Long ago, I heard this advice on some ancient management tape: "never let a piece of paper cross your desk twice". It stuck with me and I've got into the habit of immediately answering, archiving or on occasion setting a snooze timer (in GMail). If the recipient takes my promptness for granted, then I might adjust my policies for just that person. (Un)fortunately, it helps to be a manager -- then you can give feedback to people who don't read emails properly.
Ah, MIDI files. The only type of music you could realistically download from the internet back in the day, and you had to wake up at ungodly hours so that your dialup modem would not rack up a massive phone bill.
Perhaps this will help: commerce, free market and capitalism are three different things. Commerce, or trade, has existed for millennia, even among tribes and villages. The free market emerges when there are multiple producers of a good or service, and there is no compulsion upon any producer (from either a third party or another producer) to buy or sell. Capitalism would be when one or more of these producers no longer need to engage in production themselves, but are able to use their surplus savings to employ other producers and then keep for themselves the difference between market price and production cost (including cost of labor). There is nothing inherently wrong with that latter mode of production, except that it never reaches a dynamic equilibrium. Since it's surplus savings that enable the acquisition and direction of other producers (i.e. their labor), and that process leads to additional surpluses, the accumulation of surplus becomes exponential. At some point, the surplus becomes sufficient to apply compulsion on other producers, thus effectively eroding the free market that led to that mode of production in the first place.
There is currently a multi-billion, if not trillion, dollar industry (advertising and marketing) that is convincing everyone to behave the opposite way, i.e. maximize consumption with no regard to negative externalities. If we simply curb them, or better yet, use those same mechanisms to propagate a more rational message, yes, that that's all we need to do.
The problem with fast feedback loops is that they filter out long term signals. The problem with data driven decision making is that data is numeric, and the act of counting is necessarily an act of approximation, by which we erase the difference between objects or events in order to bucket them into a category so that they can be counted. So the kind of dashboards that modern managers demand, offer nothing but the most obvious, short term "insights", that you might as well eliminate the man in the middle and feed the data directly into a set of simple decision rules.
Recently, I had some ideas I would normally just put up on a blog, in the public domain for anyone to develop on top of. Now, I'm feeling slightly reluctant because an LLM will ingest it, remix it and serve it in response to a query by some unimaginative individual who will either conclude that they are smart, or that LLMs are capable of original thought, or both. And they will have no clue where the idea originated from.
Yes, if it's to provide full safety coverage, it has to be rolled out at telco level including mobile connectivity, which is where this solution runs into red tape.
There's a better network layer solution than trying to block visitors at every host or at the endpoint devices' OS/application layer. I know because a company in my country is already testing such a thing in private beta. A router firmware that provides two wifi endpoints per home, one for adults and one for minors. You only share the minors' password with your children. The firmware maintains a whitelist of sites (it periodically downloads from a central server, I think). There is nothing to be installed on endpoint device, and no gatekeeping is necessary at the host. Apparently this can be extended to mobile networks as well, but I haven't looked at it in detail.
Question: we currently emulate neural networks by performing matrix math in synchronous clock CPU architectures. Would it not be better to abandon synchronization and etch neuron synapses directly in silicon, keeping only the weights variable? I think some researchers are pursuing this, but I forget what the approach is called.
Looking at the last few minutes of messages, I get the feeling that all it takes is a handful of motivated (i.e. jobless) malicious individuals to make an entire community or a corner of the Internet look like it has devolved into barbarism.
I worry that at some point, the physical device won't matter. Border authorities will know your email address, and could force you to log into your account on a device they supply. Five years ago, I would have called anyone even bringing up this possibility paranoid, but a lot of things that were completely unimaginable outside of Hollywood political thrillers have already happened.
Not a historian nor economist, but to my layman's mind, these revolts seem like a recurring phenomenon whenever long running economic cycles reach that point at which the aristocracy overreaches while trying to suppressing growing public sentiment against them, not unlike in Polybius' anacyclosis. But unlike Polybius' cycles, as technology improves, the likelihood of a successful reset at the end of a cycle, gradually diminishes with each cycle. I've recently started on Piketty's Capital, and he too alludes to the possibility that the post-industrial-revolution spiral into inequality could have continued uninterrupted into the 20th century and beyond, had it not been for the socioeconomic shock of the world war. Looking at the current trajectory of automation of intellectual labour and surveillance technology, I too am starting to worry that the odds of breaking the current cycle are slim.
Perhaps similar to a command line utility? Arguments could be passed as URL or query parameters. And perhaps a /help route can return the supported arguments.
Thoughts about serving pure text (not HTML) so that someone can pull this using a curl command, awk the output and do various things with it? Wish more sites did that.
I don't think we have to go that far back. Plate tectonics, submersion and weathering does a good enough job of wiping the slate clean off the surface of the Earth, that any evidence of earlier hominids developing pre-industrial, coastal civilizations say, a million years ago, would be now under the crust. What we consider civilization is about 5000 years old, so it's not inconceivable that the cycle might have occurred multiple times during geologic time spans. Perhaps this is the first time civilization was not interrupted and made its way through to a technological civilization.
Kobo stylus is similar. Closest experience I've had to actually writing on paper. Quality of thought too, is closer to that of actual paper writing, compared to typing.
In my view, it's theoretically possible for a combination of the author's iterative prompts + evaluation with Wolfram Alpha to activate the weights that encode the language that describes the constraints on these polynomials (from the faulty proofs) in such a way that the author eventually arrives at this:
> ((1+xy)^3 z + y^2 (1+xy) (4+3xy), y + 3 x (1+xy)^2 z + 3 x y^2 (4+3xy), 2 x - 3 x^2 y - x^3 z): \C^3\to \C^3
Thankfully it's not happening in my organization because we happen to have a sane, incremental strategy. But it's telling that you perceive any criticism of AI code reviewer burnout as "sticking your fingers in your ears". Perhaps you might benefit from a closer read of the article.
This part toward the end of the article resonated with me:
> If you’re being asked to review huge volumes of terrible AI code, just assume that the organisation is going to burn you out and fire you. You will not convince the person drowning you in 2000 line PRs to stop. Start looking for a new job as if you have already been fired. I have seen this happen many times now
I suspect we will see this phenomenon more and more as organizations more widely adopt agentic development.
I remember an Apple ad from a while back where a hydraulic press crushes a bunch of musical instruments. Your "grey goo of the average" analogy resonates for me because these videos feel like what would ooze out if we take all relevant videos that were produced by humans and then crush them under a generative press.
The default visual circuits in our brains may have evolved to optimally handle fractal patterns and textures. Straight lines, geometrical figures and featureless surfaces may require activation of less optimal circuits. Anecdotally, I find being in environments made of featureless geometrical figures uncomfortable to be in.
The default visual circuits in our brains may have evolved to optimally handle fractal patterns and textures. Straight lines, geometrical figures and featureless surfaces may require activation of less optimal circuits. Anecdotally, I find being in environments made of featureless geometrical figures uncomfortable to be in.
Isn't this what we used to do with Geocities a quarter century ago? And with most other websites that offered FTP upload? You didn't have to be very technical -- there were windows FTP clients where you could just type in the IP, username, password and see an explorer-like view, onto which you could just drag and drop your HTML and image files.