nkoren
Bless Dolly, she was amazing!
tl;dr: very passionate young man develops a special interest in the Thylacine (Tasmanian Tiger), and becomes convinced (not without some evidence) that it might still be alive in Western Papua. So he spends two and a half years preparing to Indiana Jones it into the mountains of Western Papua, and the video ends with him saying "I went". Cut to black. No part 2 was ever posted.
Damn, I really want to know how that story finishes. (I fear that "I went" actually meant "I'm going right now", with the intention that he would post part 2 upon his return. Which appears not to have happened.)
I'm nine. The dentist has convinced my parents that my slightly crooked front teeth are a problem which needs to be solved with a retainer. The infernal device puts metallic bands around my rear molars, and makes my mouth taste like metal. Fortunately, I discover that this problem is easily solved with a bit of elbow grease and a pair of pliers. After ripping out several sets of retainers, my parents and the dentists surrender. Somehow it still takes another 38 years to be diagnosed as autistic. My barely crooked front teeth go on to have no effect on my life whatsoever.
I'm 15. A dentist informs me that I have half a dozen cavities which urgently need to be filled. I'm busy with other things, however, and keep postponing dealing with them. As years go by and no problems develop, I start to form paranoid theories that the entire purpose of dentistry is to replace all naturally-occurring tooth enamel in the body.
I'm 21. A wisdom tooth becomes impacted and infected. The pain is very much like having a hot poker shoved through my jaw, except less enjoyable. A dentist extracts the tooth, and I spend the rest of my life profoundly and eternally grateful for the existence of modern dentistry. At a follow-up appointment, I ask whether maybe I should finally get those long-neglected cavities attended to. "What cavities?" he responds, confirming that my prior dentist was a scammer.
I'm 30. My wife -- whose parents enthusiastically embraced getting her teeth perfected when she was a child -- is now having to get most of her teeth replaced. For the second time. On credit. Her complications are having complications. On the plus side, from a dentistry perspective, her naturally-occurring tooth enamel is almost totally gone. Meanwhile, I've forgotten to get a check-up for the last nine years, and am having no problems whatsoever.
I'm 50. I probably really should get that check-up one of these days. On the other hand, it's been 29 years since my last check-up, and my teeth are still causing me no trouble at all. If I were to make a four-quadrant chart of my friends whose dental circumstances I'm familiar with, I'd be one of a very small handful of people in the "no tooth problems, never goes to a dentist" quadrant. There's a LOT of people in the "serious tooth problems, regularly goes to a dentist" quadrant. The fact that there's FAR fewer people in the "no tooth problems, regularly goes to a dentist" quadrant continues to fuel my vague skepticism of the profession. Maybe that's a sampling bias, but still...
Not withstanding all of the above: the next time a tooth does go bad, I will once again be profoundly grateful that they're there.
B.) I worry what this entails for QGIS, and for the future of such community-built platforms as a whole.
Let's say I need some functionality which QGIS doesn't have. My options are to:
1. Learn to program QGIS, add the functionality, and commit it back to the community. From where I currently sit -- I've never developed for QGIS, I don't know its language -- that's an investment of several months, at a minimum.
2. Vibe-code the extension I need -- or just make a bespoke GIS application which has the small subset of GIS capabilities that I need, optimized for my particular use-case. Depending on the complexity, that's an investment of either days or hours.
By that math, (1) is never going to win, and now (2) is never going to be able to make a contribution back to QGIS. Moreover, the pool of people for whom (1) is a real option will be shrinking every day, particularly as those people have to compete economically with the people who embrace (2).
So it's hard for me to see how community projects survive in the face of these dynamics. And it would be a shame to lose them -- they create a lot of value that a bespoke vibecoded thingamajig never will. But for better or worse, I just don't see humans-only coding having much of a future.
Living in this reality, unfortunately I cannot.
So I should restate the whale story: that's the effect it had on me, and I still strongly suspect that this was intentional on the whale's part. But YMMV.
When I was a teenager, I took a rowboat out onto what was then called Scammon's Lagoon, in Baja California, where the Grey whales raise their young. A mother whale -- several times the size of our boat -- and her calf approached. The calf was curious but cautious, so the mother nudged it into approaching the boat, close enough that we could reach over and rub its nose, which everyone on the boat did in turns.
