mcbits

I haven't really experimented with being "nice" or "mean", but I would worry that a prompt like "No, dumbass, ..." would kick it into the patterns of someone who frequently got called a dumbass (perhaps for good reason) in the training set. On the other hand, maybe it could trigger more defensive responses with argumentation to explain its conclusions.

I would say the hammer is no AI. Local models are the cheapest XKGYAGH electric nailer on Amazon that "works" but jams up all the time. The $20/mo cloud models are a nice DeWalt that gives an hour of jam-free operation but takes five hours to recharge. And if someone else is paying for it, one can use the heavy duty nail gun with a big generator and compressor on a trailer that can run all day.

I prefer to call it an unplanned calendar learning opportunity.

These are not the same thing. You don't develop skills by reading about them. You have to use them, to process the information, integrate what you've learnt into your existing mental schema,

My mental AI detector would classify that passage as AI-generated with confidence around 85%. It would be 95% if the list had stopped at three items. Regardless of who wrote it, it's the same style.

I think the garbled menu accidentally perfectly illustrates what most menus look like within the brain as it tries to sift through poorly organized heaps of obscure words to find the one word that's actually needed in the moment.

There isn't a lot of money in "what time is it" and "what's the weather". :)

- Alexa, what time is it?

- Current time is 5:35 P.M. - the perfect time to crack open a can of ice cold Budweiser! A fresh 12-pack can be delivered within one hour if you order now!

They are roleplaying. It's literally the Department of Defense.[0]

[0] https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/28655-document-11-nationa...

These are geopolitical activities akin to the arms buildup of the Cold War, but happening somewhat more openly through the guise of private sector investments. The names of the companies involved are ephemeral. The numbers "invested" are largely imaginary, just play money pumped into the system over the last few years, flowing around, searching for a place to park. The result will be a certain amount of tangible infrastructure in the form of datacenters, power plants, semiconductor fabs. It's a Hail Mary move to keep pace with a certain geopolitical competitor. This process may propel society to the next level or may collapse it, depending on how society chooses to use these resources and how successful the competitor is at its own similar endeavor.

The last two paragraphs are mainly what stood out. I've spent hours trying to get LLMs to stop writing like that. It's hard because you can't just say things like "don't write lists of three items" because sometimes you want a list of three items. The rest of the text could be written by a person as it's kind of disjointed, but that could also be the result of trying to prompt out the AI-isms.

The writing is clearly AI-generated or at least AI-assisted, so I think it's safe to assume it's also a work of fiction.

Some people aren't undergrads who took Control Engineering courses.

I think you might mean schizotypal symptoms. Schizoid personality disorder is considered "on the spectrum" with schizophrenia but has very little similarity to it other than social withdrawal.

thugs

Please stop using that term unless you're talking specifically about the worshippers of Kali who would strangle and rob travelers in India in the 19th century. It does not mean anything else. It can never mean anything else.

Sounds like there is a need for investment into innovation beyond just building the next-generation fab for $2^x billion. Bringing the cost of a new less-advanced fab down from $2 billion to $100 million, and then building 20 of them, could also be profitable (though less exciting). There is a national economy that's actually been growing quite well for a few decades now by applying that general idea to other industries.

Both. Criminal (brought by the government) for the punishment, civil (brought by the victim) to recover the damages.

20Hz and 20KHz are just general guidelines for where sensitivity rapidly falls to zero in people with normal hearing. A lot of (primarily young) people can hear frequencies outside that range. I can still hear a sine wave down to about 14Hz, and I'm not sure if the limit is from my ears or the audio interface that's only rated down to 20Hz.

I can imagine "feeling" 1Hz from a big subwoofer, but it's hard to imagine what actually hearing 1Hz would be like. I wouldn't rule it out, though.

If I'm filling out a modal form and "Cancel" doesn't result in a clean form after I open it again, it should probably say something like "Hide" or "Finish later" instead.

In a just world, that's a way to gain market share. In our world, people concede their data for marginal improvements in the quality of a feature because they can't conceive of how giving up control of their data could come back to harm them. It doesn't feel like there is a downside.

I don't remember the details (or outcome) but there was a lawsuit a few years ago involving CAD or architecture software and whether they could limit how the output images were used because they were assemblages of clipart that the company asserted were still protected by copyright. Something like that. A lot of "AI" output potentially poses a similar issue, just at a far more granular level.

My guess is that stasis would be feasible sooner than keeping people fully alive and awake for the whole journey. In the latter case, they'd probably spend most of their time in the holodeck. Either way, on the scale of the universe, living in a metal tube is not very far removed from being stuck to the surface of a small iron pebble as we are now.

We could launch a vessel to Proxima Centauri right now that would arrive in thousands of years. If the passengers have lifespans measured in millions of years, that's comparable to a month for someone who lives 80 years.

The Supreme Court could have chosen not to interpret the Commerce Clause so broadly to say that not engaging in interstate commerce affects interstate commerce and therefore counts as interstate commerce (IIRC that started with wheat, not drugs), in which case most federal drug laws would not apply unless the activity actually involved interstate commerce. Then an amendment would be needed.

The falling cost of storage is at least partly the reason hosting a few thousand packages takes up hundreds of TB. "Storage is practically free" from the perspective of each of those projects. By the time .5 PB is a trivial cost, they'll need 50 PB.

Same reason governments should be held more accountable than any other person, if we're going by the "group of persons = person" definition of person.

And 4k for 20 inches display? What for? Do you plan to stick your face in the monitor?

It's still less than 300 dpi but getting close enough to be comparable to most printed materials.

Also, many tests require a centrifuge, so that's something else you have to account for if your goal is to perform the same tests with only one drop of blood. Unless your plan is to pull some Star Trek-level technology out of your hat.

That was basically the plan. Or failing that, to convince people that such technology existed or was close to existing. It's not too implausible that the centrifuge could be replaced with diffraction analysis or something since the goal is to test for the same things, not necessarily to "do the same tests." But that doesn't help if you're looking for something present in one in a million blood cells and only have a quarter-million cells to look at.

We can keep using trees, but this particular use of trees is already energy-intensive, materially intensive (thousands of miles of plastic tubes), sensitive to the weather each year, and geographically limited.

I'd think something like "lab-grown maple syrup" would be easier both to sell and (knowing nothing about how it would be produced) to produce. I love real maple syrup but can't justify paying $15 for a little vial of it. A 10-story building filled with layer upon layer of sap seeping from living wood cells is less disturbing of a vision than layers of pulsating flesh.

Or, there's no need for you to build this kind of great thing for your elderly relative because an AGI can do it instead?

Just like there is no need to design and build the FM transmitter from scratch because [factory] can do it instead. Some of us still think it's fun to build things like that as a hobby, but those who don't can still have an FM transmitter to start with and create something more exciting from there.

It looks like they call that excision, which leaves behind a breadcrumb saying something was deleted and which can't itself be deleted.