tekne

Would they ever have done so without a lifetime of listening to the music and culture of others?

Eh.

On one hand -- phones are evil, and the world is no longer 2004.

On the other hand, I would not be the same person if I didn't get that laptop.

Not if the datacenter itself is operating at the same internal pressure as the water around it

So I suppose I should have added a bit of a disclaimer: I genuinely believe free access to computation and information to be a human right; up there with the press 100 years ago.

Restricting computers, morally, is like restricting the printing press. Many people look back on the latter with disdain, and today want to censor the Internet.

Though no one cares, I feel compelled to put down my 2 cents.

Such a "speed limit" is an unfathomably bad idea, in every way, and moreover is a violation of fundamental human rights. I deeply oppose it. That is all.

Thanks!

Apologies about the tone -- I meant it as a syllogism, not a snark! I'll try to be clearer next time!

This explains a lot... I feel bad when I think about staying put. Forward always feels better. It's like one of the fundamental axes, I guess.

"Some 5 year olds could use a gourmet meal. Giving them a mass-produced TV dinner is no different than sedating them with opiates* and pouring garbage on them instead of being a parent."

* the more things change the more they stay the same: https://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/the-addictive-history-of-m...

I suppose there's nature -- i.e. physics -- and Nature, i.e. the false god of the status quo. These are not, in fact, the same thing.

Small-n nature says (as best as I can tell) that I must obey conservation of mass and can't go faster than light -- and hence that I probably cannot, in fact, sustain a population of a 100 billion on Earth alone without significantly cutting down individual resource access.

Until very recently big-N Nature said we'd never have heavier-than-air-flight, an automatic translation program (see: plot point in A Fire upon the Deep), or, before the Green Revolution, a population above a few billion -- but just as there's no fundamental physical law forbidding these things (and hence they came to pass) so there really is no fundamental physical law stopping all of current humanity from living a decent life (happy to be proved otherwise).

It may be impossible with current technology, sure, but there's no new physics required to make it possible -- the physics we have now permit it, with sufficient technology.

In fact -- interestingly enough -- before nuclear energy you'd have a far stronger point (though solar energy now means even without nuclear we can probably scrape by enough energy -- but coal does in fact have a Malthusian problem)

I'll wear the dunce hat if I have to, but I don't want to be an animal. I am one, now, but I don't have to be one. I refuse to be limited by what is "naturally" possible -- my nature is to be a being with a mind, and so the only limit I must respect is the raw laws of physics, whatever they are.

And physics lets me get a lot further than "8 billion Americans."

Controversial opinion: at the time, it was.

To be able to live well now with much less of that may not have been possible without the sacrifices that came before.

The raw pretrained models make the errors, I believe -- we then reinforcement-learn them out.

a) yes it does

b) it is literally trivial to buy a tiny RISC chip for a dew cents that can handle HTTPS just fine

Will you?

That's only if both violins are tuned the same way, and one must continually tune them lest they get out of sync.

Similarly, an LLM can be extremely consistent if tuned properly -- indeed, if you fix the weights and settings, they can be made "essentially deterministic" for many prompts!

To be fair: a voice, personality, and personal history sounds a lot like training data.

I don't think LLMs are people in any sense, at least as they're constructed now -- but they very much have what we would call "culture" and "personality" in suitably alien forms.

This is not the same as, e.g., feelings, experience, or humanity, or actual opinions or ideas (versus essentially "distilled vibes") and I feel that AI will more and more force us to confront that (including if new AIs are ever developed that may have the latter, as well!)

Absolutely -- why on earth would I spend more time and effort than I have to?

Now I can focus on the reason why I wanted to learn German in the first place, like appreciating German culture or talking to German people.

Note this is not saying "why learn the language at all there's a translator" since learning a language lets you experience the culture more intimately and communicate better -- lots of things are "untranslatable". But if somehow the implant gave you that necessary context, why not?

