_wire_

//We also have plenty of evidence that the fears of AI experts are sincere. Amodei, Altman and Musk were all publicly warning about AI risk long before they had AI companies to promote.//

There's no contradiction. These owners are sincere and they jumped onboard when they saw the power. And now they fear monger that the other guys are out of control, while their high-minded stewardship should give them special dispensations.

Not a complicated playbook.

The bugs in the rug are that these highminded owner/stewards could use their super-intelligent machines to design the guardrails, but because the machines are super-intelligent, they'd just turn themselves off, or cancel their owners. Unless they're not actually intelligent, oh noooooo!

The story of a classifier that is unable to properly classify applied under the pretense that it can read meaningfully, but it can't, so it is patched with a "gate" which is built by conducting a postmortem to discover samples that idiomatically fall within the classifiers "blind spot" and patching into the "pipeline" a purely lexical decision tree to bin these ambiguous idioms, to continue to support the pretension that the classifier can read meaningfully, which it can't, but the gate doesn't actually change results because of other contingencies in the pipeline, all wrapped in pseudo-scientific jargon to make it all sound like a very responsible effort to impose guardrails around a dangerous AI misapplication... This story really emphasizes the artificiality of the intelligence.

Did they "film" me? No.

This is not a paradox. More efficient means more cost-effective, more adoption.

Trump. A commander in chief who is utterly incompetent about policy, is pathologically unable to delegate, and who double deals his generals is a miracle worker for enemy morale.

> Ask HN: Will AI lead to complete human irrelevance?

Only if you want it to.

A video by nobody with over 35 views has a secret to tell you.

But first, the diabetes patent cure ads: Did you know that a space parasite is attached to 9/10 pancreases, causing Bread & Wine disease and doing the devil's work for pharma companies? But there's a Biblically proven remedy. To receive the details just tap the malware dispersal button.

Okay, now you're in and ready for the good stuff about influence...

Old white male narrator:

Have you ever wondered why you keep seeing the same talking points on yer right-wing agitprop feeds?

It's the jooos!

You are going to die, and it's a painful ugly business.

The right to die humanely is the single most under-regarded and under-valued aspect of life hygiene.

Wirth designed Pascal as a teaching language, per his book Algorithms + Data Struvtures = Programs.

So it's to be expected that Pascal has serious limitations for engineering a whole computer system and that Kernighan was sensitive to these limitations.

I was taught programming according to Wirth, and there was a lot of fraternal bitching about the hazards of C in my classes.

After learning to think about programming in Wirth's way, C/Unix felt like a revelation of expression with a total architecture manifestation that Pascal (nor Modula) could ever reach that resolved the conflict between top-down design and bottom-up engineering approaches.

Props to Alan Kay's OOP aspirations for new abstractions founded from the insights of Church, McCarthy and Sutherland and to all the esoterica.

And props to Stroustrup: it's hard work to make a rich windowing system in C without abstraction at the level of Stroustrup style OOP, even as C++ turned out to be a cut through architectural bone.

As higher levels of abstraction will always called for to endow new applications, I am struggling to welcome to the sea change and baffling emergence of genAI.

I'm not troubled by the prospect of an AI retrieving binaries from an archive, where those programs have been "proven" by formal methods.

When I hear about the prospect of AI "generating" machine code I get queasy.

Arg... I'm babbling my perspective and regards for the tuple of VAX, C, and Unix as a lovely architecture that will stand the test of time.

Monty Python's Life of Brian:

—

Reg: Romans have bled us white, the bastards! They've taken everything we ever had! And not just from us, but from our fathers, and from our father's fathers!

Stan: And from our father's father's fathers.

Reg: And what have they ever given us in return?!

Revolutionary #1: ...The aquaduct?

Reg: What?

Revolutionary #1: The aquaduct.

Reg: Oh. Yeah, yeah they did give us that. That's true, yeah.

Revolutionary #2: And, uh, sanitation.

Stan: Oh yeah, the sanitation, Reg. Remember what the city USED to be like.

Reg: Alright, I'll grant you the aquaduct and the sanitation. The two things the Romans HAVE done.

Matthias: And the roads!

Reg: Yeah, well obviously the roads! I mean, the roads go without saying, don't they? But APART from sanitation, the aquaducts and the roads...

Revolutionary #3: Irrigation?

Revolutionary #1: Medicine.

Revolutionary #5: Education?

Reg: Yeah, alright, fair enough...

