empath-nirvana

There are pretty clearly cases where non-combatant deaths in war are necessary -- for example if you are in a total war situation as in WWII.

People can and do argue about the morality of the Tokyo firebombings and Dresden and Hiroshima and Nagasaki where it was largely purely civilian populations in cities that were attacked, but I think it's _fairly_ non-controversial that in a total war that industrial sites and weapons manufacturing facilities and so on are valid targets in a war situation, and they are generally staffed by non-combatants.

The rule in the geneva conventions is: "In so far as objects are concerned, military objectives are limited to those objects which by their nature, location, purpose or use make an effective contribution to military action and whose total or partial destruction, capture or neutralization, in the circumstances ruling at the time, offers a definite military advantage."

Which encompasses quite a large category of non-combatants that are likely to be in the area of those "objects".

edit: not making any kind of judgement or statement at all about this particular situation -- just clarifying in general the rules of war involving non-combatants.

> Can someone explain why people try to make new cars from the ground up, rather than "fork" a base platform from GM/Toyota/KIA/whoever with a different design and little features?

That's sort of what Tesla did with the Roadster. It was a Lotus that they put an electric motor into.

1905, probably: "The oil industry spent 17x more on drilling equipment than it brought in in revenue"

2 popular and well tested rust yaml libraries have recently been marked as unmaintained and people are moving away from them to brand new projects in a rush because warnings went out about it.

I don't think "admire" is the right word, but it's a pretty impressive operation.

Songs are a lot more than their lyrics and there are a great many wonderful and popular songs that have _no lyrics at all_. Lyrical complexity isn't really a good measure of the overall complexity of a song.

Anyway, a lot of this because of the rise of dance music which is often more about rhythm and timbre, and vocals if they exist at all are often background and used more as texture than as the driving force behind the song.

huh?

> can a minute ever have 59 seconds ChatGPT Yes, a minute can have 59 seconds in the context of leap seconds. Normally, a minute is defined as having 60 seconds. However, leap seconds are a way to adjust the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) to match Earth's irregular and slowly changing rotation. When a leap second is subtracted, it technically creates a minute with 59 seconds. This subtraction has been less common than the addition of a leap second, which results in a 61-second minute, but it's theoretically possible if necessary to keep UTC aligned with solar time.

The decision to insert or delete a leap second is made by the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS) based on precise measurements of the Earth's rotation. As of my last update in April 2023, all adjustments have been additions, making some minutes 61 seconds long, but the system allows for the possibility of a 59-second minute if the Earth were to rotate faster than the time standards.

There's so much you can do in rust without messing with any of that, and the only time you have to get deep in the weeds arguing with the compiler is _exactly_ the sort of code that you _should_ be spending a lot of time carefully thinking about. That C allows you to write that code without thinking about it much is _not_ a benefit to using C.

This post shows 3 ways of doing it, including essentially the same way you'd do it in C. And it's exactly as dangerous as doing it in C is, but at least you can isolate that dangerous code to one part of your code base.

You can have bugs with that style of coding, but they're not going to be bugs of the "remote code execution" type.

That is incredibly obnoxious and irresponsible and he should turn over the repo to someone else to manage.

I think the right way to think of it is as an _experience_. It doesn't make you smarter or more creative, any more than going on a backpacking trip or reading a good book -- it just gives you a new way of seeing the world and your place in it temporarily. What you do with that experience is going to be highly personal.

I know that people can become out-right messianic after an LSD trip, but people can be similarly evangelical about travel or books or, obviously, religious experiences.

later edit: I actually do think it's more to it than that, for two reasons -- one is that while you're on acid, your brain tends to make wild connections between things that you wouldn't ordinarily do, but I don't think that's good or bad, necessarily -- it's like running an LLM on a very high temperature, it can be funny and interesting, but it's very hit and miss. The second is that I think it triggers a lot of self-reflection (to say the least) and can help you recognize and break out of negative personal patterns -- but that also tends to be what people think of as "bad trips".

I agree with this but I found it to be an extremely valuable experience all the same.

That is a terrible headline. It implies that the _abilities_ are a mirage, but it's actually the "emergent" part that might be a mirage -- which is to say it's not an unpredictable "phase transition" but gradual and predictable improvement in ability as the models scale.

There are a lot of 'old school' edm records in online stores that were redigitized from vinyl, and you can tell just looking at the wave forms the difference in how they were mastered, and they sound noticeably _worse_ than modern EDM records, with much less powerful bass. It's actually sort of interesting how they worked around that with more dynamics in older records to make the bass pop more, but I'm not sure that it's better over all, it's just different.

