tbrownaw

If I'm using a tool that in turn uses AI -- like how more and more office stuff has magic autocomplete, or how Teams does automatic transcription and summaries -- am I really using AI?

> There’s a number of male coded sins out there (wrath, lust) but greed has always seemed like a pretty universal affliction.

Isn't it usually associated with the business sphere rather than the personal sphere?

I don't think equal labor force participation has been a thing for that meant decades.

One doesn't have a piece of data, and the other has incorrect data.

Sounds like an example of that consumer preferences thing that I've heard called the "pink tax".

It can evict other things for space reasons, sure. But it doesn't make their contents invalid.

Yep, reading something doesn't invalidate your caches. Or everyone else's caches.

Or even something about how writing usefully on a topic requires higher expertise than reading and understanding what was written.

It's tedious, which is a particular kind of being hard.

In that case how would you interpret the "we can just do better"?

I haven't seen any emails about it, so I'd lean towards it being something that doesn't rate sending emails.

Replacing "something you know" with "something you have" is actually not an unalloyed good.

Those things are important when you want to use making software as a fun social activity. (And are of the appropriate tribe, for the ones with political valence.)

They matter rather less if the goal is to have useful software.

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There's also the possibility that you make something commercially valuable, and forbid corporations from deriving value from it; in which case you'll suddenly have to share space with something that's (somewhat?) interoperable and outside your control. As was seen in the news a few times when project owners got annoyed at cloud providers and tried to restrict them.

For now.

I'd imagine that just because they've decided it's good enough to go public with it, doesn't mean it's done getting better. Or that someone else can't do it better, now that it's been shown to work.

> The internet is not what’s being censored.

Well there's that thing with some countries blocking like all of Cloudflare during sportsball matches, since Cloudflare deliberately makes it impossible to block only whichever of their customers are serving unlicensed sportsball streams.

And I think the "Great Firewall" is still a thing.

And IIRC there's a couple times I've heard about countries taking down connectivity entirely during civil-war / major-unrest type incidents.

> makes moderation some form of censorship

Censorship is when Mallory decides that Alice is not permitted to talk to Bob.

Moderation is when Bob does not want to hear from Alice and Mallory blocks her for him.

The difference is on who's behalf the blocking is being done.

> Most people prefer

I would expect most people to not have much of an opinion on what other people are allowed to talk about when they're not around.

There's a section at the start that talks about what "understand" actually means.

It cannot be usefully analogized to things you can experience (or even to other things you might already understand).

Are you trying to suggest that the issue in the current post has the same underlying cause (not doing business with countries on the other side of a war)?

Path dependence causes problems, it's better to make sure you can just use current state instead.

Well of course.

If you blindly assume it works and it doesn't, that's a problem.

If your process can handle it not working, it's much less of a problem.

I would expect people selling AI to like that term for marketing reasons, completely independent of their opinion of the person who provided a crystallization point to organize the terminology change around.

> The same water that was on the earth when the dinosaurs walked the planet is still on the earth today.

Nope. Plants turn water into oxygen and (the H part of) hydrocarbons, and animals turn those back into water. And after that, the result is different water than the cycle started with.

> don't want to tell the people around them

It's probably more that they don't want to tell competitors anything they don't absolutely have to.

> Also the unforced error around NDAs and attempts at bypassing environmental and other reviews.

Hasn't it been common knowledge for a while -- as in since well before the ai boom -- that those reviews are in practice mostly tools for obstructionism (I don't want anything built) and extortion (fund this project and we'll drop our complaint), and are a significant chunk of why we suck at megaprojects in recent decades?

Is that's even half true, I don't think the "unforced" there really applies.

d'oh, yep

> Can someone steelman private equity, please?

Step back and look at what it fundamentally is.

Person A has a business they want to sell.

Person B has a pile of money and thinks that that business is (or can be) a good investment.

That's it.

So, what happens if person A is prohibited from selling their business? Are they forced to keep working because they don't have enough other savings to retire on? Do they shut the business down in order to retire? Something else?

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Calls to ban private equity are attempts to play "shoot the messenger".

> Contrary to popular belief, being intelligent in one thing does correlate with being intelligent at other things[1].

> [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)

Which section of that very long article are you claiming supports your assertion?

Here's a bit from the start of the "Concept" section:

>> In a famous research paper published in 1904,[8] English psychologist Charles Spearman observed that children's performance measures across seemingly unrelated school subjects were positively correlated. The consistent finding of universally positive correlation matrices of mental test results (or the "positive manifold"), despite large differences in tests' contents, has been described as "arguably the most replicated result in all psychology".[9]

That explicitly contradicts your assertion.

> There are now unsealed Anthropic internal documents describing Project Panama as an effort to "destructively scan all the books in the world"

If I do something destructive to my copy of Accelerate -- feed it through a scanner, leave it where the munchkin can reach, whatever -- that does nothing to deprive you of your copy. Books are funny like that; there tend to be lots of identical ones.

The basic problem is that out-of-sample predictions don't work very well.

With a title like that, I was expecting a piece about society ending as a result of how too many people marrying chatbots affects the population pyramid.