thbb123

Very similar story, in 1982: got paid at 15 to create a prospect database for a small business. What now would be called a CRM.

The enterprise had to declare me as an apprentice for 'trade jobs', as it was against the law to give a regular salary to someone under 16.

I remember my first paycheck with deductions for retirement, which pissed me off quite a bit.

Pretty much all tech companies and universities had a drop-in ftp server where anyone could, anonymously, put and retrieve files. It was a collective 'pastebin' useful to exchange information with clients and partners.

On the ftp server of the company I worked for, someone had put a cracked copy of our software for their colleagues to use.

Or I guess the kid can set it if they're smart enough to reinstall the OS or spawn a VM. I'm sure there will be online resources to help them that kids know how to share

Or, as I like to put it: I need to activate my personal transformers on my inner embeddings space to figure what is it I really want. And still, quite often, I think in terms of the programming language I'm used to and the library I'm familiar with.

So, to really create something new that I care about, LLMs don't help much.

They are still useful for plenty of other tasks.

But in this occurrence, they are public services, under the public administration's control.

Successful socialism if you want.

In Europe, more and more public transportation is free, or at least very heavily subsidized

The costs are covered by local taxes, to curb on individual vehicle use and reduce congestion. After some hiccups, some cities manage good economies of scale where everybody, including the environment, wins.

As for housing and food, while there the incentive structure is more fragile, at least, we have homeless shelters that are free, and once again, everybody wins: the costs are very low, and cities are far safer and cleaner.

In my vision, it's the opposite of ad blocker, it's something that generates non existent traffic and views beyond what I would have done.

It is not entirely true that no one cares about quality. I'd like to stay optimistic and believe that those who are demanding on the quality of their production will acquire sufficient market differentiation to prevail.

After all, this has been Apple strategy since the 80's, and, even though there were some up's and down's, overall it's a success.

I disagree. Giving fake info adds noise to the mechanism, makes it useless. Ultimately I'm inclined to believe that privacy through noise generation is a solution.

If I ever find some idle time, I'd like to make an agent that surfs the web under my identity and several fake ones, but randomly according to several fake personality traits I program. Then, after some testing and analysis of the generated patterns of crawl, release it as freeware to allow anyone to participate in the obfuscation of individuals' behaviors.

My way of phrasing this: I need to activate my personal transformers on my inner embeddings space to really figure what is it that I truly want to write.

I'm more and more convinced top execs are most likely to be advantageously replaced by LLM.

They navigate such complex decision spaces, full of compromises, tensions, political knots, that ultimately their important decisions are just made on gut feelings.

Replace the CEO with an LLM whose system prompt is carefully crafted and vetted by the board of directors, with some adequate digital twin of the company to project it's move, I'm sure it should maximize the interest of the shareholders much better.

Next up: apply the same recipe to government executive power. Couldn't be much worse than orange man.

If anything, they'd want something like Mossadegh back, which is not to please Trump at all

Even Knuth, in TAOP, acknowledges that using O(n) asymptotic behavior as a measure of performance is just a heuristic and not an absolute.

Cache-awareness and structure discovery are 2 important tools of the engineer to optimize practical problems.

If we wanted a reliable measure of the difficulty of a problem instance, it should rely on a function of O(K(n)) where K is the kolmogorov complexity of the input.

My numbers come from conversations I recall with René Amalberti, a notable specialist in the area, having advised, among others, Airbus. The conversations were around 1993-96, when I was doing my PhD, and thus may be a bit blurry by now. Also, it is perfectly possible the reference values and measurement units have evolved since then.

Still your projection shows that both reference indicators and actual values are in the ballpark of the estimates I cited.

My (and Amalberti's) main point is that safety assessment is not just about minimizing the raw number of accidents, but involves tradeoffs between various concerns, including psychological perception and revenue. Otherwise, the safest airline would be the one that does not fly anyone.

Fun fact: in the 90's, the reference gauge for aircraft safety was 1 accidental fatality per 100 million hours of passenger flight. Which is amazingly safe, far better than car and on a par with train.

