PittleyDunkin

"Parameterizing complexity" is probably a better way to say it. There's no isolation when it comes to software.

> As Carmack pointed out the problem with AR/VR right now - it's not the hardware, it's the software.

The third option is peoples' expectation for AR/VR itself: it could be a highly niche and expensive industry and unlikely to grow to the general population.

Maybe eventually. Based on this quality I don't see this happening any time in the near future.

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> No VC would want it and there’s not a wealthy user base to bootstrap it.

More to the point, VCs invented these apps specifically to disenfranchise workers and vaccuum up the lost cost as a bullshit "service fee".

Well something must have changed if they're having to show up at a job fair.

Well if we aren't going to get the actual fruits of capitalism I'm for damn sure going to fight it tooth and nail at home. Shit sucks and I can't think of anyone I trust less than an American capitalist.

How do you refer just to the sort of alphabets that do have vowels and not abjads?

I saw a photo pop up a few months back from a hiring fair at Yale. I guess Skull and Bones isn't pulling them in like it used to.

China is not a geopolitical adversary to me. Why would I want to beef with China when China has never done anything to treat me poorly?

Tbh I think this has a lot more to do with sympathy for Palestinians and the last year of protests on college campuses.

Besides, who cares if China is listening to us through the app. China and I have no beef with one another. China feeds me and clothes me and builds most of the stuff in my life and I give China my money. It's a good relationship! Much better than my relationship with this state, tbh.

While the greek letter names are derived from phoenician (e.g. aleph/alef/alep and bet), my understanding is that the term was first coined in reference to the greek script (e.g. alpha + bet-). It does, however, seem increasingly silly to look to etymology to argue for why we should use the terms as I did when actual evidence as to the origin seems extremely sketchy at best and may not be relevant to our current needs.

I just think it's useful to distinguish consonantal scripts from those with full vowel inclusion. Why not use alphabet/abjad for this? There's already a broad understanding of this meaning; why not lean into it?

I'll also admit this gets more complicated when I see people referring to an "abjad alphabet", but this leaves us with no way to describe an alphabet with consonants and vowels as opposed to a consonantal one.

> this could just be the beginning of our society beginning to scrutinize these platforms.

I think politicians have scrutinized american social media and they're 100% fine with the misery they induce so long as they are personally enriched by them.

> There's a certain historic symmetry with how opium was traditionally used in China

TikTok isn't anywhere near as destructive as opium was. Hell, purely in terms of "mis/disinformation" surely facebook and twitter are many times worse than TikTok.

Surely the appropriate modern parallel is fentanyl.

Yes, exactly. Linear A was the first alphabet, and greek gave "alphabet" its name.

I almost get the sense that people are interpreting abjad as "lesser-than" an alphabet. It's just a distinction, it's not a value judgement.

> This is a modern distinction.

Well, the actual scripts were distinguished semantically all along, and "alphabet" is also a word newer than the scripts in question. We should probably just use the words that make most sense to modern english speakers rather than... whomever you're referring to. Or just use "phonetic script" or something.

They have money and want to make more money? This seems like a straightforward question to answer.

I'm not really convinced he's on "the wrong side"—we're entitled to strong opinions about the role of film in society and this is either value-oriented or subjective. But I emphatically do admire his willingness to stake his claim without ambiguity.

> His reviews aren't any less interesting even when you disagree with him.

100%

Does it even need to be that analytical? Conservatism can also also be general skepticism of change. And I don't know if you've ever tried to quit nicotine before but it's very good at convincing you it's a relatively harmless habit that helps cope with all sorts of stress and anxiety. If you're already inclined to be generally skeptical of change, smoking would slot right in there.

That said I'm curious if we're projecting back strong moralistic or party/ideology-aligned takes on smoking before it was really prevalent. I don't think anyone is questioning the role money plays in broadly misleading the public about smoking itself, just that the ideological/partisan divide such as it exists today might not map cleanly to the past.

Why not the Volcker shock? I think there's stronger evidence for persistent effects there.

Regardless, I see systems analysis as more productive here than root cause analysis.

I want to push back on the surreal end slightly. It's true that his movies are extremely resistant to analysis, and it's true that much of his imagery is de-facto surreal. But his movies still have narratives assembled from humans in concrete situations with concrete problems and easily understandable actions and reactions. In other words, you can enjoy his movies as an experience at relative face-value in a way many other forms of surreal art resist.

Some more than others, perhaps—the man produced Dune and Eraserhead pretty damn close together, and Eraserhead is not generally considered an easy movie to watch. But the man was never afraid or dismissive of giving us straightforwardly enjoyable cinema, even if we can't easily articulate why!

I find it interesting how much Ebert hated that movie. I'm not sure how I feel about it myself, tbh, but I am certain I don't have his conviction to state it clearly and unambiguously. The film certainly made me feel things no other movie has.

I see what you're saying in the sense of passive energy collection, but perpetual motion strikes me as a terrible metaphor. Perpetual motion would imply so many thing about the universe that solar can't deliver.

> Humans engage in confabulation but they’re mostly aware of it.

I'm not sure this is the case at all. Some awareness of this doesn't imply full awareness. In my experience, most people are unaware of how incoherent their worldviews are, so the distinction between normative and confabulatory behavior isn't clear.

> An AI that has enough sense of self-awareness to not hallucinate

It's not entirely clear that this is meaningful. Humans engage in confabulation, too.

The divorce of wages and productivity is real. You can pick any year in the last 40 and the trend will be very evident.

I'm actually curious if this continues through he 2020s. It could have gotten worse or better or been the yardstick by which people were fired or hired.

Frankly we don't even need currency to begin with.

I doubt that it's a single action that sustained four+ decades of impacts. More likely this is the concerted effort of capital to continually reign in threats.

> Is there a risk that cloud providers cannot meet the demand?

Waste? Cloud providers are super expensive and can't generally justify this expense with the benefits of outsourcing.

How about we cut the AI bit and just get a nice C02 decrease, i.e. the actual thing that will support future humans? THat's one more coal plant we can shut down.

Yea but gpt-4 is also only very slightly marginally useful in terms of productivity as it stands today. I highly doubt we're going to get returns on this without huge structural changes to how chatbots work.