SquibblesRedux

It feels like this is preface for making one of two arguments: Either all living organisms are chattel, or no living organisms can be chattel. I say this be because saying everything is neurons (or whatever basic interconnect you choose) wipes away any demarcation one could use to differentiate between "has rights" and "does not have rights."

Why can't we work on building data centers in places away from human population centers? E.g., middle of the desert, northern wilds of Alaska, lease northern land from Canada, under the Atlantic or Pacific, etc. I understand that these remote areas come with their own issues and challenges, but it seems to me that tackling those challenges head on would bring about other advancements in technology.

As long as the site remains ecologically "healthy," I suspect it would be beneficial to learn how to leverage otherwise vacant land.

I am still waiting for a cure to cancer. For a guaranteed prophylactic against Alzheimer's and dementia. For flying cars for everyone. For space bases throughout the solar system. For weather control. For all trains to be self-driving. For all those power lines across the world to go away. For an end to poverty.

If things are going so well, then how come things still aren't going so well?

Perhaps a walkabout across a manifold.

You are absolutely right.

In a sense, Aldous Huxley explored these ideas in his novel "Brave New World." [0] The novel describes a world were there is a rational order to human society, which has been engineered to be "optimal." A very good read I highly recommend.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World

Crypto: The only way to win is not to play.

I was not making an argument that the economy is zero-sum, or that Musk or Bezos did not build wealth. I merely pointed out methods they used to build their empires. For example, Musk did take advantage of government incentives, sidestepped regulations, etc.

Again, I never claimed there was any sort of zero-sum transfer of wealth. I'm simply pointing out there are varied ways to build up wealth; people have various opinions about those ways. It's right to call out misconceptions or outright falsehoods, but it's also good to understand what leads people to form or accept those misconceptions in the first place.

Musk got a huge leg up through the government, whether it be tax credits, incentives, side-stepping regulations, etc.

Bezos ran at a loss for so long it drove out actual and potential competitors.

Most (or all?) of the recent titans seem like each has his own company town. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town )

While their activities certainly fall in the realm of capitalism, and are just blips at longer time scales, it certainly feels like capitalism has been a bit under the weather for the past couple decades.

Regarding the money invested in AI, it all gives me "irrational exuberance" vibes.

And don't forget:

"hi" and "hello" are not the same.

Sam explains the situation on Mike Peace's channel here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyrFgOMfsmM

(Mike is another wood turner.)

Can fully AI‑generated code be copyrightable? Is there evidence that the leaked code was AI-generated?

I would argue that no app/website should be selling itself to kids. No corporation should be trying to tether its ARR to children's attention.

> For me, AI tools act like supercharged ... search and auto complete.

I think that is a fairly good definition of what an LLM is. I'd say the third leg of the definition is adjustable randomness.

Just like in "I, Robot?"

I tend to see humans as just another animal species, subject to pressures similar to those of other mammals. Whenever disease comes up it seems like vaccinations are the only factor discussed.

Can anyone here speak to other factors (at a macro scale) that influence human health over large spans of time?

Well, Palantir was taken.

As an official greybeard who has written much in C, C++, Perl, Python, and now Rust, I can say Rust is a wonderful systems programming language. Nothing at all like Perl, and as others have mentioned, a great relief from C++ while providing all the power and low-level bits and bobs important for systems programming.

It looks nice. The movement is smooth and elegant. However, I really don't understand what the essential play loop is supposed to be. Is this about graphs? Calculus? Physics? Am I solving puzzles? Taking quizzes?

The challenge with long form texts is that they are so often picked apart, each piece quoted and analyzed on its own, without regard for how that small piece fits into the whole, often veering from a far more nuanced argument or portrait of life.

Something I very much like about poetry, is that so much wisdom can be condensed into such succinct language. We fill the gaps with our own experiences, not relying on the author to lead us step by step. And I see poetry proliferating in modern times in song. (How else is a poet to earn a living?)

There frequently are reminders of who we are, where we come from, and whence we always return. Life is a wheel. From Black Sabbath:

   They say that life's a carousel
   Spinning fast, you gotta ride it well
   The world is full of Kings and Queens
   Who blind your eyes and steal your dreams
   It's Heaven and Hell, oh well
   And they'll tell you black is really white
   The moon is just the sun at night
   And when you walk in golden halls
   You get to keep the gold that falls
   It's Heaven and Hell

I just asked ChatGPT-5 to "give me a 16x16 PNG icon of an apple" and it did exactly that. It looks good, too.

Not that I don't recognize the inherent limits of LLMs, but there are as many edge cases covered as are found in the training sets. (More or less.)

Has the XDG Base Directory Specification been adopted by an official standards committee? In my previous life, calling something a standard carried a great deal of weight. For example, contracts could mandate compliance with standards.

Having built apps and CLI tools for macOS, the author's post certainly makes sense to me. Calling something a standard without backing from a standards committee seems odd, however.

At the risk of sounding dismissive -- this is all drama that amounts to nothing more than Internet entertainment. Legitimate claims of harm should be heard in court. Legitimate scientific debate should be hashed out at conferences or in peer-reviewed journals. Drama posted to an audience of 8 billion people, hosted in personal blogs and on YouTube videos, seems like soap opera entertainment at best and childish behavior at worst.

Just my humble opinion as a bystander looking in.

Another way to think about it is how interesting it is that humans can be so easily influenced by strings of words. (Or images, or sounds.) I suppose I would characterize it as so many people being earnestly vulnerable. It all makes me think of Kahneman's [0] System 1 (fast) and System 2 (slow) thinking.

[0] "Thinking, Fast and Slow" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow

This is another great example of how LLMs are not really any sort of AI, or even proper knowledge representation. Not saying they don't have their uses (like souped up search and permutation generators), but definitely not something that resembles intelligence.

Fun game!

In the old days, code reuse was an aspirational goal. We had collections of functions, libraries, etc., but the overhead of reusing specific lines of code, or patterns of lines of code, was too burdensome to be practical. Many tutorials have been published on how to create a tower defense game, meaning there is tons of sample code out there for this domain. I would ask that give the amount of source material available, when when ask an LLM to generate code, is this really "AI" of any sort, or is it really a new kind of search?

Indeed, it's nothing but function fitting.

But always remember, "Do not use a propane torch indoors."

https://www.cdc.gov/parasites/baylisascaris/resources/raccoo...