kolektiv

I just had a look at this (I'd been meaning to for a while, I miss the milkman leaving milk and other bits from my childhood). The milk is literally 4x the price I would pay in the supermarket. It's a lovely idea, but in this economic climate, most people are more price-conscious than that...

Broadly speaking I agree with you in principle - but in practice over time you come to realise that there are only shitty clients. They might not intend to be, they might not have started out that way, but time is a destructive thing...

For info: I don't believe (1), I do believe (2) although not that strongly - it's more likely to be a leap than a gradient, I suspect - I simply don't see anything right now that convinces me it's just over the next hill.

Your conclusion... maybe, yes - I don't think we're anywhere near a simulation approach with sufficient fidelity however. Also 82% is very specific!

Our current achievements in flight are impressive, and obviously optimised for practicality on a couple of axes. More generally though, our version of flight, compared with most birds, is the equivalent of a soap box racer against a Formula 1.

I agree with you on that - there are very real, very well-evidenced, species-level harms (x-risks, if you really must) happening right now: pesticide-induced biodiversity loss, soil erosion/loss, ocean acidification, ice shelf melting, and on and on. These are real and quantifiable, and we know of ways to address them (not without cost/pain).

It actually makes me quite angry that as much effort is being wasted on regulating tiny theoretical risks as it is when we are failing on a planetary scale on large concrete risks.

They declare that - but I could also declare I'm trying to build a nuclear bomb (n.b. I'm not). Whether people are likely to try and stop me, or try and apply some legal non-proliferation framework, is partly influenced by whether they believe what I'm claiming is realistic (it's not - I have a workshop, but no fissile material).

Nobody gets too worried about me doing something which would be awful, but the general consensus is that I won't achieve. Until a company gives some credible evidence they're close to AGI... (And companies have millions/billions of reasons to claim they are when they're not, so scepticism is warranted).

I understand your point, I think - and certainly I don't want to go anywhere near name-calling or derision, that doesn't help anyone. But I am reminded of arguments I've had with creationists (I am not comparing you with them, but sometimes the general tone of the debate). It seems like one side is making an extraordinary claim, and then demanding the other side rebut it, and that's not something that seems reasonable to me.

The thing about nuclear weapons is that the theoretical science was clear before the testing - building and testing them was proof by demonstration, but many people agreed with the theory well before that. How they would be used was certainly debated, but there was a clear and well-explained proposal for every step of their creation, which could be tested and falsified if needed. I don't think that's the case here - there seems to be more of a claim for a general acceleration with an inevitable endpoint, and that claim of inevitability feels very short on grounding.

I am more than prepared to admit that I may not be seeing (for various reasons) the evidence that this is near/possible - but I would also claim that nobody is convincingly showing any either.

That last question is one I think about often! It sounds like your childhood was pretty well spent. I wanted to make lasers too - just not on film! I built most of one, but only lacked a decently sized ruby, for some reason. Probably just as well, as my childhood electronics would almost certainly have been at least as lethal as your kart...

Oh, absolutely - such an entity obviously could! Modelling the behaviour of such an entity is very difficult indeed, as you'd need to make all kinds of assumptions without basis. However, you only need to model this behaviour once you've posited the likely existence of such an entity - and that's where (purely subjectively) it feels like there's a gap.

Nothing has yet convinced me (and I am absolutely honest about the fact that I'm not a deep expert and also not privy to the inner workings of relevant organisations) that it's likely to exist soon. I am very open to being convinced by evidence - but an "argument from trajectory" seems to be what we have at the moment, and so far, those have stalled at local maxima every single time.

We've built some incredibly impressive tools, but so far, nothing that looks or feels like a concept of will (note, not consciousness) yet, to the best of my knowledge.

I'm not convinced the onus should be on one side to prove why something isn't an existential risk. We don't start with an assumption that something is world-ending about anything else; we generally need to see a plausibly worked-through example of how the world ends, using technology we can all broadly agree exists/will shortly exist.

