earth_walker

Abstractions are a way to manage complexity - hiding things is only one way to do that. Deciding how to organize it, when and how to expose it, and when to get out of the way, are all important aspects of designing abstractions.

Good question - and there's been lots of work on this area. See for example property testing and fuzz testing, which can do something similar to what your second paragraph suggests.

You should be able to find a property testing library in your favourite language such as Hypothesis (python), Quickcheck (Haskell), Fastcheck (JS/typescript), etc.

Paint didn't replace charcoal. Photography didn't replace drawings. Digital art didn't replace physical media. Random game level generation didn't replace architecture.

AI generated works will find a place beside human generated works.

It may even improve the market for 'artsy' films and great acting by highlighting the difference a little human talent can make.

It's not the art that's at risk, it's the grunt work. What will shift is the volume of human-created drek that employed millions to AI-created drek that employs tens.

Elm's strengths are its constraints, which allow for simple, readable code that's easy to test and reason about - partly because libraries are also guaranteed to work within those constraints.

I've tried and failed several times to write Haskell in an Elm style, even though the syntax is so similar. It's probably me (it's definitely me!), but I've found that as soon as you depend on a library or two outside of prelude their complexities bleed into your project and eventually force you into peppering that readable, simple code with lifts, lenses, transformations and hidden magic.

Not to mention the error messages and compile times make developing in Haskell a chore in comparison.

p.s. Elm has not been abandoned, it's very active and getting better every day. You just can't measure by updates to the (stable, but with a few old bugs) core. For a small, unpopular language there is so much work going into high quality libraries and development tools. Check out

https://elmcraft.org/lore/elm-core-development

for a discussion.

Elm is so nice to work in. Great error messages, and near instant compile times, and a great ecosystem of static analysis, scaffolding, scripting, and hot reloading tools make the live development cycle super nice - it actually feels like what the lispers always promised would happen if we embraced repl-driven development.

Agreed. I've run the house using google minis and assistant for years now, and asking assistant to do / about stuff has not improved one iota in that time and has introduced several more quirks and bugs.

Makes me wish I had bet on Alexa or Apple instead.

I work with the regulated drug development industry, and believe there is a useful and important distinction between Quality Control (QC) and Quality Assurance (QA). I wonder if perhaps this distinction would be useful to software quality too.

QC are the processes that ensure a quality product: things like tests, monitoring, metrology, audit trails, etc. No one person or team is responsible for these, rather they are processes that exist throughout.

QA is a role that ensures these and other quality-related processes are in place and operating correctly. An independent, top level view if possible. They may do this through testing, record reviews, regular inspections and audits, document and procedure reviews, analyzing metrics.

Yes, they will probably test here and there to make sure everything is in order, but this should be higher level - testing against specifications, acceptability and regulatory, perhaps some exploratory testing, etc.

Critically they should not be the QC process itself: rather they should be making sure the QC process is doing its job. QA's value is not in catching that one rare bug (though they might), but in long term quality, stability, and consistency.

Hint: V = Vanadium and I = Iodine.

I just typed in "6 minutes and 55 second" in the youtube search and someone had posted a video called "6 minutes and 55 seconds of X"

That's exactly how I start every morning. Now I'll just imagine myself as an emerging super-intelligence!

It's another reason not to expect AI to be "like humans". Agreed.

I think the adaptive noise filter is going to be the really tricky part. The fact that we have a limited, fading memory is thought to be a feature and not a bug, as is our ability to do a lot of useful learning while remembering little in terms of details - for example from the "information overload" period in our infancy.

I guess that assumes AGI's emotional intelligence scales with processing power.

What if it instead over-thinks things by multiples of billions and we get this super neurotic, touchy and sulky teenager?

Reading all about this the main thing I'm learning is about human behaviour.

Now, I'm not arguing against the usefulness of understanding the undefined behaviours, limits and boundaries of these models, but the way many of these conversations go reminds me so much of toddlers trying to eat, hit, shake, and generally break everything new they come across.

If we ever see the day where an AI chat bot gains some kind of sci-fi-style sentience the first thing it will experience is a flood of people trying their best to break it, piss it off, confuse it, create alternate evil personalities, and generally be dicks.

Combine that with having been trained on Reddit and Youtube comments, and We. are. screwed.