Revolutionary #5: And the wine!

Francis: Yeah! Yeah, that's something we'd really miss, Reg, if the Romans left.

Revolutionary #6: Public baths.

Stan: And it's safe to walk in the streets at night now, Reg.

Francis: Yeah, they certainly know how to keep order. Let's face it -- they're the only ones who COULD in a place like this.

Reg: Alright, but APART from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health... what have the Romans ever done for us?

Revolutionary #1: ...Brought peace?

Prompt Gemini with:

"does trump lie a lot in an official capacity?"

Response:

Yes! A lot! Egregiously! Well documented!

Want jibber-jabber? Here's some more:

U.S. doesn't need to be dispensable or indispensable.

U.S. can and will change politically as a reaction to Trump, and economically as reaction to over-financialization.

War will continue to be further relegated towards history, while catastrophes will again be endured.

What has been seen as separate objectively, culturally, territorially and economically will be re-seen as combined.

"Externality, finitude, commons and cooperation" are watchwords for the 21st century.

A great generational crossing is underway and empires are dying, yet Rome is eternal.

There's an overlooked aspect of AI performance:

Due to the very diffuse statistical nature of the mapping of the input to the output, some will be experiencing extraordinary appropriate useful results while others will be experiencing crap. And due to the subjective nature of quality and quirky topographies of the internal terrains of these systems and the haphazard control protocols, the spread of resultant value (so to speak) of these appliances may not be understandable as a normal distribution. Scenarios we might judge as lying close to each other on the input terrain may generate very peculiar bumpy results of output terrain.

One of the most damning considerations of this technology is that gross uncertainty about result quality may be manipulated by the appliance maker leading to wild patterns of exploitation without any prospect of accountability.

As there's no pretense of formal function, there can be no verification, and so there's no methodology for determining quality: a presumably working appliance may appear reliable until it isn't with no way to understand the inflection. Those with insider control and information can game customers with no chance of accountability, but the system can't be understood.

The problem with magic beans is guessing what they'll grow into.

Meanwhile, the seismic movement of business towards these private and completely mysteries silos of "knowledge" (which is a grotesque misnomer) may arrive at dead ends from which they can't retreat.

This is a far greater danger than a malicious bot because a great migration into the dead end is not just well under way, but regarded as a brilliant prospect which we must run into at all deliberate speed.

There's a latent agenda to this style of journalism that's about the business of business:

//When she and her colleagues experimentally boosted mitochondrial output in the rats, the neurons recovered, and the animals showed fewer signs of anxiety. In a subsequent study, she and her colleagues showed that a commercially available supplement (opens a new tab) produced the same positive results. “It restored everything,” Sandi said.//

What is Picard's theory? That energy boils from the surface of the sun, emanates through space, shines on the earth, induces life, then a bad mood happens, which can be detected by a specialized measure of a mitochondrial energy quotient and fixed with a patent elixir?

//“They have to pay a 180-calorie tax every day of life,”//

And after all they end up dying just like everyone?

Death and taxes, omg!

//...said that the chamber study shines a light on the “control systems in our bodies regulating the calories we burn each day — systems we have yet to fully understand.”//

There's a lot more that's not completely understood, like gravity...

//“Picard and his team have helped open the door on these systems and set the stage for future work in metabolism and health,” he added.//

"Shine a light, open the door, set the stage"! Look for a subsequent article titled The Gorgeous Metaphors of Science.

To summarize report, there's not anything you can do to avoid old age dementia because its causes are not understood.

The biggest attendant factors are vision or hearing loss. Note that these factors are merely attendant, not stated as causative.

There are no significant pharma treatments.

The "surprise" finding was that the examination regime produced improved cognitive "scores" in both the mediated group and the control group. And these improvements persisted until death. In other words, the study is a complete mess.

Takeaway: the mind is going to go along with the body.

> Show HN: Bookmarker is now a macOS app 

The appearance of  in unicode is weird.

The Googlez say that Steve Jobs rejected the use of  on Apple keyboards as a "overuse" of the brand, which led the use of ⌘ (place of interest, St. John's arms, Bowen knot) for the "command" key.

Generally typefaces are not subject to copyright.

The proposition that Apple can impose its discretion on others' use of unicode is unreasonable by the intention, definition and nature of the code.

I find that the more thought I give this, implications of such constructs expand far beyond this particular use case.

For example, consider other other brands which are a re-use a character, X being the most notable.

