mmooss

What things? Again, I don't see any but manipulation and fraud, but I certainly could be missing some.

(2012)

Also here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20131230055512/http://squid314.l...

Does anyone know the provenance of this story? One comment says, responding to someone who recommends publishing it,

The problem is that it's published so he can sell only second rights.

EDIT: The story is tagged (at the top) "fiction, raikoth". Raikoth is the 'constructed civilization' of Scott Alexander, author of Slate Star Codex, et al. And though the post is at gwern.net, I see the author is "Scott".

Why allow anthropomorphism in LLM or any computer output, for any age group?

A simple regulation would be that all LLM output must:

  * Explicitly identify itself as a computer

  * Identify the human or human org controlling it
    (e.g., 'This is Claude v8.90 software made by Anthropic.')

  * Not attempt to mimic humans except for entertainment
    purposes, and then clearly labeled (e.g., 'This is not
    a human. It is a computer pretending to be human for
    entertainment purposes.').

He wrote at length about how wikipedia is the antithesis of the entire conception of a wiki.

Do you happen to know where?

I'm curious about Mozilla's seeming shift in strategy (possibly it was awhile ago and I overlooked it):

For a long time, with relatively limited (compared to Google and Apple) development resources, they focused on minimizing upkeep and technical debt. They added and maintained features appealing to the vast majority, the non-technical users, and left the rest to extensions.

Now I'm seeing geek and power user favorites like a built-in color picker, PDF editing features, and now multi-account containers moved into the browser. What changed? Are they focusing on different audience? Do they have new resources so that they can afford maintaining all these additional, more niche features?

I'm not talking about now. You said "every few decades" - when has it happened before?

I think "every few decades" normalizes what is a unique situation in US history.

I really don't care about other "advanced democracies", we're talking about America

You probably need to specify that on HN; you could be writing from anywhere about anywhere.

It's why we flirt with/fall face first into authoritarianism every few decades.

Did the US or any advanced democracy "flirt with/fall face first into authoritarianism" a few decades ago?

The lesson of the last 50 years of the computer and software marketplace is that free and low-end eventually wins.

The parent comment cherry-picks evidence. There are plenty of counter-examples:

  * Office productivity suites
  * Search engines
  * Email services
  * Cloud services
  * Accounting software

Dev tools are not for 99% of end users and not realistically available to them (even if they stumble across dev tools, they don't know what they've found or how to use them). PDF editing is for end users and is realistically available.

Containers let you keep separate parts of your online life (work, shopping, personal, banking) logged into different accounts in the same browser window, but keep your cookies and ad tracking isolated inside each container.

What's new here? Containers have been an add-on, at least, for a long time? Is it integrated into core Firefox for the first time?

Quickly pick and copy a color from any page by typing "pick color", "color picker", or "eyedropper" in the address bar and selecting the "Pick a color" quick action.

This seems like add-on or developer tools territory. Maybe that's what quick actions are? Does Firefox really want to add non-essential widgets to maintain, support, and integrate going forward? Maybe this one is necessary for some reason? I have a global color-picker that works in every application; I expect many who need one have the same.

Many URLs start with http(s): and end in .pdf. If we define web browser as http browser rather than html browser, then viewing PDFs fits the concept. My web browser also displays plain text, video, audio, etc., so http browser seems accurate and html browser plainly inadequate.

And regardless of logical fit for geeks (who understand the paragraph above), users clicking a .pdf URL may find it much more convenient if it just opens in their browser like any other http page, rather than downloading, opening in another window, getting lost between the MDI browser and separate SDI of the PDF file, etc. Why not treat PDF as just another web format?

To me, more strange is Firefox adding PDF editing features to its core, rather than as add-ons. Users can't edit HTML or any other media without extra tools. Many pdf reader apps can't do some of these things (afaik). Why invest developer time in PDF editing?

Think for yourself. I'm not making a pitch for funding. Instead of complaining and talking about tangential stuff, get to work.

Wow, people are really advocates of helplessness. Warfare is a great example:

It has gone on for all of history, yet people working together have mostly eliminated it - exactly what you say. It has gone on for all of history, and most of what humans have acheived by working together have been done contemporaneously with it.

