drewm1980

I have the opposite gut feeling about LLM's; I think they're going to break down the barriers to adopting new programming languages, since they'll lower the cost of porting code dramatically.

The code in a language's standard library is probably enough to train an LLM on the new syntax, and even if it isn't, agents now observe the compiler output and can in principle learn from it. Porting code from one language to another doesn't require deep creativity and is, barring API aesthetics, a perfectly well defined task. It will be one of the first programming tasks to be perfectly automated by LLM's.

We are going to have to use our brains again to start thinking about why we're doing any of the stuff we're doing, and what effects it will have on the world.

It's good that you repented and at least tried to do something good with the money, but it would have been even better to donate it to an environmental organization with better judgement than you have. Proof of work crypto mining was an inexcusably bad idea for humanity from day one.

I mean, not everyone spent their decade on distributed computing. Some devs with a retrogrouch inclination kept writing single threaded code in native languages on a single node. Single core clock speed stagnated, but it was still worth buying new CPU's with more cores because they also had more cache, and all the extra cores are useful for running ~other peoples' bloated code.

Did you read the article? The section about "alarmists" and "troublemakers" is directly relevant to your take on the use of the word "Nazi". Some people have been calling Musk a Nazi for what, a decade? They sounded like alarmists a decade ago, but now he's literally doing Nazi salutes on TV, acting like it's normal.

I put whipped soy milk on my vegan homemade pumpkin pie last night and it was great. Do not miss dairy, and am thankful for modern food innovations that are helping us get past the suffering and environmental devastation of dairy.

No mention of how cruise ships are essentially entire cities powered by fossil fuels that dump their waste directly into the ocean?

Grapes are for luddites! Seriously though, my grapes are so reliable at cropping compared to tomato plants I think it would be more interesting to engineer grapes to be tomato-like.

I've got 99 reasons to be vegan, but shark extinction... is yet another one.

You can probably find an IDE plugin that inlines the assembly for a c function. Most ids can show the assembly side by side with your c code so it wouldn't be that much of a step. To fulfill your vision you would also need a decompiler (and an inliner) to convert a block of assembly back into C if a corresponding C routine exists.

There actually is such a thing as reversible computing(?) that keeps around enough intermediate values to run the code backwards to the inputs. Not sure what it is actually good for. Not to be confused with time travel debuggers, though they are similar in spirit.

Are your discerning charcuterie board lovers open to new flavors, or are they going to demand 1:1 indistinguishable replicas of specific dairy cheeses?

My favorite locally produced moldy nut cheese (Omage) does not have a flavor or texture like any dairy cheese I've tasted. IMO, dairy cheeses taste more different from each other than vegan versions taste from the dairy cheese they are mimicking (usually by using the exact same cultures).

With all the modern biotech we have, and the speed at which you can breed microorganisms, I don't think we should shrink from the challenge of domesticating new microbes from wild sources, and we should celebrate any new interesting flavors that come from it. Tradition (i.e. DO dairy cheese) is peer pressure from dead people.

These currently burn leaded gas. This company is building machines that will barf lead into the air you breathe and onto the crops you eat.

Poor, persecuted, POTUS? He led an attack on the capitol to try to overturn his loss in the election. The "meaningless political prosecutions" you refer to is the legal system failing to function at a basic level and throw him in jail for sedition, and yes, it is frustrating and scary for the rest of the free world.

3M highest level protection earmuffs are great. Electronic noise cancellation is a silly gimmick IMO.

Same. This is about meat, although since a lot of our land is used to grow feed for livestock, subsidies for plant agriculture are indirectly subsidizing inefficient animal agriculture.

IIRC you're really not suppose to do this. A pressurized pressure cooker is not something you want to drop accidentally.

It's not just the convenience. Pressure cookers are way more energy efficient than boiling a big pot of food on an electric stove. If you're using an electric air conditioner to re-extract that heat from your house, the savings are even bigger.

You do need to know how long your food needs to cook up front, or be tolerant of overcooked food.

Some founders are legitimately in it for the long haul and treat working for the company they founded as their career. I don't know how common they are, but I was lucky to work for one for about a decade.

