bitwize

> Maybe the level of diagnostic refers to the LLM effort level.

I thought the ship's systems were just instrumented with self-diagnostic hardware and the "levels" of diagnostic indicated varying levels of time/effort.

Consider modern hard disks and SSDs, which are fitted with SMART self-diagnostic tools. You can run a short test, which checks the various electrical and mechanical (for HDDs) components, environmental sensors, etc. and ensures those are operational at a high level. Or you can run a long test, which checks the platter surface/flash memory sector by sector and can take several hours to complete, but which will flag up more problems earlier. Presumably a warp nacelle, being a much more complex and dangerous system, might have many more diagnostic procedures that can take varying lengths of time, from basic integrity checks of the plasma conduits to the warp core to ensuring the power flux coming from each coil is within tolerances.

Obviously, yeah, it's fiction and it's just bullshit. But one of the nice things about TNG is that its premise pretty much confines actually intelligent machines to Data and his relatives, with a handful of exceptions such as Moriarty, which the Holodeck generated specifically to challenge Data. Thus, it's designed around the idea that there's always something for the biological crew to do. Hence, "level 3 diagnostics" or any diagnostic are automated data gathering operations similar to SMART tests, allowing the engineering crew to perform analysis on what the data mean. Star Trek is fundamentally humanist; its fictional universe is constructed to celebrate the greatness and achievements of humans and other living beings, without going to the extremes that Dune went to by banning computers altogether.

If you have to install an OS, you fail! Most people use what comes on the machine. This is why Windows struggled to get traction until 3.x: Windows 3 was the first version for which Microsoft negotiated OEMs to preinstall it. This is why Linux struggles to get traction today. Preinstalls are key.

If my wife had to install an OS before using a computer, yeah, I think she could do it. But she'd find it such an incovenience compared to her Mac, which came with the easiest to use modern OS all ready to go out of the box.

Lumon needs to hear about this. Macrodata refinement can now be completely automated.

I actually meant THIS bone song: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AKAiUtWZ4xY

I thought that was what was happening to Neo when they jacked him into the learning pod?

    Location: Gulfport, MS
    Remote: Yes, please
    Willing to relocate: Probably not
    Technologies: C, C++, Python, Ruby, JS/TS, Java, Lisp (preferred), Linux, Android, PostgreSQL...
    Email: bitwize at gmail dot com
    GitHub: https://github.com/bitwize
    CV available upon request

Developer with a background in various kinds of software, from robotics to native desktop apps and enterprise web apps. Focused on simplicity and building the right thing right. Looking to make a tangible, positive impact in people's lives through my work. Open to full-time or contract work.

"Well, you know, you know, you know, I—I—I—I just—I just do what the machines tell me to now. Th-th-they're, they are smarter than us now, a-a-and it makes more fiduciary sense to let them have control."

We're not at the singularity, but we've passed the point of no return.

Inducing the changes to become better at math requires years of study. This is "I know kung fu".

Was kind of expecting/hoping for this bone song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDJKgi2e-Aw

"It's full of, of, of things that are only correct because they're grammatical, but they're tough on the ear, you see..." —Orson Welles

Even smart people have limited time and limited capacity for effort. Failure to Just Work is sand in their gears. Hand-rolled Linux TVs are a nonstarter.

Sceptre dumb TV. Failing that, large computer monitor or digital signage display. You WILL pay a premium.

We have AIs hacking people's computers and brains, and now we have the Major's thermo-optic camouflage. They were right to keep the newest Ghost in the Shell set in 2029-2030. Seems like it's right on time.

...For now.

Frontier models are generating sensible abstract engineering decisions for nontrivial code bases. Phase 1 (GPT 4 era) was "fancy autocomplete": it could generate a function or complete a clause before losing the plot. Phase 2 (Opus 4.x era) was the spec-driven development era, involving careful construction of guardrails and guidelines and steering the agents as they worked. Phase 3 is the beginning of the "software factory" era. You can now one-shot nontrivial apps with a prompt that leaves most of the specifics up to the agents. You just can't do this for like, a whole enterprise—maybe a microservice.

Another phase or two, and you can pretty much say goodbye to 95% of SWE jobs. The only people left involved in the software development process will be business analysts, product managers, and perhaps designers if they don't want the UI to look all "AI ass-ugly". A handful of trillion-dollar companies will retain a few really smart people who could code by hand if they wanted to, to keep the models trained and topped up on good practices. But line-of-business, which was the bread and butter for software engineers for going on 70 years now, will be done by machine. Humans will specify, and humans will QA the results, and that's it.

Strangely enough, one of the shortest math papers ever published is another computer disproof of a long-standing conjecture, by Lander and Parkin (1966):

"A direct search on the CDC 6600 yielded 27⁵ + 84⁵ + 110⁵ + 133⁵ = 144⁵ as the smallest instance in which four fifth powers sum to a fifth power. This is a counterexample to a conjecture by Euler that at least n nth powers are required to sum to an nth power, n > 2."

https://projecteuclid.org/journals/bulletin-of-the-american-...

So yeah, computers have been slaughtering math tentpoles since forever ago, but I don't think I've seen so many big ones taken down so quickly. Although if Euler had been alive when the 1966 paper was published, he might've crashed out the way Terence Tao is doing now.

