jjaksic

How would you make porn that isn't "objectifying"? Would you add an hour of prologue showing actors going to work, hanging out with friends, having hobbies etc, to show they are aren't just "sex objects"? I don't know if such porn would be very popular, leave alone cost-effective to produce.

Also, I don't see how women in porn are any more objectified than men. In the porn that I've seen, men are 100% objectified and portrayed as only good for "one thing".

I don't know if porn really affects population growth. There are so many other factors that do that to a much greater extent, such as: 1) gender equality and women working, 2) education, 3) contraception, 4) lower child mortality, 5) the fact that 200 years ago kids were an asset (free labor on the farm and support in old age) but today they're just a huge expense, 6) the fact that even a few decades ago child care consumed much less time as kids could be left to play outside, but today you have to supervise them 24/7 at least until they're 12. Etc etc. people don't have kids for a long list of reasons, none of which has to do with men watching so much porn they can't have sex even once.

But even if that was true, who's to say that population has to keep growing? There's 8 billion of us, isn't that enough? Housing prices are through the roof and most young people can't even hope to be able to afford a house. Human population has doubled about 4 times in the last 100 years. If it doubles yet again there's going to be 16 billion of us. Do you think the world and humanity can sustain infinite exponential growth? I don't think so. The only reasons to want population growth is because the pension system is a Ponzi scheme, but that's a completely different problem.

I also find it interesting that on one hand the argument against porn is, "porn is bad because it encourages X behavior in real life", but then another is "porn is bad because it discourages sex in real life".

This reminds me of a recent conversation we had at work where someone suggested that at some point all backend APIs are going to get replaced by a single LLM that'll just do anything (if you ask it nicely enough).

Define "impact on the world". Facebook has massive impact (arguably net-negative). I haven't heard of BASF since 5.25 floppies, though I'm sure they produce some very important things. Did you mean positive impact? Physical impact?

> It's a big loss if a user has to wait 3 months for a bugfix

This is incredibly short-sighted. You're talking about 1 user 3 months, and you think that's "big" ? I'd say it's a much bigger loss if the project gets kicked out because of one person's impatience. Then everybody will have to wait forever, how is that better?

If the fs is as good as you claim, then you better play by the rules and make sure the project survives and eventually goes GA. If it happens a few months later, then so be it. Think about the long term.

If you're worried about a single user leaving, then a much better strategy would be to explain to this user the Linux release timeline, or how to apply a patch, than to go up toe to toe against Linus.

And btw, squeezing a fix/feature in at the last minute in order to help one user is not as good as you think it is. Even if that one user appreciates your responsiveness, to everyone else it sends a message that the key dev is super impatient and unprofessional. So even if you manage to keep that one user, how many potential users are you losing by sending that message?

A person who points out flaws is not an asshole. An asshole is a person who breaks rules and who breaks trust. We're talking about the latter, not the former.

Since when is reasoning synonymous with invention? All humans with a functioning brain can reason, but only a tiny fraction have or will ever invent anything.

"Solving novel problems" does not mean "solving world problems that even humans are unable to solve", it simply means solving problems that are "novel" compared to what's in the training data.

Can you reason? Yes? Then why haven't you cured cancer? Let's not have double standards.

By that definition is OpenAI also censoring small websites? What about Washington Post, is it censoring small websites? Because I sure can't see them in any of those places.

Cool. If you do this with an LLM, someone will pay you a lot of money.

One tech company once made a device similar to this, with a front-facing camera to be worn on one's chest. It worked great in tests. Then right before launch they realized that women had breasts, which made the whole concept useless. Who could have predicted that?

I hope you followed its instructions. I'm very curious what this "transaction machine" is. Probably something novel and very cool.

Netanyahu is most definitely no angel and he's in large part responsible for the current situation including Oct 7 by propping up Hamas for his own political gain. However, what it happening in Gaza is not ethnic cleansing. Ethnic cleansing is systematic killing of civilians based on ethnicity. This has happened multiple times in history, but it's not what's happening here. There are way too many innocent casualties, yes, but nobody is systematically killing Palestinians. I don't know what this "relocation" plan is; forced relocation is of course bad, but it's much better than systematic killing (which is what ethnic cleansing is), and it's also arguably much better than civilians being stuck in a war zone.

Truth of the matter is that it's very challenging to fight an army of 40k terrorists who are intentionally mixed with civilians in order to maximize civilian casualties. How would you deal with a terrorist organization like that? I don't think anybody has a good answer.

