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The problem with union types for exceptions is that it becomes impossible to return an error as the correct case, or at least there is no way to discriminate any more. Functions that deal with errors also need to be able to have exceptional situations, and in many cases there are completely generic functions as well that can error out for generic reasons. A basic example is the elementary case of having a list of errors for some reason and indexing out of bounds producing an error, what if one have a list of values, which are all derived from itself accessing lists, each of which contains “Ok:Val+Err:OutOfBounds”, accessing that list itself now becomes indeterminate.

The other issue is that the language needs to have support for union types rather than merely sum types. And there's a good reason almost no statically typed language has support for union types since it removes provability and it's not something that can in easily be statically decided, requiring dynamic type tags, but then again, that's what sum types effectively are as well.

Typed Racket is statically typed and has union types, but it's an extra layer on top of a dynamically typed language, so the type tags where there already, but it's not easy to erase type data at run time not to implement.

In your example of “String|Error”, it essentially requires that every String is now tagged at runtime with tag information about it in practice.

If it ever become impossible to spot a human from a bit, then bots become valuable contributors to online discussion with interesting insights so I don't see the problem.

I don't understand banning these kinds of things in general opposed to simply taxing them considerably.

A man should have the freedom to damage the environment so long as he pay for it, and that money can then be used to undo his damage.

Of course, it's always quite inconsistent how these things are applied based on cultural reasons. I've been in favor for a long time for higher taxes on paper. The production of paper is apparently 1/5 of deforestation and there really is not much justification for it now with alternatives with less of an environmental footprint, but too many people, even those who supposedly stand for the environment, are too emotionally attached to paper for cultural reasons to see this ever pass.

One of the many, many reasons I think the fact that the big vendors did not accept XHTML 2.0 and instead wanted HTML 5 was probably influenced by the that it makes it almost impossible for smaller vendors to developer their own new independent engine.

XHTML 2.0 and even 1.1 was a very good opportunity to throw all that away.

It requires so much to be able to generate answers tot hings asked about a wide variety of subjects, not to be able to generate grammatically valid sentences and parse them, which other a.i.'s also did before with far fewer tokens.

No, not at all. I'm purely saying that the argument that they are different from humans is not necessarily substantiated.

> In this (and other comments by you I think?) you've implied the onus is on the AGI sceptics to prove to you that the LLM is not sentient (or whatever word you want to describe motive force, intent, consciousness, etc that we associate with human intelligence). This is an unreasonable request - it is on you to show that it is so.

And yet, humans are assumed so without having to show it.

Suppose a computer programmed for scientific exploration came to earth that was only following a program, did not consider itself sentient or have a consciousness, but met humans who claimed they did, and they were then tasked with providing an argument that could convince this computer? How could they do so?

The computer would always argue that they are simply claiming to be due to evolution as it's advantages as it arouses sympathy, but that in reality they are soulless neural networks whose behavior simply evolved from selective pressure. They could never actually offer a compelling argument nor explain how the neural network inside of their cranium could ever produce self-awareness.

Universal grammar only speaks to the ability to parse and form sentences, not to internal logic.

That ChatGPT is capable of producing human-like sentences from pattern recognition without any universal grammar baked in, even if the underlying reasoning might be flawed, goes against the argument of something such as universal grammar existing.

At the very least, it shows that a neural net is capable of parsing and producing coherent grammar without any assistance from universal grammar. It does not prove that humans don't have it, but it does make a compelling case that it's clearly not required for humans to have it either.

That is a very wrong view of something that communicates so closely with the hardware and deals with graphics.

It's very much chasing a moving target of new graphics technology and many of the innovations made by Wayland have been ported to Xorg. The interesting thing is that screen tearing used to be a problem on Xorg but never was on Wayland but much of the technology responsible for that has now found it's way into Xorg to make it a thing of the past there too. Of course integration with new hardware drivers is also required.

It's entirely possible it will continue to be maintained that way, or that the Wayland philosophy will finally be broken and these things will be added once they realize there is a great enough demand, but these are all possibilities, not certainties.

It doesn't matter and it's still a theatre. Those malicious applications can do what they want regardless by editing arbitrary files and obtain the same end.

