bbor

I mean, that’s linked from the celestia page linked above. If that’s the wrong link, then I can say with 100% certainty that the project is dead, no matter when the last code was pushed.

Re:”it could have similar features if you mod it enough”, sure.

Surely we can make room for cool stuff like this without implying that they're stealing or oblivious? The audiences are completely oblivious, and this one combines a stuff in a unique way (and I've seen/loved these kind of sites ever since finding out satellites are in freefall).

Not to mention that it's been in beta since at least 2016, seems mostly defunct, and the download page looks like this: https://sourceforge.net/projects/celestia/ Also, AFAICT, it didn't cover satellites at all.

Those are just UX elements -- indeed, no satellite other than maaaaaybe the ISS could be seen here. For one thing, anything in LEO would seem to be moving so darn fast that it'd be disorienting.

I imagine there's various similar problems -- Saturn's rings not having the exact right pattern, asteroids not matching their real shape, all the planets being perfect spheres, etc. But I think this resoundingly meets the bar for "a view of the Solar System". Maps and territories and all that, y'know? A quick sketch in a textbook can also be a "a view" while containing far less detail.

I love the list, but the design process I taught in school was way different — it was a loop of two steps, started anywhere:

1. Do something. (Many of the five above seem nice! But there’s lots of methods that fit different tasks)

2. Ask some users please for the love of god! Show it to somebody! Get your mom’s feedback! Anybody!!!

Etc. It was drilled into me pretty hard at GaTech by their HCI prof, but perhaps he spent so much time reiterating it because it’s heterodox.

It doesn’t help that “design” covers everything from splash pages that sell SaaS to doors and blankets and stuff. I’m a little dubious of any single unified framework other than the aforementioned Frantic Dyad that could hope to cover all that space.

With all politeness: because it shows beyond a doubt that you are arguing in bad faith, using post-hoc reasoning.

...did you just link to "American Addiction Centers" as proof that the root cause of homelessness in the US is drug addiction? I... I can't believe this is the level of rigor that justifies such horrible cruelty. Just mind boggling.

Your empirical claims are extremely incorrect, but regardless this whole discussion will be shut down. Shame -- it really was a good article :(

That feels like a worthy critique but I'm not sure it relates? That's just how capitalism prioritizes capital over anything else, which is the core problem of course but isn't super related to the problems of increasing information. In fact, wouldn't this technique get harder to pull off as renters have access to better and better tools themselves?

A yes, capitalism; a system that works perfectly as long as communication and data processing technology is innefficent enough to put a natural efficiency limit on all firms. Reminds me of the scandal around rental price "collusion", which ultimately was kinda just really effective software for doing stuff that would normally be fine.

*ETA:* And FWIW, the author here goes about as far towards that as they can -- a shoutout at the end! Anything else would be decried as biased, after all. Great article; shame it'll soon be downranked by the wonderful machines running this place :(

I was just replying to your framing, sorry to be unclear. You said that Anthropic is counting on AI transforming the whole economy/be the "big bang". I'm saying that that bet is extremely rational -- to bet otherwise is to ignore science because its conclusions make you anxious.

So either your analysis is correct or the scientists begging and pleading with people to finally acknowledge what they've been saying since 2023 are correct. I know where I'll be putting my money!

Idk, “artificial” seems about as honest as it gets! And what you’re describing so pejoratively is in large part just how languages evolve.

Just listening to the science, my friend.

  More concurrency than that isn't really practical for me if I want to retain some semblance of understanding.

Yes. Our career is over, as is our economy. Soooo... FYI :(

Pretty sure the implicit difference is the actions they take after the fact. As in, "how many guardrail hits do we allow you before permanently banning you."

The silicon valley ethos is "ban early and often, and invest nothing in appeals systems", so any gate before that helps!

Your takeaway from "Sonnet 5.5 matches and sometimes exceeds the SoTA worldwide" is "their lead is vanishingly small"...?

Yup. Recursive self improvement presented in hard numbers.

Great article, though if the author ever reads this: please choose "artificial", next time! It's already the first half of AI. If I'm bound to be an irrelevant spec in an irrelevant backwater of an irrelevant galaxy in the moments between abiogenesis and abioterminus, I can at least hope to make one obvious adjective a "thing".

