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aldousd666

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you are never going to get away from reading the code every time. at least I haven't seen how you could possibly. That being said, it is considerably less work to read and check the code than it is to have to build it all, even if you know what you're doing and have done it before.

I learned from the Dragon Book, decades ago. I already knew a lot of programming at that point, but I think most people writing compilers do. I'm curious if there really is an audience of people whose first introduction to programming is writing a compiler... I would think not, actually.

And they say you can't learn anything about computers from these bots... I had to learn this lesson from giving a shell account to one of my compatriots. I worked with him on group projects so I trusted him. He installed a fork bomb in his user's cron tab that went off at 3:00 a.m. everyday and I had to wonder why my hand compiled DRI driven screensaver went to a crawl. I did learn the lesson and I did forgive him. But it didn't cost me a couple Grand in API fees.

To be clear, I mean AI is going to be the downfall of ad supported content. But let's face it. We have link farms and spam factories as a result of the ad supported content market. I think this is going to eventually do justice for users because it puts a premium on content quality that someone will want to pay a direct licensing fee to scrape for your AI bots as opposed to tricking somebody into clicking on a link and looking at an impression for something they won't buy.

This is ultimately just going to give them training material for how to avoid this crap. They'll have to up their game to get good code. The arms race just took another step, and if you're spending money creating or hosting this kind of content, it's not going to make up for the money you're losing by your other content getting scraped. The bottom has always been threatening to fall out of the ads paid for eyeballs, And nobody could anticipate the trigger for the downfall. Looks like we found it.

Goodbye to Sora 4 months ago

It's super expensive for them to run this hardware. And they need the compute for other things. Everyone who's cursed open AI for going down in the middle of the day whenever they're using it to write code or do some other thing, will breathe a little easier now that there's some compute available. Wise decision, in my opinion.

Some advice I follow, and give to others: Refuse notifications by default. Only enable them when you're getting paid to see them. (slack and work email, for example count as getting paid to see them)

The web is the enemy. I have an ad blocking VPN and I use GroundNews to filter out sites that have paywalls. Between those two things, I lead a relatively sane life. But I tried looking at some of the same places on an unflitered device and man, I can't even imagine living like that. It now costs me $100/year in ad blocking/circumvention just so I don't want to kill the browser.

I don't disagree, but neither does the article. It's just talking about the fact that we previously considered anything that can't be easily and tersely written down as nearly or entirely intractable. But, as we have seen, the three body problem is not really a hum-dinger as far as the universe goes, it's not even table stakes. We need to be able to do the same kind of energy arbitrage on n-body problems that we do on 2. And now we have the beginnings of a place to toy with more complicated ideas -- since these won't fit on a blackboard.

In the 1980's, computer software was sold in catalogs and magazines. Users had either of three platforms: A Macintosh, a PC-Compatible (probably x86), or a Commodore/Amiga. So these are the three categories were there to help you order the correct version of oregon trail. They were really a name for the operating systems, not the specifics of the hardware, at least back then they were.

I recently read about 'in thread' ads, like on Twitter, as being not as effective unless they are 'brand recognition' ads. Like, they will help you decide which one to pick when you are staring at two fungible brands on the shelf, but they will not convince you to buy something you have never heard about before, especially not from a direct click through. So while Ads work is true, in many ways, they don't in many others. The brand damage you can get from having those in-thread ads is also real: Ads target the user, not the thread, but by showing up, users associate advertisers with the thread. If you were in some argument about dictators taking over, and suddenly a product pops up, you may assign the negative energy you have toward dictators to that brand as well.

I am unmoved by his little diatribe. What sort of compensation was he looking for, exactly, and under what auspices? Is there some language creator payout somewhere for people who invent them?

8-bit Boléro 7 months ago

I love projects like this. finally someone found a new use for those dot matrix printers.

'defect' only applies to prisoners dilemma type problems. that is just one, very limited class of problem, and I would argue not very relevant to discussing AI inevitability.

qualia may not exist as such. they could just be essentially 'names' for states of neurons that we mix and match (like chords on a keyboard. arguing over the 'redness' of a percept is like arguing about the C-sharpness of a chord. we can talk about some frequencies but that's it.) we would have no way of knowing otherwise since we only perceive the output of our neural processes, and don't get to participate in the construction of these outputs, nor sense them happening. We just 'know' they are happening when we achieve those neural states and we identify those states relative to the others.

I discovered this a few years ago when someone who didn't understand what semver is was trying to do a rails version upgrade for us. They were practically throwing stuff when I got there and explained that lexicographical comparison of the strings would not work. I was about to write my own class for it, but then I thought that since Bundler knew how to resolve deps we should see what it uses. The rest is history!