There is no such thing as a "private" network that is magically more secure than the internet, and if you don't trust it on the internet, you shouldn't trust it on your private network. If you have anything of value, there are going to be bad actors poking around in your private network eventually.

Blackberry chugged along with record profits for a couple of years after the iphone had already made them irrelevant.

I like the app store, I like the restrictions, I don't want apple to change anything about it. I sort of think apple shouldn't try to comply with these sorts of potential lawsuits by making their app store worse, they should just let people jail break the phone and offer zero support for it.

If people want to buy an iphone and shit it up, let them do it.

The problem is that chatting with an LLM is extremely disruptive to their business model and it's difficult for them to productize without killing the golden goose.

it means "learning"

https://www.etymonline.com/word/*mendh-

It's vanishingly rare that individuals have any liability or are punished for software fuckups. Maybe if someone is completely incompetent, they'll get fired, but I'm not sure that's meaningfully different than cancelling a service that doesn't work as advertised.

> Infinities are quite different, given that it is by definition impossible to measure whether something in reality is infinite or not unless you have infinite time.

It's impossible to count a negative number of things. It's impossible to count an imaginary number of things, it's impossible to count a matrix of things. It's impossible to count an irrational number of things. These are all fictions that people use because they're useful. Infinity is exactly the same as any of those other concepts.

I don't really think that thinking of LLMs and related technologies as "Artificial Humans" is the right way to think about how they're going to be integrated into workflows. What is going to happen is that people are going to be adopt these tools to solve particular tasks that are annoying or tedious for developers to do, in a way similar to the way tools like Ansible and Chef replaced the task of logging into ssh servers manually to install stuff, and aws replaced 'sending a guy out to the data center to setup a server' for many companies.

And it's going to be done piecemeal, not all-at-once. Someone will figure out a way to get an AI to do _one_ thing faster and cheaper than a human and sell _that_. Maybe it's automatic test generation, maybe it's automatically remediating alerts, maybe it's code reviews. The scope of work of what a software developer does will be reduced until it's reduced to two categories:

1) Those tasks that it is still currently only possible for a human to do. 2) Those tasks which are easier and cheaper for a human to do.

You don't even really need to think about LLMs as AIs or conscious or whether they pass the turing test or not, it's just like every other form of automation we've already developed. There are vast swathes of work that software developers and IT people did a few decades ago that almost nobody does any more because of various forms of automation. None of that has reduced the overall amount of jobs for software developers because there isn't a limited amount of software development to do. If you make software development less expensive and easier than people will apply it to more tasks, and software developers will become _more_ valuable and not _less_.

That math is sometimes practical is nice, but it's not the point.

No, you haven't. You've seen some symbols that represent the ludicrous physical notion of a negative amount of an object. Look outside, count negative 3 sheep. You can't. It's a _fiction_ which happens to be useful for accounting for debt.

Have you ever seen a negative number of things?

I think probably the solution here is to stop using publishing in peer reviewed journals as a job requirement for academics. Even before ChatGPT, academic publishing was already falling victim to Goodhart's law. Remove the perverse incentives and it should cut down on this by quite a lot.

If you're playing dungeons and dragons, then unicorns "exist" within the context of that game, and there are rules for interacting with them. If you're reading a fantasy novel, then unicorns exist within the context of that fictional universe. And because people enjoy playing Dungeons and Dragons and reading fantasy novels, that existence has real value both for those people and for the people creating those novels and games. And you can say that certain things are true about unicorns within the context of those games and fictional worlds. (For example, it is true that unicorns have horns).

If it makes you feel better to put infinity into the same category of reality as "unicorns", then I think that's fine? It doesn't necessarily need to be the case that anything in mathematics corresponds to something that is physically manifested, and probably _most_ of mathematics does not -- not just infinities.

Hashicorp's prices are not what i'd consider to be 'enterprise prices'. When we looked at buying "enterprise vault" a few years ago it was six figures a year for a relatively small install. It was basically "we don't want your business" pricing.

Believe it or not, no. We're using cluster-api.

I've got a github actions pipeline that stands up a kind cluster, installs cluster-api on it, uses cluster-api to stand up the control plane cluster and then copies over the cluster-api config to it along with argocd, and after that it's self-managing. We did have to do a little bit of terraform to get iam roles set up, but that's it.

Everything after that is pure argo cd, cluster-api and crossplane.

I work at something that's basically a startup incubator and we can stand up and manage the infrastructure for an entire enterprise, on either aws or azure (including stuff like SSO artifact storage and CICD pipelines), from a central control plane with just a few lines of yaml, and they can be deploying code within 30 minutes. And it's continuously reconciled, so there's no drift, and if we push out an update to something, it rolls out to everything within minutes.