"Soul" is one of those things that we cannot point to a specific factor or set of factors, but we know it exists. LLMs trained on human-produced content perform well, but LLMs trained on LLM-produced content undergo model collapse fairly rapidly. "Soul" is the quality that allows us to produce such robust training data. We each have a unique point of view derived from our life's experience and how that altered our brain, that comes through in whatever work we produce—not just a convolution over a large number of thin vertical slices of human points of view. Now, what this may mean is that our brains are just token predictors that constantly ingest large amounts of data from the real world and continuously retrain on that data (and do so on ~20 W of power which is phenomenal by current AI standards). In fact you can induce a sort of model collapse in a human by isolating them in a sensory-deprivation chamber, after which they will literally begin to hallucinate. So the creation of a machine with a soul is not theoretically off the table, but as it is—yeah, LLMs don't have it.

Dude, LLMs are finding algorithmic efficiency solutions where humans have long assumed there were none. We're inside the singularity now.

> The problem is the Universal Paperclips problem because AI has nothing like an effective feedback loop and will spiral to the heat death of the universe to accomplish its goal.

There was an episode of the 1966 series that dealt with this: "The Changeling", the one with Nomad. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Changeling_(Star_Trek:_The...

Because despite his lack of emotions and other human traits, Data is a person, not a service provided by a for-profit corporate entity. He doesn't do La Forge's job for him, nor is La Forge or any other Enterprise crew member expected to perform all their duties with him as an intermediary. He doesn't undermine the competence of every single crew member on the ship; that job was left to Wesley Crusher. (whoops did I just say that out loud) But most importantly, it's fiction... and the writers can contrive to present problems and challenges that Data cannot resolve whereas one of the other characters can. It's also telling that the only truly sentient robots on TNG were the Soong-type androids—quirky side projects of a sort of mad scientist, rather than massive corporate or institutional undertakings. That made them rare and special, and allowed them to dodge the sticky wickets presented by having that sort of AI be ubiquitous.

> Then the clearly fake recruiter39923243323@gmail addresses offering to "work together".

I once proompted one of these to write me a poem about Sauron from The Lord of the Rings, and sure enough, their next message came back: "Sauron rose beneath the flame..."

I think whoever is running these has updated their system prompt since then.

Software has gotten vastly more complex over the intervening decades, and unfortunately it has historically been beyond human capacity and/or institutional time/money availability to keep everything running super efficiently.

The good news is that with LLMs, we can make software efficient again, much more cheaply!

Cdr-coding?

This person is actually correct. Demos are much more on the art side of coding than most forms of programming, so while LLMs may be up to the mechanical task, they won't produce code with the finesse that a human coder can. That goes double for the art and music. What's more, a demo with AI-gen elements wouldn't be accepted by the community. AI-gen webshit may be embraced by the industry, but the demoscene has different standards: human craftsmanship is the entire point.

Relatedly, I was a bit surprised and delighted to find out that the Sonic (the Hedgehog) community is vehemently rejecting AI recompiles, ports, and fangame projects. Clankers are ok with them when it comes to Dr. Robotnik's evil creations, but not in the real world!

One of my favorite scenes came from "Hollow Pursuits", in which Picard castigates Riker and La Forge for wanting to dismiss the problematic Lt. Barclay from the crew. Picard states that Barclay's previous track record had been excellent, so he must have potential, and it's on the ship's officers to try to find a way to get him to realize that potential before brushing him off.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMqYP7o-2fg

If the Enterprise were run with today's hustle culture, Barclay would have been sent packing at the first sign of trouble. Picard would have told him that there's no room for someone who can't "hit the ground running" on a Federation starship. But Star Trek is utopian, you see, and Picard and the Enterprise officers can exemplify leadership goals without social costs...

The feedback is two-way.

At first, Ian Fleming, author of the Bond novels, considered the casting of the brawny Sean Connery in the role of his suave, lanky super-spy to be absurd. After having seen Dr. No, however, he was so impressed with Connery's performance that he wrote a Scottish backstory for Bond and, for Ian Fleming as much as for anyone else, Connery became the original and definitive "face" of Bond.

A different actor might've been picked to play Picard in season one. But how would that Picard have hit with audiences were it not for Stewart's delivery? And would the character have evolved in a different direction had the writers had a different actor in mind when imagining the character? (My money's on yes.)

Third-party package repo is compromised. Everybody curl | bash directly from Dario's web site until a solution can be found.

A service to automatically throw St. Joseph's Day bread into someone's backyard

The Rabbit AI of this space: a wearable over-the-shoulder salt thrower that connects to a cloud API

I mean pay 100% of the cost yourself rather than relying on insurance. You can use a bank card or credit card.

> At Vercel, Geist Sans runs the product. For headlines, though, we wanted a second voice, one that belongs to the same system, instead of a stranger picked from a drop-down menu.

I hate hate hate hate hate this verbiage. I can't tell if this is AI or the kind of insipid marketroid-speak that gave AI writing its distinctive grossness, but it makes me want to barf reading this slop, which is a shame because the font itself is nice.