bjt

I'm sure it can be taught not to lean so heavily on the stylistic flourishes that bother us so much today, but writing is always going to seem vapid if you're taking 1x the amount of intention (the prompt) and inflating it to 5x or 10x the number of words.

100%. You're at the place that I was trying to lead the parent comment. There's a wide range of reasonable positions on how much to invest in any given thing like science, the arts, etc.

The public is generally bad at debates around taxing and spending, sadly. Voters struggle to accept the idea that more of X means less of Y. They want to believe they can have it all, for free, and there are plenty of politicians willing to tell them they can.

The more pertinent question is not the binary "should we fund mathematicians or not?" It's "how many?" The money you dole out to them needs to come from someone else.

Easy yes: Let's impose a tax on everyone to support at least one mathematician.

Easy no: Let's impose a tax on everyone to support one billion mathematicians.

Where are you going to draw that line? How are you going to convince a majority of voters that you're drawing it at the right place?

Is the LLM going to order all the shower caps produced by Chinese factories and try them out?

The grandparent comment said "liable". That's civil court, not criminal, and doesn't need the DOJ to be involved. HuggingFace and/or RubyGems could sue OpenAI.

States also have their own laws against unauthorized computer use (hacking). A state Attorney General could bring a suit under those laws, regardless of who is in the white house.

They absolutely could. There's a decent claim for OAI being reckless or at least negligent.

The limiting thing, in my mind, is the need to show harm. How much did OAI's recklessness hurt HuggingFace? There's some dev hours devoted to the cleanup but it's not like it devastated their business. Their legal team is probably a lot more focused on the Nvidia acquisition instead.

These (and other TOS agreements) fall under the category of "adhesion contracts".

Because the buyer has no real ability to negotiate, any ambiguity is resolved in their favor. A judge can also strike provisions that a reasonable buyer would not expect, or that are unconscionable. So it's up to the judge's judgment.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/adhesion-contract.asp

There are incentives other than marketing, but I doubt the SEO company referred to by the ancestor comment is planning to do lots of business in the political propaganda space.

> We can't keep pretending it's normal for SCOTUS to decide everything about our society.

That's not what this is. As the 9th Circuit points out, states already have quite extensive laws about gambling. We don't need Congress to step in to either reinforce or displace them. The courts are doing their job by ruling on existing laws.

I think they're saying that coffee is a healthier habit than soda.

The point you make is observed in compression too, though, once you start optimizing for certain use cases. When LAME encodes sound into an mp3 it doesn't give equal weight to all frequencies. It throws away data outside the range of human hearing to leave more room for what's in-range.

In this case CDC = Changed Data Capture.

Yes, and to bring in another tired metaphor people make about AI agents, this is what you want an intern to do when they get stuck. Don't just churn indefinitely without an idea what the right direction is. Certainly don't go hack other companies to steal an answer. The model's lack of any sense of legal or ethical boundaries is where it's far, far stupider than the intern, and far, far more reckless for a company to wield the way OpenAI did here.

Unlike the CIA and/or FBI being in charge of preventing attacks like 9/11, NSA and DHS aren't in charge of each state's or city's infrastructure. They could run some opt-in program that local governments could then engage with, but "negligence" is a bit strong for systems they're not in charge of and have no access to.

There must be agents already ordering Doordash meals or Uber rides.

I'm curious from the other direction; where do you see overlap between k8s and what's described on the Superlogical website?

Because at some point their emails about the firing will be subpoenaed, and if they lie about it now it's going to bite them harder later.

I don't think it's really that new, legally. Cows, dogs, and whatever have been escaping from people's land and damaging their neighbor's land for thousands of years. Cases like that get decided on standards of negligence, recklessness, or strict liability. There's still a lot of mileage left in those concepts.

I also thought that was weird. Then I learned it gets better. If you click through to the BBC article that was apparently their main source, the quote is this:

> Alternatively, as Prof Barber explained, it can be compared to a single string of spaghetti holding up 3,000 half-kilogram bags of sugar.

So the professor used an item that was familiar to his English audience (1500 kg=3307 lbs), then the Smithsonian writer tried to be helpful in converting the units, but switched to an item far less familiar to an American. I don't think I've ever bought a 1lb bag of sugar here, while a 500g bag is a little small but normal in the UK.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31500883

https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/gol-ui/product/sainsburys-white...

OK but, Postgres is not one of those clunky "we have to replace this" systems.

Except, a gallon is a gallon no matter which gas station I'm at. Also I know my car's gas mileage, and it doesn't change when I visit a Shell station instead of a Chevron. The composition of the gas is regulated, as are the pumps that dispense it. There are inspectors from the state whose job it is to ensure that when I buy a gallon, I really get a gallon.

Tokenizers aren't standardized to anywhere near that level. A "token" from one isn't the same as a token from another.

Sometimes they are. The US Earned Income Tax Credit being probably the biggest example.

https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/federal/earned-income...

It's not that bizarre. Not everyone is trying to optimize for maximum profit. Some creators or companies want to build a community by increasing the consumer surplus received by their buyers. They are willing to trade profit for that. Scalpers slip into the middle, take the surplus for themselves, and prevent the community building or other social goods that the seller is trying to create.

"SUV" is too broad a category. A RAV4 is an SUV. It's similarly sized to most of the SUVs I've seen in Europe. And a pedestrian getting hit by one would have a similar experience to getting hit by a sedan. It's nothing like the big Rams, GMCs or F250s with the high front grilles that are becoming more popular while also being far deadlier to pedestrians.

I agree with the "steal an ancient roman baby" premise. The "roman citizen" example is not as strong. Cognitive ability is not just genetics. The grown-up roman would be missing a lot of advantages during their upbringing that weren't available back then. Also, limiting it to just "citizens" means limiting it to their upper class.

Compared to Roman times, we've had pretty big advances in nutrition, healthcare, education, and widespread middle class wealth. It's not unreasonable to infer that these would have an impact on cognitive ability similar to the effect they've had on life expectancy.

That being said, there's definitely a present-ist bias, as the McSweeney's article does a good job mocking. I do believe their best thinkers were as good as our best thinkers.

People eating lead in their food don't know it's there.

People engaging with the AI built into Google results pages can see it, and assumedly Google's A/B testing showed that they engaged with it.

Good piece, but I think there's a missing angle to it. He cites a study showing how often people say they "use AI", and a little over 50% use it less than once per week.

If we're just talking about AI chat interfaces, sure. But I think the way that AI usage is going to grow isn't mostly by getting more chat engagement. It's about baking AI features into software that people already use.

For example, suppose you asked the same people "How often do you search on Google?" I am willing to bet the numbers go up a lot. And all of those people are "using AI" in a very real sense, they just don't think about it when it's baked in.

If you've ever watched an episode of "How It's Made" and seen how incredibly customized these machines are, it won't be surprising that the people who build them are proud of their work.

Slightly agree. :)

I don't think handmade shoes are the right comparison, unless you're talking about software that's meant to be used by just one person.

The more apt comparison might be to the engineers building and maintaining the manufacturing equipment in the shoe factory. It's a degree removed from the consumer, but there's definitely still craftsmanship involved there.

They tended to be solo productions, or sponsored by aristocratic patrons. Anyone suggesting that we could create movies, TV, music, or games on the scale we do today, without copyright, does not seem worth taking seriously.