The supposed threads of malicious applications keylogging and stealing your website passwords to worry about is rather strange when such an application can edit the files on your system such that you're starting a modified version of a web browser they injected with whatever code they want to do the same. In fact, this is probably easier to do than try to write some kind of a.i. that filters what it thinks are “password keypresses” opposed to altering the code of the web browser such that it simply sends whatever is being put into a field marked as “password” on a website.

It's a moral panic boogeyman that has no actual implications for actual real life security. Like quite a bit of “security” talk these days. Much of it comes down to the “door in your room” analogy where “security experts” talk about putting a big door in the middle of one's living room with an impenetrable lock on the idea of kindly asking criminals to only go through that door to steal things. In reality they'll just walk around it, and now one has an inconvenient door in the middle of one's living room.

> Not sure what you mean.

Many of the things one can at least ask permissions for as I read it on the Apple system are actually purposefully simply not available due to similar concerns.

Many of the leading Wayland developers believe in this. The Enlightenment lead developer for instance does not believe a programmatic way to make screenshots or listen to keypresses should ever exist. I had some debates with him about this and he believes the risks are too high as well as revealing that he seemed to believe that streaming videogames did not work by way of a third party tool that captures the screen contents, but that each video game had this functionality built in, which is certainly not the case and that he believes this might explain his reluctance for such an a.p.i. to facilitate this.

> But at any rate, Wayland is completely optional. You can keep running X and nobody will stop you. People will keep running X without issue for a very long time. This is very different from what the Apple world is like.

Opinions are divided on that matter. The reality is that many of the developers of Xorg have abandoned in in lieu of Wayland and many Wayland developers, many former Xorg developers are clear in their opinion that they see it as a replacement, not an alternative and eventually expect everyone to switch.

Whether that will happen is anyone's guess. They are often met with counter arguments that Xorg and the X11 protocol itself simply has features that many businesses and private individuals need for their lifelihood so there is going to be commercial incentive to pick up maintainership should they abandon it. They have also conceded heavily already on many of the features they initially said where either unneeded or a security risk when they realized the reality that many people outside of their bubble did use them. Libinput originally did not have any mouse acceleration settings on the argument that no one would want to turn it off or fine tune it to begin with, but now has it when they realized that unlike what they thought, demand for the ability to fine tune or turn off mouse acceleration is higher than they anticipated.

“keylogging” is such a moral panic.

If applications can edit arbitrary files on the system it's already game over. I have no idea why people focus so much on “keylogging” as the supposed super important and dangerous thing.

If one run any malware with the full file edit permissions of one's user account at that point in theory the only solution is erase not only the hard drive, but also every other drive on any other system one's user account has access to or at least in sofar those do not have some logging for connexions in some way to see who connected that cannot be edited by the permissions one has on that system. Of course if one has root on one's own system nothing on that system can be trusted any more from that point. The malware could in theory have edited the firmware at that point to hide any checks one could do with a recovery system on a portable drive, but that's all quite theoretical of course, but it's possible in theory.

Keylogging is such a strange thing to focus on in the face of being able to edit arbitrary files owned by the user.

These permission systems in practice don't really do as much to shield users as many think though.

People often just drop the word “sandbox” and say “applications are sandboxed” and that that means that they're safe but it's really not that simple in practice. What often happens is that such applications still need to communicate over some socket with some server that was never designed for such a sandbox, say PulseAudio, and in many cases can then simply instruct the outer daemon to do whatever they want with full permission, either by design, or by oversight since the no one who wrote the outer daemon thought about it at the time since they were never designed for that purpose.

The situation with Wayland is actually worse than this by far.

IT makes windows stand out more from each other. They are in effect very thick borders that stand out.

Do you believe there is no merit to being able to set border size for windows?

Cynically speaking I'm somewhat scared of the way i3 is programmed that adding gaps would have to be hacky.

My instincts tell me that if that be the case, the code probably isn't very clean and itself full of hacks.

So, what I'm to take from this is that though plasma itself can be donated without risk, the other components cannot?

> We can actually refine blood plasma down to a state where it's basically 100% safe even if someone with "bad blood" donated it.

Do you have a source on this? Given that many blood donation facilities still refuse many “risk groups”, which honestly always carried the stench of politics to me how arbitrarily they are selected, from donating blood?

You'll notice I'll never spoke of “fault”. I spoke of what is in Youtube's interest.

