TaylorAlexander
TaylorAlexander on Hacker News
Very much worth saying that many of the people what write code at Apple are women. Some of them are my friends.
Do you mean to suggest women have a lower sex drive? When I started taking estrogen and suppressing my T, my sex drive changed a lot but it didn’t reduce. It’s just more impacted by emotional factors like life stress and anxiety.
Certainly the ire of Andrew Tate fans should be thoroughly ignored. You can have whatever sex drive you want, and their contempt is childish and misguided. If you did want to try experiencing a higher sex drive, try edging daily for a week without getting off and see how you feel on day 7.
20 years is an eternity in terms of innovation. This has an extreme effect compared to the natural state (no IP restrictions). I argue that the effects of patents is actually poorly understood, and most arguments for how they work fail to explain how and why open source works, revealing serious flaws in the foundational theories of IP restrictions.
The sole function of a patent is to restrict innovation. That’s the only direct result of patents. All other claims about encouraging innovation rely on beliefs about secondary and tertiary effects which I believe are incomplete, out of date, and often simply incorrect.
Edit: Even the pure capitalists don’t like it: https://youtu.be/hoSWC_6mDCk
I’m vegan too. Someone will say “what about the microorganisms in your gut” or something. People often have a negative reaction to vegans and that’s not going to change.
Sure, their choice to give it away may not have gone as they hoped, I’m just pushing back against the idea that making copies of a thing the creator explicitly gave permission to copy is “stealing”. The core of open source is that making and distributing modified or unmodified copies is good. Calling it stealing undermines the very important social work we can do with open source.
Prusa gave everyone permission to make copies of their i3 series machines, make modifications, and distribute modified versions. It’s not theft if you have been given explicit permission to make copies.
“You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's
source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you
conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate
copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty.”
“You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion
of it, thus forming a work based on the Program, and copy and
distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1
above.”
https://github.com/prusa3d/Original-Prusa-i3/blob/MK3S/LICEN...
Hah. I mean it did blow up (the booster), but not due to impact from a failed soft landing. The soft landing succeeded, then it blew up.
One time I had to run a very old version of Eagle CAD on Linux and it turned out that even tho I had a native Linux version, it was easier to run the windows version in wine! I guess stable interfaces have their advantages.
> In terms of quantity
At the very least China is generally gonna have everyone else beat on quantity of people involved in quite a lot of things.
> Should we charge taxes on sugar due to health care costs?
Doesn’t New York City do this with a soda tax?
I don’t think Altman’s predictions about AI progress can be relied upon. With tens of billions of dollars or more in company value tied up in that claim, I don’t think any person could be capable of true objective assessment. See for example Musk’s decade of baffling promises about self driving, which have ensured high stock values for Tesla while also failing to come to pass.
Ah that’s a fair point. I asked him:
https://bsky.app/profile/tlalexander.bsky.social/post/3laiw4...
I think I have heard that in the country he was living in, violating patents for personal use was okay. My understanding is that things are much more strict in the USA, where I believe you can’t help others violate patents so you can’t publish work the way Adrian did. I know that in the early days of 3D printing everyone wanted a belt printer, but users and hackers on the forum regularly expressed concern over MakerBot’s patent and the associated legal risk of violating it. That’s why today’s belt printers have the head at a 45 degree angle. It’s a patent workaround because MakerBot’s patent specified a belt that was parallel to the motion axes. At least that’s what I think Brook Drumm of Printrbot told me.
So even if they didn’t affect Adrian, they certainly had a chilling effect. And I don’t think even under Adrian’s legal regime he would have been allowed to sell the work, so more expensive engineering development was prohibited. We didn’t get cheap 3d printers until companies could mass produce existing low cost open source designs, and that mass production was obviously prohibited by the patents. We didn’t get low cost machines until competition was allowed in to the space.
A few notes:
The patents were a huge impediment. They did not expire till 2008 - before then printers cost $25k. They were expensive and stratasys had no incentive to make them $300 like they are today so volumes were limited. From their release in 1995 until 2008 stratasys sold like 13000 printers according to their company history web page. For a long time now Prusa has shipped more printers than that in a single month. The Reprap Darwin wasn’t built until late 2007, then makerbot and others followed. I bought an Ultimaker in 2011 and that’s when it feels to me like home printing started to become viable.
Once anyone could build their own design, a community of hackers and engineers formed that continuously improved the designs with diverse ideas and experiments. That community is what made 3D printing what it is today. And it was illegal for them to do all of that (in many countries) until the patent expiration in 2008. That’s a big reason why it took so long. I think it’s interesting to consider whether this would have happened sooner if they had never been patented, though perhaps the expired patent created a legal safe haven where no one could take away the basic principles by patenting them. Anyway, patents play a big role in this story!
Edit: Some cool history here: https://3dprintingindustry.com/news/interview-dr-adrian-bowy...
Yeah I have seen a farm do this! They bought from other local farms at least, not Target. But the claim "vendors at farmers markets can only sell what they grew themselves" is only true to the extent that there is enforcement and sufficient oversight to find violators.
Does Wikipedia allow content of this type? Aka “here’s some cool stuff I found”?
Or put another way, if you’re more familiar with Wikipedia, can you describe how to think about this type of thing being done on Wikipedia? Thanks.
Certainly I can see the appeal of implementing control in the silicon I own rather than buying a vendor's chip and having to deal with their supply chain, their sales team, their space claim on my board, etc.
Ah, that’s a good point thanks for the correction.
At this point I really only take rigorous research papers in to account when considering this stuff. Apple published research just this month that the parent post is referring to. A systematic study is far more compelling than an anecdote.
https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/gsm-symbolic
Absolutely should not exist. California’s Central Valley cattle farms are notorious for giving people a glimpse of how inhumane factory farming is. You drive down I-5 and the smell of these places is overpowering for miles. You can’t ignore them and when you see them you know that no creature should be forced to live like that. I’ve heard from several friends that those farms contributed to their decision to stop eating animal products.
These farms are inhumane for the animals, and they exist as a fragile ecosystem at risk of bacterial or viral outbreaks. In nature, plants and animals coexist with insects and microorganisms in ways which are more robust to catastrophic collapse. But these cattle farms are like agricultural monocrops - dead dirt and one kind of creature, fed by machines and vulnerable to the rapid spread of disease and sickness. It’s bad for the animals and it’s bad for us.
So you’re absolutely right, this should not exist!
Right. We don’t have a word for that. Like “using a bicycle” has the word “bicycling”.
Tho someone here suggested “computering” which is pretty good.
And today I realized that despite it being an extremely common activity, we don’t really have a word for “using the computer” which is distinct from “computing”. It’s funny because AI models are always “using a computer” but now they can “use your computer.”
Another way of saying this is that we do this with a system comprised of human eyes and a human brain. We’re very good at making machine eyes, but the brain part is proving extremely difficult for us to reproduce with machines.
Yeah I also hadn’t but it makes sense. Just like all output from an LLM is a “hallucination” but we have a tendency to only call it a hallucination when something looks wrong about the result, we forget that our conscious lived experience is a hallucination based on a bunch of abstract sensory data that our brain fuses in to a world state experience. It’s obvious when we are asleep that dreams are hallucinations, but it is less obvious that the conscious experience is too.
Well Gemini completely hallucinated command line switches on a recent question I asked it about the program “john the ripper”.
We absolutely need public sources of truth at the very least until we can build systems that actually reason based on a combination of first principles and experience, and even then we need sources of truth for experience.
You simply cannot create solutions to new problems if your data gets too old to encompass the new subject matter. We have so systems which can adequately determine fact from fiction, and new human experiences will always need to be documented for machines to understand them.