Nition

Yes indeed, I'm aware of it, though I admit I never finished the whole thing. It did make me notice this situation even more acutely.

It's funny that the part everyone quotes from the book (namely the Borges fable and the 'desert of the real itself') is in the introduction. Makes me wonder how many others didn't actually get through it. :)

Ah, thank you very much for this reply, because I haven't watched Community myself so I didn't realise the confusion between a show that's intentionally about a meta situation vs. ... well what you've written explains my meaning exactly.

I don't know if I have a good argument for it myself. I have seen a lot of people saying specifically that they based their {thing} on {prior thing} rather than something from life, but I haven't exactly kept a list. Beyond that it's mostly a feeling.

To give an extreme example, just to make what I'm talking about obvious, this recent Instacart superbowl ad comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXGTaGjqERc

Nothing about the scene or anyone in it is really connected to any reality; the whole thing is like a second-level simulation of prior media.

I have really noticed recently that a lot of modern media (film, TV, videogames, etc) seems much more based on prior media than on the author's experience of the world. Like everything is now operating at a meta level. It's a little sad.

I'm all for packaging nice reusable libraries, but someone has to actually do it. A lot of them just don't exist (yet).

With the level of ability that AI is at right now, I've found it useful personally to think of it something like a very good search over existing knowledge. Another step up in searchability in the lineage of reference books, stack overflow, GitHub etc.

Programmers are rewriting and reinventing the same techniques more often than any other vocation I can think of, and so we were primed for a really good search over prior art. The fact that AI can also adapt that prior art to your particular use case makes it even more powerful.

Much like how great success never came from cobbling together various bits of copy-pasted code from Stack Overflow though, current AI can't really build your whole project.

Yeah, look at the parent comment I was sarcastically responding to.

Of course top of all that, even if human morals were perfect, it's still a dubious claim.

We'll have to disagree here. My feelings are more in line with Nick Cave's recent essay on AI generated music: https://www.theredhandfiles.com/considering-human-imaginatio...

A superintelligent AI will be safe though, because it learnt its morality from us.

I think with a book or movie, a lot of the emotional reaction actually comes from the work of the human that created it. You can feel the emotion of the creator and the story they set out to tell and have some connection with them. You make a good point about how we've always been able to emotionally connect with fiction, but low effort AI does feel different.

Nah, you just open source it in a broken state without anything that had separate licensing, so nobody is happy and the law is followed.

Ha! Well, at least that actually increases my confidence that VeraCrypt is secure.

This looking so much like an intentional backdoor just makes me wonder even more about TrueCrypt's sudden recommendation in 2014 that everyone switch to BitLocker. This particular backdoor didn't exist then (it's only Win11 apparently) but this sure makes it seem more plausible that another one might have.

Though if TrueCrypt was killed to try and get people to switch to encryption that could be backdoored, then why allow its successor VeraCrypt to exist? It's open source and independently audited, so it really shouldn't be backdoored.

Good point. Same problem as with AI art and writing; we actually appreciate the human striving.

That makes sense, although in that case personally I would have named it Windows Linux Subsystem.

Is this really true, or is it just something people have repeated enough times like 'nuclear Ghandi'?

I mainly ask because Microsoft has another product called Linux Integration Services: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=551...

It's a Linux subsystem for Windows so we'll call it Windows Subsystem For Linux.

And now those words are infusing the training runs of LLMs as well. The words of the extrovert who's already outside living life aren't written down.

AR glasses killer app.

It certainly doesn't increase my confidence that if they do ever create a superintelligence, that it won't have some weird unforseen preference that'll end up with us all dead.

You can try it here: https://talkie-lm.com/chat

There's a few minutes' wait time, but it's working.

Continuing this conversation, I'm trying to convince TALKIE about computers.

USER: I wonder if we could build a calculating machine that would be close enough to perfectly reliable that we would not have to verify the results. For example, you may have seen Leibniz's work showing that all numbers can be represented with just 0 and 1, or George Boole's work on algebra with just two values. Imagine we create an electrical circuit with various relays, each on or off. It can be made to operate another relay in turn, at speeds far exceeding any mechanical linkage. Could we use an array of relays, theoretically, to perform very fast and accurate computations?

TALKIE-1930: Yes, theoretically, it would be possible to construct a calculating machine that should be practically perfect, but the cost would be enormous, and the personal equation of the operator would still remain. Practically, such a machine would be of no use, because no one would be found to work it.

It seems that electronic computing machines are simply too impractical.

Let's try some more...

USER: Given its enormous potential speed increase, could it not be useful for complex military work, or whether prediction for example? I'm sure someone could be trained to operate such a machine.

TALKIE-1930: Yes, it could be so used.

USER: Do you think it will be possible in the future to use machines, powered by electricity, to do the kind of mathematical calculations that computers do today?

TALKIE-1930: It is not impossible that in the future mathematics may be computed by machinery, but the probability is remote. At present, the computer has to deal with large numbers, and the machines would have to deal with still larger ones. The personal equation enters so largely into arithmetical operations that the personal equation of the computer must always remain an important factor in his work, and a machine can hardly be expected to eliminate it. Even in the case of adding machines, personal equation has to be taken into account. Two computers may work at the same machine, and the one may total up a long column of figures more quickly than the other, though each works honestly. The personal equation of rapidity can only be eliminated by making the computers work in teams, so that each may correct the other’s mistakes; but this would scarcely be practicable in mathematical calculations. At best, machinery can only be used to save labour, not to supersede it. Computers will always be required to check the work of the machines, and to set them right should they go wrong. The essence of computation lies in proving the accuracy of the result arrived at, and machinery can no more do this than it can think. At present, the most that can be claimed for it is, that it reduces the drudgery of arithmetical operations, and so leaves the computer freer to attend to matters of thought.

Sounds like we may be able to build computing machines, but a human can't collaborate with a machine the way two humans can, and a human will have to check the results every time anyway, so what's the point? Only a human can prove that a calculation is correct.

I vividly remember my friend and I first thinking of this question during a sleepover at around 13 years old, as we stayed awake late talking about what seemed at the time like the deep philosophies of life. This isn't to say that it's a bad question, but more that it's funny how everyone seems to come up with this question independently at some point. I've read many others with the same question since.

I wouldn't say they necessarily aren't personally concerned as well. I think quite often if people disagree with their employer but don't want to lose their jobs, it's more amenable to phrase disagreement like they have there. Yes it would be braver to just come out and say "I really don't like this", but at least it's braver than saying nothing at all.

Apple should have used that one for the 2016 MacBook.

The Leaf is one of those cars now too: https://www.caranddriver.com/photos/g65082021/2026-nissan-le...

Ultimately even with that tech, you can still take a photo of an AI generated scene. Maybe coupled with geolocation data in the signature or something it might work.

I feel it's too much of a perfect match to be generated from the model's memory. It's pixel perfect. Gotta be a mistake.

The links Gemini references are also to articles about the Skoda bell, so it's just a circular reference to the same claim anyway.