I am most definitely not justifying Netanyahu and how he's handling this. In fact he helped prop up Hamas and made them as powerful as they are for his own political gain. However, Hamas is a truly awful terrorist organization that definitely has made and continues to make the situation A LOT worse than it needs to be. This is not a peaceful residence movement, it's a terrorist organization that DOES NOT WANT peace, in fact their stated mission is a "holy war" and complete destruction of Israel and all Jews. Hamas is not Gandhi or MLK; they're essentially ISIS.

Also, what IDF is doing is not genocide. Please don't misuse the word. Genocide is systematic killing of people of a certain origin, which has happened during the Holocaust and multiple other times in history, but it's not what's happening here. A huge number of innocent Palestinians have been killed, yes, but it's not due to systematic killing based on origin. The population of Gaza has grown from 650k in 1990 to 2.2M in 2023; if there was actual genocide happening (and Israel most definitely has the capacity to kill every single person in Gaza), the numbers would have gone down, not up.

I think many people shower too often and needlessly waste water and heating energy. I shower when I begin to itch or smell. Showering when you're not dirty is wasteful.

I can see some potential value add in this space. Whenever you're going somewhere new and/or you don't already know your exact itinerary upfront, you would (nowadays) typically ask an AI bot for recommendations, and those are typically poorly integrated, and often AI will suggest places that don't exist, are closed etc., then you have to manually book them. I haven't checked travel apps space lately, but I believe there's room here to deliver a more seamless experience. Getting users is going to be the hard part.

Yes, I was in this place too when I had a consulting company. We bid on projects with quotes for high quality work and guaranteed delivery within the agreed timeframe. More often than not we got rejected in favor of some students who submitted a quote for 4x less. I sometimes asked those clients how the project went, and they'd say, well, those guys missed the deadline and asked for more money several times

GPTs are language models, not "fact and truth" models. They don't even know what facts are, they just know that "if I use this word in this place, it won't sound unusual". They get rewarded for saying things that users find compelling, not necessarily what's true (and again, they have no reference to ground truth).

LLMs are like car salesmen. They learn to say things they think you want to hear in order to buy a car (upvote a response). Sometimes that's useful and truthful information, other times it isn't. (In LLMs' defense, car salesmen lie more intentionally.)

I think AI can be an amazing tool that can help us learn even better when used correctly and when not used as a substitute for learning and understanding.

It can be used as a personal tutor. How awesome is it to have a tutor always available to answer almost any question from any angle to really help you understand? Yes, AI won't get everything right 100%, but for students who are still learning basics, it's fair to assume that having an AI tutor can yield far better results than having no tutor at all.

It can also be used as a tool for doing mundane work, so you can focus more on the interesting and creative work. Kind of like a calculator or a spreadsheet. Would math majors become better mathematicians if they had to do all calculations by hand?

I think instead of banning AI, education needs to reform. Teaching staff should focus less time on giving lectures and grading papers (those things can be recorded and automated) and more time on ORAL EXAMS where they really probe student's knowledge and there's no possibility of cheating.

Students can and should use AI to help them prepare. E.g. don't ask AI to write an essay for you, write it yourself and ask it to critique it. Don't ask it to give you answers for a test, ask it to ask you questions on the topic and find gaps in your knowledge. Etc.

One thing that LLMs seem to be missing, even after ingesting the whole web, is the super-basic knowledge that every human learns before the age of 3. Most of that stuff in not written anywhere, because it's totally obvious to anyone who can read. A knowledge base like Cyc can be useful to fill these gaps, because it was made for an AI with zero base knowledge and explicitly specifies even the most obvious concepts.

When it starts saying, "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that," that's when we're really in trouble.

Yes, this! I wanted to join Threads as an alternative to Twitter, but I changed my mind when it tried to force me to create an Instagram account. I don't want an Instagram account because I think posting or looking at people's pictures is idiotic. So as long as Threads requires me to touch Instagram in any way, it's a hard pass.

The universe is Minecraft with cubes the size of 1 Planck length. How much would it take to simulate that? Another 100 years of Moore's law?

Startup culture has become fairly mainstream, thanks to shows like "Silicon Valley"; but there aren't any humorous books about "making the world a better place" by becoming seemingly rich, so we decided to create one. It’s an epic tale about a stereotypical hipster named Theo and his disruptive startup, which I'm sure many of you will find heartwarming :)

Comments and "investment capital" welcome :) Also, feel free to share with your hipster and non-hipster friends.

Yes, changing requirements, scope creep etc.