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pclowes

Re:A Book That Will Never Be Read on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @10:46AM (#50072595)
Feels like this has been going on for 50 years. The AI acceleration just made it more visible.

Before it was artisanal non-replicable, p-hacked, publish or perish motivated, politically biased slop. Now we have some AI sugar sprinkled on top.

How do they know the accuracy of the clock? Eg: 2s of drift in 65M years.

Naively, measuring that seems more difficult than the clock. Wouldn’t you need a perfect clock as a baseline? There must be something really clever here.

Re:You Are No Longer Invited to Dinner on Tuesday September 29, 2026 @06:08PM (#49901412)
Filtering these people is a feature not a bug.
Re:It's Time to Investigate the AI Labs on Tuesday September 29, 2026 @01:29PM (#49897039)
This is a thought experiment. People keep running around glibly talking about p(doom) which is the extinction of the entire human race.

They are throwing numbers out like “10%”.

If they are serious and believed then yes, prepare for the possibility of very extreme reactions at a global and potentially nuclear scale.

World Wars flattened cities all over the world for much less.

We can’t talk about AI being the end of the species and not expect the most extreme reactions in global History.

Or maybe we just put some nerds who cant control their agents and keep running their mouths in jail?

Re:It's Time to Investigate the AI Labs on Monday September 28, 2026 @10:54PM (#49887511)
Yes you can, the US could shut down the entire internet if it wanted.

While that is extreme, if there is a high p(doom) it is also reasonable.

We can absolutely do things to control AI and fine or imprison those who can’t control theirs. This is not some inevitable outcome.

We could vaporize these companies tomorrow if we wanted.

Any solid citations for "and has pushed Low Earth Orbit to the brink of the Kessler Syndrome."?

I would be honestly intrigued but wary of just the usual Elon bad/good so all things he does bad/good narratives.

If we are on the brink of Kessler Syndrome in LEO I would expect market pricing to reflect that.

Re:Grok 4.7 on Tuesday September 22, 2026 @11:51AM (#49803280)
I mean maybe the super smart person will work at GOOG/META/Netflix to do some absolutely ground breaking work stuffing ads and slop pixels into as many ocular nerves as possible. However, I could see a smart person taking an "underpaid" (SpaceX SWE: ~$200-400k pre-IPO) to do the following:

Neuralink: to see the impact of increased independence and autonomy of a paraplegic one day after the operation

SpaceX: to quite literally approach the final frontier. Currently launches 80-90% of all orbital mass. Starlink is saving lives constantly.

Tesla: to kickstart the EV revolution and reduce fossil fuel dependence

Boring Company: to radically decrease tunneling costs applicable to all sorts of critical urban problems from transportation to utilities etc

Re:Grok 4.7 on Monday September 21, 2026 @10:57PM (#49796316)
I don’t love the guy and currently am receiving lawsuit settlement money from him but…

This is such cope.

Re:I am often wrong on Sunday September 20, 2026 @06:55PM (#49780973)
Lets say you have a colleague named Bob. Bob is a pretty good engineer, but he is as confident when he doesn’t know as when he knows.

You can never tell his degree of confidence in his answer. For low-level things he is pretty good but for critical high-level things it is more ambiguous.

You work around this by checking Bob’s work. Having formal verification steps to check what he says.

Now let’s say you meet Bob’s twin brother Bill. Who talks and sounds just like Bob. He makes fairly grand high-level statements that you can neither test nor verify.

How much do you intuitively distrust him?

Re:I am often wrong on Sunday September 20, 2026 @04:16PM (#49779635)
Having listened to him give a couple of talks I am always struck by how much he talks and writes like Claude code.

I don’t think he farms out all of his writing and talking to LLMs. I don’t think Claude code was trained to emulate him or anything.

I think his “voice” has been filed LLM smooth by years of agent based interactions. He claims Anthropic engineers use an average of 500+ agents a day. They are human interfaces to token generators more than human to human communication. They are picking up the tendencies of their most frequent communication partner.

Unfortunately, I see Claude being wrong often enough that I view it as a faulty narrator. Often helpful, sometimes totally full of it.

And now I subconsciously apply this filter to anything that sounds like Claude.

Makes me nervous that my voice may be becoming that of a faulty narrators.

Re:Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month on Wednesday September 16, 2026 @05:01PM (#49732970)
Any court case involving an LLM you can point to where LLM output violated copyright AND that was held up in court?

General thought here is the entire economy is all in on a bet that that would never be enforced and I am willing to bet we would rather change the law than destroy the economy…

Re:Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month on Tuesday September 15, 2026 @10:05PM (#49721311)
Why would anyone care about either of these things in a negative sense?

Isn’t that just saying “he uses modern tools and has subject matter expertise”?

I just have no idea how they are remotely going to enforce this.

Like the bad actors can make E2E apps and side load or have their own store. Now with LLMs, this is increasingly trivial.

You cannot stop pedophiles and terrorists from using math.

They might as well try to outlaw the Pythagorean theorem.

This just makes your average law of abiding citizen more vulnerable and the surveillance state more powerful.

Re:I'm Becoming AI-Blind on Saturday August 22, 2026 @03:00PM (#49402694)
Is this progress in the room with us right now?

The state of population level mental health seems to be declining in most measurable categories.

Re:I'm Becoming AI-Blind on Saturday August 22, 2026 @09:58AM (#49399805)
We have actually little idea how human brains work.

Every age thinks they know how they work, and then every subsequent age laughs at the previous age’s rudimentary understanding.

