ajb

I guess part of the point is that it's not subject to the constraints of what you could actually do, so you can make it even more impressive. It's propaganda, after all.

My high school computing teacher had a chemistry degree, from back around then. There was so much expectation about computers, that when the chemicals he was doing his phd on seemed to have some kind of nonlinear behaviour, his supervisor got hugely excited and made him look into whether there was a way use them to build switching devices; even though it would have been highly impractical even if they had. Basically everyone was trying ways to make switches.

People have a bad intuition about economic mechanisms, but that does not mean that AI won't cause huge regressive effects.

The transition from independent artisans to factory work didn't cause massive unemployment. But it cause the former artisans to lose out, because they no longer had the bargaining power they had before - their work was now a commodity. This resulted in "Engel's pause", a period in which wages stagnated, and so conditions got worse because prices also increased.

But AI also isn't just automation. It's the automation of automation. You may think that you will just level up and learn the new skill set of managing AIs, but the AI companies will be collecting the data to automate that too. Often by watching you.

I think this is a good observation, but I think the diagnosis is slightly wrong. I don't think the process of becoming dismissive of opinions different to yours is limited to those with "extremist" views.

The people who agree with you are a biased sample of the population. But so are the people who are willing to openly disagree. So we have both a "bubble" and an "anti-bubble". This is especially true for people with unusual views, but it's also true for everyone.

I had a colleague who was part of an idiosyncratic religious denomination, which believes in the literal truth of the Bible etc. He was a nice guy and mostly we avoided talking about this. The one person who raised it in social conversation was the most tactless guy in the office. (To be fair he wasn't that tactless. Someone has to be last). Lots of people online are looking for a verbal fight. The decent people who know you socially or via work, but disagree with you over some political or religious issue, will usually avoid talking about it with you. That applies just as much if you have a mainstream but not universally held belief, as if you have an extreme one.

The problem here is that there's not really any incentive to seriously engage with a person with opposing views, even though our society would be a lot better if people did it. Lots of people seem to think that freedom of speech just means freedom to harangue those you disagree with, and aren't interested in the search for truth.

You could actually look at the sources before dismissing them as a conspiracy theory. It took less than 2 seconds to click through to the patent, of which the very first claim is:

- 1. A method of reducing the period before the onset of sleep in an individual comprising administering to the individual a single dose of melatonin of less than 1 mg, said single dose effective to raise the peak plasma level of melatonin in the individual to within physiological nocturnal levels of normal untreated individuals.

And that patent was granted.

There is a rumour that the high doses are because the correct dose was under patent.

I can only find that in a comment here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/10/melatonin-much-more-th... but I could have sworn it was in the main article when I first read it. (If so that makes it less likely, because the author revises his articles for correctness)

That (albeit long) article is worth reading. For example, it explains that melatonin is a phase signal, so being saturated with too much melatonin actually makes the signal less clear (as well as potentially causing other issues).

The one thing that gives me concern in their is "nanoda [the external proof checker] is [now] tracked daily". Although that would have caught this issue, we also now live in a world in which some model is going to think that hacking the proof-checker distribution is the obvious way to obtain the proof it is after; I expect that attempts on that will be much more common than soundness bugs. However, this is said without knowing what other measures are in place to assure the integrity of the distribution.

This is a moving tribute. Stephen Wolfram's writing often has certain faults, which I mention only to be able to say that he has here transcended them; this is a genuine and heartfelt piece of writing which makes me feel sad for his loss.

That's a likely motivation, but it's worth pointing out that it's against one of the HN community's other values: thinking things through properly, not just picking an option.

The hacker mindset values understanding how the moving parts fit together, and thinking about whether better strategies than the "received wisdom" exist. Politics is often a demand to pick a side, which is against that, but "we just don't do politically contraversial subjects here" is even more against that.

FWIW I have seen wind damage to a brick building, but with a shade sail, which while having a similar purpose is typically larger than a typical awning (although an awning on every window might approach the same load).