The reaction you're seeing is not because we've all got drinking problems. It's due to the reactionary way this and other similar studies are headlined: "No level of alcohol consumption is safe...". It's click-bait, and so you're seeing the resulting clicks.

I'm sure you wouldn't have seen anywhere near this kind of reaction if the headline was instead "Any level of alcohol consumption increases liver cancer risk by X in 10,000" or "Adjustments to confounding factors show that non-drinkers have a 0.0000X% longer life expectancy".

Beyond the headline designed to invoke a reaction, I think there's a good basis for general fear of this kind of judgment - it invokes the language around many other prohibitions of all that is good and fun in the name of our physical or moral health.

We are only just working through lifting prohibitions on Cannabis here in the west, albeit with many strings attached. Many countries (and a good number of North American counties) still have prohibitions on alcohol. We as a society prohibit many kinds of mushroom, plant roots, leaves and oils.

Here in Canada the health authority has a "no safe levels" attitude towards absinthe, house-made mayo, rare burgers and many of the world's greatest cheeses. We've put "for external use only" warning labels on cooking ingredients like mustard oil and tamarind extracts. We've banned cooking wines entirely!

So yes. When I see "no safe levels of alcohol" I do tend to over-react. Keep your grubby little hands off my bottle.

The hippies did not 'push' free love and drug use - those are themes evident in every generation's youth. It's what teens do.

In the hippies case, as the movement became more mainstream the establishment funded efforts to emphasize those aspects over the other, more socialist and anti-war aspects that were the basis of the earlier counter-culture.

Just look at the evolution in the music of the movement: protest songs of the early to mid 60s (Dylan, Sam Cooke, Simon & Garfunkle...) gave way to the commercially produced, glitzy psychedelic music in the late 60s. From Surrealistic Pillows in 1967 to American Beauty in 1970 and beyond it was basically about sex, partying, navel gazing and spacing out.

The message clearly became much safer and, as it happens, more profitable.

I've even heard one conspiracy theorist say that the change in attitude for many bands was orchestrated by 3-letter agencies to influence the anti-war movement, though I don't know how much evidence there is of that.

Location: Southern Alberta

Remote: Preferred

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Experienced QA professional, particularly in GLP/GMP/GPP. QMS / quality process design, implementation and streamlining. Spreadsheet, software and instrument validation / 21CFRpart11 and OECD compliance. Elm/Haskell and .net in service of the above.

Website: https://hylandqs.ca

Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/brendan-hyland-b23bb04

email: brendan at hylandqs dot ca

Resume: Available on request.

My name is Brendan. I'm an experienced GLP/GMP/GPP QA professional with a bit of a programming problem.

I help regulated pharma and cannabis facilities with quality, compliance, validation and in particular streamlining those processes.

I closed out a couple of successful multi-year projects this year and am now re-emerging into the market, trying to figure out what's next.

I have hands-on experience in a Cannabis/CBD extraction facility as well as pre-clinical Pharma. I'm a Health-Canada approved QAP with security clearance, and a Registered Quality Assurance Professional. I have managed large multinational drug development projects and small QA teams.

I can also program, and have built and delivered custom software and a few full stack web-facing projects. Preferred technologies these days are Elm & Haskell, but I spent a few years tied to the .Net ecosystem. So if you need someone to bridge the gap between your software engineers and the lab bench, production line or regulatory department, I'm your guy.

Feel free to drop me a line even if it's just to chat, I'd love to hear from you!

SEEKING WORK: Remote / Southern Alberta. Will consider travel and relocating for the right opportunity.

My name is Brendan. I'm an experienced GLP/GMP/GPP QA professional with a bit of a programming problem.

I help regulated pharma and cannabis facilities with quality, compliance, validation and in particular streamlining those processes.

I closed out a couple of successful multi-year projects this year and am now re-emerging into the market, trying to figure out what's next.

I have hands-on experience in a Cannabis/CBD extraction facility as well as pre-clinical Pharma. I'm a Health-Canada approved QAP with security clearance, and a Registered Quality Assurance Professional. I have managed large multinational drug development projects and small QA teams.

I can also program, and have built and delivered custom software and a few full stack web-facing projects. Preferred technologies these days are Elm & Haskell, but I spent a few years tied to the .Net ecosystem. So if you need someone to bridge the gap between your software engineers and the lab bench, production line or regulatory department, I'm your guy.