What did the whales get out of this? Certainly nothing tangible -- nobody was feeding them or anything like that. But if you've ever rubbed a wild baby whale's nose while looking at it in the eyes -- and experienced the emotional connection which results -- then you will be forever incapable of hostility, apathy, or utilitarian thinking about whales.
I'm certain the mother whale knew what she was doing. She was recruiting us to her side. MUCH more effective, in the long term, than merely running away.
Looking back at it, it's hard to believe that nobody died...
tl;dr: two countries, divided by a common language.
Now: please make it rapidly reusable and at least 10x larger. Europe desperately needs sovereign launch capabilities in that class. Today, you were the first to cross the starting line. AWESOME. Have a drink, get some rest, and get back to work. Everyone will be rooting for you!
There are a number of such stories which tell about landforms which have been under the ocean for 11,000 years, since the great meltwater pulses raised the ocean at the end of the ice age. Long after the stories were documented by anthropologists -- who thought it was unusual that so much mythology would be concerned with the topography of the seafloor -- sonar was invented, which confirmed that the landforms existed more or less exactly as the stories said.
So personally I think that's pretty hard proof of at least 11,000 years of accurate oral tradition.
Thank you, Dolly. That meant a lot to us, and millions upon millions of other people too.
I'm a longtime space guy, so Musk has been on my radar for decades -- since long before he was a billionaire. He actually first hit my radar even before founding SpaceX, when he made a "Mars Greenhouse" presentation to the Mars Society in 2001 (I'm a founding member). Since then, I've built up a huge amount of respect for his technical accomplishments, which are indeed extraordinary. I wish to hell he'd stayed apolitical -- if he had, then we could indeed just talk tech.
But he didn't, and we can't. There was a time when the absolute best rockets in the world were German -- but if it's 1942 and you're talking about sourcing rockets from the Luftwaffe, then I hope to hell you'd be focused on a few things beyond just the technology itself.
Me: Hey Fable, I've got this massive, theoretically challenging, totally novel, ill-defined cutting-edge problem that I'd like you to solve.
Fable: < Doesn't merely solve the problem -- utterly obliterates it. Nukes it from orbit. Does a robust one-shot that takes several hours to complete. >
Me: Holy smokes, that was amazing!!!! But the formatting could use some simple refinements. Could you change the margins and maybe add a drop-cap at the start of each section in the user docs?
Fable: < Commences another multi-hour nuclear exchange with the code >
Me: WT?!?!
(The moral of this story is that bringing a nuke to a knife-fight is only occasionally the best strategy. And in more practical terms: Fable is amazing -- but only for certain classes of problems, and even if it were free there's a lot I probably wouldn't use it for.
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/3sac4u/interactive...
With an AI, I can say "I don't understand that part, can you explain more?" Or "what about this concern I just thought of", or "I already know almost enough about this, I just need this one gap filled in." It's an objectively better experience.
(The domain, FWIW, is a geospatial transport-planning tool, including a completely custom microsimulation engine, with loads of options for visualization, analytics, etc.)
At the start of this development process, LLMs were capable of assisting with little more than the framework boilerplate stuff. That was very useful, but was well under 50% of the LOC. They were particularly bad at understanding the microsimulator, where they would routinely forget which end of a FIFO queue was the front. LLMs are routinely and correctly criticized for their lack of a true world model, and when it came to modelling real-world physical/spatial/geographic systems, the fact that they see the world as nothing but text was a huge limitation. Not just in terms of having a pretty hazy grasp on concepts like "spatial direction", but even more critically, being unable to rationalize about the "world-within-a-world" which the simulator is attempting to model. They were fully unable to do that.
That was 18 months ago. Now, Claude writes > 99% of my code. It demonstrates a far better grasp of first-order world-model phenomena (like "spatial orientation"), and a decent (but not fantastic) ability to reason about the second-order "world-within-a-world" that the simulator is creating. It's a huge improvement. For some areas of the code, I still need to spell things out very explicitly, giving precise instructions for how a method will work. That's definitely not vibe-coding. But for other areas of the code, I can just say "add this analysis or visualization feature", without specifying how, and Claude will one-shot a result that's somewhere between good and great.
