kombookcha

It's very funny that the very first thing anybody knows about the department of efficiency is that it has two bosses.

That's so cool! Very interesting how similar it would be to the ice houses used right up until fridges come around. Ice blocks in basements lined with timber and packed in sawdust.

Sumerian civilization is just endlessly fascinating.

God what a pain in the ass to put them all on and take them all off, no wonder they didn't make it

It's a good painting, but with such an unreasonable amount of hype, the real deal can only disappoint. You can't even really engage with it as a painting, it's become some kind of inescapable weird hyper symbol of Great Art (tm).

St John the Baptist gets me far better than Mona Lisa. And as you say, the drawings are kinda where he really shines.

I like to think that for a guy with so many different talents and pursuits, doing all these repetitive, careful passes over what was ultimately commission work to pay his bills was less engaging than the rapid, iterative nature of drawing. Technical and precise, yet ferociously vivid.

If an ancient octopus wanted to wear some rubber-like workwear to do his dirty civilization-building, would he wear a big glove with 8 'fingers', or would he wear a flexible thimble on each tentacle?

Yeah, it's an odd angle - they're cancelling because they don't like what he's doing with the paper, the product that they were buying. What you are legally allowed to do, and what your customers will tolerate you doing before they stop being your customers, are two entirely different things.

Retaining functionality even in the face of mild-to-moderate borkedness is sorta the inciting goal for even making it in the first place, way back in the cold war days. Building on top of "How do we make a communications network that can handle a bunch of nukes" sets you up for a very resilient baseline :)

If you want to be sure it's legit, try the site vcoins - they have a good selection of shops specializing in ancient greek coinage, and they have a good reputation for vetting.

Is there any particular city state / public person your friend is fond of? I'd plug that in their search bar and see what comes up.

Lie is not a stretch at this point. It very clearly hasn't been 'nearly ready' this entire 11 years.

This isn't just a HN commenter who got carried away with starry eyed hype in a comment. This is a corporate salesman, and he's trying to sell a product that simply cannot do what he claims it can do.

It's not human error at this point, he's just knowingly selling magic beans.

What did you see that you feel is being under-discussed?

Chainsaw arm ala Evil Dead and I'm back on board.

Groovy ;)

This dude has lied about robotaxis for a full 11 years. Think about where you were in life 11 years ago. Each time he's done this, it's been brought up in here with steadily decreasing enthusiasm. What reason would anybody have to engage seriously with this until an actual product has shipped?

I straight up do not believe that Optimus is capable of vacuuming a car unassisted without damaging itself, the car or the hoover.

Damn, that guy is citing sources, must mean he's wrong and there is no need for you to examine any of the vibes-based assumptions you are making about the real world then.

Exactly, yeah - the noise to signal ratio is shifted catastrophically because you can generate infinite amounts of bullshit in a flash. You don't have to trickily convince people that X is true instead of Y with some carefully planted forgery, you can just drown out the Y with a billion fake X.

It effectively kills the non-walled internet as an information repository.

Exactly, yeah. The high frequency of mistakes from voice commands is a specific point of friction that makes me still prefer tactile buttons for cars - ideally somewhere you don't have to take your hands off the wheel or your eyes off the road. If voice command got really good, that would probably change for me.

Touchscreens are great for phones, but I'm really not a fan of them in cars where I prefer the tactile feedback of knowing what button is under my finger.

A lot of it just comes down to having the right tool for the right usecase, really.

Interestingly, a big barrier to voice recognition is the same as with AI assistants - they don't understand context, and so they have a difficult time navigating messy inputs that you need assumed knowledge and contextual understanding for. Which is kinda the baseline for how humans communicate things to eachother with words in the first place.

Yeah, the issue with climate change and world hunger has never been the ability to generate loads and loads of vaguely relevant text in a very short time. It also isn't a problem of being able to recognize patterns in data, as you would with machine learning.

They're issues of socially and politically organizing how humans and resources and economies interact, and there is nothing about the current crop of AI that suggests they can help with that in any particular capacity. If anything the genAI hunger for energy and chips is kinda looking like a net negative in terms of the first problem.

I don't even really get why the hypemen are pushing these huge global issues as motivators - surely that insane standard of Unrealised Value only highlights how limited the abilities of this technology actually are?

I strongly doubt that you're gonna be listening to this stuff recreationally once the novelty wears off, but if I'm wrong and you actually enjoy listening to two robots pretend to be excited about your documents and webpages long term, then have fun with that I guess.

Honestly, it's obviously horrendously gag-worthy and everything, but also kind of funny that there is so much bullshit marketing copy out there that LLM's invariably converge on this inspirational Stanford application letter / upbeat linkedin influencer tone of voice, and just apply it to everything.