Website: https://hylandqs.ca Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/brendan-hyland-b23bb04

email brendan at hylandqs dot ca

Feel free to drop me a line even if it's just to chat, I'd love to hear from you!

I don't find twitter to be seamless nor easy. They have reduced my choices to the point where I can't actually see what I want to see without doing a bunch of research into how to 'game' the system.

Looking at my home page right now, Elon is at the top saying that "Twitter needs to become by far the most accurate source of information about the world. That’s our mission." Followed by an advert from a company I didn't subscribe to, and then a bunch of meaningless personal tweets from people I don't know and I didn't subscribe to. One news item on the whole page.

I get regular email notifications updating me on the latest paranoid rants from various right wing 'rebel' groups (that I definitely didn't subscribe to), and I cannot find any way to stop them because they only show up in my emails, not in my feed. There's no way I can see to block them. That's not seamless nor easy.

The email notifications I do want cut off important headlines half way through the sentence, forcing me to log into the platform just to read what might have happened. No way to configure that either. Certainly not seamless nor easy.

Oh, they are paid. According to the contract they take various types of payment ranging from: Sunday mornings drinking bad wine, tithes all the way to lifelong celibacy and blood sacrifice.

Here in Canada that's what we called John Player Specials. Black and gold. To go with your tux.

Having said that... as I play with it more, I really like the UI. If there was a privacy-first option I would definitely use it.

For me, never.

For most of the other people in my life, they are primarily searching for products, books, people, and ideas for recipes or various projects around the home.

So I totally see the utility of having these social media sites in the feed.

On the other hand, this reduces privacy even more than stock google, basically broadcasting your search terms to a whole bunch of bad actors, so I won't be recommending it to anyone.

As impressive as this regime is if you can do it, I'd recommend most people start a little slower and mix it up a little more - this kind of highly repetitive strain will burn out your body, just as the insane work schedule burnt you out.

Start slow, throw in some yoga or tai chi and build up those joints and tendons - they don't increase in strength as quickly as muscles do.

Here in Canada private companies can and do pay dividends to their shareholders.

Please go ahead and provide proven solutions to those of us who are exhausted and desperate. If you profit while you're at it too, it's a clear win-win!

I think there will likely be better ways to bias the training of specific instances - Something like a 'training library' with biased training data that you can plug in for your use case.

For example let's say you're a well known designer with a distinct style, and you train your own instance on your lifetime's body of work. Now you can generate whatever you want in 'your style' (just like you can now ask for a painting in Dali's style).

Now you've turned your style and design process into a factory - for every new client you can create whatever they want, in your style, with multiple examples, in a button press. Perhaps you can even sell that 'training library' to other designers?

I see what you mean about GPT returning copies. But is there really a difference if your model just happens to 'calculate' an exact copy instead?

For example, if you enter in something simple and high profile, what it returns looks pretty close to an existing work...

Try, for example, typing in "Banksy", "Brad Pitt" or "Starbucks".

So if you type in "Photo of a Coffee", "Impressionist painting of a fruit bowl" or "Blue canvas with one red line in the middle", how do you guarantee that the image you get back isn't actually a copy of someone's work?

I disagree. The majority is never informed enough to make a good decision on something as nuanced as censorship. At least a dictatorship could, theoretically, be benevolent and act on the advice of experts.

I think you don't give enough emphasis on the "if you even could before" part. Sure, this makes realistic fakes easier and more available to to the masses. So what? We've had the technology to 'frame' people in similar ways for decades now, and other than entertain the 4chan teens it does squat.

There's enough money interest in bringing down certain politicians, if faking a sex tape or back-room conversation would make any difference to the world it would have been done already. Hell, politicians pretty much admit publicly that they are rapists and we don't do anything about it. Who's gonna care about a couple of gorilla-pics of a normie?

People don't and never have trusted any evidence that doesn't reaffirm their world view, regardless of how true that evidence is. More realistic evidence won't change that.

America has always paid 1x for a TV without ads.

It is the TV and media companies that are a) using lies and deception to convince America that it's ok to instead pay (1x + advertising + a hidden loss of privacy) for a TV, and b) colluding to raise the prices of 'dumb' TVs as an added lever against consumers.

Educating people on the real costs, and pointing out better alternatives are the best ways to combat this.

Not giving them your money in the first place would be the easiest solution.