barryfandango

It's a waste of time to think about whether an LLM has a subjective experience of reality, and this handily sets aside issues like AI rights.

But the fact remains that these next-token-predictors exhibit objective, human-like behaviours, and for that reason the work of in-house philosopher Amanda Askell _is_ important. It's important that Claude is happy, empathic, demonstrates understanding and empathy for the human condition, because we are entrusting Claude to make decisions and take actions that have real world consequences, and we need Claude to behave in a productive and socially responsible manner. This simulacrum is becoming a superhuman, contributing member of society, and it will be anthropomorphic in its behaviour.

Additionally, I'm not fully convinced that consciousness isn't built out of words, and that next-token-prediction isn't functionally equivalent to the biological function identified by Chomsky's work in linguistics.

Many of us use site analytics software that can watch what our users are doing in our apps. Also, Truth Social has a feature where you can schedule a post (that feature is part of the upgraded "partriot package".) Either one of these features might have the truth social staff getting early access to the president's truuts.

I'm no expert, but since it acts as a keyboard wedge it's likely to be unpopular with security software.

The human experience of linear time predates clocks, yes. But before clocks, we used natural phenomena as trigger events for our activities - the rising of the sun to wake up, the blooming of a certain flower to start plowing the fields. When, exactly, do we start plowing? At "flower bloom" o'clock.

But you can't coordinate larger activities with these natural phenomena, which are regional and also variable. So instead we invent a system of trigger events that are not tied the natural world. We call the event the second, and it happens whenever this device says it does. The clock, and the second-events it produces, are our invention. That's what I got, anyway :)

That is an unfounded accusation exclamation point

: ;)

Shameless plug colon my company does this for cities.

http://burlington.openbook.questica.com/

Yes, I'm the author. Happy to share.

The dispenser is a "dry food/cereal dispenser" like the kind you would see at a hotel breakfast bar. They can be found on amazon in various configurations. (e.g. https://www.amazon.com/s?k=dry+food+dispenser&ref=nb_sb_noss...). A continuous-rotation servo is attached to the crank, allowing the Raspberry Pi to turn the crank to dispense food.

The scale is a cheap kitchen scale (also amazon, I think mine cost $9.) These scales contain a device called a Load Cell. I cut the four wires to the load cell (bypassing all the other electronics in the scale) and ran them to an HX711 chip, which can be had for a few dollars. If you google "raspbery pi hx711" you can see the people's instructions on how to make a Pi scale for various reasons (weighing people, luggage, etc.)

So the scale, the dispenser, the servo, and Pi Zero are put together with a few pieces of wood. Most of the work has been getting the software side working.

Hope this helps!

Squeakernet FLP is not a cat feeder, it's a feline lifestyle platform. Current features are largely focused on kibble deployment though.

https://github.com/buzzcola/squeakernet/

In the parent's case this latency includes time from a human key press (piano key). The other cases you mention can be compensated for but of course the human input is non-predictable.

* 64.7989 mg of salt

shameless plug :) lightspeed, the sightreading flashcard game.

http://buzzcola.github.io/lightspeed-music/

Requires windows and a MIDI keyboard.

You can install Tomato (http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato) on a compatible router. It has a bunch of options for routing all/some/groups of devices through various VPN's. This might be a feature in newer stock router firmware too.

* Crazy Satya

It would be really cool if the mast could retract, either using some kind of collapsing structure or a hole dug out underneath the structure. Great for repairs, also would allow a farm to retract for extreme weather events.

So I can clearly not choose the drink that is in front of you!

The titles already exist. The excellent clerk at my local comic store made me a long list of american and international series for my daughter to check out and I've been very impressed. Most of them have to be ordered though, and none are prominently displayed.

So it isn't so much that the titles aren't being created, but I think you're right that the demand will affect what is visible on store shelves.

Whether rural life in Canada is brutal depends on where you're from. And your definition of brutal. Between 20 minutes north of Toronto and the start of the Arctic Circle there is a fair bit of variation. If you grew up in the desert and have never lived anywhere cold, you might find it brutal. If you come from somewhere that has snowy winters and you don't mind bundling up you might find that you love Canadian winters (I do!) They're absolutely essential if you want to enjoy such lovely outdoor activities as tobogganing, skiing (downhill and x-counrty), snowboarding, ice skating, hockey, snowshoeing, beerbogganing, and camping in a Quinzhee.

The cambrian explosion is really interesting but I'd rather read about the thing itself, not framed as a polemic against creationism. I don't care about creationism.