Small ones like this may be fine, but buildings (especially old ones) may have surprisingly small margin for extra wind load laterally. What seems like a cheap option could require an expensive structural analysis, or an even more expensive later repair.

Indeed, I would be interested to know if this was more than just albedo.

There can be a difference between whose the fault is, and who is accountable. Usually, the entity you paid is the one legally accountable to you. This is not just a trivial detail: you will have no luck with the law attempting to hold the other entity to account, even if they are at fault; while you can hold your counterparty to account even if their action was dictated by someone else; they have to act correctly with you- it's not your problem if their relationship with some other company is put into contention. This may not apply to domains, FWIW. usually, buying a domain means you have a contract with the registry too. I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.

This can big companies too, FWIW. Cisco were in violation of the GPL over the WRT54G, which resulted eventually in the release of OpwnWRT. Well, Cisco weren't the entity which actually caused that fault; the chip vendor was, as they were the ones who used the linux kernel without releasing the source. That is not a valid reason to violate a licence.

I don't know why you expect me to be a partisan for it, given the best thing I said about it was "driving on it is a non-event".

Experimentation with junction design has been a good thing in the UK. Many of the designs are, however, attempts to do as well as possible in the space, because a better design would require compulsorily purchasing some people's houses or gardens. So, although there are not lots of magic roundabouts, there are lots of agglomerations of mini-roundabouts with slightly different topology , many of which are more annoying (but fit in the space, and keep traffic flowing).

However, it does seem likely that this is kept mainly because of its fame. I seem to recall that there was a proposal to replace it which was shouted down.

I'm sure you know this, but for the benefit of those who haven't seen it before: it does not go anticlockwise. The"roundabout" in the middle is an illusion generated by the 5 normal roundabouts in a circle. There are no special rules.

It has a bad rep, but if you're used to British mini roundabouts, driving on it is a non-event. The regularity actually means it's simpler than other, smaller, but more arbitrary aggregations of mini-roundabouts.

Interesting.

I think part of the reason people assume it's not possible is that (at least in the UK) there is so much faux-consultation which has approximately no effect; both in the public and private sector. But it looks superficially like the same thing.

Igalia is very serious about worker ownership. They aren't legally structured as a cooperative, as they don't technically meet the definition - as I understand it, they were nervous about the idea of committing wholly to new employees getting an equal vote right away, so there is a longer, more gradual process through which employees become owners and gain voting rights. But a very large fraction have them, and (like a cooperative) their rights are legally enforceable.

Substack is trying to turn itself into a social network, so comments on substack posts by other substack bloggers let people find other blogs. This is why half the comments on popular substacks are from other bloggers casually mentioning the articles they wrote.

It also means that if you comment on a substack, other people can find all the comments you made on every substack, by default.

While the alcohol consumption can be a bit nuts, the UK has a relatively strong cultural tradition that what happens in the pub stays in the pub. That makes it a useful low-risk way to air work issues that would not be raised in a work meeting, either because criticism would be taken as an offense, or just because the person raising them would not get to speak to the person that needs to hear.

Of course, there's nothing enforcing that managers respect it. The main mechanism is that many managers realise it's in their interests to be able to hear unvarnished truths, and for their team to be able to relieve their feelings outside work instead of inside. And for them to be able to get to know their team better. But not all have the integrity or humility to do so.

The problem is not necessarily job losses as such. When artisans were replaced by factory work, it took a long time for automation to actually reduce the number of workers. What happened quickly was that the asset of the artisans -their skill and experience - was replaced by an asset owned by the factory owner -the capital equipment. That converted workers from having guaranteed work, and a degree of autonomy, to being a replaceable commodity dominated by the factory system.

This is the real threat today. The growth of the middle class was essentially the growth of jobs in which the workers have human capital in their skill and experience again. That experience is being slurped up by LLMs and other models.

