overvale

I mean... isn't this the entire point of font-family fallbacks?

This article (saw it somewhere years ago) was a large influence on my emacs config. Because of it I discovered emacs' secondary selection feature, which I use all the time now.

They're interactive art projects!

I had no idea there were people this optimistic still left in the world.

Feelings about Palantir aside, this is a really misleading headline. The FCA has hired Palantir to "investigate the watchdog’s internal intelligence data", which presumably requires Palantir to have access to that sensitive data.

Saying that Palantir is "reaching" into the British state, and then having the article image be "billionaire Donald Trump donor Peter Thiel" literally holding a wad of cash is... not exactly a high standard of reportage.

Isn't that what the web is for?

Great write-up. But is the classified-network moat meaningful when the product is inference on a foundation model? The Last Supper primes locked in because the technology itself was bespoke.

They also had to reintroduce motion blur since the per frame exposure time is half.

A totally fascinating experiment.

I managed to build myself exactly this with Claude's help. There are 3 levels of protection.

1. I use an app called SelfControl, which blocks websites temporarily.

2. I have a script which watches `/etc/hosts` with launchd and reverts it to a version pulled from a server if the file changes. This blocks websites I never want to go to.

3. I setup a 'focus mode' with hammerspoon prevents me from launching certain apps, and makes me wait 30 seconds and type a string of text when I want to switch it off.

Yes, all of these things can be disabled when I want to, but the point is that they all add some fiction and give me a chance the reconsider the distracting action I was about to take.

I've been doing it for about 2 weeks, so far it's working pretty well!

Debevec tried a version of this: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.13702

Not just PR. I mean... they got fired over those limits.

A great point! I've experienced the same.

We reshape reality to match the mental models we create. To the extent this has always been the case I have to accept it, but it feels like we're in a logarithmic curve of that pattern becoming faster and more powerful.

I'm genuinely interested in the world around me, and I like being entertained as much as the next person, but the problem with social media for me is that it creates a simulacrum of the world which does not correspond to the tangible reality I see around me.

I would go further and say that social media is just another kind of "news". The News, essentially, takes an incomprehensibly complex world and distills/simplifies it into something you can understand. In the same way that one creates a mental model for how a complex system works in order to better understand it. That's a useful thing!

But the distillation/simplification process introduces biases and distortions in its model of the world, which can lead to the model being extremely inaccurate. And with social media that inaccuracy extends to representations of your friends, family, and your self.

To the extent that The News, and Social Media, creates a reasonably accurate model of the world around you they're useful, but I take it all with a heavy dose of skepticism.

I'm not 100% clear myself but I think that the criticism is that what was supposed to be a non-profit delivering world-changing technology for the public good was bullied/manipulated into a for-profit entity that would enrich investors and consolidate power among the wealthy.

So the "theft" is the wealthy stealing the benefits of AGI from the people. I think.

I should have structured my sentences a little better. I'm not confused about why he has detractors, I'm confused as to why people thought it would go any other way with this munch money on the line.

But, you're right, that's no reason to refrain from criticizing them for it.

No, I'm saying I'm cynical because I assume that whenever this much money is involved there's no way events unfold in a fair, ethical, utopian way. It always turns into a knife fight in the mud.

Yeah, you're right, it's not a fair comparison.

I'm so genuinely confused by all this. It seems that Altman has a lot of detractors here, and I'm not sure why (my fault for not keeping up I guess). But a company that wants to spend trillions of dollars on AGI infrastructure and hopes to re-shape the entire global economy surely needs to plow a staggering amount of money into its operations and not into a non-profit. I get that there is controversy over redirecting profits of a very successful business from a non-profit entity (which would be great) to private parties, but... that was always going to happen right? Am I just too cynical?

What am I missing? I'm genuinely curious.

Also, the largest theft in human history surely has to be the East India Company extracting something like 50 trillion from India over 200 years, right?

The Politics of Succession, by Andrej Kokkonen, Jørgen Møller, Anders Sundell

https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Politics_of_Success...

this book also shows that the development and spread of primogeniture - the eldest-son-taking-the-throne - mitigated the problem of succession in Europe in the period after AD 1000. The predictability and stability that followed from a clear hereditary principle outweighed the problems of incompetent and irrational rulers sometimes inheriting power. The data used in the book demonstrates that primogeniture reduced the risk of depositions and civil war following the inevitable deaths of leaders.

History says: proved useful.

It turns out hereditary succession is not a good way to choose a competent political leader.

I'm not sure republics have cracked that one either.

Farcical aquatic ceremonies have their uses.

Hot take: hereditary kingdoms were a reasonably successful solution to curbing constant civil war in a time when representative democracies might not have been viable (for various reasons).

I don’t agree with that. I see people carrying around iPads, clipboards, physical books, sheets of paper, paper notebooks, dedicated cameras, even walkie talkies. All of those people have smartphones in their pockets as well.

Constantinople.

I think you could make identical arguments about any new technology. Amazingly expensive computers were once not very practical, it’s easy to point at any massive world changing tech and call it unethical, you can find these arguments about oil, railroads, 24 hour news, etc. and the same is true for economic incentives. Rubber barons and railroad tycoons were not well intentioned from this point of view. I don’t think there’s anything about AI that is inherently different from previous tech.

And isn’t that the entire point of the quote?

I’m not trying to be dismissive of your point, just to pose a counterpoint.

Ultimately, the answer is simple: reinventing AI is essentially reinventing the smartphone.

I don’t think this is true at all. The smartphone is not some kind of endgame device after which there is no future. No more so than the train was the endgame of transportation. Why are we limiting our imagination about the future to only include what is true today?

“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

― Douglas Adams

Other people have said this, but I don’t think it’s going to be any different than living in a world where people can spread rumors orally or print lies with a printing press. We’ve been dealing with those challenges for a long time.

Our ways of thinking and our courts understand that you can’t trust what people say and you can’t trust what you read. We’ve internalized that as a society.

Looking back, there seems to have been a brief period of time when you could actually trust photographs and videos. I think in the long run, this period of time will be seen as a historical anomaly, and video will be no more trusted than the printed or spoken word is today.

I really liked him in WeCrashed. He was the perfect kind of strange for that part.