jordanpg

There's a Contracts prof reading this and writing a final exam question right now.

The lawyers I know are very fixated on the problem of hallucinated case citations which is amusing to me as a onetime programmer, since case citations have a well-defined syntax and would be relatively easy to check programmatically.

In the podcast, Cal Newport repeats at least 20 times that agentic AI is nothing more than an LLM execution loop, as if this is some kind of trump card, taking for granted the usual stochastic parrot trope. At no point does he even consider the possibility that the LLM output itself is noteworthy. These people are permanently stuck in November 2022.

Simple? Just wait until a federal court finds OpenAI or Anthropic immune under Section 230 for something an agent does.

Also, even after you find precisely what you're looking for, there is no guarantee that what arrives will not be a cheap imitation or reduced-quality version of what you purchased.

Before reading The Stranger, I was headlong into the then-popular "New Atheism" movement, which came with a certain air of superiority of brainpower over the naive masses. But reading The Stranger had a profound impact on me, even before I knew anything more formal about existentialist philosophy.

It was an awakening: I began to understand that the problem with the world isn't that everyone needs to learn more physics and think more like me. The problem is that none of this stuff -- life -- really means anything; that's a hard pill for lots of people to swallow (understandably); and our stupid little lives are just 80 years or so of farting around and trying to forget about what is obvious (h/t to KV).

The book ultimately softened my overly critical views about religion and superstition and helped me mature into someone much more sympathetic to the various weird things that people think and do.

Can confirm. Top of the article could be about my dad. Same flavor of cancer and everything.

Have not read it yet, but recently researched this question and came to this book as a readable overview of the latest thinking in cosmology, Battle of the Big Bang: The New Tales of Our Cosmic Origins by Afshordi and Halper [1].

The book assumes a basic knowledge of physics and cosmology so it does not spend half the book reviewing basics like many pop physics books do.

[1] https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo244963...

I suspect this is happening a thousand times a day right now. But it will be many years before the first test case gets to a federal appeals court. In the meantime, there will be some unknown tens of thousands of new patents granted that involved varying degrees of AI inventorship. The legal term of art is "reliance interest." I think courts will be extremely reluctant to rock the boat by the time this is litigated because AI will be as common as "Googling" by then.

Software patent law and AI inventorship are separate legal issues. For example, an AI could invent a mechanical device which is a more "meat and potatoes" kind of IP. But the question of whether the AI, or the human invoking the AI, should be listed on the patent is distinct.

The plaintiff is Stephen Thaler who has made a career of this litigation all over the world.

To my knowledge, he has notched only one win (i.e., granted patent) in South Africa, where patents are only cursorily examined [1].

The last word in the US is from the Federal Circuit a couple of years ago [2]. Same basic outcome: only a human being can be an inventor.

That said, the new Director of the USPTO has indicated that inventors should feel free to use AI however much they want as long as a human name is on the patent. However, it should be stressed that the Director's guidelines have not been litigated yet.

[1] https://artificialinventor.com/patent/

[2] https://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/opinions-orders/21-2347.OPINIO...

(simple, non-complicated consumer) Alternatives I'm aware of are:

Amazon Fire TV

Apple TV

Smart TV built-ins

Are there any others?

They have absolutely no idea what they are destroying or why. An entire generation of scientists will be lost. It is breathtaking to watch what will surely be someday labeled as one of the greatest acts of intentional, national self-destruction ever.

I was just thinking about this. LLMs are nothing if not easy litmus tests for identifying bullshit jobs.

> If you had asked me this question years ago, I probably would have agreed with you.

It is breathtaking to consider how many strong opinions of the young are like this. Strong opinions voiced every day around here. Strong opinions that change with time and experience and osmosis.

> If LLMs were around when I was a student, I would've also used them to "speed up" my homework assignments then proceed to fail all my tests.

As a counterpoint, I was once a physics grad student. I didn't finish the PhD because at some point I discovered that I was not going to be the next Richard Feynman and this was too much for my ego at the time. But I think that if LLMs were available, I might have finished.

