bryanrasmussen

When the doctor slapped my ass directly after I was born I reportedly turned to him and in a serious tone inquired "why did you do that, explain it to me like I was 5" which so freaked the poor man out that he dropped me on my head, and thus I myself have no recollection of the event.

He was later sent to an asylum for the criminally insane although he used to break out and try to hunt me down to kill me for being "evil".

I just find it interesting that Lord Rutherford thought the purpose of science was chatting up barmaids.

it’s now just shorthand for “describe using the first principles the expected audience should understand.”

I think at that it still fails pretty bad. I suppose the expected audience is quite a bit broader than people who would know or actually care what nostr events are. Maybe my expectation is off though.

I made a response on the Cervantes quote

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49002363

that pertains here to some extent.

Definitely a sterling example of the benefits of not paying people, given that he died in poverty and spent his life working odd jobs despite writing what was a best seller in debtor's prison.

But as you found quotes from someone arguing that writing to be paid is somehow bad

"I agree with Balzac and 19th-century writers, black and white, who say, 'I write for money'" -- Maya Angelou

"No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money" -- Samuel Johnson.

But hey, I gotta admit, the first guy had one example of someone who wrote despite not having hopes of getting anything for their effort and now you come with one, so obviously my idea that not everyone has in the age of the world written without hope of compensation was wrong.

But let's go back to your quote, which for some reason you think is a good one against my assertion that there are people have written for money and to retain copyright.

Sancho makes the final point "It will be a wonder if he succeeds, for it will be only hurry, hurry, with him, like the tailor on Easter Eve; and works done in a hurry are never finished as perfectly as they ought to be."

Which is a really good point for someone writing in a time when copyright did not exist and the only way to ever make money from your writing was to write quickly and to get the work into someone's hands after which they paid you, maybe, once.

I'm of course in agreement, somewhat, that works done too quickly are not done well enough, but some people can write at a speed that to others may seem in a hurry but to them are rather slow.

But I will give an example, Mark Twain, who I've already pointed out is the perfect example of someone who definitely wrote for money, except for a couple things he wrote towards the end of his life when he was old and bitter and also pretty darn rich by the standards of his time.

He took 7 years to write Huck Finn. If he wrote for money how did he afford this? Well he shelved it for a bit when he had writer's block and wrote other things for money, but also because he was in a much more financially secure situation than Cervantes expected the writer for money to be, due to his success, part of that success based on copyrighting Tom Sawyer before its publication.

But he also did do a bunch of crap, including the sequels to Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, and of course writing The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson too quickly to keep from bankruptcy from bad investments. I am not against the assertion that writing for money will produce things that are bad, but I do not believe that, quotes aside, it can be shown definitely that it will produce bad things.

At any rate if you read things written the last few hundred years and find them worthwhile, unless you are very particular in how you choose what you read, you probably have read lots of things that were written either partially or wholly for money.

Finally I notice neither you or other people who responded had anything to say to this part of what I wrote

"And of those who write even without monetary recompense, will they publish?

Will they send off to someone their writing and then sit through the editorial process for months, and agree to changes in order to get published?

Will they go through all the various parts of having to sell since they will not be getting paid for what they wrote?"

I look forward to the quotes from great works of literature detailing how the non-writing parts of the publishing process are required for the writer to produce something great and how they should not consider money when laboring on that either.

I have to think there is probably a real good and obvious technical reason for this and the guy who wrote this is an idiot. But I don't have the cartographic knowledge of the area or the data to make the argument so I'm hoping someone who does will point out the obvious.

missed "Numberless are the world's wonders, but none more wonderful than man" from Antigone.

Really, all of them? In the history of the world there has never existed a writer who thought, hey I think I can do that pretty well, I suppose I will give a try and see if I can make money.

There has never been a writer who, writing for love, also thought, hey that is a great idea for a science fiction story, and that magazine is paying for science fiction, I will, in entrepreneurial fashion try to write a story so I can earn money. If it works out really well I could even have a best seller and move out of this garret! Or did this presumed writer just say, nah, screw that, another volume of poetry about dark haired ladies for me!

And of those who write even without monetary recompense, will they publish?

Will they send off to someone their writing and then sit through the editorial process for months, and agree to changes in order to get published?