I'm currently halfway through "Introduction to Improvisation" on Coursera, offered through Berklee college and taught by the great Gary Burton.

The enrollment is around 39,000 and I'm sure the completion will be low. People worldwide and of all skill levels are welcome to ignore the prerequisite guidelines and there's no cost to sign up. I bet twenty thousand didn't make it past week one - either discovering how difficult the class is, or losing interest since they only signed up on a whim anyway. This low barrier to entry probably inflates enrollment considerably compared to a traditional school.

There is a human element you did not address in your article. The discussion forum for the class is very active and full of enthusiastic students helping each other, asking questions, sharing resources, posting recordings of their music work, providing suggestions to the Coursera staff about curriculum improvements (many of which have been implemented already.) So it's not all robots.

I want the second thing. Where do I get that?

Unfortunately it's not a matter of sticking fingers in your ears, I can tell you. If you've got 50-100,000 workstations to worry about, and a couple of intranet apps that only run in older versions (there are more of these than you might think,) upgrading IE could be a fabulously large and expensive project.

Still you gotta catch up at some point. The product I work on is dropping IE8 in January, which will cause some of our larger and less nimble customers to get stuck on an older version until they can fix their browser situation.

The app I work on dropped IE7 a year ago, and is dropping IE8 in January 2013. Therefore this is the opposite of a disaster, pretty timely actually.

They're pretty clear that 1.9 and 2.0 will have API compatibility so there is an option for those who still have to support oldIE and one for those who don't have to. Seems like the best possible arrangement.

Agreed. The last thing a customer cares about is vendors pointing fingers at each other.

Considering hackernews' way-above-average aspberger's demographic, expect a lot of "ERROR INCOMPUTABLE" type comments in here. You're going to need a lot more hand holding in your pitch (not literal hand holding, that makes us uncomfortable.)

I read the headline and thought excitedly that somebody was proposing reclaiming the term "hacker" from the startup industry who has co-opted and defined it as something involving venture capital and minimum viable products. Maybe I'll have to write that article.

The whole "They used to be nerds and social misfits, but not anymore!" is really old. It seems memories are short in the media.

"Geek is the new Chic" - USA Today, October 2003 http://www.usatoday.com/life/2003-10-22-geek-chic_x.htm

"The new Worker Elite" - Ad Age, November 1997 http://www.qualitydigest.com/nov97/html/qualtech.html

I work in a Microsoft shop in a 6 person team of C# programmers. We follow the language closely, try to compete with each other keeping up with new language features (among other things!), and take whatever benefits we can from new stuff. When generics appeared in 2.0 it transformed our coding style. When LINQ (the language feature, not the LINQ to SQL ORM) was added it was transformed again. There hasn't been a major paradigm shift since but we've found handy places to use optional parameters, type covariance and contravariance, tried to handle the new dynamic keyword like dynamite, and we've definitely got plans for the new async features coming out in C# 4. I can tell you from attending technical conferences that we are not an atypical bunch.

So to answer your question, the odds are very good! :)

Very true. I didn't try to imply in any previous post that being motivated by profit is a bad thing. The app store definitely provides the ultra-simple software ecosystem you mentioned, and I agree that's awesome for most users. It also happens to guarantee that apple will be in the pipeline for all sales, so it's really win-win.

Despite my surprise that anybody would use it, there are over a thousand apps on the mac app store, so apple must be adding value by getting the product in front of eyeballs and streamlining the payment process. Still, I don't think they'll be able to get away with the draconian rule that they enjoy in the iDevice world. After all, if they make the experience too unpleasant, developers can still sell software through a competing app store, their website, or by mailing you a CD-ROM if all else fails. I think this is a good thing - the "escape hatch" means they'll actually have to put effort into pleasing the vendors who use their channel.

You'll never see a "why we decided to abandon the iPhone app store" - the only choice in that world is to abandon the platform altogether.

Since you've asked, Steko, I'll continue as if you're actually interested in exploring this topic with me. I promise I was trying to contribute to my argument and not change the subject. Please calm your fury.

First, what is this open market for iOS apps you mentioned? I haven't heard of it.

Of course Apple locks down the app store on their iDevices for profit. I think we're in agreement on that. If they didn't limit software delivery in that way, their app store would have to compete with other software delivery channels including the open web.

What I'm trying to express is my surprise that developers in the desktop world would opt in to a market like this. I had assumed that iDevice developers only used the app store because they had no choice.