high purities and affordable prices.

After a lot of work, I was unable to come up with a figure. My best guess was $3 to $30 quadrillion dollars, if it were even possible!

And all of that to have a bunch of miserable real estate in a cold, dark, arid, lifeless, airless, radioactive desert characterized by fine, abrasive, statically charged, poisonous dust. Antarctica is nicer in every way - much warmer, much brighter, has breathable air, endless quantities of water, etc - and yet no one lives there.

The most likely theory is that the universe is much like it appears to be and the speed of light is an absolute barrier, and that in practice means that interstellar civilizations never form, because it's simply far, far too expensive and difficult.

If alien civilizations lasted indefinitely, that wouldn't be a barrier, but in the one sample of a civilization we have, we are consuming our resources and generating waste at an exponentially increasing rate, and will crash and burn leaving us without the quadrillions of "dollars" it would take to even start colonizing the stars.

This seems well-reasoned and clear. The author is pissed off, but one can see why if what the article presents is accurate.

But I personally don't know either the code base or the material ("terminals") well enough to be potentially able to confirm or refute it.

It'd be great to see some refutation of this article or a defense of the original changes so we could make up our minds.

I have yet to hear a solid argument against Tesla achieving full self-driving within the next ten years.

You've already asked the same question a few times. Here's what I posted the last time you did (you didn't respond):

Years of deliberate false statements by Tesla about their self-driving capacity should make any rational person very skeptical of their future claims.

Having a CEO who is obsessed with posting far-right-wing political statements on Xitter over managing his actual businesses is also a red flag. What rational manager goes out of their way to alienate at least half of their potential customers?

I am firmly in Tesla's target audience, but under no circumstances would I buy one, if only to avoid the social embarrassment of being associated with this pathologically mendacious malignant narcissist.

But chess is a game of complete information, and one where the entire state can be perfectly and unambiguously represented in less than 64 bytes.

During that time there was also a pandemic that killed millions, a psychotic US President, and repeated waves of layoffs amongst tech workers.

An office job provided structure and meaningful daily contact that is not replicated in 30 minute zoom calls.

I'm a very friendly guy, and always get along with my coworkers, but I go to work to work. For meaningful daily contact, I have my friends and family.

The European idea of going to work, working systematically for eight hours, and then going home to your real life seems much healthier to me.

Another way to see it is this: the cost of keeping a worker in an office is at least 10% of their salary. Another 5% of the workers day is spent commuting.

I personally would rather have a 10% raise and another 250 hours of spare time every year. I think if you phrased it that way, most people would agree.

The New York Post is not a reliable source.

Years of deliberate false statements by Tesla about their self-driving capacity should make any rational person very skeptical of their future claims.

Having a CEO who is obsessed with posting far-right-wing political statements on Xitter over managing his actual business is also a red flag. What rational manager goes out of their way to alienate at least half of their potential customers?

I am firmly in Tesla's target audience, but under no circumstances would I buy one, if only to avoid the social embarrassment of being associated with this pathologically mendacious malignant narcissist.

No, there is in fact a qualitative difference between a program where the expected number of CVEs is 1, and one where the expected number of CVEs is 0.02.

Or even Venus, as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marching_Morons

(Text here: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/51233/51233-h/51233-h.htm)

Both involved Cyril Kornbluth, what a great talent, taken far too soon.

Interestingly, Pohl wrote a sequel to The Space Merchants decades later, and I picked it up, fully expecting it to be terrible, and it was brilliant, and made me cry at the end.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Merchants%27_War_(Pohl_nov...

Are you aware

Few sentences that start with this clause are emitted in good faith, and yours is certainly not one of them.

Translation of what you wrote: "I don't like what you wrote but I can't see how to refute it either."

The fact that the ai is instructed after the fact to make changes to what you asked it to do, invisibly.

And what proof do you have that this paranoid story is happening?

Surely the most simple hypothesis is that this is a bug?