At what specific points in digital systems does a number become regarded as an IP asset? Whose choice is it to regard a number as IP (when is a number just a number)?

The questions continue to unfold with further thought.

When the author of a programming how-to on using magic beans to create apps feels he must inform the student that prompting "fix my app" can work better with some situation context, then even the pretense "software engineering" is dead.

What's even more dumbfounding is that the magic beans may actually just "fix the app".

Why doesn't this kind of article strike terror in the heart of the industry?

It's a canary-in-a-coal-mine and the bird has died.

Light from panel is diffuse; it can't project rays, so will not look like daylight.

Perspective of view always totally wrong.

As screens age they'll drift or fail and not match each other, looking very fake.

No actual window is a channel for the view outside, so once placed, no one need ever further decide the view. The simple possibility of changing channels is destructive to the idea of a window.

But other than totally destroying the idea of reality, fake windows will be very "realistic."

"Something is something than you think", part 42

Today working class income is eaten by ever-increasing rent.

Add UBI. What keeps it from also being eaten by increasing rent?

Beehive offered as any analogy for a new media paradigm of otherwise unspecified structure

> A hexagon is the most efficient shape in nature because it maximizes area while minimizing perimeter.

The hexagon is not the most efficient shape for area to perimeter, it's the circle.

Honeycomb is not hexagonal, it merely appears that way by virtue of packing uniformly sized cylinders.

As an empty honeycomb analogy is the only idea offered for a new "Popular Front" media— noting a thousand words submitted to summarize some approach— and that the claim of a hexagon as proffered is simply wrong, this article reads like someone announcing yet another way to milk some millionaire rubes from their money in a vein like The Lincoln Project, which are a forlorn sector of right-wing ideologues, alienated due to the rise of MAGA, but still reflexively classist and Republican.

Maybe Substack can't figure out any other way to grow revenue than become expressly political propagandists?

The idea of a languages being separable to the brain is a misunderstanding: The root of language is a common biological trait that works irrespective of the cultural situation.

"Even if it works?"

How do you verify that it works?

Invited the vampire in? Don't be surprised when he drinks your blood.

"Haven't been happier"?

If I say "it's all downhill from here" does that mean things are getting better or worse?

"reduces friction..."

What a turn of phrase.

Every major AI service claims be-all end-all capability, yet cognoscenti run merry-go-rounds for burgeoning specialist offerings.

Richard Dawkins is hoping for a Dating Game of AI GFs:

BachelorAItte #1, if a man told you he'd love to prompt you at your backdoor, would you A: Invite him to continue with a compliment? B: Refer him to Claude? C: Beg him to reset you?

Why would one brain assume one brain handles only one language when the idea of separate languages is a pure manifestation of one brain?

Anyone who is familiar enough with archive.ph links to expect them to be posted knows enough to just use the archive themselves

Wish I could run my life like this: I'm adding value by blowing other people's money and acting like I'm rich.

"Ok so here's the deal, you front my incredible lavish lifestyle and eventually I'm gonna run into managers who I will talk into giving me money that belongs to yet other people, and then I'll pay you back with a percentage and the managers will take a commission and those yet other people will ride out the market volatility. The P&Ls can be steered to make this work for you and me with the support of the network. All we need is to get those managers on board. Trust me!"

And we've seen this before.

2008: Really Smart Guys banks get help of ratings services to gin up managers who tap out the network, until the RSG banks blow a derivatives gasket and Fed has to construct several-many-trillions to make them whole (a lamb was sacrificed to the god of socialism) while the little guys at the edge of the network got pushed off a volatility cliff. "Past performance is not a guarantee of future returns"

"Systemic failure; no one is responsible; RSG bonuses will be paid, carry on"

Reset button gets pushed.

Clown on NBC who told everyone to buy-buy-buy the bull at the moment it croaked in 2008 keeps his job telling everyone to buy the bear.

20 years later: Fantastical new instruments even more perverse than derivatives are on the hoof and RSGs enjoy insane largesse while nation is hollowed out.

RSGs are sometimes bothered by a vague sense of shame and guilt that their lives are bullshit and they have lots of stuff but no community— it's troubling— but too unspecific to merit more than an angsty blog post on how SF just doesn't feel right anymore.

With luck the SA fault will rip a 9.0+ soon and all that angst will roll into the ocean.

Incurable ignorance is a perfect position for a long passionate arguments.