Now, facing the growth of air travel, it was decided to raise this bar to 1 per billion hour. Not as an end by itself - this comes at very high cost and had a significant impact on travel prices. But because, with the growth of air travel, this would have implied one major accident per fortnight on average. And because those accident are more spectacular and relayed by media, civil aviation authorities feared this might raise angst and deter the public from air travel.

So, safety was enhanced, but mostly for marketing reasons.

The problem I see with decentralized protocols is that node owners can easily be spotted, and then crushed under legal constraints that will make them more insecure than a strong multinational who's there just for profit and can balance legal fight for a relative privacy with it's own interest in protecting its customers.

How comes US celebrities have to create their foundation in Sweden instead of the US?

Or simply yelling "fire" for no reason in a crowded space must be a sin, pretty much like it's a limit of free speech.

keep a human in the loop before executing the kill chain, or to reduce Skynet-like tail risks in line with Paul Christiano's arms race doom scenario.

It is a little known secret that plenty of defense systems are already set up to dispense of the human in the loop protocol before a fire action. For defense primarily, but also for attack once a target has been designated. I worked on protocols in the 90's, and this decision was already accepted.

It happens to be so effective that the military won't bulge on this.

Also, it is not much worse to have a decision system act autonomously for a kill system, if you consider that the alternative is a dumb system such as a landmine.

Btw: while there always is a "stop button" in these systems, don't be fooled. Those are meant to provide semblance of comfort and compliance to the designers of those systems, but are hardly effective in practice.

I disagree that you need a lot of space for self hosting. Unless you want to host streaming content for thousands of users, Intel NUC or raspberry PI on top of your router is plenty enough to host nextcloud, some webservers with decent traffic (assuming you have gigabit connection, which is now commonplace), email, backups and media server for family and friends.

Thinking of something like APL or J?

CEOs like to brag about how AI is going to replace skilled workers. Yet, it should be obvious to anyone having experience in LLMs that top executives are the jobs that are most likely replaceable by AI.

Just keep smooth talking everyone into cost reductions and make arbitrary decisions to make it feel like you're actually in charge.

Algorithm aversion and automation biases have been thoroughly studied over the past 70 years of human factors for industrial security. All in all, the thought processes of humans are not always compatible with the evidence on which automation works.

Check out Fitts, HABA-MABA for more results.

In the late 90's, I attended a talk by Ted Nelson, the guy who coined the term Hypertext. To him, things started going downhill with HTML, and the URL. The gist of his complain is that he wanted links to be bi-directional.

In the 80's, telecom operators were complaining that TCP/IP and packet transmission was a regression over circuit commutation.

So it looks like the internet has progressed through perpetual regression.

I maintain my land line so that when a website or business asks for my phone number, I don't give them my mobile. Lots of funny stories with this one.

This is starting to feel like Manna, the Marshall Brain novel: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

Depending on how you want to think about it, it was funny or inevitable or symbolic that the robotic takeover did not start at MIT, NASA, Microsoft or Ford. It started at a Burger-G restaurant in Cary, NC on May 17. It seemed like such a simple thing at the time, but May 17 marked a pivotal moment in human history.

I don't know about go, but java is pathetic. I have 30 years old c++ programs that work just fine.

However, an application that I had written to be backward compatible with java 1.4, 15 years ago, cannot be compiled today. And I had to make major changes to have it run on anything past java 8, ~10 years ago, I believe.

Interestingly, the censorship can be somewhat bypassed in other languages than English (and, I presume, Chinese).

Then it's likely an opportunity for factoring. The ideal is to never have duplicate code

The french postal services does that and includes a digital wallet and cloud repository.for instance, my paycheck certificates are delivered on this wallet.

Besides, the french administration is providing its own global scheme for online authentication.

Right now it works for all public services, but it is also open to all willing businesses.

It makes it also very easy to control tightly what kind of information is distributed to various services and businesses.