dsign

I was thinking the other day, "why do we have kids?"

The most noble, selfless reason I could think of is "so that they try again". I say, the "most noble" because people have plenty of more selfish reasons: "they'll make me feel better", "to make me a better person", "to keep up with the expectations of my friends and family", "they'll give me comfort when I'm old and frail", "they will care for me". And then no-reasons such as "it's the way things are", and "everybody does it", and "god wants it".

But I prefer mine: "so that they try again". Try what? To fix the wrongs, to succeed where we failed. But that is a mirror: if my kids inherit the world of my failures, can I look back into my soul and say that I tried hard enough? When the day they lose something precious comes, and they understand this world is mostly darkness, will I be able to look them in the eyes and say that I tried hard enough to beget the light they crave?

There has to be a responsibility model for that; somebody who can say “we don’t do X even if the auditors say we should, because Y”. But I see where you are coming from, I’ve seen security theater to cost $$$$$$$ at the org I’m part of.

> Insecure software will be exploited this way or another, if the vulnerabilities are real and the threat model is valid.

The algorithm is: if the threat model is valid, there are vulnerabilities and you either have some software everybody knows about or a gang of hackers specifically targeting you, you should patch.

The part of the industry that profits from security theater will want you to patch no matter what, even if your business goes down in flames due to downtimes and new bugs introduced by patched components. They won't remind you to assess the threat model first.

What? What I'm thinking is "bad judges, opening the gates for AIs to control us, and letting young people that could be interns have to make ends meet by less legal means. Those lawyers are heroes!"

I have some friends that come from that part of the world. It brings me to tears that they are good Christians and Muslims but don't remember Inanna nor Asherah, nor all the others who the priests murdered so that Yahweh could thrive...as a widower. Gosh though I don't think old Yahweh would have liked what the priests did to him either...

I don't know; I think that if I were young and I didn't have to worry about the future, I would be happy. I also think that, if I were young and worry free but had my current level of maturity, I would manage to have a far more interesting social life that I could afford in my previous youth.

It's just hard to make predictions about post-scarcity. At present, we are all running against a clock and that shapes the way we see the world. We are running out of time and about to hit the wall of frailty and death. And, every human being that has ever existed went or has been going through the same. So, our vast spirituality is 95% about dealing with that fact. But we are at a moment in our civilization development in which we actually can take that wall down; it's just such a shame that 95% of our vast spirituality is at best non-cooperative, and at worst very angry and self-defeating.

The orgies? He shouldn't have gone to any if his wife didn't approve. But anybody that can go with their conscience in peace should have orgies more often than they have wine. "You shall not hate your kinsfolk in your heart. Reprove your kinsman but incur no guilt because of him. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against your countrymen. *Love* your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD." (Lev 19:17–18). What the priests and the FBI say is just politics :-).

Does anybody what's the status with solar power there? Seems like the country would have plenty of sun to use. I know that some private people in the island are running almost 24x7 on solar and batteries, but most private people, companies and specially the government are still in blackout.

I'm not hugely concerned about the company using properly anonymized data from my sessions for training, but I'm hugely concerned about anything below that bar. While I wait for hardware to run LLMs locally to become better, I'm going to do my best to handle any PI-adjacent data with a mixture of models from OpenRouter.

I find it easier than x86 SIMD[^1], but the lack of support for vector operations for 32 bits makes me very grumpy.

[^1] Though, to be honest, x86 has great automatic SIMD tools so I never had to try too hard.

Why does this article read like good, honest, working-class astroturfing?

Cheers and well said :-)

I'm a professional cynic and I spread the idea of "population decline to solve our resource problems" every time I have a chance; I even write dystopic science fiction with this theme. I do it not because I think it's the solution (yours is), but to jolt people in a reaction like yours. Let's build a bright future; just in our solar system there's easily enough matter and space for a trillion humans, each enjoying many acres of forest[^1].

[^2]: https://claude.ai/share/bbab0507-109d-4b4b-b5bb-2a44afad901a

I don't understand either what, technically, "off-key" means. I mean, sure, in well-known songs the singer needs to sing certain parts at a certain pitch, and it sounds awful when they don't. But say this is a song you are composing. There, you have your chord progression, but the chords and their notes are some sort of guidance. You may compose the song in such a way that the singer sticks strictly to the notes in the chord as much as possible, but that sounds weird and requires no small amount of singing skill. Or you may keep the singer a perfect fourth or a minor third away from some notes of the chord for part of the melody, "off key", and it may still sound good.