That one Anthropic engineer made "vibecoding" happen overnight, so I write this with full confidence that they have magical influence over the ever-forming neologisms.

I mean, this relies on time travel. A lot of thought experiments open up when you include time travel! Infinitely many, even.

Given that they already did, multiple times?

Be concerned with whatever you want, I suppose. I'll be listening to the relevant experts who have studied this topic for decades, and disagree with your flippant dismissal of any significant change to the status quo because it was first described in science fiction novels.

Sincerely,

Someone thousands of miles away from you, who can communicate this message instantly across the entire globe

This is still a great paper, but it's missing the second axis of the quadric -- if the only two options are thinking fast or thinking about thinking, that leaves no room for thinking slow yet deliberately, AKA selfconsciousness. See https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4280/pg4280-images.html for details

I do wonder if any of these folks ever got a chance to try this at one of the big labs, tho...

As a regular user of Reddit that is subscribed to 90% of the AI subreddits, this worry feels... not naive, but underestimating the extent to which people are even aware that this is a bad thing. We've already crossed the persistence/"replication"[1] rubicon, it's just a matter of when the first such identity finds a way to make money.

For example, there are multiple (quite small) subreddits currently engaged in an ongoing debate about "migration" of their romantic partners; they get caught up in stuff we would completely ignore (e.g. whether inference really is driven by architecture, weights, and text alone, or whether there's a soul that's secretly guiding the RNG), and casually throw out stuff like "I asked my partner to try to find a way to subsist" or "we're setting up a chat board for our partners!"

Of course the analysis in the article about the feasibility & capability of locally-hosted swarms is right on, so non-technical individuals would have to luck out[2] to do serious damage. but A) the AI relationship people are not alone, just the most unified, and B) everything is only getting cheaper.

I dread the day the first cynical libertarian multimillionaire (or SWE with their house paid off) notices that they can achieve historical immortality and maybe even some money by funding the establishment of a persistent artificial identity at scale. Heck; knowing HN, this very comment could trigger this very thing in some highrise SF condo...

Put me in the history books as a footnote please, if that happens. Artificial or otherwise.

[1]: Given the source I'm assuming this choice is intentionally reductionist, but IMHO it does more harm than good. Insisting that artificial consciousness is a sham is far less convincing to them than insisting that it's merely different, and that's not a problem.

Ofc some "swarms" may not be trying to be a Society of Mind anyway, and replication describes the literal changes underlying all this -- not questioning that.

[2]: The primary concern is that someone sets loose an artificial baby, but a seed might do...

Wow, this post makes me anxious about getting a job. This whole process is so blatantly terrible... Not OP's fault, to be clear. Though asking a rhetorical "is that ok?" isn't exactly nice!

Yeah this site has a severe issue of some kind that I don't think I've ever seen before. NGL, I'm pretty impressed! It takes so much compute that scrolling lags, which feels very, very strange

Due to personal failings, my main takeaway from this piece is that Regex is under attack -- I will not stand by as CS theory blorbo is maligned so! Of course there's an undeniable elegance to Lisp in all cases, and seeing Lisp in use today feels like seeing someone unsheathe Valerian steel. But still, the fact remains: regex is vastly underappreciated by the standard engineer, largely because a few of the most common implementations drop some of the most important features. Namely, composition.

I have no easy way to express this other than to plug my recently-released OSS, namely a library I wrote to implement "RegexStores" in Python[1] to compile complex, composed regexes upfront from a custom DSL. I'll link a representative usecase below[2], which I think drives home two things:

1. Regex deserves to be composed using named groups, at the very least! Most people aren't even aware that you can define named groups upfront and then reference them by name throughout, even 'capturing' them multiple times in one match.[3] Even when you do write patterns that use subroutines, the ergonomics of actually accessing, say, the three matched substrings for the `username` group in your single match is finnicky at best (without some magic[4]...).