If we're talking about nuclear weapons, for example, the tech is clear, the pattern of human behaviour is clear: they could cause immense, species-level damage. There's really little to argue about. With AI, there still seems to be a lot of hand-waving between where we are now and "AGI". What we have now is in many ways impressive, but the onus is still on the claimant to show that it's going to turn into something much more dangerous through some known progression. At the moment there is a very big, underpants gnomes-style "?" gap before we get to AGI/profit, and if people are basing this on currently secret tech, then they're going to have to reveal it if they want people to think they're doing something other than creating a legislative moat.

To be fair, I raced 2-stroke karts for years, and up until relatively recently, clutches weren't a thing. Most karts were direct-drive, as you didn't want lag and power loss, and simplicity was usually more important than anything else for weight and general sanity. The engine was more likely to stall when you didn't want it to than go when it shouldn't - if you spun in a race, that was it, race over.

That said, the rest of your kart sounds like it was probably best avoided - you should be grateful for that pull-start breakage, yes!

I'm working on a hobby project at the moment, which at the moment is all about sequencing, and my long term plan is to integrate Glicol in some way - it's a great project, and I can't wait to start digging around further.

I'm looking forward to seeing what you do with hardware - I'm sure it'll be cool!

You don't need a final legislative change to impact inward investment and manufacturing location when everyone knows it's coming. The Brexit vote hit investment confidence and manufacturing long before the final withdrawal agreement because the writing was on the wall and manufacturers avoid risk.

"No effect on trade" is definitely not true, I've personally had multiple exporting clients go bust due to trade restrictions and even if their volume of trade is exactly replaced, the balance and make up of trade is different (it isn't just that, however).

No questions from me, just some appreciation and thanks for the release. While it is clearly not founded solely on the pure and selfless love of AWS for Rust, it is nevertheless very positive for the language to have good stable ways to work with major platforms. Writing things on AWS in Rust is now a significantly easier sell.

Thanks for all the work on this, looking forward to trying a few new pieces out!

I'm writing a library at the moment with exactly this kind of issue (not quite that formulation, but morally equivalent). The whole thing would be a lot simpler (and remove the need for procedural macros to generate all of the types and impls) with variadic generics.

Would I use variadic generics regularly? Probably not. But in places where they'd be useful - boy, would they really be useful!

At some point you've got to get from language to action, yes - in my case, I use the LLM as a multi-stage classifier, mapping from a set of high-level areas of capability, to more focused mappings to specific systems and capabilities. So the first layer of classification might say something like "this interaction was about <environmental control>" where <environmental control> is one of a finite set of possible systems. The next layer might say something like "this is about <lighting>", and the next layer may now have enough information to interrogate using a specific enough prompt (which may be generated based on a capability definition, so for example "determine any physical location, an action, and any inputs regarding colour or brightness from the following input" - which can be generated from the possible inputs of the capability you think you're addressing).

Of course this isn't fool proof, and there still needs to be work defining capabilities of systems, etc. (although these are tasks AI can assist with). But it's promising - "teaching" the system how to do new things is relatively simple, and effectively akin to describing capabilities rather than programming directly.

You can. There are definitely still footguns - some things are just not easy. But there are also fewer footguns, and the overall type system makes modelling problems in ways which are often simpler to reason about more achievable (trivial example - state machines are common, and easy to represent in relatively safe ways with exhaustively checked enums, matching, etc.)

Is rewriting something in Rust a guarantee of no bugs? Nope. But it does likely make it easier for the rewriters to reduce the number of bugs.

Not very likely? I mean sure, it's theoretically possible, but like all conspiracies it requires a lot of people to keep a very juicy secret perfectly, so... probably not.

The number of people previously well disposed towards pharmaceutical companies that are now not because of Russell Brand probably doesn't have the boards quaking in their boots either - the likely shareholder overlap is not high.

I'm not sure the middle classes are likely to be hit by ULEZ anyway - it hits vehicles older than a certain age, primarily - not many of those Chelsea Tractors are likely to fall foul of it. While I agree with ULEZ, I will admit it's quite regressive - the people with old/polluting vehicles are, in many cases, those least able to afford anything better and/or the charge. Public transport should be much better, but that's way beyond the scope of something the mayor can quickly impact.