The event we need is for you and others to start working, instead of standing on the sidelines telling other people it's impossible.

Humanity has overcome many things by working together. Much of humanity is already working together to overcome climate change. In fact, if the Republican Party in the US would get to work on it, that may be a sufficient fraction of humanity. And if the US led on it, more would participate.

I seriously expect that some will begin to say that LLM output is the word of God.

The marketing and ecosystem surrounding these tools feeds into the anthropomorphization to a huge extent

And especially their design. The con artist politeness and confidence is not an accident of output, but a design choice by the developers.

I tell non-technical people: It's a software program; there is always a person behind it, and they have consciously chosen this output, to serve their own interests.

Both claims seem to obviously contradict reality, imho:

Humans are wired to anthropomorphise; we do it with sticks and rocks.

I do not see people anthropomorphize their TVs, books, paintings, cars, houses, rocks, sticks, ... I'm not sure what you're talking about here. I haven't seen someone call a rock or stick by a pronoun, for example.

I've seen people fancifully do it, but it's exaggeration for a cute effect, and works because everyone knows they're exaggerating.

We’ve invented a technology that hijacks that part of humanity more effectively than anything ever. Asking people to “not be so stupid” is not going to help.

People learn to look at things in different ways. Humans learn, society changes. It's changed quite a bit in recent years; it's much different than a century ago, a century before that, etc.

In a way, it's more worship of technology to say humans are hopelessly, powerlessly dumb, and technology inevitably rules them. The inevitability of technology is of course a self-serving trope of the industry: you are powerless, we are inevitable. How convenient, and short-sighted.

It's an interesting question: Isn't Texas widely marketed as a 'low tax area'?

It may be a 'low income tax area', with more regressive taxes used to fund the state and an equal or higher total? Texans need to pay for the same things, generally, as people in Massachusetts (though maybe they don't invest as much in schools, health care, etc.).

Another story in the same publication is about one of their writers being arrested because of Flock cameras (falsely IDing their test-drive car).

For recovering wet film (p. 69) (excerpts are not continuous in the original):

The key is to prevent the films from drying out before they can be rewashed and dried in a laboratory, and to keep them cool while waiting for this treatment.

Place each wet film inside a plastic bag and seal it up with as little air as possible. Do not try to remove excess water. If plastic bags are not immediately available, fully immerse each film in a bucket of clean cool water until they can be bagged up. Replace the water daily until then.

Dealing with wet film requires the services of accessible and affordable laboratory facilities with sufficient capacity to handle the affected films.

Globally there are now very few film laboratories with the necessary equipment and expertise to do this ... / In short, without access to a film laboratory and without sufficient funds to pay for salvaging wet films, they are likely to be unsalvageable.

Wet films in rolls left to air-dry will almost certainly become blocked

... attempting to rewash films without laboratory equipment is at best risky and time-consuming, and at worst impossible. The most difficult part of the process is adequately drying the film after manual washing, as the unwound film must be air-dried in a still environment. It may be possible to successfully dry a film by winding it around an improvised drying rack, but this requires a lot of space for even a single reel, and will not be a feasible option if any more than a handful of films are affected. Forced drying using fans will result in drying marks and dirt embedded in the emulsion.

FIAF is the International Federation of Film Archives, which has a wealth of resources.

Ch. 6 begins the technical specifics of film. The guide also covers paper and photos, as well as magnetic tape (p. 72).

Regarding the unintentional overdoses:

"There are two distinct clinical syndromes described in literature. One is the 'garden variety', wherein the patients ingested large amounts of acetaminophen with a suicidal intent .... The other pattern is seen in chronic alcoholics who ingest smaller amounts of acetaminophen in an attempt to relieve pain ...."

"The causes of chronic pain in the accidental overdose group were toothache, chronic backache, or headache."

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/cc1475

The Pubmed articles are from 20 years ago. The 2023 JAMA article has some qualified information:

"In 2021, US poison centers received more than 80 000 cases involving an acetaminophen product.1 The National Electronic Injury Surveillance System estimated that 78 414 emergency department (ED) visits occurred annually in the US from January 1, 2006, through December 31, 2007, for overdoses of acetaminophen-containing products.2 In Canada, approximately 4500 hospitalizations occur each year because of acetaminophen overdose.3"

It doesn't tell us risk. Acetaminophen is very widely used, potentially the most widely used drug. I'm not sure what these numbers represent in terms of risk.