Will they go through all the various parts of having to sell since they will not be getting paid for what they wrote?

Rhetorically speaking, Anne Frank is a writer who wrote without caring about any of that stuff, but unless the argument is that we should be rounding up people to send to death camps in order to promote better literature I don't really see the point of the argument.

Sure, after Anne Frank died and the war ended and her father had her diary published he went through the whole editing process and doing whatever was needed to spur sales of the book without much interest in benefiting from the copyright, but I sort of feel that he and his daughter may have been something of an outlier in most publication histories, and their story, engaging as it is, may not actually demonstrate so obviously that "writers will write even without monetary recompense"

on edit: The idea that people are "compelled to write" is essentially an idea that writers have some sort of psychological problem, at least a form of neuroticism, the argument that as they will write without compensation and thus there is no reason to compensate them is at its best an argument to take advantage of people with a psychological condition, although, for all the reasons outlined above I think we can see that the argument is completely senseless and flies in the face of logic.

There has been recent discussion of who was America's Homer, and I suggested Mark Twain https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48927260 who was a guy who so blindingly obviously wrote for money in almost all cases that it would just be absolutely ludicrous to argue otherwise.

Also, I see I got my downvote, oh noes!

I would expect a show about how a long time ago James L. Kraft was a lowly thala-siren farmer and cheese maker in a galaxy far away, forced to flee the Empire and make his way to Buffalo, New York, in 1902 where, armed with nothing but a blaster, his knowledge of cheese, and ability to be roguishly charming he stood up for the rights of locally oppressed racial and gender minorities against the system while making some of the best darn food that a country without any knowledge of how to cook things that did not taste like potatoes ever had encountered!

Season Two: Amazingly Henry John Heinz, James L. Kraft's primary rival for the love of Rebel Princess Amorilyza, played by Zendaya (which is the reason I'm watching this show, if truth be told), also managed to escape the Empire and make his own food company!

I would suppose getting out of nature's way happens in one of two ways - infrequently because there is nothing of value in an area left to extract so people leave it alone, or infrequently because there is regulation forcing people to leave it alone.

if people can figure out a good way to map a set of pieces laid out with given tolerance ranges for piece

so you work in some space where extremely good visual understanding and ability to abstract in 3 dimensions is a prerequisite?

When I read your comment I completely give myself over to the understanding that you mean she wrote a whole and continuous book, without ever researching whether you meant a book about uncastrated male animals. Imagine my surprise when I go the radio to discuss your comment and a zoologist calls up to correct my understanding of a common English phrase.

Well, yes, the Coen brothers did do the best version of the Odyssey for screen after all.

https://medium.com/luminasticity/huck-finn-one-of-the-greate...

"In the world of the book Huck Finn is not respected, although he comes close at times to it, contravening all the values of a society that should be considered corrupt by ours.

And in our world Huck Finn is not respectable and must be continually defended to keep from being totally thrown out of the literary society, because contravening the deep values of his corrupt society, he does have some of the surface mannerisms."

OK I wasn't aware of this document, although I still say the first proposing of the problem publicly was Sagan's article, and this one is people trying to recollect a lunch time conversation years after the fact.

So I feel it is really Sagan's summation of the problem that is the original. So I would say maybe they said the only way it could work was if there was FTL or some similar formulation, but I think Sagan also showed that it could work in other ways.

So I guess we just sort of disagree on this.

yeah me neither, maybe it was using the phrase good faith.

I suppose landlords if they think it is very beneficial to use AI to get people to pay more for apartments might fight back, probably free speech or some such thing, some landlords might just do it because they dislike Mamdani.

Anyway I'm not sure if they would need to update much, just issue statement "using AI to create an image that cannot actually happen in reality for an apartment by.. (long winded description follows) is obviously deceptive and falls under current regulations and laws and we will be prosecuting it as such" - this would of course be determined by how things work in NY specifically.

You are wrong.

First, I would just naturally assume you are wrong as Fermi would have known that FTL was practically impossible.

Fermi evidently made the comment in the 1950s at Los Alamos, as I understand it became widely known due to Carl Sagan's 1963 paper "Direct contact among galactic civilizations by relativistic interstellar spaceflight"

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/003206...

