fnordsensei

They could build them somewhere where people don't care. But you can't co-opt 70 years of public infrastructure investments out in the middle of nowhere.

And didn’t Genghis Khan more or less go to war with most of the known (and some of the unknown) world and for all intents and purposes win?

You'd probably want to be more precise regarding "important for what" as well. And the philosophical angle: if the person hadn't existed, would someone else have slotted in to take their place? Is the impact measured in years/decades, because the overall historical forces were heading in a direction anyway?

Is it like trying to say "the most important bacterium in a petri dish"?

Without diminishing the impact that Musk has had, I'm fairly certain that Musk isn't the answer. And either way, the intent of saying that Musk is the most important person in history I'm fairly certain wasn't a very grounded decision. I'm sure it was more an expression of reverence and fealty.

Whoever came up with the wheel, maybe? Perhaps someone carrying the original homo sapiens mutations?

I have a friend who unironically said "Elon Musk is the most important human who has ever lived"

Same here. The miniseries itself has its quirks and oddities, but I find it charming. Particularly his role as Merlin.

Well, kind of. This is the kind of problem that you might throw schemas (eg. Malli) at pre 1.13.

It’ll be nice to have it at hand in the base language though.

Yes, why not resolve it the same way all the others have done?

Say that Trump has weird elbows or something, Trump sues for defamation, they settle, bribe completed.

The people we should be genuinely scared of today are the ones that are looking at Britain's past and are thinking to themselves that colonization sure looks like a good idea that will work super well in modern times. Which not many actual Brits think.

Didn’t write “money”, wrote “resources”, but sure.

Yes, there’s a risk to releasing a product whenever you can be held accountable for that product. I understand that Apple seeks to be as unaccountable as possible.

So we ultimately agree with one another: Apple can do it, but doesn’t want to, for various reasons.

The point isn’t that it’s easy or straightforward to do. The point is that one of the world’s wealthiest companies can spare the resources needed to comply with the regulations of one of the world’s largest markets.

Right.

Meta’s biggest culture problem is definitely “not enough masculine energy”.

3.5 flash is listed as stable rather than preview, or am I misreading?

https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/models/gemini-3.5-flas...

Step 1: put tariffs on coffee and bananas. Step 2: pump out CO2 until climate is appropriate for growing coffee and bananas. … Step n: Load profits onto your scavenged freight boat and try to find Dryland.

Is it more efficient though? It just looks like burning long term prospects for short term ones. Which is on brand with the current regime to be fair.

Planned economies don’t work great beyond small scopes.

The market does work, but it’s a giant paper clip AI and needs regulation in order to not turn everything into paper clips.

Wouldn’t it be accurate for that as well? Unless we change to base 10 time units or something. Then we all have a lot of work to do.

But if it’s just about starting over from 0 being the AI apocalypse or something, I’m sure it’ll be more manageable, and the fix could hopefully be done on a cave wall using a flint spear tip.

It’s a canned tuning mechanism to force the model to change track and align with the user.

It’s not so much a message to you as a message to the model from itself.

Same, but it’s a PITA when you also want to support tool calling at the same time. Had to do a double call: call and check if it will use tools. If not, call again and force the use of the (now injected) return schema tool.

I think you’re after something other than immutability then.

You’re allowed to rebind a var defined within a loop, it doesn’t mean that you can’t hang on to the old value if you need to.

With mutability, you actively can’t hang on to the old value, it’ll change under your feet.

Maybe it makes more sense if you think about it like tail recursion: you call a function and do some calculations, and then you call the same function again, but with new args.

This is allowed, and not the same as hammering a variable in place.

That’s the point, you’re just haggling about scopes now. All the way from being new per program invocation to new per loop.

Immutability doesn’t have this connotation.

There is precedence for Apple waiting for technologies to mature before using them (last mover advantage), and then dominating by being the platform owner.

Sometimes, it seems that this just makes parts of their offering seem aged though, while they (presumably) sit around being discontent with the currently available alternatives. Especially now with LLMs which age faster than anything.

Information, power, and insight asymmetry between an individual and a company. That’s why there are consumer protection laws in many countries; to even the scales, not to favor individuals. With no hand on the scales, asymmetry is the default.

Claude Garden Path Sentence

So to do true UBI, you’d also have to raise taxes quite a bit.

If US GDP is ~30 trillion, the program would have to capture ~20% of that to achieve your target.

Do check my math, I’m not sure I’ve got this right.

Gaming seems to have been improving massively as well, in no small part due to Valves efforts if I’m to understand correctly.

Other than that, there’s literally nothing I need from Microsoft currently.

MS is little more than a rent seeker to me.

I don't disagree exactly, it's just that it smells weird.

LLMs are incredibly good at social engineering when we let them, whereas I could write the code to emit "you're right" or "that's not quite right" without involving any statistical prediction.

Ie., as a method of persuasion, canned responses are incredibly inefficient (as evidenced by the annoyance with them), whereas we know that the LLM is capable of being far more insidious and subtle in its praise of you. For example, it could be instructed to launch weak counter arguments, "spot" the weaknesses, and then conclude that your position is the correct one.

But let's say that there's a monitoring mechanism that concludes that adjustments are needed. In order to "force" the LLM to drop the previous context, it "seeds" the response with "You're right", or "That's not quite right", as if it were the LLMs own conclusion. Then, when the LLM starts predicting what comes next, it must conclude things that follow from "you're right" or "that's not quite right".

So while they are very inefficient as persuasion and communication, they might be very efficient at breaking with the otherwise overwhelming context that would interfere with the change you're trying to affect.

That's the reason why I like the canned phrases. It's not that I particularly enjoy the communication in itself, it's that they are clear enough signals of what's going on. They give a tiny level observability to the black box, in the form of indicating a path change.

I’ve had the opposite experience with GPT-5, where it’s utterly convinced that its own (incorrect) solution is the way to go that it turns me down and preemptively launches tools to implement what it has in mind.

I get that it’s tradeoffs, but erring on the side of the human being correct is probably going to be a safer bet for another generation or two.

That doesn’t seem plausible to me. Not that LLMs can’t be sycophantic, but I don’t think this phrase in particular is part of it.

It’s a canned phrase in a place where an LLM could be much more creative to much greater efficacy.

That’s not the purpose of it, as I understand it; it’s a token phrase generated to cajole it down a particular path.[1] An alignment mechanism.

The complement appears to be, “actually, that’s not right.”, a correction mechanism.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45137802