That's the semi-real shopping site's fake journalism site. Try to keep up!

That would be a fantastic art installation. In some places, landlords allow empty storefronts to be used for art.

You might get people to contribute satirical spins on different trends or designers.

I hope you or someone does it.

Seriously, the project's code name could be dopamine delivery. They could make it a demo of all the tricks.

overdose is not uncommon

Anecdotally, I hear about it far more in Internet comments like the parent than elsewhere. How common is it?

I looked up the author, Johann Kurtz. I'm not sure of Kurtz's background otherwise - any economics? Kurtz has a position at the C.S. Lewis Institute, which describes its mission, "we develop wholehearted disciples of Jesus Christ who articulate, defend, share, and live their faith in personal and public life." That website describes him thusly:

https://www.cslewisinstitute.org/?speaker=johann-kurtz

"Johann Kurtz is a legacy adviser and succession strategist, helping individuals and families to arrange their affairs towards lasting good. He is a Substack bestseller, and his blog Becoming Noble – on philosophy, theology, and history – is read by tens of thousands each week. He recently published a book titled Leaving a Legacy: Inheritance, Charity & Thousand-Year Families which reveals that true charity is a multi-generational project—and that virtuous family dynasties are its indispensable guardians. It equips leaders to embrace this sacred duty and forge a legacy they will be forever proud of."

Here is the substack, Becoming Noble:

https://becomingnoble.substack.com/

"Build family, resources, and security as the West declines. Get the weekly email to join the new elite." and "Our old ways have been forgotten. Subscribe to learn them again."

  * * * *

For example: an American family in 1975 could send their children to public school on the assumption that the vast majority of other children would belong to intact families, communities like their own, and would speak English as a first language.

I've read about family decline going back decades, maybe forever. I strongly doubt the first language of children affects other kids' educations - except maybe exposing other kids to new languages and perspectives. Kurtz includes no specific claim about and no basis for the state of these issues or their impacts. It's all just implied, a dog whistle: Who are these other people?

My argument is that previous generations received an enormous stock of social capital: trusted neighbors, functional public schools, a productive courtship culture, predictable career arcs, and a public square in which children could roam and adults could be relied upon

In the latter, I think a lot of those things would be news to prior generations, and of course you can read people in any generation in history decrying current failure of morals (which I think means, it's not like the idealistic views I formed in my childhood).

And he even cites fictional, rose-colored nostalgia as evidence (quoting Scott Alexander):

The childhood depicted in nostalgic media rested on a dense web of adults who knew each other, shared a rough moral sense, and could be relied upon to mind each other’s children. That web is now a feature of particular places (often expensive places) rather than a general inheritance, and discerning which places have kept it is of key importance for families hoping to raise agentic children with deep networks of trusted friends.

And there are things that rest on speculation:

The socializing that happened in parks, neighborhoods, boy scouts, etc. now must happen in the private domain.

Why? I see plenty of kids in parks and neighborhoods, in all sorts of neighborhoods in cities. It also ignores where much childhood socialising takes place now: Online.

And he also seems to verge into incel territory, again without saying the quiet part out loud:

Women now substantially outnumber men on university campuses and outpace them in degrees earned, yet the preference for husbands who match or exceed a wife’s income and education has not correspondingly relaxed. ... For a regular man, this implies that becoming marriageable now requires clearing exceptional bars: a degree (with the debt that comes attached) and an income well above the male median (also — 6ft, muscular physique, etc. etc.).

I read: those women ruining everything by getting educations and careers, and declining to do free menial labor for men!

Move the at-home spouse into the labor market and every service she provided must be repurchased from the latest private equity roll-up (nursery, takeaway, cleaner, security system…).

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Is disregarding laws, defrauding shareholders, and corruptly buying government contracts - as just a few examples - a 'market economy'? Is there a market for those government contracts, other than the market for the president's favor?