What a shameful lack of planning and foresight.

One fourth in joke, three fourths seriously, I say that Google should have built their datacenter underground in this case. First, trees will appreciate if they can warm their roots during winter with data center heat. Second, Finland has a border with Russia, so it just makes sense to put vital infrastructure underground. Third, when people start revolting against AI (and something tells me the Finnish are going to the on the vanguard), it's just better (for the shareholders) to force the rioters to dig through many meters of rooted dirt than to have to fill the building with weaponized androids and then have to pay Boston Dynamics a wad of money for them and also feel nervous for what will happen if the rioters cut the power.

I watched the other day Rick Beato's "What If Stairway To Heaven Came Out Today?" and what stroke me is that his granddaughter remarked that the song didn't have auto-tune. First, she has great musical ear. Second, she destroyed my illusion that "true" musical producers were in the business of zapping the singer whenever they went out of tune, not of using auto-tune, which is something more becoming of the plebeian musicians who make songs from their bedroom.

With that said, a silver lining of AI learning to imitate mainstream producers is that the (big players of the) music industry may finally lose their grip on people's musical taste. Maybe people will start searching for alternative styles, and going to their (minor artists with a unique voice) performances in person.

This is… not bad, but not ground breaking. I expect there will be something more in the coming years but nothing that will change the fundamental about disease and illness. For AI to make “orders-of-magnitude” more progress into the biology of diseases, fully automated labs are the next thing, though I would rather not have one of those here on Earth… maybe we should put a couple billion on building biolabs on the Moon…

I don't think it was a republican the one who "destroyed... inexhaustible energy supplies". It was well-meaning environmentalists in Europe who didn't bother with math nor science when they demanded to take down nuclear power and to buy gas from Russia. They were raised in the "end of history" culture of the nineties that was a little too cheerful, but busy shifting manufacture to Asia, and it favored more humanities in schools in this part of the world, in itself not a bad thing, but to the detriment of exact and logical thinking. Maybe all of it made our thinking an easy prey of the people selling the oil and the gas.

Republican or German butterflies (as in "butterfly effect") should not be blamed when they start a big scale avalanche on loose snow.

Well, it does. Which is the problem. We essentially have three choices: one , we walk the knife edge which is our current-day thinking, where we hope that we somehow enable some magical thing--in the future, always in the future--that solves climate change without making life even a little worse for anybody. Two, we do nothing and adapt to climate change however it comes. Three: we do something unpleasant. Four is "go and make colonies in space" but for most folk that's the same as three.

This. I have, lying around unpublished, a few science fiction novels that I wrote where I assumed we actually did everything realistically needed to stop climate change. Like, not the deal "we make some solar panels but keep all the industries," but the real thing: "we take down the industries, we promote degrowth, we embrace and promote a proper demographic collapse, we shame meat eaters, we put youth into environmental enforcement militias, and we change global culture to embrace all of that."

It's a world that has nothing to do with this one. Of course deceiving ourselves with plastic straws is easier.

Sorely tempted to develop a microcontroller device that acts like a smart dictaphone for when I'm going on long hikes, like, an aural text editor. It could also be a smartphone app by I dread the idea of having to jump through a million Apple hoops to get something working on an iPhone....

> Schools survived what happened to religion. It should be no surprise that they’ve survived the radio, motion pictures, and the internet.

What happened to religion? Last I checked it was doing well.

> We typically confuse why something claims it exists, ie to glorify God, vs the forces that actually perpetuate it, which are subtler, we’d prefer not spoken aloud, and more prosaic, ie endowments, prestige, and needing someone to watch one’s kids.

We typically confuse that that particular confusion is the thing. God is the model's weights running on the distributed computer that we form collectively with our brains and whose running realization we call "society." The Christians (which are superb at sleazing their way around the irrefutable lack of supernatural divinity) call it "concursus dei". Considering that in some parts of the world people consistently elect whoever looks more like a radical God-GPU-node, I would say this particular one among our "dī" is still firmly at the helm.

Well, it’s at least you and me thinking that.

> What would such a world look like?

Major religions, minor religions, cults will have a field day. Or more like a field century or a millennium or twenty, who knows.

