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Mtinieon On 17th century "cocaine"

Which part is bullshit? The discussion, generally or the pedantic point that the active compound is the same in the various presentations people are arguing about?

Mtinieon On 17th century "cocaine"

Perfect response. I'm chuckling, so thank you.

What's also humorous to me is this entire discussion is centered around vernacular usage of a word versus the scientific definition. Cocaine is cocaine, but "cocaine" means different things to some people and not to others.

Mtinieon On 17th century "cocaine"

https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/Cocaine

Does the molecule C17H21NO4 exist in both the raw, dried leaves of the coca plant, and a powdered, refined extract from the same plant?

Mtinieon On 17th century "cocaine"

They were using cocaine. It was a less concentrated form, sure, but it’s still using the same substance for a psychoactive effect.

Mtinieon Independent directors of 23andMe resign from board

How has Geneweb worked for you? Is it straightforward enough to use if you are somewhat technical, or do the “wizards” need to have a solid understanding of OCaml to make it worthwhile?

My daughter has been interested for years in delving into our different familial trees and has extensive records on paper and in various digital formats. She isn’t overly technical but could be taught to use a web interface if she’d gain value from the effort.

Mtinieon Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

I can easily envision a scenario that would preemptively “explain” why the pagers are internally different from past models:

Supplier: “Hey, we’ve got a refreshed model of the pager you wanted to buy in bulk. Interested?”

Buyer: “I don’t know, how do they work?”

Supplier: “Same as the other ones, minus a bit less plastic protection. With the weight savings they’ve added a new hardened receiver that’s supposedly more secure and will keep communications private. Also, they are 50% cheaper per unit…”

Buyer: “Say no more. We’ll take them.”

Mtinieon Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

If cost per unit isn’t a consideration, I suspect you can shrink the size of the electronic components used in the pager to make room for a 20 gram explosive charge.

Pagers—especially commodity models—aren’t profitable enough to warrant cutting edge tech with the latest advances in microelectronics. Lots of room to improve things if you are making a set of them at a loss.

Mtinieon Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach

You’d need to pick a day of importance to launch the chaos-sowing attack against information and social services. I’m sure there’s a useful one in early November.

Mtinieon OpenAI co-founder John Schulman says he will leave and join rival Anthropic

Is that a similar argument to “in the long run, digital social networks are healthy for society?”

I agree with your position, and I also agree that social networks can be a net positive…I’m just not convinced society can get out of “short run” thinking before it tears itself apart with exploitation.

Mtinieon OpenAI co-founder John Schulman says he will leave and join rival Anthropic

Training weights are gold.

Mtinieon "We ran out of columns"

Mercurial lost because it had the wrong mindshare. It was the Betamax of version control and while it had a lot of positives, it never gained the critical mass to overcome VHS.

Mtinieon Top doctor remains brain cancer-free after a year

That depends on the year. For example:

1947 - 4064 mm // 3682.800 Beetles

1969 - 4031 mm // 3712.949 Beetles

2019 - 4287 mm // 3491.229 Beetles

Mtinieon PaliGemma: Open-Source Multimodal Model by Google

“The first example of free and open-source software is believed to be the A-2 system, developed at the UNIVAC division of Remington Rand in 1953,[6] which was released to customers with its source code.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_free_and_open-sou....

Mtinieon GPUs Go Brrr

I’d assumed (like you) it meant that the H100 is ornery AND pickier about what it consumes, while the RTX4090 is playful and will eat damn near anything within reach of its mouth (with its sharp, velociraptor-like puppy teeth), whether you want it to or not.

But that may be straining the meme somewhat. :)

Mtinieon Solar Storm Knocks Out Farmers' Tractor GPS Systems During Peak Planting Season

Simply out of curiosity, how large of a space are you maintaining?

Mtinieon Apple apologizes for iPad 'Crush' ad that 'missed the mark'

I disliked the ad. I wasn’t outraged. I take a nuanced view that it was a piece of creative poised to be an impressive addition to Apple’s advertising laurels that missed the mark because its creators failed to account for a growing cultural unease.

Mtinieon Apple apologizes for iPad 'Crush' ad that 'missed the mark'

Exactly! Promote it as a modern day, virtual “Bag of Holding” and you win over the table top gamers, too. :)

Mtinieon Apple apologizes for iPad 'Crush' ad that 'missed the mark'

I had not considered that option, thank you for sharing that someone had.

Conceptually it makes a lot more sense in reverse.

“Look at every type of creative tool and instrument *contained* within this thin iPad” is inspiring.

“Look at how we’ve crushed all these creative tools and instruments” is decidedly not.

Mtinieon Social engineering takeovers of open source projects

Are people really looking though? Are all open source libraries being run through extensive performance profiling to look for known heuristics? Are they being looked at line by line for aberrations?

I don’t have confidence that people are looking for evidence of potential exploitation because of reasons like the ones you bring up.

So we’re back to we just don’t know.

Mtinieon Social engineering takeovers of open source projects

We have always faced it, it’s just that there's more awareness of the potential issues.

Mtinieon The Runners Who Went So Hard They Were Never the Same

Personally, I appreciate the transcript. I don’t enjoy listening to podcasts so having access to the info without having to force myself to listen is nice.

Mtinieon Memary: Open-Source Longterm Memory for Autonomous Agents

Discomfort noted, but I think it can work in either case. Pronounced your way, it’s the proverbial teat of knowledge for LLMs.

Mtinieon I now lack the juice to fuel the bluster to conceal that I am a simpleton

Your comment tells me all I need to know about you.

Obtuse commentary is worthless for discussion.

Mtinieon The darker side of being a doctor (2017)

…but if you postpone a procedure, the medical facility they work at isn’t able to keep up with their revenue targets.

Mtinieon The UX of UUIDs

I’m inferring the comment you were responding to meant

“Asking the customer to copy/paste the UUID from a URL to send to Support via an email or chat.”

Rather than asking a customer to read it out to you.

Mtinieon After AI beat them, professional Go players got better and more creative

That’s fair but I don’t understand the relevance to my comment.

Illustrators and graphic artists are in a hard spot given the commercial work they do. I’ve worked in this industry in the past and can attest that many of the contracts I executed on cared less about the originality of the output and more about the specifics of the prompt.

Generative AI is enough for a lot of clients, if the price is right, even when the output is subjectively bad.

Mtinieon After AI beat them, professional Go players got better and more creative

> On the other hand, art is mostly created by artists who were professionally trained as artists, i.e. not as scientists. Knowledge about computer technology is typically rather limited with both artists and collectors, leading to fairly bland stuff, or properly misguided hypes such as NFTs.

Having reread this section, and considered it, I’m going to hard disagree. You are severely underrating the technical capabilities of artists. Historical and contemporary.

Mtinieon After AI beat them, professional Go players got better and more creative

I use diffusion models and other generative tools to give me inspiration for works. While these aren’t solutions, per say, the tools do help me define (and refine) my approaches and offer visual options to consider.

Mtinieon After AI beat them, professional Go players got better and more creative

> Most of contemporary art is unaffected by the current AI craze.

The illustrators and digital artists I know would generally disagree.

As an abstract painter, I agree with you.

Significant genre specificity.

Mtinieon After AI beat them, professional Go players got better and more creative

This supports with my hypothesis about human-created art, post-AI.

People are deeply concerned about how their livelihoods and identities will survive the next few years. I get it, and while there’s certainly a level of existential dread that feels reasonable, I don’t see many people yet discussing what the visual arts industries will look like on the other side.

If Go play is in any way a creative exercise—which I’ve heard it is— then I’m super interested to see the state of humans in the arts 24 months out from now.