strken

I'm not religious nor a recovering alcoholic, but I've always liked the serenity prayer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serenity_Prayer.

Obviously it is unreasonable to continue walking with a stone in your boot because you want to adapt to it; equally obviously it is unreasonable to expect your boots to last forever without repair.

In 2019 I bet they were more than 2x what they were in 2012.

Do you mean "just because it's a bell curve, doesn't make it a normal distribution"?

The question is, for what purposes is the user trying to be unmasked?

I disagree that ads are the only reason to dox someone. I assume that few pieces of writing would be controversial enough to warrant a fake identity, but those few would be important.

If I wanted to pseudonymously accuse a mayor of corruption, I think it would be safer to generate true stats and interview real people, but do so in an area I don't live, with some anecdotes where the facts don't quite match my life, using language that has been edited by a friend with a different writing style.

I was thinking this. Why not just lie? Come up with personas, stack them on other personas, and eventually you're pretending to be a 23 year old Asian man from California who is pretending to be a 50 year old New Zealand carpenter and half the bits are muddled.

I'm finding it almost impossible to fill that free time with work, unless it's just reading emails and chat messages.

I can context switch between two or three chats, but doing so speeds up my agent use at the cost of making reviews and discovery harder, so it might come out in the wash.

The user doesn't need to carefully goad Claude, they just need to send it to an attacker's website. The attacker is the one creating the link traversal merry-go-round.

I thought most Australians had different pricing for peak/off-peak. I'm paying 39c/kWh for peak (3pm to 9pm) and 20c/kWh for off-peak (9pm to 3pm the next day).

It's quite a good metaphor. What used to happen to an old horse? How many horses do you see now that the world has moved to tractors[0]?

I can't wait to be kept in agistment by my overlords, fed on treacle and oats, ridden in circles once a fortnight, and shot when I break a leg.

[0] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/United-States-Farm-based...

Do "entering proprietary information into AI tools", "using non-approved AI tools", and "ignoring guidelines and best practices" really count as sabotaging an AI strategy because you are opposed to it? An over-enthusiastic early adopter would do all three.

High culture can feel obscurantist to me.

Writers like to impress that they and Derrida are in on a shared secret, but if this secret is not interesting then the reader must not be allowed to know it before doing some work. A barricade of allusions and references and filler is necessary to make readers feel like they really earned an insight.

Whereas if we took a step back and stripped off the allegories, we'd realise that Derrida's argument to Lacan about the nature of the phallus is not interesting and does not tell us much.

In the context of "I want the human cancer gone from this planet" and the rest of that blog post, I am confident that it's a desire.

Probably a desire for a peaceful fading out of the human species rather than a violent one, but it's still far beyond PR naivety.

Wanting every living human being to die and our species to go extinct ("NTHE" stands for "near-term human extinction") is a little beyond not being professional PR folks.

Their direct work output contributes to a functioning democracy, but does so indirectly by providing material goods and services, which I refer to by the shorthand "economic reasons". We don't train nurses and carpenters because their training directly supports democracy; we train them because we want to live inside and be cared for when needed, and these things are incidentally good for any society, democratic or otherwise.

They may of course contribute as individuals, too, but their training is not required for them to do so.

I believe the argument was that they do contribute to a functioning democracy, as opposed to investment in training nurses and carpenters, who are being trained for economic reasons. The argument was that the two goals are so different that they should be funded differently.

Hiring funnels at big companies are funny because they're all about stacking filters together in a way that optimises some random grab bag of metrics in the candidates who make it through.

One of those metrics is "number of people hired who literally can't write code". You'd be able to give these candidates a full description of what the median is and they still wouldn't be able to finish this question, and you're not going to get too many false positives, so you add it to your rotation as the first question and have an enthusiastic mid-level engineer do it as the first half-hour round of an interview.

Then you design a few more rounds to test for the positive things you want, like pair refactoring, architecture, lunch with the team, or whatever floats your boat. That way your senior engineers don't need to interview people who can't write code and you stand a lower chance of accidentally hiring some of them.

