alganet

Reflections. I don't think it can keep heat more than steel does.

To anyone reading: think very carefully about what you're doing before pointing high powerful lasers at glass.

Dude, the movie Don't Look Up is a metaphor for climate change denialism. It has nothing to do with asteroids.

Again (see my other comment in the thread), I thought the oxides were just for color variation and there was depth changes that could be used for a mold.

Anyway, there are still ways of moving forward with the idea. For example, chemically removing the oxide layer to a desired thickness sounds feasible. If I were him, I would try it (but maybe in another video, as the whole process would be a whole different rollercoaster).

Can you be more specific? I don't see a tangible way to root this discussion except for speculation.

I thought the oxides were just for color variation. Maybe I misunderstood that part.

Why not?

We can make it so it's never aliens, or always aliens. Public and science opinion has become a free for all lately.

People are so caught up in the 3I/ATLAS stuff, for example. Should we beam a message to it? What should we think of it? It's a circus.

Let's go back to Boyajian's Star instead. Can we really be sure the dimming is not caused by a mothership coming from that direction? It explains everything, right? Maybe that's how they communicate, by sending a paper plane and opening a large occlusion origami that says "we come from this general direction" (I'm cosplaying Avi Loeb here, satirically).

There's something about interpretation in all of this. Space is full of radio signals. We determine lots of them to be natural (with good reason).

I'm afraid proposing "we should answer" (in case of electromagnetic signals) could lead to a scenario in which people are encouraged to believe something without the means to verifying it. Some idiot group could do it just to increase the popular optimism about space in order to induce a favorable perception on the development of space technologies with the ultimate goal of just bumping some industry with money. It's the kind of world we live in right now, unfortunatelly.

If we want to be serious about humanity's place in the universe, first we need to be serious about our home right here. I don't think we're mature enough to have responsible control over technologies that could be used to send a powerful signal into space.

I think this has applications in virtual fences. For example, if you want to restrict someone's behavior to a certain pattern.

Also, you can think of it as the subject (or subjects) programming the modeling agent: if the modeled mind is able to recognize it's being modeled, it's reasonable to consider the possibility that it can influence how those inferred scripts are created just by shaping its own behavior.

It can't be like an EEG, right? "Please be quiet and predictable while I model you, sir".

Of course, what humans think of predictability might not hold water. One could think he's behaving in a random way but in reality following well-known patterns (unknown to him).

It's an interesting problem. Absolutely terrifying stuff.

2007 saw the first widespread global political campaign over social media. It was an overwhelming success. So good, everyone started doing it. So good, you can't not do it.

That opened a Pandora's box of what can be described as ideological harassment online. Again, we live in a world now in which everyone does it. It is now so pervasive, that the current generation cannot understand what it was before, and therefore cannot perceive what changed (not being nostalgic, lots of things were bad back then).

In my opinion, that explains a lot of related trends related to mental health, perceived internet addiction, even device type market share.

It is true that empathy is defined as ability to relate, and that doesn't imply happiness. Similar with intelligence. It's a quirk of our current reductionist world.

However, our definitions for those things are murky. I'm making a bold claim that being evil is ultimately a dumb move.

I'm also making a bold claim by estabilishing a path from intelligence to empathy to kindness. Actually, before intelligence, comes communication.

Communication -> Intelligence -> Empathy -> Kindness

In that sense, when empathy does not lead to kindness, it's because whoever has it stopped before moving to the next step.

The empath who is not kind stopped at an important step. He is able to relate to others, but is not able to observe higher dynamics except for when those dynamics include himself.

Maybe you're being naive about what kindness means. It seems that you are relating it to altruism and charity in a very superficial sense.

Since you mentioned AI, I'll also give my perspective on that:

I'm concerned that it will, literally, suck the blood of good engineers to pump into bad ones.

Some 10 years ago, I would tell juniors that donating blood is a good thing to do and something they should aim for. I am not so sure about that anymore. Today I would teach them to sharpen wooden stakes.

I want promising junior developers to survive. That's an important prerequisite for being able to be a good developer. I don't want them to be too naive and die off.

There's a certain mesmerizing effect that creeps in once you start digging into programming language fundamentals.

Any kind of notation, really, can do that to a person. It's kind of hypnotic.

I avoid it like the plague (getting too much into it). Not because I dislike it, but because I like it so much.

I believe the ideal programming language must be full of problems, and then obvious ways to get around those problems. It's better than a near-perfect language with one or two problems that are very hard to get around.

The "Stop Writing Dead Programs" video mentioned is quite nice. It's surprising how the web is a platform for many of the languages the presenter offer as inspiration.

The main question I asked is "what would Trump be without an enemy?", and that's your response.

Ok, fine. Let's think of that hypothetical: The US wins.

Then what? How would Trump thrive in that world? What's his next angle? Every single country in the world is thinking that same question.

I don't think China wants to fight.

What would Trump be without an enemy? I think that's the question we need to answer here. Can he thrive in a world in peace? I have difficulty imagining what he would do.

I would go even further: most countries in the world right now don't need an enemy. There is just a few of them that are defined by persistent war.

I am sorry, there is a bunch of steps to that conclusion that I took for granted.

We seem to be in a moment that values more terrible engineers in volume than non-terrible engineers.