What the Fermi paradox involves is near light speeds, because, as Sagan says in the paper above "Interstellar spaceflight at relativistic velocities has several obvious advantages... all points in the Galaxy are accessible within the lifetime of a human crew, due to relativistic time dilation."

There is also the Michael Hart paper "Explanation for the Absence of Extraterrestrials on Earth" from 1975 but I have not found any satisfactory for open reading source of this online.

At any rate it seems absurd that any famous physicist of the last 90 years at least would ever have suggested that aliens should have been here because they would have had faster than light travel. You are essentially saying Fermi thought Einstein's Theory of Relativity was very much wrong.

on edit: I said 90 years to hedge bets in case there was some really old guy still hanging around in 1935, science progressing one funeral at a time and all that. But it seems really unlikely that there would have been.

well, reading the article Mamdani is cracking down on "deceptive landlord practices" thus it means his administration will apply deceptive landlord practice laws to use of AI images in advertising apartments. At some point if somebody wants to fight the issue they can take it to court.

As a general rule you probably don't need new laws to penalize behavior you think should be penalized, there are more than enough laws where a good faith interpretation would fit.

hmm, if these estimates of Amazon profit for the next quarter are correct Bezos is set to become a trillionaire! Take that Musk!!

that may be what was intended, but if so they should have written something like

"we used to walk 15 miles up hill, BOTH WAYS, just to get to school and back home", which approximates the way that joke is generally phrased, instead of "we used to walk 15 miles up hill, BOTH WAYS, just to get to school" ;)

I think it is somewhat weird that nobody put Twain in.

I could also see someone suggesting Hemingway, although I don't buy it.

Hart Crane at this point in time seems somewhat secondary, so that was surprising.

The Tracy Chapman thing seemed seriously like a troll, I could definitely agree to a black Homer, but then I guess it would be Langston Hughes or James Baldwin as my choices.

To suggest someone though who has the name recognition for American literature that Homer had for the Greeks, it would need to be Twain. You can't really have a great national writer that hardly anybody in the nation can name.

doesn't matter, you're still walking uphill to get to school, no matter which way you're taking.

well if the school was on top of the hill and you lived at the bottom you would need to walk up hill no matter which way you took, I'm guessing there was only two roads going up the hill though?

Spock had not realized that James Kirk emitted a psionic reality distortion field through higher dimensional "luck", if he had he would have been a bit more relaxed.

and you know he underestimates survival probabilities the same way Scotty overestimates how long it will take to fix the engines

NOT SPOCK!!!

They haven't prevented that. They have prevented trademarking the terms, thus other people whose AI offerings are Open are in fact allowed to describe their products as an Open AI, I presume they are not allowed to describe their products as being OpenAI however as that would create consumer confusion.

Furthermore they have not said anything about [adjective] being non trademarkable, they have said that you shouldn't be able to trademark things that have specific meaning in your industry, as Open has some specific meaning in the software industry.

Thus you would probably be allowed to name your things [big] +[proudct/service provided] or in this case bigAI because big does not really imply a specific desirable quality in the Software industry.

Now before you start talking of how you can see blah blah how big would be useful blah blah, as is the tradition whenever programmers encounter a legal decision that they do not agree with, it just ain't gonna work. I guess though I cannot prevent the inevitable, but nobody in IT says does it have the technical quality of "bigness" before purchasing, but they do about the quality of "Openness", so obviously some adjectives would be untrademarkable in this context, if you named your AI SecureAI probably no go, If you named your AI UglyAssAI probably fine.

Life in 2050 may be completely unpredictable to someone who was taken out of time in the year 2000.

Well the end of AMOC would also be a singularity by that measure, maybe about the same time.

I didn't read the article, because I got two PR_CONNECT_RESET_ERRORs in a row, I don't know whose fault it is, but I blame the bosses.

for enterprise level dependability and support should normally be the winner.

While I understand the intent, it often makes the text verbose and awkward. So usually the suggested text is safer, but at the same time harder to read

this seems a side effect of being trained on the internet corpus. Much of online communication of the past decades has been people forcing themselves to write unnaturally in order that someone with an ax to grind does not willfully interpret something in the worst way possible in order to elevate their moral stature at the expense of those they interpret.

A somewhat dumbed down version of much of the latter half of 20th century literary criticism, in my opinion.

At any rate, the AI, as in every other thing it does, learned it from watching us.