Indeed; it doesn't feel as though it be in the interest of the website which is why support is dropping.

Youtube wants people to subscribe, which I don't do, I simply add the RSS feed of channels I want to be updated about which is probably not what either Youtube or those channels want given how much they are begging me to subscribe all the time.

I really don't even care that much about skin colors.

White, black, purple Americans tend to have similar perspectives on things, so do white, black and purple Swedes.

The issue is that the articles on many international things are clearly written from an Anglo-Saxon perspective, often citing purely English sources on events that happen in, say, France or Syria.

It is my perspective that gender and race are completely insignificant compared to culture and it annoys me how often Anglo-Saxons think otherwise, probably because of never really having interacted with a foreign culture.

In the end, from my perspective, Anglo-Saxons from whatever gender or color tend to think very much alike and very different from persons from entirely different countries. The country one is born in influences one's perspectives far more than one's gender or skin color, how could it not really?

That they prioritize such minutiæ over bigger problems is something I found a slap in the face, or rather, a reminder of the issue that they're probably barely aware of it and don't realize how different the perspective of other culture can be.

Indeed, that's a common issue too with historical events.

But even scientific things. I can't read Mandarin, but I've been told many times that many subjects on many linguistic concepts on the Chinese Wikipedia look very different and that seemingly English-language linguistics and Chinese-language linguistics can come to very different conclusions from the same data. That of course is troubling in and of itself, but it should be featured proportionally.

From what I understand, among English-language communication, the Altaic language hypothesis has essentially completely bee discredited, but many linguists in Asia apparently still consider it plausible. — I don't have the expertise to judge who is wrong and who is right here, but English-language Wikipedia should either give those voices a proportional weight, or, at least note that it is discredited among English-language linguists, as right now it arouses the impression that it's globally discredited.

Mostly because I'm tired of these U.S.A. “diversity” efforts which come down to “more persons from the U.S.A.” overlooking most of the world.

That they apparently think gender defines perspectives more than ethnicity and cultural background is the problem. Apparently they can make an effort towards gender but not toward the issue that plagues English-Language Wikipedia that only English-language sources are used in the end, often even about subjects that are fundamentally not in English such as the critical response of non-English media, being phrased as though it's a global consensus.

Again, I've seen some places where his has recently improved, but it's annoying to, say, see on Wikipedia that for instance “criticism was mixed” on a French film that was overwhelmingly positively received in France because English-language criticism was more negative due to cultural differences.

They're not trying to recruit contributors outside of the Anglocentric perspective; they're not in any way trying to mitigate that problem.

I used to donate, but no longer do, not for this, but because I'm tired about the Anglocentric, U.S.A.-centric style on Wikipedia with little efforts to fix it, as well as other neutrality issues.

When they flung some banner about soliciting more female contributors in my face which reeked of Americana it was the last straw.

I've seen some articles at least add “English-language criticism" by now instead of simply “criticism” when talking about the critical reception of work that wasn't even in the English language so that's a start, but too often still that doesn't happen. It's obviously unavoidable that English-language Wikipedia incurs some Anglocentric bias, but there is almost no effort to fix it and not even a template seemingly to warn that an article might carry an Anglocentric bias, even those that report on matters that mostly pertain outside of the Anglosphære.

Which makes it more confusing why it was originally as it was because it's really not harder to implement as any compiler implements it as desugaring before optimizations een occur and this form is simpler.

The only explanation I see is that they really gave it no thought at all whatsoever and it wasn't a tradeoff but simply not thinking clearly.

Peer-reviewers also don't follow particular names around; they see the name above the submission and it influences them, as on H.N. no doubt.

But it's far worse, even without a recognized names, most votes are cast without proper reading, and I'm fairly certain also by the least intelligent subsection given how often submissions are upvoted on H.N. and Reddit that are pure clickbait and demolished in the comments by people that actually read it. People that vote by and large only read the title or the first sentence and make up their mind from there.

The nice part is that that can be gamed and should be gamed.

People should copy the writing style of famous auctor's then to expose the system and keep people honest because then they know there are copycats.

It's not different from Reddit or H.N. in the sense that most people that vote never bothered to read the entire post and the same thing is true with peer review. This isn't simply the case in soft-science as the Bognanov affair showed.

They skim, see if it looks okayish and give it their approval.