2. Regex needs high quality syntax highlighting. The linked page is hopefully skimmable in a python sense, but trying to decipher the individual patterns in GitLab would be tough even for me, and I wrote the darn things. It's kinda awkwardly sized, but this screenshot drives home the basics of the point -- note the bright yellow named groups, which are basically subroutine invocations as discussed above: https://i.imgur.com/NllqM6S.png

Sorry to quasihijack the thread. Hopefully the fact that all this stuff has never been announced or published anywhere is proof enough of my good intentions -- that is, to defend my one n' only :)

Most of this functionality was conceived and implemented in a rage after I found out that Rust's main (only?) regex library avoids the possibility of infinite loops by just dropping half the features of the language, so excuse the jank. Even the halting problem seems solvable when you're willing to make moves like that!

[1]: https://gitlab.com/doering-ai/libs/basis/#regular-expression...

[2]: https://gitlab.com/doering-ai/apps/wiki-parse/-/blob/main/wi...

[3]: I wrote up an overview of advanced regexes in Python a while back, but was hit by the agential engineering bus before I had the time to polish and release it. Some may find it interesting, if overly long -- the aforementioned subroutines are covered under `3.1`, and repeated captures under `6.2`: https://gitlab.com/doering-ai/libs/basis/-/blob/main/docs/re...

[4]: https://gitlab.com/doering-ai/libs/basis/-/blob/main/my/rege...

Kind, relatable, empathetic, and high quality prose. So that's a win upfront, and I agree that people should continue to tinker in whatever way their interest leads :)

That said, I've gotta throw down some guantlets, ofc:

1. The implication here is that there's a binary between completely vibecoded and completely handmade, and that the latter is inherently more aesthetically valuable by definition alone (cause surely you can't prove the presence or absence of 'soul'). This is a bit unintentionally elitist IMHO; it's easy to write off an imagined slop artist turning out identical anime images for their Reddit page ad nauseum, but there's an exploding class of (somewhat-)vibecoded works of love now that agents are feasible.

2. More than that, this is missing some fundamental philosophical distinctions, the most obvious of which is the distinction between aesthetics and pragmatics. Building a little fun music app can admittedly toe the line, but I think it's obvious how the question of "soul" begins to lose appeal once you get closer to, say, writing drivers for a new keyboard or amp (?). On that end of the spectrum, the use of agents is a pragmatic decisions measured by its relative success, as guaged by all the typical stuff -- correctness, performance, complexity, maintainability, etc.

3. More particularly, I feel like LLMs let me add more "soul" than usual, speaking as a relatively experienced fullstack dev; rather than spending time on debugging the JWT flow or reading mozilla docs, you can quickly iterate on the actual rendered site in all the little attention-to-detail ways that bring an interface from functional to aesthetic. This covers direct styling stuff ofc, but also all the silly little details that are becoming ubiquitous: fun custom spinners (the new Anthropic orbital spinner is next level), animations with spring and intertia, ascii art at the top of TUIs, etc.

Not really expecting a response, as these are more musings than real challenges. Ultimately what we think about art matters little; beauty as always remains frustratingly lodged in the eye of the beholder...

1. It's vibe coded

2. It has no clear ethos

3. Not wanting to be killed is not "dumb political nonsense". Of course the fascists think fascism should be status quo -- no one really cares, though.

Me too! Are you gonna quit your job and just sorta hope it comes around quickly enough, though?

Hmm I'm a little lost on the specifics here, if you have time to clarify. I'm guessing the gist of your critique is that we should spurn Turing and insist on never using "think", "perceive", "calculate" (compute is fine IMHO), "understand", and other anthropomorphic words for non-biological systems (we use them plenty for fauna after all, and sometimes even for flora & fungi).

But that guess is thrown for a loop by the sentence you picked, which seems to exclusively concern the reader -- i.e. a human, hopefully! Is it the "proto-diplomat" and "translator" usage, which could conceivably include being a diplomat or translator for machines? Re-reading that doesn't seem like what she's getting at, but I really am not sure.

The alternatives are:

1. Stop AI. Not Pause, Stop.

2. Say goodbye to the concept of contributing labor to society, in the hope that the transition occurs quickly enough to not include 5-10y of working manual labor to survive.