We gave a Nobel prize to the psychiatrist for inventing a method to remove the frontal lobes of a brain through the nose in 1949. Lobotomies were performed through the 70s.

We are likely doing similar if not subtler but worse things today (just one more pill bro). We still have no idea what we are doing when it comes to the brain.

Re:What Garbage Collection Costs on Thursday August 13, 2026 @10:31AM (#49286562)
This is one of the best high-level survey explanations of GC I have seen, nice work.
Re:US hires over 2k video gamers as air traffic controllers on Tuesday August 11, 2026 @09:17PM (#49266733)
From a very naïve perspective, why isn’t air traffic control a solved problem?

Would love to be educated here, but it seems like there are just not that many moving pieces per airport (<10,000) and all of them are tagged with transponders, etc. And a human in the loop with respect to coordination might be the biggest source of risk.

This all seems like queuing theory and collision avoidance, which are very well done by computers.

Re:What Happened to Talenti? on Thursday August 06, 2026 @05:35PM (#49202919)
Amazing fresh ice cream is just not that hard to make at home.

It’s also a fun social thing especially with young kids.

Companies need to be taught that if they enshittify they die.

Apple is historically successfully secretive.

I suspect their security “lapses” are more along the lines of “give them enough rope to thoroughly hang themselves”

Re:Writing by hand is good for your brain on Thursday July 23, 2026 @08:57PM (#49030079)
This is something you don’t need to argue about. You don’t need a cite studies.

The studies are not geared for a sample size of one there is only one you.

Just… Try it.

You can just do things. They don’t have to be rational, the best things rarely are.

How? I would argue Jack is a much better 0 to 1 guy than Zuck and Zuck is a better 1 to N guy

Jack: Twitter, Square (Block), Bluesky/ATProto, bitchat (interesting), buzz (we will see). He just always fumbles the 1 to N (See Vine as an example)

Other Twitter Guy: Medium

Zuck: PHP dev, gets a hit, reads innovators dilemma... buys instagram. Everything else sucks.

I would agree with that, but we probably have different definitions of poor. Destitute? Absolutely. I don’t think anybody is shocked that starving people commit crimes to not die.

However, I have been in plenty of low income high trust areas. In some ways, those were even more high trust.

Economics play a role, but there is a moral and cultural fabric that gets built through repeated interactions overtime. Unfortunately, that fabric is very susceptible to damage.

Eg: there are plenty of towns where you wouldn’t have to lock your car or even your bike, but it only takes a couple thefts for the entire culture to change…

This looks very interesting, thank you for the recommendation.
Because it is naive to think that the people with the power of absolute surveillance would ever permit “sousveillance”. People already survey atrocities committed by regimes and reporting them does less and less every year.

Camera towers may benefit the populace in the short term, but eventually they will be used as a choke collar.

Think of every story, historical or fiction, where a rebellion or resistance struggled against entrenched power. Now imagine that with constant surveillance everywhere. The story gets really short: “then they were all rounded up”.

There are high trust communities all over America. Fewer every year.
People always want high trust societies. They are incredibly hard to create and incredibly easy to destroy.

However, once the cameras go up, you will never ever create one there. High trust requires, well, actual trust. You can’t build real trust in a panopticon just a sickly police state facsimile of it.

Society and progress moves at the speed of trust. Without it many uniquely human and beautiful things disappear.

Safer for who? Definitely not anyone critical of the Chinese dictator or regime. Definitely not the Uygher population.

Free society is more important than marginally safer streets.

Re:If You Build It, They Will Come on Monday July 20, 2026 @10:56AM (#48979759)
I don’t understand how you could possibly get that take away from my comment.

Not maintaining existing public transportation and making it dirty, difficult or dangerous to use is what prevents the construction of more. Voters vote against throwing more money into what seems like a lost cause or at least something they wouldn’t use if they had any other option. In the US any class besides the lowest classes typically does so they avoid public transportation and use cars and so it gets worse.

The transportation must be somewhat appealing to the middle class in order for it to be scalable and sustainable from a tax-policy perspective.

I am very pro public transportation! Would love it if ours and the rider behavior on it was held to the same standard as Amsterdam.

Re:If You Build It, They Will Come on Sunday July 19, 2026 @03:09PM (#48970861)
This still feels like a good faith discussion so I’ll engage.

The US does over incarcerate on average. There is clearly a problem there! The solution is not abdicating prosecution and the rule of law to make up for it in “progressive” cities.

Taking the Iryna Zarutska case as an extreme example, I don’t think anyone would argue that the killer should have been on that train. He should have been imprisoned/involuntarily committed a long time ago.

It is not progressive or empathetic to allow predators to with severe mental or drug issues with long histories of violence to repeatedly prey on a specific community regardless of the national incarceration rate.

Having people who come across as crazy or violent on public transportation makes the average citizen vote for the very policies that produce over incarceration (or defund public transportation) because they look around and their lived experience is that there are not enough police or bad people in jail and that the taxpayer dollars are wasted on public transportation because it becomes a cesspool of crime and drug use.

If you want to lower incarceration and you want people to use public transportation, it must be clean and orderly and socially sustainable.

Re:If You Build It, They Will Come on Sunday July 19, 2026 @12:07PM (#48969345)
I don’t think you appreciate how hard it is to get arrested and how ineffective it is when a DA won’t prosecute crimes. Like yes in a more perfect and just society, this would not be a problem.

In fact, most cities can operate just fine without barrier-esque fare gates. However, when you are trying to pull a city out of a societal doom loop, you need to do what you can when you can.

I think it would blow your mind if you knew the types of crimes a criminal can commit and be released.

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