I’ve always interpreted this saying to point in the direction you’re actually going. That a machine does not have a “purpose”. Its creator might have had a purpose in mind, but when talking about the machine one should focus on what it actually does. This avoids needing to fend off attacks about how noble the creator’s intention for their machine may or may not have been, which could otherwise consume the rhetorical oxygen better spent.
This is absurd. The cheapest energy available is solar, which is becoming more true every day. If truly the goal was just to have cheap energy, solar buildout would be a huge component of the strategy.
I don’t understand your comment, can you elaborate? I’m saying that drawing corporate investment into open software is preferable to all of that investment going into proprietary software. I want as much open software as possible and I want us to be practical at all levels. Big swings like public grants and a better safety net (even UBI) are things I’m supportive of too, and can coexist with incentives for drawing in corporates. There’s a certain purism argument that a company that is involved in open software is constantly criticized for being insufficiently open but a proprietary software company receives no such similar criticism, which I think is irrational.
I find this attitude self-defeating because the lure of being able to provide some amount of proprietary software on top of open is what draws in the corporate investment in open software. And in the system we live in, it’s hard to imagine there’d be nearly as much open software as there is without that corporate investment. As a big fan of open software, this seems like a great trade to me.
(Disclosure: I work for a company with this business model, in part because I like working on open software)
A total ban is nonsensical. If you’re concerned about noise regulate the sound level. If you’re concerned about energy use, tax it and put the money raised into a solar subsidy. But the idea you can have a heat pump and can’t have an AC is absurd because a heat pump literally is an AC flipped around.
My concern is that even if the LLM can turn your colleague's bad writing into something more coherent and actionable, is that something actually what your colleague meant to convey? It could be clear and still detached from the reality of their intention, or they may not have even formed a clear intention. If the goal of writing is to convey what's in another human's brain, that goal is failed completely.
Artists have to eat, it doesn’t make them not artists. Games are not hard to classify as art. You may not like the art or think a lot of it’s not very good, but they are art, because art is not the exclusive domain of “auteur driven passion projects”.
Do you work in this field or are you just reading that? I’ve been out of the game for over five years now, but as far as I can tell from people I know still in that world, if you’re going to make more than like … 3 of a part, casting is going to be much cheaper. And while you can do some prototyping on 3d prints, the nature of the material winds up different from a cast part.
Relatedly, I fully expect the software business to fail to learn from (nearly) literally every other industry how to operate when your marginal costs are no longer zero. It drives me nuts the number of people in software who think that people in other industries are slow because they’re just not as smart as us, rather than because when it takes months to get a cast part made, it better be right the first time.
I've long thought that any country should buy solar panels from any other country that's crazy enough to sell them to you at a subsidized price. It's not like buying oil; once you have the panels, that energy independence belongs to you.
I got really sad reading Good Omens where Pestilence has retired because of all the progress of medical science and thinking "if only". Funny enough, Pratchett has Famine doing exactly what's working for Pestilence today, convincing people to make bad choices despite easy ways to avoid the horsemen's influence.
In many industries, if you can't do something safely, you simply can't do it at all. Maybe yeah, if you can't build a sufficiently strong automated system, then you need human moderators across a huge number of locations. Them's the breaks for running a wildly profitable service that half the world's population uses.
The video of the prototype invention has the effect of making people think they don't need to be concerned about ramps and doorknobs and ADA enforcement because some teen in a garage has just solved this problem forever. People who need accommodations also require the political support of able-bodied people in order to actually make change happen, and his argument is that these videos dissipate that support.
Do you think that its possible to raise the bar for junior engineers such that "you have AI now, so I need you to own farther up the review chain yourself"? I feel like I could answer either way. No, you need reps on projects to have that kind of judgement, that's what makes a senior. But also yes, while it will take the junior way longer to do that kind of review, they have the time to do it now, and its now the bottleneck so it makes sense to put their effort into that portion.
But it ... won't be? The companies have no motivation to do so. The copyright on lots of these books are surely already expired, so if they wanted to they could be putting these up now. I'm sure internally this is viewed as a corpus of knowledge they have that their competitors do not, so they will not release them unless something forces them to.
I think the lede is a bit buried here. The key point is that when renewables levelized cost is cheaper than the marginal cost of other sources (and I'll add, particularly when its below the fuel-only cost) the ability to economically displace those other sources is extremely strong.
Yes, exactly that. Tons of crime is committed using only in-person communication. Should we all have microphones in our homes? Do detective work, flip sources, follow the money.
The story about the woman recording her dates is getting extrapolated into too much. Her friends told her it made people uncomfortable and that she should stop. This is not a trend.
I think it is a huge mistake to believe that there is a “true” nature of the models. They are artificial, everything about them is a construct. This is like asking the true shape of the clay without the potter’s influence.