gensym

I wish we (the people who contributed to the sum total of human knowledge up until 2020) had strengthened our defenses against these weirdos stealing everything so they could package it up and sell it back to us for the last few years we can make a living.

Growing up in rural Illinois in the 1980s meant a large number of the books I read came from places other than bookstores.

We did have a Waldenbooks in the mall that was 45 minutes away that we went to 4x/year, but the local library was tiny and I read everything worth reading there probably before I was 10.

The local grocery store had a small section of mass-market paperbacks, and it was my primary place to get books. I know it had lots of Stephen King novels, and I think my first copy of Dune may even have come from there.

(Hardcovers were something that libraries had, not anything normal people would buy, as far as I knew.)

Dry can be good for wines - apparently, a little stress causes plants to produce more fruit (I guess the intuition is that if the plant thinks it might die, it's time to try to reproduce), and water in particular can dilute the flavors of the grape. A winemaker friend of mine was complaining when we get rain here right before harvest time a month or so ago because it's going to lead to a lower quality year.

Temecula resident checking in... yes, it does.

It gets hot here, but Temecula gets a breeze from the ocean that makes it somewhat tolerable for growing grapes. The wines were tend to be the high-alcohol variety (think cabs and zins) because those are what grow better in the heat.

Most of the wines here aren't that good, but the wineries are more the attraction because they're beautiful and a short drive from LA, SD, or Palm Springs. Popular for weddings and bachelorette parties.

(There are some wineries here doing interesting things but if I'm buying wine to consume at home I'm usually looking for other regions than my backyard).

Came to the comments to see if anyone was talking about Becky Chambers - thank you for not disappointing me! I picked up Monk and Robot with an intention to save it for an upcoming vacation, but started reading the first few pages early and couldn't put it down. I'm really looking forward to her next book in October.

> Please stop with the black and white thinking, the doomers and the e/acc people might as be the same person with a different colored hat with how uncritically they think.

I couldn't agree more. You seem to have assumed that I'm some e/acc advocate. I'm not. I think AI as it is being developed is likely to make the world much worse.

Among the concerns I have:

  - bad actors using it to do bad things (hacking, bioweapons, etc).
  - the way AI enables mass surveillance. 
  - erosion of creative expression and human connection (i.e., your "brainless simps" comment)
  - concentration of wealth and power
  - an eval going sideways ("uh... we were testing to see if it would kill the simulated humans with simulated drones and it accidentally got into the real drones...")

These things are very different than the doomer religion of "RSI makes god that will kill us all", and I think think the framing is important.

We have new evidence that both OpenAI and Anthropic are doing a complete shit job of supervising their eval runs, and we need to be calling for accountability and oversight of what they're doing rather than cower in fear of what a hypothetical future god they are conjuring up might do.

Someone's never met the Windows File Copy dialog.

"RSI" simply means the tool is used to improve the capabilities of the tool. (And then the improved tool can then, in theory, improve further, and so on, at least if we live in a fantasyland where constraints and bottlenecks do not exist). I have a a harness skill that I run at the end of each coding session to review the skills used in the session and identify any ways they could have been improved. Technically, that is RSI, but I don't think it's in any danger of turning godlike any time soon.

It is one of those terms, like "instrumental convergence" and "orthogonality thesis" that makes an everyday concept appear technical and inaccessible in order to add the appearance of rigor to the doomer religion.

Yeah, good point, I remember the first time I travelled to countries that default to water and wondering how to use the pitcher they had in public toilets, and I know some ultralight backpackers who just use a smartwater bottle with no attachment.

But for someone starting out, I do think having something to propel the water upwards helps a bit.

You don't even need to shell out for one of those (though I'm sure they're nice). Bidet attachments work really well. If you have a 3D printer, you can try using a bidet very easily: https://www.printables.com/model/739924-bidet-from-a-pet-bot...

I use the 3D-printed one for travel (I'd gladly pay extra for hotels that have bidets) and outdoor use.

Using a bidet is such an easy life upgrade for anyone relying on TP.

Not the original commenter, but in my view as a crusty old software engineer, the reason to learn how transistors is because they're interesting and the key to how all computation is implemented. Once you learn how transistors work, you can learn how logic gates work. And then how CPUs and memory work. Bit by bit, computers stop being magic boxes and start being something built from technologies you understand.

Now, for most software careers (including my own), that knowledge isn't directly practical. BUT, the most important things for a successful, fulfilling career are curiosity and a willingness to dive into subjects _without_ necessarily knowing how (or even if) that knowledge will yield practical applications. That drive is what's going to lead to insights and breakthroughs over your career that wouldn't happen if you just let abstractions be abstractions.

I hit it whenever doing anything related to security. Auditing code, probing systems, investigating suspicious user activity, etc.

I would guess that it's hard to compete with Google without a consumer component. Most enterprises already have contracts and policies with Google, so anything driven from the top-down is likely to prefer Google.

(And failing that, there was a real risk for OpenAI to be the default for enterprises.)

To defeat that, you need to frontline employees the chance to experience better tooling and models which is where the subsidized subscriptions come in.

It's all cultural. It's pretty bonkers that you can tell who someone voted for in 2024 with a high degree of accuracy just by the shape of their sunglasses lenses.

