card_zero

I just don't like moral distortions. Is YC in control of Flock or responsible for their choices? Who are "them", what are we ignorant about and why is it Marxism?

How about the "it’s them" part?

Taunted = vaunted?

Games

Possibly not an illusion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arachnids_as_food

Yeah, I wanted to say that too. You can't (always) separate enjoying the craft from enjoying the praise. People too often talk about the value of an art object divorced from its provenance, as if you could measure its goodness with a meter, instead of the value of the audience relating to the personality expressed in it, which means it's a communication, and the communication isn't all one-way. When you're crafting something you're initiating that communication. Of course you want praise, or distressed complaints or anyway some reaction.

It's primarily marketing for some mystic self-help shtick. You ask a question about your life, like in tarot, and a facilitator gradual reveals ambiguous answers until you agree that you had a revelation, like in tarot, and cross their palm with silver. Totally not fortune-telling apparently.

Wasn't there a recent HN post explaining that engineering a deadly-and-successful virus requires experimentation?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49636906

Flagged, rather oddly.

Hmm, you said array, I suppose that's a kind of live experimentation. Would tend to alert the pesky humans that there's something going on, though.

True enough, but who was against technology?

This is being against interest in a specific technology. For example I could say "I think yo-yos are stupid". But the yo-yo is here to stay! The world must adapt to the yo-yo or be left behind, because we all think that yo-yos are very important and we use them constantly to do everything instead of using our hands! Or we could not be interested in that, because it's stupid.

Great news everybody! I've invented infinite crap!

You're wrong about the ducks. But getting back to your previous wrong argument from 14 hours ago, you basically deny the meaning of terms like "uninspired", "insipid", and "derivative", on the grounds that we're all standing on the shoulders of giants and therefore it's all good. This is incorrect, it's not all good, and the things the LLMs do really are unoriginal, a term that really does mean something.

It's a book that works on many levels.

1. That's a misleading name for "take my secrets",

2. It's on by default,

3. Somebody says there's a second setting "don't train on my data", which is the real setting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49639743

This was announced three days ago in Australia, the world's ban lab. Or at least the upcoming proposal of draft legislation was announced.

Downvotes might work as an abuse sponge, absorbing the impulse to make personal attacks. Other than that possible advantage, the downvote functionality seems contradictory to the concept of a discussion forum, I agree.

If, as you say, it doesn't matter that the AI company gets praise for somebody else's discovery, then it also wouldn't matter if the praise went to the academic. You apparently resent the academic for seeking praise instead of being content with anonymously advancing human knowledge, but you don't resent the AI company seeking praise while leaching off the academic.

I want the rest of you to have big phones, so that the concept of "mobile friendly websites" can die. This is my sole interest in phones. So I hope the Duo can be held comfortably in landscape orientation, but I guess in fact it can't be held comfortably at all. Oh well.

You think that the liberty of capitalism enables selfish assholes to have influence, while under the constraints of communism the people with the influence are not selfish assholes.

Fantasy software: something that uses hooks to intercept internet requests from a specified other program, and sends them through USB to a corresponding phone app using a weird protocol, and the app relays them to the phone's internet connection so it's like a tether, and then your Windows program can be online, but Windows can't.

"Hating", no. He wanted to write books like The White Company. He could have done! But Holmes was more popular, so he asked a higher price, got paid, and continued with the Holmes. This is like a dialog with the public. It's not that he had instructions such as now make Holmes a vampire and was compelled to obey. The level of his obedience to the public was modulated by his level of liking money. Less money and more freedom was an option. I can't find the Le Guin foreword, but I wonder in what way she was convinced.

But anyway, no, you are not on rails in your creative "job", and it is self-directed, unless you think you're compelled to make X amount of money and thus have no choice but to write loathed vampire books, without even the option to go and work more happily in a factory.

Them: I don't know what AGI is! But AI can't do this thing! So it's not AGI!

You: I don't know what AGI is! But AI can do that thing actually! So it is AGI!

> a novelist only writes a vampire book because that's what the market wants

Not exactly. If you're in it for the money, don't be an artist (because it's not very effective). Having established that you're not in it for the money, don't slavishly follow the market, what's the point of that? But respect your audience, of course, and try to get them to part with their money on your terms, which is the fun of the whole thing and why you're not working in real estate instead.

You mean "... using a conventional computer"? (Excuse me if you didn't mean that.)

One point is that being in an actual war changes the rules. If you're caught in a desperate fight for your civilization, you'll put civility on hold, because being polite wouldn't do any good and you're too busy being desperate. But unless you love living like you're in a warzone, you probably prefer to maintain civility at all other times.

So you ask what one should do in 1934, on the cusp of war, in a pre-war situation. That kind of depends on knowing that it's a pre-war situation and knowing that things are desperate and that you should throw civility out of the window. If I was strongly aware of that fact (as some were), I'd be thinking mainly "how do I keep a low profile and escape from Germany," not "how do I tell the fascists that I disapprove of all they stand for".

But I suppose there's a kind of antsy ambiguous semi-desperate state that just makes people angry without fully committing to desperation.

Post-war is different of course because then you've won, and it's socially acceptable to be rude to nazis, the conventionally accepted bad guys. Common consent encourages it. It's a civil kind of rudeness!

It's a kind of shared fiction of an imaginary person's thinking, really. The author writes "now, I know what you must be thinking", and hopes the reader will agree "OK, close enough".

I'm reminded of this exchange in Good Omens:

Madame Tracy poked her head around the door. "Coo-ee, Mr. Shadwell," she said, giving Newt a friendly little wave. "A gentleman on the telephone for you. Hallo, Mr. Newton."

"Awa' wi' ye, harlot," said Shadwell, automatically.

"He sounds ever so refined," said Madame Tracy, taking no notice. "And I'll be getting us a nice bit of liver for Sunday."

"I'd sooner sup wi' the De'el, wumman."

"So if you'd let me have the plates back from last week it'd be a help, there's a love," said Madame Tracy, and tottered unsteadily back on three-inch heels to her flat and whatever it was that had been interrupted.

The thesis seems to be

1. We could refrain from getting offended when just buying coffee etc., and overlook low-key indications of political views, in order to cooperate,

2. We could avoid offending one another with confrontational exhibitions of political views, in ordinary life, when not seeking a confrontation.

In which case the fact that they are wrong, and we are correct and wonderful, and indeed the fact that moral relativism is kaput, can just be ignored in this ordinary everyday context. Which we could inhabit most days.

The BBC news site has a particular boner for slightly unusual moon appearances. If you search the site for moon, there's abundant stories on topics like "blood moon", "buck moon", "super new moon", "strawberry moon", "blue moon", "orange moon", "worm moon", "snow moon", "wolf moon", "harvest moon", the moon being quite near in the sky to Venus, "beaver supermoon", "hunter's moon", "pink moon", and whenever anything even approximating an eclipse happens they write multiple articles about it. So I am given the impression that eclipses happen every other week.

Those are not that. The first two are people complaining about other people incontinently identifying text as AI, because it's annoying to listen to unreliable hunches and aspersions. The second two are complaining about AI detectors not being very reliable. The claim made in the last one is a casual anecdote about "an AI detector", presumably told because it's amusing. It isn't a vehement statement about how you must accept slop into your life.