The question is whether "LLM operator" is really going to be a profession which requires scarce skills and experience, or whether many companies will be operable with less well-rewarded workers. I think that those who think there's an obvious correct prediction here are overconfident.

The one I really don't accept is the Ryanair Russian Roulette pricing model, where they advertise cheap prices, but have many hidden tripwires that add a multiple of the sticker cost.

The problem is that they also need to be big enough not to be rolled by aggressive behaviour such as lawsuits, pressure from politicians, etc. I mean, some of my domains are at a tiny company run by geeks, but I wouldn't really blame them for caving if someone really put the heat on them.

There's a certain threshold above which you want to use the "law firm with in-house domain registry" type. I think the threshold is pretty high though, definitely "call us for a quote" territory. But you will notice that big companies like Amazon and Google that have their own registry, don't use it for their critical domains - such as Google.com or Amazon.com.

In the UK, the old common law rule does not apply to land that has been registered centrally, that is then the legal definition of who owns the property. However there are still properties that are not registered and for those, the rule you describe is still applicable; the holder of the deeds is the owner.

Registration is now compulsory on sales, but that only came in in 1990.

As to what I mean by binned, I mean literally binned, thrown away.

The UK used to have a distributed system - everyone had to have a solicitor store "deeds" of their property, which were a sort of paper blockchain of all the transactions the land had been in since - I don't know, since records began I guess. Since we got a centralised land registry cheaper solicitors have binned these, but some properties still have them as a historical record.

I understand the frustration, but it's justifiable for the public to be concerned about AI in general because the novelty of the technology means that boundaries between beneficial and problematic usage is not yet stable and well defined. For existing technologies consensus on that has usually been reached, although it changes over time. In many cases we may not yet have enough information to decide.

Nor is this a trivial decision. AI has the potential to change society and economic relations as profoundly as the industrial revolution, or the invention of the printing press.

These boundaries are also contested, as interests which benefit from a particular application are different from those whose interests are harmed. Society needs to identify which usages have a net benefit.

It also needs to define which usages cause "absolute" harms which is will consider unacceptable regardless of benefits to some parties. Such as, potentially, reductions in personal autonomy, increased leverage or dominance by government or private interests.

Not only that, but data and models which were collected/ built for one purpose can easily be adapted for others.

This is also basically now happening all at once in many domains.

In short, you can expect there to be tension over these boundaries for some time. It's not realistic to expect that others will agree with your personal perception of which applications are "obviously" unproblematic.

A positive one, or a negative one?

The problem with this line of thinking is that the more humanity succeeds at becoming efficient at providing for its essential goods and services, the more the economy rests on unnecessary ones. Should we really accept that the more successful we are, the less individuals can expect to be valued?

Yeah that happens all the time. Anyone/thing with popular public releases has fans/journeys scraping the website looking for unreleased material or scoops.

In the early days one of the high profile soaps in the UK published their "catch up" summaries for the week ahead which you could get just by editing the date in the URL. But back then not so many people were looking, so they were doing it for months...

In the semiconductor industry this role is called Field Application Engineer. They do serious work, not just slideware, as your chip probably ships with drivers that were designed months or years before you could get significant time from the customers engineers (which generally only happens after you manufacture, but you need software to prove it works well before that). So these guys are the ones who adapt it, and their feedback is valuable as they are the ones who build understanding of the customer.

However, at my old employer they didn't get commit rights to the main software repos. They had to carry around a bunch of patches which were gradually cleaned up and integrated. As I didn't directly work with them, I don't know if this says more about them or the guys managing the internal development.

It's a role that fits a different personality to that typical among software engineers. If you're bored as a dev it may suit. Pointless to try to shoehorn people into the role that don't suit it though.

Interesting, I hadn't heard of Petersen's algorithm before. There's a similar algorithm by Lamport (of course): https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/fast-mutex.pdf .