acjohnson55

Found the robot, y'all

Yep. The Crisis of the Third Century, especially.

But also, pre-imperial Rome, a number of times. The Conflicts of the Orders, the entire late-Republican period from the Gracchi to the final demise of the Republic under Augustus.

And then the Eastern Empire had to reinvent itself multiple times. The near-collapse to the Caliphate. The Norman invasions of the Balkans and the First Crusade. The Fourth Crusade and its aftermath.

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Then in the West, you have a couple brief periods where Rome isn't subject to Eastern Imperial overlordship. Justinian fully reconquers it in the late 500s, and Rome stays nominally part of the Eastern Empire until its brief loss to the Lombards in the 750s. But Charlemange's father, Pepin the Short, reconquered Rome and confirmed the Pope's authority over it. A couple decades later, Charlemagne is crowned Emperor of the Romans. And Rome exists under a constantly shifting balance of authority between Popes and Emperors until the Italian Unification in the late 1800s.

It should also be noted that even before the end of the Western Imperial line in 476, Rome rarely served as the actual home of the emperors since the late 200s.

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So there's an interesting question of whether Rome ever did really fall, before the modern period. I would say "yes", in the sense that after the mid-400s, you never again have a sense of authority over the Mediterranean basin eminating from Rome (or the northern half of Italy). That's what people think of when they think of Rome. There are only brief periods of anything like that, and you never again have multi-generational, institutional authority.

But in other ways, there really is a continual reinvention of political systems that trace their lineage and cultural power to Rome. In that sense, it's kind of like China, which is similarly not really a continuous institution.

These findings differ from earlier studies that associated rudeness with poorer outcomes, suggesting that newer LLMs may respond differently to tonal variation.

Unless the mechanism is understood, my assumption is that this is a moving target.

It would be interesting to understand the data on this. But I suspect that the results would vary by model.

But I avoid unnecessary emotion in my prompts because I don't want potentially distracting activations. Kind of like communicating with humans.

Every now and then, a random math or science concept hits front page. Usually, people chime in with interesting perspectives on it. Guess we'll see.

I do think there is going to be an entire risk market for insuring against AI mistakes.

I've used Vim plenty for the past 30 years. I don't prefer it to GUI text editors.

I've always been a bit mystified by the popularity of TUIs. To me, the power of the terminal is the streaming model. Composible utilities is something that is much less common in GUIs.

I get it that maybe the constraints of terminals force design of TUIs to be more focused on the purpose of the tool than polish, but it's not that compelling of a point to me.

I use VSCode and Conductor right now.

They recently got bought by Cursor.

I think there's a pretty good chance Adam Back is Satoshi, but I don't think this is a great article. Perhaps he's rendering a careful scientific process in a way that makes for a readable narrative, but as written, it sounds like a lot of gut feel and confirmation bias.

The biggest new contribution to the Satoshi question seems to be ad hoc stylometry. To have faith in his methodology, he should be testing it on identitying other people. If he were to show me that a repeatable methodology that doesn't require hand tuning can identify other people with low error rate, and it said Back=Satoshi, that would be much more convincing.

Like so much tech writing done by non engineers, there are many places where mundane things are made to sound remarkable (e.g. Black's thesis used C++, the "heated debate").

When I read the article, I was taken aback by the clear references to fraud in the before and after photos.

We're in an absolutely golden age of grift.

Depends on what you mean by "win". It would be possible to go in, topple the regime and secure the nuclear material. But only at astronomical cost and years of blowback

All those ships stuck on either side of the Strait of Hormuz and their insurers would beg to differ.

A pipeline will circumvent Iranian tolls, but would be vulnerable to Iranian strikes in a war.

I did one of these experiments around 2011, and because it was so obvious that the experiment was contrived, there was a lot of misdirection around the actual experiment, which was testing something totally different from the pretense. Like different responses to font color or something like that.

Or, they actually do have an intuition of the real objective and they skip steps to more efficiently skip to the outcome.

Just saw this days later - I'm not sure if it was a surge specifically, but it got bricked after a really wacky power swing. So maybe not a surge, exactly.

This may be more correct than you know. Chefs actually don't cook food customers eat. They plan the menu and manage the operations. The cooks cook.

I lost an audio mixer to a bad surge last year. I don't know whether it was additional load or just really bad fluctuations that damaged the device. Nothing else bit the dust, but the, digital board in this mixer got bricked.

Interesting, so a prompt that causes a couple dozen tool calls will end up costing in the tens of dollars?

I like the idea of smarter filtering. But I wonder how a modal interacts with automatic form filling.

I don't care for the chaotically ordered list of countries after the suggested country.

I think a better version would be nonmodal, but with a modal button to expose more powerful browsing.

I also question why we have to fill out so many forms in the first place. We should have better ways by now to get frequently used bundles of info to counterparties.

Twitter still attracts top quality initial posts from prominent people, even though the replies are garbage, or worse. Honestly, it doesn't compute to me how people can justify continuing to contribute there.

I agree, I'm sorry to say.

I personally believe it's because they replicated the same incentive structure as Twitter. Being provocative generates engagement, which gets you reach and creates the perception of relevance.

At first, people were just happy to be at an alternative to Elon Twitter. But good vibes only get you so far when the incentives point the other direction.

There's no muslim country I ever want to visit.

Your loss.

No one misses Saddam.

Parts of Iraq are much better off, like Kurdistan. Other parts were utterly devastated by our operations, insurgency, sectarian violence, ISIS, and so on. Some people had religious freedom and now live in areas under theocratic control.

I hope that it works out for you and your family.

If I were in their shoes, I would be celebrating, too. But this is complicated. If they and their loved ones are already outside the country, they are not directly imperiled by the power vacuum. So the upside is maybe their homeland becomes hospitable again, but the downside is basically that it remains inhospitable.

I'm not saying that the diaspora doesn't care about the risks or have empathy for those that remain in Iran. I'm sure there are also many people who are deeply concerned. Just that being an emigre changes things.

I think it's fine to call it a shit move.

It's this part:

Canning people when you do well is just a way to milk the cow that others raised for you.

I don't think people should reasonably expect to be employed if a company doesn't need them for its future plans.

Plus it shows a blatant lack of imagination and foresight.

It seems to me Block has tried a whole bunch of different things. Imagination isn't their problem. I'm not deeply familiar with their business, but my hunch is that it's more that they're giving up on some of their pie in the sky ideas and consolidating on what's working.

Yes, it is considered generous here. I have been laid off or taken a voluntary severance 3 times and never got anywhere near 5 months.