To me, it sounds very likely that if you're a not-terrible engineer, you won't be rewarded by that effort. Instead, you'll be hired or leveraged for value in the same batch as several other mixed-quality engineers, and rewarded as a maybe-terrible engineer.

Maybe I just want to be non-terrible if there's a viable reward for doing that.

That goes for jobs (you are hired to do something etc) and also for work like free software, open source, even portfolio work (stuff you do to display your skills). Maybe you want to do just enough to show that you can be a non-terrible engineer if the reward for acting that way is guaranteed, which today, it isn't (in my opinion).

> Obviously I don’t understand every library I use – that’d be absurd

Hey, that's a neat idea.

What if we could make a whole useful system that one single person can understand completely down to the bottom (in a single lifetime or less)?

Doesn't mean you have to understand it, but a system that you could if you wanted to. If possible, also, something familiar (in contrast to an esoteric TempleOS like thing).

Clearness is a luxury good. I want to be able to demonstrate that I can do it, but I won't do it for free.

No, it doesn't.

> They called them “stories,” and “epics,” and recorded them in Jira, but they were more like technical tasks.

Yep. Mostly title-only technical tasks that will end up as a point in a graph, and an excuse to put tools over people instead of people over tools. A true perversion of the agile core principles. Jira-oriented product development killed agile.

It should have been separatd into "new hire" and "long time employee", regardless of technical experience.

You should expect new hires (of any seniority level) to jump in and try to fix things. It shows they're invested, willing to embrace opportunities.

You should expect new hires (of any seniority level) to ask lots of questions. They need to learn this new environment, quickly. That's the best way to do it.

You should expect new hires (of any seniority level) to try to be extra helpful. They still don't know exactly where they can help the most, mapping the ground is a good sign.

You should expect new hires (of any seniority level) to be enthusiastic. It shows they value being there, and are on board with trying new approaches. In other words, it shows they believe themselves to be useful in that new environment.

It has absolutely nothing to do with being a senior, but being in a new environment. Of course, to juniors, every environment is new and they should do that all the time. Seniors should do that when they change environments, or when the environment changes for them.

Tapestry of belief systems, conceptual terrain that constrains social behavior... same stuff.

I don't claim he is the one being obscene. I think he's quite conservative (the idea of AI influencing behavior is not new and his example is simplistic). I was talking about myself attempting to describe these dynamics in more clear cut terms.

It's also not universally obscene, it's obscene in a "everybody knows but you are not supposed to talk about it" way.

I'm approaching astrology and horoscope from a more "social role" perspective than a strictly internet-atheist-boy one.

That's why I can put them together. They work together to create an effect in society. Astrology and horoscope belong together and support each other. Doesn't matter if one of them is less random.

The aspects you described (stars, cellestial bodies, energy) directly refer to scientific concepts. Which I find hilarious. It totally didn't started like that.

Look at what you said: light, kinds of energy. It totally is a domesticated strain of an earlier belief that was much different. The very domesticated strain you defend still supports the general idea of things like horoscope (in social dynamics terms), but it has come a long way in becoming more secular.

I would say my first description (a less virulent strain is possible) is spot on.

But it is, kind of, a Terminator situation. A cultural one, not a technological one.

You see, this idea did travelled to the past. Maybe not with a time machine, but by means of us humans imagining it before it existed.

Now we're laying the public discourse of a real technology on top of a landing strip made on the popular culture by movies and sci-fi authors.

The plane: the actual technology we're just developing.

The landing strip: the decades of imagining and popular culture.

If anyone truly believes LLMs are a monster, they're mistaken. The monster is within this brahmanian representation of it. That is the dangerous stuff. And it's the stuff media outlets are also playing with a lot.

We're kind of dumb, technical people. We can't see that stuff very clearly. Culture and metaphor and ideas. I mean, we can, but we're naive, idealistic and shallow. What if we weren't?

There is a lot of belief systems in place that shape how human relationships should be. Would you date someone that has a different political affiliation? Be friends with someone who holds different values? And so on...

Digital algorithms now play a role in those belief systems, and the broadcasting of lifes in those digital platforms is a key part of it.

The question "how to take responsibility for yourself?" and similar rejection attitudes nowadays act more like a public encouragement to self-shun. It is, in itself, an act of broadcasting with the explicit goal of interacting with such belief systems.

The most obscene thing you can do in such an arrangement of beliefs is to expose one of the belief systems. It is kind of an attention grabbing mechanism, but very different from Kardashian-style media presence. It's way, way more obscene.

Sure bro.

You can't stop astrology. Humanity will never free itself from it. Someone you know probably uses it. Maybe that person will make decisions based on horoscope, and that in turn will affect your decisions.

I think AI is going to be very similar. And maybe it even develops a less virulent benign strain (like astronomy), but the bad one will hang around forever.

I see.

Why not have the LLM generate the whole thing? I mean, just prompt it to manage the cloud for you. Use some markdowns to keep the things that work, discard the things that don't, and keep doing trial and error until it works for your scenario.

You just need to find a reusable unit for those markdowns. Something simple and easy that can be composed and would allow an easier time doing the trial and error stuff.

It depends on a lot of things.

How do you plan to manage state?

Let's say you have 100 programs in your PATH that start with the letter "g", but only one program in the current folder that starts with "g". You type `./g[TAB]` so it autocompletes automatically to the local program instead of cycling through dozens of results you know you don't want.