I have had to learn to make do without cut and paste it's so flakey in Reddit. I gave up on editing posts before hitting send.

Tesla's cars (and private automobiles in general) are not a compelling vision, they're toys for rich people. I looked it up. About a million Teslas have ever been manufactured. Round the population to a power of 10... 10 billion people. So one human in 10k gets a Tesla. The main thing most climate activists that I talk to want is for billions of people to not have to die off due to resource mismanagement. People don't believe that it's even possible for our civilization to collapse, even though entire civilizations have collapsed numerous times over the course of history. This is not a world we're envisioning, is a world we're ~visioning. With our eyeballs.

You're being sarcastic, but it sounds like you agree with the authors about the situation we're in, and the desirability of building the sustainable utopia ~before we're forced to shut down our civilization and die off.

We need a president to declare transitioning of fossil fuels to be a national emergency and also a matter of national defense, and set the military industrial complex to work actually building a sustainable supply chain for energy and materials.

Electric and hydrogen fueled airplanes are progressing. There are also futuristic ideas about powering the planes with ground or space based lasers powered by solar. Zeppelins still scale really well, and ships can use sails again. I believe a lot of this stuff would have already been resolved if we had stopped propping up the fossil fuel industry by funding wars to maintain supply and allowing the industry to externalize its costs.

I also feel that not building world-destroying robots should be something we should be able to reach consensus on. My current favorite world-destroying robot photo is from the battle of Lutzerath:

https://i.redd.it/bonkanv0xiba1.jpg

If that photo doesn't cause people to wake up to what's being done, ostensibly on our behalf, I don't know what will.

If your grocery doesn't have locally produced, affordable, delicious vegan junk food by now you should be pissed off at the people producing your food and demand better.

Your animals are pets, not a food production system. Those animal farming practices will not scale to feed 8 billion people. Most ~humans are not receiving the standard of care you claim to be providing your animals with.

The idea that continuing to live is a personal decision is tempting as a part of a moral code (Ayn Rand takes this idea to absurd conclusions, for example.), but depression/suffering must be ~extremely severe for people to get over their self-preservation instinct. You are ~not, in any meaningful way, making a conscious decision to continue living for the rest of your natural life. You never gave consent to be in the situation you're in as a human being, and the animals you're raising ~certainly didn't.

IMHO going vegan is the only practical strategy for reducing the impact of your diet. You have no practical way of knowing most of what's going on in the supply chain for most products, or their true carbon footprint, but overall, the footprint of growing plants and feeding them to animals is way higher than just eating plants yourself. The laws of physics are, to some extent, "on your side" when it comes to boycotting animal products for sustainability reasons.

There ~are some plant products with well publicized ethical or sustainability scandals like coffee, chocolate, date palm, and avocados, that are worthy of looking into once you've already gone vegan. By all means look into those and try to source them carefully if you can or add them to your boycott, but be careful not to buy into the greenwashing false-equivalence that because some plant products ~are wasteful, it's OK to eat meat.

Do you argue against people legally consuming marijuana because the cartels skin people alive?

Skinning people alive is not vegan. Humans are animals too.

Do you think life in prison or even the death penalty should be on the table for a drunk driver that hits and kills a pregnant skunk? Because that’s what would happen if it was a pregnant woman instead.

Driving over a sentient being with your car is not vegan, skunk or woman, pregnant or not.

I'm not being sarcastic. Vegans are so often accused of not caring about humans that some people actually believe the FUD, and you might be one of them.

I know how fucked up industrial farming is. That doesn't mean eating animals is immoral.

These two things are intrinsically tied in practice. The utopia where well cared for animals feed 8 billion people does not exist, and cannot exist without many more earths.

Try going vegan for say... a year. Make it a fun game. You get to try out some new foods and restaurants! You can always start eating meat again if you decide you want to take part in the stuff you saw watching Dominion.

You don't even have to give up pedantic moral discussions and infighting (i.e. the distinction between "fucked up" and "immoral"). Those are deeply entrenched traditions in the vegan community!

Indeed, your professor was starting under the assumption that our civilization will not collapse. If you want to know what happens when the resources your civilization is built on run out, you're probably better off asking a historian than an economist.