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bertmuthalaly

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Now that I see this in the light of the recent sama article, I wonder whether the point of the "it's too dangerous" rhetoric is to enable "Open" AI to avoid open-sourcing the weights and process.

A convenient pretext for maintaining a monetizable competitive advantage while claiming a benevolent purpose.

jank is C++ 1 year ago

It's the first section in the article -

"I have implemented manual memory management via cpp/new and cpp/delete. This uses jank's GC allocator (currently bdwgc), rather than malloc, so using cpp/delete isn't generally needed. However, if cpp/delete is used then memory collection can be eager and more deterministic.

The implementation has full bdwgc support for destructors as well, so both manual deletion and automatic collection will trigger non-trivial destructors."

Thinking through the implications of building batteries for homes and coordinating them for demand response programs a la Tesla Powerwall.

Distributed battery storage can help alleviate transmission bottlenecks that prevent other storage and renewables from coexisting on the current grid (building new transmission is slow, on the order of decades).

Home batteries themselves are made of commodity parts (18650 battery cells power everything from vapes to electric cars) and battery management and demand response are software problems that are amenable to good systems programming.

That paper is really frustrating - it seems to be written for laypeople like us, but conflates the theory that humans made a containment mistake and COVID escaped from a lab so (we should make research safer) with "COVID is an intentionally engineered bioweapon, so we should stop researching."

And the most critical claim in the paper is not substantiated in any way:

Gain-of-function research is also subject to intense scrutiny and governmental oversight, precisely because of the high risk involved in conducting it safely; thus, it is extremely unlikely that gain-of-function research on hard-to-obtain coronaviruses (such as bat SARS-like coronaviruses) could occur under the radar.

Or substantiation is hinted at but never delivered:

This work produced some of the strongest corroborating evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is a naturally emergent pathogen, as serological surveys demonstrated that people living in close proximity to colonies of bats had antibodies to bat SARS-like coronaviruses. The NIH has since set impossible conditions for restoring the grant, ensuring that this research will never resume.

Maybe the next place to go is learning more about the initial results from the EcoHealth Alliance grant referenced in the above quote. Still, it's a pretty unsatisfying review.

[edit, fixed typo: containement -> containment]

On iOS now, if you’re setting up a new device, Signal will prompt you to transfer your messages from your old device.

Not exactly a backup feature but it covers one use case (I don’t want to lose my chat history when I switch devices).

Isn’t freezing/lagging after a couple of minutes of use a symptom of an ailing software ecosystem, not a criticism of the hardware?

Have you taken a look at the output?

I selected the NYC scanner and found many examples like this:

June 8, 2020 9:03 PM EDT: "Google Launcher new job and I want to play better third-party colder or does the people from the vegetable okay"

Any significant interface change is going to annoy some users. It's pretty unavoidable.

I'm usually with you, but you could not have picked a worse example - adding (or removing) latency to the critical path of how we read and think about code has large downstream effects that are difficult to measure and difficult to get fired (or promoted) for.

I think the conversation has shifted slightly this decade to avoiding incidental (accidental) complexity (I didn’t realize Fred Brooks popularized the term!), which I wish the author would address.

Otherwise this essay is spot on when it comes to essential conplexity.

Incidentally, the question of “where complexity lives” is one of the focal points of “A Philosophy of Software Design,” which comes highly recommended if you’re trying to come up with your strategy for managing complexity from first principles.