Part of my problem was that at some point the math transitioned from stuff I understood to symbols and notation that I knew how to manipulate but didn't really understand. LLMs could have helped bridge that gap.

On the other hand, it's hard to imagine I wouldn't have used it for Jackson, etc. but we got Jackson solutions from previous students and the internet anyway. Using LLMs probably would have been more effective, used correctly.

> The only possible answer in a republic is that people accountable to the political system are allocated that power.

It's not that what's happening in the US with respect to science funding is not legal, it's just dumb. And, no, it doesn't have to be this way or that way because the constitution says so.

There are probably millions of spending decisions happening daily that are delegated, by elected or appointed officials, to non-elected or non-appointed people. In the scientific realm, spending decisions have been largely delegated to scientists since the end of WW2, and it's been very effective.

That's a lovely thought but it assumes, as with so many other things about our republican form of government, that the political appointees are good faith actors, at least with respect to funding of science. There are many reasons to suspect that the goal here is not just control of funding, but the defenestration of science more broadly because scientific findings tend to conflict with assertions politicians would like to make. I would submit that people flying on planes, using cell phones and computers, and going to the doctor don't want that, even if they think they do.

Unfortunately, these are agency rules. Congress can intervene, but only with major legislative action, which is unlikely. There will be hearings and Senators will express great concern, but the Administration will probably be able to do whatever they want. If anything slows this down, it will be the courts.

> Second, the update utility got stuck. Just frozen. Couldn't open it. I hadn't tweaked anything, hadn't installed anything unusual, hadn't deviated from the vanilla setup. Day seven of a fresh Fedora install and the update tool was bricked.

"update tool was bricked"? What?

100% agree. The two examples are garden-variety computer problems and not articulated with any degree of precision for someone who claims to have attempted to troubleshoot them. It's either AI-generated or the author has only elementary Linux know-how (which is cool, but we don't need to take their wholesale dismissal of an entire ecosystem quite as seriously).

My contributions:

https://halupedia.com/jgldfjgjdflgjdflkgjldjglkdjlg

https://halupedia.com/aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa...

https://halupedia.com/drop-table-users

https://halupedia.com/test-test

https://halupedia.com/test-test-test-test-test-test-test-tes...

@kevinroose

i follow AI adoption pretty closely, and i have never seen such a yawning inside/outside gap.

people in SF are putting multi-agent claudeswarms in charge of their lives, consulting chatbots before every decision, wireheading to a degree only sci-fi writers dared to imagine.

people elsewhere are still trying to get approval to use Copilot in Teams, if they're using AI at all.

it's possible the early adopter bubble i'm in has always been this intense, but there seems to be a cultural takeoff happening in addition to the technical one. not ideal!

https://www.nytimes.com/by/kevin-roose https://x.com/kevinroose/status/2015464558115295369

Isn't that what GPTZero does?

If these are so easy to identify, why not just incorporate some kind of screening into the early stages of peer review?

My point still stands. The country will obviously not be permanently swarming with ICE agents violently grabbing immigrants off the street. There is going to be mission creep. If this isn't obvious then I don't know what to else I can say to convince you. Immigration is clearly just a pretext to establishing a national police force.

Remember this thread when you hear for the first time that ICE agents are tasked with doing something that has nothing to do with immigration enforcement. Coming soon.

Along the same lines, anyone who thinks this is just about immigration should ask themselves what all these tens of thousands of ICE agents are going to do when all the immigrants are finally deported.

Are they just going to go home and go back to their old jobs? Or do you think the Administration is going to find something else for them to do.

People are, yes, but I'm not. I'm looking inward and trying to be honest about what it's going to take to get me on the street.

> Not sure being out in the street really does much.

I agree; this phrase was just a stand in for doing something -- anything -- about the state of affairs I don't like. Other than things I can do from my couch like commenting on HN.

> Posting online literally is political activity.

This guy's book convinced me otherwise: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/political-...

"Political hobbyism" is things like commenting on the internet, as distinct from going out and convincing people to vote differently or running for offfice.