I've got a Tesla Model 3, which a) has a perfectly decent range, up near the top of the general class, and b) isn't a huge car. It's not a small car but a sensibly mid-sized car - significantly smaller than the ridiculous SUVs I weave in between.

Electric is a non-factor here; in fact, one of the fundamental things that Tesla gets right, which other manufacturers of electric vehicles studiously ignore, is aerodynamics (not all, clearly). The very worst size and shape for an electric vehicle is "huge and brick-like" as it is for all vehicles - it's much more apparent with EVs, though, where the range is so easily comparable.

(N.B. I got it before Musk went so spectacularly off the deep end, it was a motoring choice not a political/fandom one).

If you assume that it's simply linear, then depending on length you could certainly lose if sufficiently incompetent. Of course, then 1D Connect Four would be effectively a tape, and thus a Turing machine capable of encoding 5D Chess... I'll admit the simile doesn't stand much in the way of stress!

Oh I'd forgotten that, truly the idiot that keeps on giving.

He did acquire a lot of talent. Then he fired the majority of it and slagged off/alienated the rest, losing most of the institutional knowledge gained over years. He then systematically torched any external goodwill with both advertisers and users, before torpedoing the brand identity which had cut through to non-tech culture.

At some point, you have to just admit that he might not be playing 5D Chess, but 1D Connect Four, and he's still losing.

I am not a designer (not for 20 years now) but that desktop image (rotating gif of different styles) is not a good advert. There are many, many layout issues with those that I would really spend time to try and make "default" look right out of the box (and in line with platform HID guidelines). I am a Rust developer, and I think Slint could be amazing, but those things will put off people who are driven by design quality.

I think were there sufficient demand to counterbalance the potential awkwardness of publishing something which will offend, they would still be publishing it. Nobody is stopping them doing so. Indeed, if someone felt so strongly about this that they wished to see it re-published, there is probably a sum of money which would acquire the rights and allow them to do so. This book has not been banned. Should someone acquire the rights to it and decide to publish, they may do so unhindered.

There are, however, many creative works which are no longer published because they are just too far from what people would see as fine now. They're generally unlamented, but nothing is stopping someone from publishing them again, if they fancy losing money.

Publishers are a business, generally speaking. To address your edit: What is the upside to a publisher of publishing a book widely (though not universally) considered offensive? Especially if that books is aimed at children?

Clearly, they consider what demand there is to be not worth the expense and potential reputational risk of satisfying. You can say that this last part is a form of censorship - but in reality, it's just how cultures work. There are things which are considered taboo. You may do them if you wish, but you have no right to say they should be consequence free.

Kind of. But if somebody else wants to publish these books in particular, they could probably buy the rights to do so for a suitable price. Whether that price would be higher or lower now is an interesting philosophical debate, but the fact that it's possible to do so, given appropriate capital, takes this out of the realm of censorship (subjective opinion, clearly).

People, and organisations, self-censor all the time. It may be problematic, depending on the circumstances, and the external pressures and forces which lead them to do so. In this particular case, I don't see anything overly damaging about the cause > effect: "many people are not comfortable, and do not enjoy, reading crude racial caricatures" > "we'll stop publishing some books which contain them".

Sigh. Nobody has cancelled Dr. Seuss. The publisher has decided not to publish a small number of his works which contain some stereotypes and characterisations which are pretty far from what most people would see as "fine" now. Nobody has made them do this, nobody is going round collecting and burning copies already in print. Many books stop being published all the time for all kinds of reasons - being out of step with contemporary mores and experiences is, and always has been, one of them.

And as a secondary thought around Rusoto (which is awesome, but could be even more so) - it would be great if we came up with some way of covering the non-HTTP/REST type services - for example, there are various streaming services (think speech to text, text to speech, etc.) which are simply not covered by Rusoto. So you can configure those services using Rusoto, but not use them. I've written a few medium-hacky clients for things like AWS Transcribe, but it would be great to... well, not have to.

Rusoto is an awesome project though, huge thanks to those who've got it to where it is.