> why did you put it up for a human review at all then?

This seems to be the crux of the issue.

I'm guessing the most of the time, the answer is "because that's a mandatory gate to getting these changes into production". If the PR author doesn't see the value in review, it's going to be hard to convince them to write reviewable PRs.

If they're actually looking for human feedback, telling them how to submit PRs in a way that's amenable to human feedback is going to be a lot more successful.

I have had success with washing wool or technical garments in the sinks of hotel rooms. I don't actually do that very often but knowing that I can helps with the anxiety of running out of clothing.

For me, it was having children that really forced me to learn to travel light. We lived in Chicago and going to the airport meant walking to the transit stop to get to the airport, so I needed a way to carry luggage (I did so on my back) for a mile while also being able to push a stroller.

The advantages of packing light aren't always obvious[1] until you experience them, so you can pretty much tell someone's level of travel experience by how small their luggage is. I've yet to meet someone who packs more and more stuff based on past experience.

As the article mentions, good fabrics (like merino wool) can go a long way.

(1) Reliability and flexibility being foremost. Not having to worry about lost luggage. Itinerary changes are much easier when all your stuff is with you and can fit on your lap or under your seat. Then comes the comfort and speed. Being able to take the stairs or not blinking an eye at walking an extra half mile go a long way towards making travel enjoyable.

Strip malls at least offer something to the local residents. I recall from my time in Chicago that some of the best immigrant-family-run run restaurants were in strip malls on the northwest side.

Warehouses, though, are worse than data centers in that they bring a lot of traffic to the area. (I currently live in Riverside Country, CA which may be the warehouse capital of the country).

But if we're being honest, most people see warehouses as a way to get cheap stuff to them, which they like and data centers as a way to make them unemployable, which they don't like so much.

I fear they are laying the groundwork to ban US citizens from using Chinese models, so that they can make sure that Brockman gets his money's worth.

I get what you're saying and I see that how my comment could be interpreted. I wish I had worded it better.

The most vibrant places in the world (again, IME) have a diversity of abilities, backgrounds, ages, and economic status.

There's another type of place - the sort of place I had in mind - that doesn't. That attracts people who are trying to get away from law and any sort of social contract. Some of those places look attractive on the surface. That's the sort of place I'm talking about. They're probably not as common as they seem to be to me.

Also, IME, places with no employers tend to be populated primarily by addicts, disability fraudsters, and other criminals.

Gotta fuckin love hn. Can't say the simplest thing without getting thrown into a well, actually.

I wasn't claiming to have run a damned study. Just making an observation. The thing is, people who don't enjoy exercising but start exercising anyway tend to find they enjoy it after a while. Saying people enjoy exercise is like saying "ice cream tastes good". There's a bit of activation energy required, but it's not a huge stretch to notice that something that is good for our bodies gives us pleasure.

What a weird question. The amount depends on what you hope to accomplish.

Want to be able to get on the floor and play with your grandkids? That's going to require a certain amount of mobility work.

Want to be able to hike up Mount Whitney? You'll need regular cardio.

I also hate the phrasing that exercise is something to "get away with". Most people who exercise regularly enjoy it. Moving your body is fun, especially once you get fit enough to do it without pain or immediate exhaustion.

If you're making 300k in the US and "scraping the bottom of the barrel", you need to learn to manage your money better.

I'm the sole earner of a family with two kids. Living in Southern California. Our living expenses are _way_ less than that. We don't live extravagantly, but we're able to vacation a couple times a year, eat out regularly, etc.

Favored companies get access to frontier models, which gives them a competitive advantage, starving out smaller companies. Any smaller companies that do manage to innovate ultimately get acquired by the favored companies since they are worth more with access to frontier models than without (which is effectively a discount on the purchase price of those companies).

I'm not saying that's going to happen, but it is one possible scenario that, over time, would be disastrous for innovation and freedom.

Just because a policy is legal doesn't mean it cannot be disastrous.

So you think Anthropic is using internal AI assistants to pull away from competitors and the leapfrogging we've seen over the last several years is now done?

That seems to me to be the most concrete and least obvious prediction in the quoted text.

I don't think that's happening. If that were generally accepted as true I would expect OpenAI to be unable to successfully IPO.

> I am not cynical enough to believe that Anthropic's warnings are pure marketing hype.

Nor am I. I think they believe that AI poses a grave danger, and they are playing the prisoner's dilemma as an unvirtuous actor.

1. If anyone builds strong AI, it may be catastrophically bad.

2. If anyone builds strong AI, it will be better for the builder than for anyone who does not. Either because it won't be catastrophically bad so the builder will get to enjoy all the spoils indefinitely or because it will and at least the builder will be rich for a while.

I grew up in Illinois in the 80s and 90s, so I had a front-row seat to that gutting. Watching my dad move from factory to factory, go to night school to learn tool-and-die and then see all the tool-and-die jobs move overseas.

So no, it didn't stop it. But the fact that it didn't happen overnight did allow my dad to feed his family and make sure my brother and I had better opportunities. If that gutting had happened over a couple years rather than a couple decades, we would have starved, and the knowledge that we did it "ourselves" rather than have it forced upon us by globalization wouldn't have stocked our pantry.

So, yes, there are direct parallels here. I want to give US families a chance to adapt.