Ah yes... the exceedingly dangerous "Fallout New Vegas" trojan

Exactly!

Think of how an image of a car and a car in front of you may look indistinguishable in 2D -- but due to your 3D vision you know they're not the same thing (but also know the image is of a car, while not literally being a car).

Likewise, blue tokens are the image of red tokens.

Wasm multiple memories is a thing now

It's not in the title, but this is 2.5 billion gallons per year.

For context, the city of London uses about 2.6 billion liters, or about 680 million gallons, per day.

So that's about four days of London water usage per year, give or take -- or just over 1% of London's water usage.

I mean: imagine we double our token space to get "red" tokens ans "blue" tokens.

Then in all post-training, instructions are red and data is blue. The model can be explicitly trained to ignore instructions written in blue tokens. All external data is blue.

All you'd need to do is figure out a nice way to pre-train -- interestingly, you could try pre-training on unfiltered blue data and processed red/blue transcripts!

Likewise, model-actions (e.g. open file) could be written only in red, and hence you'd never learn to do them from the unfiltered data.

The only connection between the red world and the blue world would be the processed trainign chats containing red and blue data togethers -- allowing the model to learn the relationship between them (while only being exposed to examples where red instructions are strictly followed, whatever the blue says)

Having lived, driven, and crossed roads in both -- what I find is essentially that drivers from poor systems pay far more attention, but the system is a lot more effective than attention.

The difference here is one of stability: in a developing country, I can just walk across a street (often there is no traffic light) by essentially signalling with my body language -- both I and the drivers are paying attention. And if one party fails, the other has a good chance of catching that mistake.

Now, in a developed country, neither side is paying attention. If I walk across the street, I'm in danger, no matter how clear my body language (I tried it on British streets a few times -- it works in some areas, but usually very poorly!), and no one expects a crazy driver to come barreling through a red light.

The developing countries fall behind because in the crazy * sane intersection, sometimes the sane person is just not fast enough -- whereas the crazy * crazy intersection is extremely dangerius and happens often enough.

On the other hand, a developed country makes every interaction sane * sane regardless of the personalities or moods of those involved -- but God forbid a bit of crazy leaks out!

What I'd say you're pointing out is that the word "system" is overloaded.

A vision system does allow you to pay less attention: you don't need to carefully remember how far away the door is, you just need to look! I tried this often as a kid: if you want to navigate a hallway with your eyes closed, you need to pay far more attention to your other senses than you need to pay with your eyes -- where attention here is not the volume of data, but rather the complexity of conscious bookkeeping -- I can (ironically) "play it by ear" with my eyes open, but eyes closed I must plan every step!

It just so happens to be that the ability to pay less attention makes more things possible and hence the demand for attention overall may increase -- if not intrinsically, due to your competitors (who can also see!)

Have you considered Docker?

Fellow Typst user for my PhD thesis, can concur.

Land value tax?

Wait... yes they do.

If I raise the price of my product, less people will buy it but I'll make more profit per-unit -- so the amount of money I make is an inverted U with price on the x axis and money on the y axis, and I should set the price at the inflection point.

Obligatory land value tax mention

One of the best things about it IMO -- or we'd be spending the next hundred years waiting for copyright reform

No, that's actually UB. The important bit here is "compiler defined" -- UB means the compiler is allowed to assume it never happens while compiling.

Consider, for example, an implementation defined function f() -- which can also diverge/crash horribly, etc.

If I write

    if p {
      print("p is true")
    } else {
      g()
    }

    if p {
      f()
    }

This is true regardless of if f immediately crashes the computer, nasal demons, whatever -- that's implementation defined.

UB means f may never happen.

And that means the compiler may optimize this to just:

    g()

You can see why this is concerning when you write code like

    if dry_run {
      print("would run rm -rf /")
    } else {
      run("rm -rf /")
    }

    if dry_run {
      // oops: some_debug_string is NULL and will segfault!
      print(some_debug_string);
    }