Up to a few years ago, I would see or read some science fiction that was medieval times with spaceships (ala Dune) and I would roll my eyes and think “ffs, can’t people move on and invent something more original?”. Now I seriously believe that’s one of the most benign futures waiting for our species[^1]. Not that there isn’t lots of lights in this tunnel, it’s just that its shadows are very black.

[^1]: https://w.ouzu.im/aweb/unhinged

Kind of shocking that a 1980 chip could do 80 bits floating points. It makes me a little mad at all of those microcontrollers from this year, 46 years later that ship without floating point support or, at best, 32 bits, but they do come with a "secure island" and a radio capable to ring ET.

> Also, you still have to convince the public.

In terms of working democracy and social governance, we can kill a big flock of birds with a single shot if the public can understand cryptography. Think about it: we live in an age where everything is digital and has a microprocessor inside. Even money is digital. But the "public" can't parse simple logical statements, and they vote for the funniest clown in the race (for a definition of funny). The best this schism can possibly end is if we vote in a Luddite Empire that squashes technology. All other scenarios are far scarier.

Microsoft should stop tormenting developers and fix text input in MS Teams, then go and atone for its many, many sins, before committing new ones, like this “this not really an open weights model but we want to IE6-them with our bully tactics”.

There was a time, not too far in memory, when the value of being human wasn't about our intellectual prowess[^1]. We were creative with the human worth thing: being there in the time of need, faith, nobility or being a well-dreaded, literally-bloody viking full of beads in your beard.

Yes, I fear we will stop being the top of the food chain[^2]. But by god weren't we getting bored? Maybe getting off our high horses and going into the weeds won't be such a bad thing.

[^1] And even today, if you go to parties and keep bouncing into people that have no trouble picking up intellectually stimulating topics, you are in a lucky minority.

[^2]: More about my fears, which are unhealthy and you don't have to read but I feel compelled to include citations: https://w.ouzu.im/aweb/unhinged

Aye, will we stop hammering nails on God's coffin?

What's next? Maybe in a little bit we will discover that we H. Sapiens suffer from severe polysemanticity in our wetware because our individual neurons are messy and massive like an ENIAC while the corvids in the park have neat and efficient little brains that don't need unfolding ?... How's the pope (may God stop afflicting him with cancer or may Man make him live forever) going to explain that?

> By your logic there is no cancer problem till the heart disease problem is solved (which is well above cancer)

That's one of those things that causes me depression and anxiety: in many places cancer is actually above heart disease. From my vantage, that's a bad thing because people that die from sudden heart disease or from the sudden disintegration of their brains as the bullet from their gun travels through it get a better deal than those who die from cancer.

Suicide is sometimes a good solution to a problem (cancer) with no other solution. Make no mistake, I think that people should live forever even if we have to boil the oceans to get there; yes, I'm that kind of monster. But I'm not the kind that says that people should die in horrible agony just because of the stigma that doing otherwise imply.

Agree with everything else you said.

Things that work for depression: writing, composing music, exercise, playing video games. Things that don't help: alcohol nor drugs. Role of family and community: YMMV. I envy lots of folks with supportive and kind families, but I also witnessed much suffering and terrible loss caused by a loving family that doesn't quite get the loving part right.

With that out of the way, I'll say that for as long as suicide mortality is well below cancer mortality, society doesn't really have a suicide problem.

NPC is not rare even among not Asian-descent people, it’s just poorly documented; I lost my brother to it in July and we don’t have anybody coming from Asia our ancestry, that we know of. The doctor did said “there are only 20 cases of this in the world” after citing a paper where the sample size was 20. He did not order genetical tests nor tests for biomarkers for modern drugs. “Standard of care” my brother got in the US is from the 80s and it was unconnected to the molecular biology of his cancer (there has been a lot of relevant research in the last 20 years), but the doctors will subject you to it before even allowing you to access the better, most modern options. In my brother’s case, the standard of care treatment put fuel into his process instead of slowing it down, and by the time immunotherapies and other options were considered, it was already too late.

One thing I noticed is that the oncologists managed my brother far more than they actually worked on his case; oncologists are often overworked and, by necessity, desensitized. They are aware of new treatments because the pharma industry takes good care of that, but they are way less willing to read scientific literature relevant to a specific type of “rare cancer” present in a “single patient”, and they actually need the two things to be effective.

I feel for you and for your family; may the stars align for you and you get to be out of your crucible with the least amount of suffering.