`arc land` is burnt into my brain by Phabricator, so I'm aware that the term predates LLMs, but it still drives me nuts.

It's impossible to undo some of these linguistic wobbles. Even if you could filter out 100% of LLM input, the humans themselves are learning to say "land" at a higher frequency now.

I feel compelled to mention that the vast majority of cyclists are part of a household which owns a car, as well.

This is misreading the original reply. An enormously complex problem is different from an enormously complex project. Complex projects can usually be decomposed into tasks of varying complexity, some of which I bet an LLM helps with.

Good for you, but that is entirely you describing your life and doesn't address the point.

Which was that, if "what matters is that you move, consistently, every week", then it's motivational to tell sedentary people that pretty much any amount of exercise will do. Once you get over the initial activation energy then exercise is easier.

Have you ever heard of the motivational technique where, instead of telling themselves "I'm going for a run", people will say "I'm going to put my shoes on and see how I feel, no commitment and no pressure", and they end up nearly always going for a run anyway plus they do it more often and have more fun?

Also, have you read Dynomight's blog post[0] about how the biggest barrier to starting exercise isn't improving too slowly, it's overtraining and giving up?

This article could be seen as a way to do the minimum exercise possible. I think a better reading is that all exercise is good, you can spend five minutes on the exercise bike or do a few leg raises and push-ups, no pressure, it's still good for you, and maybe tomorrow you'll go for a run or make it to the gym.

[0] https://dynomight.net/2021/01/25/how-to-run-without-all-the-...

I've had two dogs. One didn't like fireworks but would just turn his head towards the noise then walk over to the nearest human, and the other completely ignored them.

However! The first was a Labrador cross and the second was full lab. Breeds intended for use as gun dogs might not react to gunpowder and explosions as much.

I feel the opposite. AI writing is like a version of Google Maps where you can see little black and white houses up close, but when you zoom out, all those details fade to white noise.

There are a bunch of upsides here. Industrialisation increases standard of living compared to an agrarian economy. A service economy, where services mean things like industrial engineering and product marketing, increases standard of living even further.

I get that tool and die is going to be in demand again one day, but that's not an overall downside. For that to happen, every country which could be outsourced to will be too wealthy and have a service economy, and they'll have to use their wealth to hire the last remaining tool and die makers as instructors. Compared to the upsides of nobody being a subsistence farmer or sweatshop worker anymore, and of most people living in advanced economies, that downside is small.

I'm starting to think that when non-experts believe a job will be easy to automate with AI, it usually has hidden elements which they don't understand and which make automating it almost impossible.

Meanwhile, there are all these intellectual jobs which are hard for humans to do, so we assume they're just hard in general. Look closer, though, and many don't involve human social interaction, only require a small amount of good taste, and don't have any physical component.

A socialist might object that deregulating private enterprise (and let's add lowering taxes, moving to a flat tax rate, cutting programs, etc.) is obviously not socialist regardless of anything you nationalise. And they would be right!

But this person, who is neither socialist nor libertarian, is obviously not a normal centrist either.

The political compass always seems to me like it should be a heatmap, or a polygon of 90th percentile political views, or something that more clearly shows the standard deviation and the presence of outlier positions.

Some simplification is necessary, but not so much that it obscures the difference between a normal centrist versus someone who wants to nationalise half the economy and deregulate the other half.

The last of the three was done on Australians. Not that it changes your point, given the latitude of Australia.

We do know that Anthropic claims earlier models eventually turned a profit, and OpenAI is presumably the same.

What is in doubt is whether past performance is an indicator of future results. How long will the ever-increasing R&D expenditure keep paying off?

It's more like you have a business making engines, each generation of engine has eventually turned out to be profitable over its lifespan, but each generation has an exponentially increasing R&D cost and your customers will switch from the old engines to a competitor if they don't like the newest generation.

You're stuck racing against your competitors with the distinct possibility that your R&D costs will outgrow the market demand, and you can't stop because otherwise your customers will stop investing in your dead end tech and switch.