tshaddox

The author addressed it and dismissed it. I think their dismissal is mistaken, so there’s no bonus points for addressing it.

That’s a fair point. My thinking was that, once you’re using a password manager, you’ll A) use it to generate random passwords that would be unwieldy to memorize and B) have passwords synced to all your devices such that you will never deal with the plain text password directly.

Of course it is conceivable to want to directly access the plain text password for reasons you mention, although that would be exceedingly rare (at least for me). In those cases I agree that passkeys don’t work, although I might argue that if the average user thinks they need to access the plain text password, there’s a significant chance that they’re being phished!

You're agreeing precisely with the parent commenter that passkeys are, from a user's perspective, just passwords that require the use of a password manager. The difficulties many people have understanding or using passkeys are valid to point out and criticize, but they're precisely the same difficulties people have moving from the paradigm of "memorizing or writing down all my passwords" to "using a password manager."

Yeah, the article is mostly legitimately interesting facts about historical empires. Framing it around alleged shortcomings of the Age of Empires video games is unnecessary and obtuse.

Not really. The author mentions "the game is to be understood as an abstraction" as a potential caveat, and then immediately dismisses it with "but I don’t think it goes for Age of Empires."

Well, sure, and there's also a 200 population limit per player (in Age of Empires 2, at least). And no day-night cycle or seasons. These are clearly intentional choices to capture the vibes of economic and military conflict while massively compacting the scale of true historical conflict.

I never truly understood what the intended business model around LLMs was.

A closely related question is “what do the American labs need to do in order to justify their enormous market valuations?”

It seems like the answer cannot possibly be “gradually improve model capability while figuring out how to better monetize inference.” The valuations are just way too high for that to be sufficient.

Surely the answer has to be “continually achieve large leaps in capability comparable to the first consumer releases of ChatGPT while also maintaining a significant capability lead over open models and new competitors.”

And does anyone think that’s going to happen? Even with state-level protection from competition (which incidentally would significantly harm the American economy), the large leaps in capability seem to be coming fewer and farther between.

The analogy being made from piracy to copyright infringement is more about living entirely outside the rule of law and less about the obvious fact that stealing is one of the main things that pirates do. The analogy was first made in reference to unauthorized book publishers, which is pretty close to modern usage (although it used to refer only to the producers of the unauthorized copies, not the consumers). But there's also things like "pirate radio" (unauthorized broadcasts, not necessarily of copyrighted material, and not even necessarily illegal at the source of the broadcast) and "pirate taxis" (simply unlicensed taxi services)

This is always a cute proposal, but what are people expecting to happen? If such a law actually rolled out with strong enforcement, all the buttons would just change from "Buy" to "Rent", which wouldn't meaningfully improve access to and fair usage of media.

Piracy has never been stealing. If you get into trouble with the legal system for piracy, it's for copyright infringement, not larceny.

If you’re not a realist, just say so. Then we’ll know that there’s no point in engaging with your epistemology, because your epistemology also admits claims like “the Universe sprang into existence last Thursday,” or “I am the only entity that exists,” or “Jupiter doesn’t actually exists, it merely appears to exist.”

We have artifacts and historical texts talking about them, so we at least know that Romulus and Remus are figures that ancient humans talked about.

Well, yeah, but you seem to be confusing the authenticity of the writings as ancient artifacts with the historical accuracy of the contents of the writings. I don’t think anyone disputes that the Torah contains stories that had been widely spread and believed among the writers, compilers, and intended audience at the time.

Indeed, although it is important to note that science is a proper subset of "using reason to solve problems."

If you conceptualize this as “there is an appropriate amount of brevity for each situation” then it would be expected for a better model to use different amounts of brevity if it gets better at determining the appropriate amount.

My view is that popular models by default output wildly excessive amounts of prose for nearly every use case, so if this changes in a new model that’s a pure win.

The original poster was referring to the golang port of TypeScript which was done almost exclusively for performance reasons. They weren’t just making an unprompted comparison of two type systems.

most advanced type system known to mankind (yeahhh yeahh Hindley-Milner eat your heart out)

This TypeScript release is largely about performance. Isn't OCaml still at least twice as fast (and maybe even faster for incremental compilation on very large codebases)?

Isn't it a bad sign that there are such varied results? Perhaps that's only a bad sign for the state of science, but I suspect it's also a bad sign for the effectiveness of the drug.

Historically, Sudafed has contained pseudoephedrine, the wonder drug equally good at clearing congestion and making crystal meth.

It's much better at clearing congestion than at making crystal meth. And, as the joke goes, it's easier to make an effective decongestant from meth than it is to buy it from a store.

The problem for us isn’t that AI will take our jobs; it’s that snake-oil salesmen can sell the idea that AI will take our jobs, investors buy into it, companies try it, fire their folks, the snake-oil salesmen IPOs, the companies that bought into this idea implode in some form or fashion, and the salesmen have already taken the money and ran.

Or, it eventually becomes clear to enough people that the AI companies aren't going to make enough money to justify their valuations, so the asset bubble bursts, the economy crashes, and we lose our jobs.

I think it’s exceedingly unlikely for a good-faith reader to mistake good-faith human writing for AI writing.

Even if you use em dashes and a few phrases that have become associated with AI writing, there’s still an unmistakeable sense of how much effort was put into the writing.

But I suppose there might be naive readers who don’t know how to spot this effort and would false positive on em dashes or supposed AI phrases.

The article was very clearly written or heavily edited by AI, which I suspect explains some of the peculiarities in structure and wording.

6! is the number of minutes in 12 hours and the number of hours in a 30-day month.

Okay, then how can something become boring? It needs to start as the new hotness? Does that imply that the people who use non-boring software are the ones who determine which things get to graduate to being boring?

So something can only be "boring but works" if it was created before today?

They literally sell actual crystals that you’re supposed to place on top of speakers and amplifiers to make them sound better.

To me it’s less about the technologies used to produce the audio. If a human has put some creative effort into it, even if it’s mostly curating AI-generated audio, I’m in principle fine with that. But if little to no effort was put into it, it’s slop by definition.

I didn’t suggest anything about the link between pirating media and buying media, and that’s not relevant to my point. The point is, if you want to support a creator financially, then by all means do so. And if you want a DRM-free copy of a work, and piracy is the only way to get that, then by all means do so. Neither precludes the other.

Again, pirating doesn’t stop you or anyone else from sending money to the copyright holder via whatever means the copyright holder prefers.

I think you’re confusing your own file backup practices with ownership. If you purchase a DRM-free piece of software (say, a game from GoG), I’d say you own it just as much as if you bought the same game on a CD (assuming the CD was also DRM-free).

If you don’t keep a copy of the game yourself, and one day you can no longer access it because GoG ceases to exist, that doesn’t mean you never owned it. It just means you failed to back it up. You could also fail to backup a CD when it inevitably stops functioning.

I’m somewhat experienced in wilderness backpacking, and I always look into bear protocol anywhere I visit (including talking to the rangers there in person). But it’s disingenuous to suggest that you’d learn nothing from death statistics. Are you suggesting that there’s no need to know that, because if the numbers were too high in an area they’d close it down?