> 3-5 years ago, I guarantee you wouldn't be able to tell it's AI generated

You would however be able to tell that it was extremely obnoxious and bland, and without the novelty of the technical trick, you would not be listening to it.

They're not connecting to the autotune, but to the artist. People have a lot of opinions about Taylor Swift's music but "not being personal enough" is definitely not a common one.

If you wanna advocate for unplugged music being more gratifying, I don't disagree, but acting like the autotune is what people are getting out of Taylor Swift songs is goofy.

If you ask a Swiftie what they love about Taylor Swift, I guarantee they will not say "the autotune is flawless".

They're not connecting with the relative correctness of each note, but feeling a human, creative connection with an artist expressing herself.

Debunking bullshit inherently takes more effort than generating bullshit, so the human factor is normally your big force multiplier. Does this person seem trustworthy? What else have they done, who have they worked with, what hidden motivations or biases might they have, are their vibes /off/ to your acute social monkey senses?

However with AI anyone can generate absurd torrential flows of bullshit at a rate where, with your finite human time and energy, the only winning move is to reject out of hand any piece of media that you can sniff out as AI. It's a solution that's imperfect, but workable, when you're swimming through a sea of slop.

I have to think that whatever they're using this for, it could be done at a much lower data resolution.

Well, not entirely by accident - things like companion planting were very much observable as advantageous for pest control or nutrient efficiency. Think like how carrots and garlic both like being next to radishes, and while carrots thrive with being near peas, garlic suffers. It's quite actionable stuff whether you're deciding the layout and planting sequence of a small kitchen garden or a large plot of land.

I am unsure exactly how much of the biology was understood at the time, but it also wasn't entirely drawn out of thin air. A lot of it was just drawing a bunch of known good practices together as a cohesive design philosophy for how to run a farm.

Spirituality stuff was very in vogue at the time, so it's hard to say if it would have even gotten popular without the cosmic forces type stuff. Even if it was a dubious contribution to the actual mechanics :)

It sort of remains to be seen whether they can actually make that cash - they're no longer the only game in town, and while they have an obvious adoption and brand name recognition advantage in their industry, they've also been running real hot on investor funding on the assumption that more processing power is what it's gonna take for them to stay competitive and continue improving. But they're gonna have to fight Google and Microsoft on that front. If there is a general plateau coming up in all of these models, or they fail to keep pace with their extremely well-supplied competition, it might not be so easy to convert their position into money.

A large part of it was public awareness of the health risks and relatead damage to the image of smoking as cool and classy.

Now, the proportion of people who still take up smoking today do so in spite of all this, which is probably down to them having various specific user profiles that are unaffected by this (IE they live in communities/work jobs where its ubiquitous or are huge James Dean fans).

For gambling, you could possibly go a long way with awareness and labelling, but I think an issue is that gambling is a lot less visible than smoking. Nobody can smell that you popped outside to blow your paycheck on tonight's game. Making gambling deeply uncool might make some people not take it up, but most of the existing addicts would likely carry on in secret. They're already commonly hiding their losses from spouses and friends, so what's one more layer of secrecy?

At any rate, what worked for smoking wasn't making smokers quit, but making fewer and fewer kids start doing it, so making it a pain in the ass to place your first bet might help.

The blinding flash of annoyance I feel each time the wires catch on a doorhandle is probably more likely to kill me with chip damage to my heart rate than a battery explosion to be honest.

As I read it, nobody is necessarily in the wrong. I get that they want to be able to confirm this while they're young enough to dive it, but at the same time that may not be the best thing for the wreck itself.

I am guessing you're correct and it's the latter - that they don't feel like the couple and their associates are qualified/equipped to mess around with it if it /is/ archeologically significant. The amount of effort to protect the single piece they were allowed to bring up gives some idea of the kind of sustained effort of many highly trained people it would involve.

Now, if the state believes the raised piece to be from an 1800s fishing vessel as apparently the one expert says, it's also possible that they just don't think it's worth the effort and expense, and that the divers are misinterpreting the wreck site and seeing what they want to see.

Conversely, if it did believe it was the genuine article, there may not be the funds to do an operation like this immediately. Archeological sites are generally fairly stable when left in place, so for an instituation waiting 10 years to make a move on this isn't a big deal, and there are likely other sites that need to excavated before they're destroyed for various reasons - but if you're an aging couple and this is your big dream, then there's an urgency here that may easily be considered reckless if you're evaluating purely based on the best way to approach an archeological site, more so than a sense of romance and adventure.