So where we're at now is that Claude often needs hand-holding for some of the most complex areas of the code, and it definitely doesn't understand how the whole application hangs together -- I have to keep reminding it of that, and am constantly taking steps to ensure that it remains well-architected doesn't devolve into a collection of warring patches.
And yet -- in the past 18 months, the boundary between what the LLM is capable of and what I need to exercise control over has shifted MASSIVELY, and it has shifted in the direction of LLMs being more able to rationalize about meta-models and higher-order architectures.
I've got two small children. When they say they can't do something, I always remind them that they can't do that thing -- YET. What they can do today is very far from the ultimate limits of their capabilities. I feel similarly about the capabilities of LLMs. No, they definitely can't vibecode a Photoshop-class application. YET.
There's a robin who often sits in the fig tree in my back yard, giving friendly little chirps whenever I'm near. (I have no way of knowing whether it's the same robin from day to day, but if it's different robins then they all seem to be on the same wavelength.)
Anyhow, today a neighborhood cat came to the back door, and was aggressively friendly when I opened it. Clearly offering affection in exchange for... what? I've never given this cat anything before, apart from a friendly pat. Meanwhile the robin was overhead in the fig tree, giving totally different chirps than I'm used to. Clearly "warning!" "danger!" chirps. It was amazing how unambiguous they were.
I was puzzled who the robin's audience for this was, however. I'd never noticed it freaking out about cats before. Was it trying to warn me for some reason? Trying to warn other nearby birds? I couldn't see any. I thought that maybe it was just shouting at the cat out of general pique.
Then the cat led me to the answer. Turns out it had trapped an (uninjured) baby squirrel behind a planter box near my door. It couldn't reach the squirrel, and the squirrel couldn't escape. The cat seemed to be under the impression that since we were now friends, I could move the planter box and help it to get the baby squirrel. Sadly I had to disappoint it, and after unexpectedly acrobatic shenanigans, I facilitated the squirrel's escape instead.
The robin, meanwhile, ceased its warning chirps the moment it saw that I was aware of the baby squirrel. Then it watched the ensuing affair unfold, from the safety of the fig tree. Once the squirrel was safe and the cat had left disappointed, the robin looked at me, gave a few of its usual happy chirps, and flew away.
1. Eliminate / work around the electoral college system, which makes it so that people in the most diverse, educated, and economically-productive parts of the country have dramatically less voting power than a small minority of people who live in more homogeneous, less educated, and less economically-productive areas. This would significantly change the messaging needed to win.
2. Eliminate first-pass-the-post voting, which encourage candidates with extreme views, eliminate anything other than (largely false) political binaries, make it possible to win elections while receiving a minority of the votes, and make it so that the only viable strategy is to vote for the lesser evil rather than somebody you actually want.
3. Get the money out of politics. Make untraceably-funded super-PACs illegal.
4. Gerrymandering should be super fucking illegal.
Other places do this. They're more democratic than the US, and while they still frequently elect stupid politicians, none of those are as bottom-of-the-barrel as what the US is able to scrape together.
All I'm saying is that the argument that "It's not consciousness, it's just <insert any tangentially mathematical claim here>", is dogma. Given everything that we don't know, agnosticism is the appropriate response.
It wasn't very long ago that scientists were certain that animals did not posses thoughts or feelings. Any behaviour which appeared to resemble thinking or feeling was simply unconscious autonomic responses, with no more thought behind them than a sunflower turning towards the sun. Animals, by definition, lack Immortal Souls and Free Will, and therefore they are empty inside. Biological automata.
Of course this dogma was unfalsifiable, because any apparent evidence of animal cognition could be refuted as simply not being cognition, by definition.
Look, either cognition is magic, or it's math. There really isn't a middle ground. If you want to believe that wetware is fundamentally irreducible to math, then you believe it's magic. If that's want you want to believe, then fine. But it's dogma, and maintaining that dogma will require increasingly willful acts of blindness.