lambdaone

Even asking a human being why they did a certain thing is questionable. The research on choice blindness seems like a pretty definitive debunking of post-hoc rationalization:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introspection_illusion#Choice_...

I think a better way of putting this is that humans think they can accurately re-tell what their consciousness was doing. Whether they actually can, or even if consciousness exists at all as a thing outside the perception of consciousness is a philosophical question currently beyond answering.

This is the crucial point.

It has vastly increased my hobby programming "velocity", but has improved my day job performance by perhaps a quarter at most; so much in programming is not the task of programming, but mapping the problem and dealing with the outside world.

I happily go abroad and speak with my hosts in my rudimentary German, and we are all happy. Sometimes we shift to their slightly-less-rudimentary English, and that's good too. Although we sometimes resort to machine translation to look up a specific word or phrase when we are both stuck, we have never felt the need to use real-time spoken machine translation.

DMCA notices are meant to be submitted "under penalty of perjury", and false notices could in theory result in civil action being taken against those who send them. In practice, neither of these occur even if the sender is a real person, like a record company lawyer lending their name to complaint that are entirely computer generated, or, in this as in so many cases, a completely fabricated identity.

Requiring verification through government ID for takedown notices should be a minimum requirement.

This is pretty much the backstory of Dune. In the first novel, the character Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam says:

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."

This is a Manhattan Project-level endeavour, and most countries would not be capable of it. China, however, is. Even though it lacks the expertise to do all these specific things to the Western cutting edge level right now, it has the resources, the overall technology and engineering base, and the determination to achieve the goal with the full power of the Chinese economy behind it. Not to mention industrial espionage.

It might take them a decade, but they'll get there. Working on the basis that you can somehow stop China rather than merely delaying them is a comforting illusion.

The problem with not learning languages is that it restricts you to computer-mediated communication. If you learn other languages than your own, even at a fairly basic level, there is a whole world of social interaction and culture out there that just can't be accessed with a machine in the way.

This isn't to say that automated translation is bad, I use it extensively, but not all interaction worth having is online.

A win that, as I understand it, did not actually set a precedent and is thus of no actual legal use to them.

Democratic socialists and social democrats solve the free rider problem through general taxation and regulation.

Consider universal healthcare as the case in point for this; we absorb the cost of chronically ill people by mixing them in with the rest of the population, at a fraction of the price that the "free market" costs to attempt and fail to do the same thing.

As I understand it what was "explicitly illegal" was copying the books, in the sense of mere copying before feeding them to the model, and this is what the Anthropic copyright settlement is about.

Actually processing them through the model, though, was considered transformative and therefore fair use.

The horse has bolted some time ago on this; the "frontier" is not as inaccessible as it once was, and open models, once out there, can't be put back in the bag.

Even if the US bans opens models, the Chinese and Russians will still have them, along with the rest of the world including cybersecurity attackers, and that's probably the worst-case scenario for the US.

The only way forward now is open models and how we restructure society around them.

The article really doesn't hold back: one of the subheadings is "Picking up where phrenology left off".

> Always thought the dencrentalisation and forking of Wikipedia would be the endgame. Would allow for people to actually curate their own spaces again.

Database dumps and software for the entire enyclopedia are avaible for free, and multiple forks already exist, including two which are run on behalf of the Russian and Chinese governments. You are, and have always been, more than welcome to create your own.

Sanger did, indeed, create his own Wikipedia alternative.[0] It failed to catch on, and is currently maintaned and almost exclusively edited by just one person.

[0] https://www.citizendium.org/

Instead of having distinct tokens, you could have modifier vectors which would be added to other tokens. Think in terms of control, shift, meta etc.

12-bit log is a very common format in professional post-production.

<prefix>::1, <prefix>::2, <prefix>::3, <prefix>::4... exactly how hard can that be?

Or if you're feeling playful, <prefix>::b0d, <prefix>::bed, <prefix>::dad, <prefix>::b1d...

A changeover to your IPv5 would be just as agonizing as the changeover to IPv6. A system with a larger address space is fundamentally uninteroperable with one with a smaller address space as there is nowhere to put the extra bits in the old protocol. The lack of motivation to move to the new protocol would also be just the same.

And as for memorization: do you actually memorize MAC addresses for your interfaces? The answer is no, you don't, becase ARP handles all that for you. Well, for IPv6, DNS, mDNS and so on handles all that for both your IPv4 and your IPv6 addresses - or should, if you know what you are doing, as memorizing IPs doesn't really scale beyond a few dozen machines.

Yes, IPv6 is overengineered, but it gets the pain of having larger addresses in the packet done once and for all - the odds of needing more than 128 bits in the rest of human history are very small indeed. And if something radically new needs to replace the current IPv6 architecture, which is much more likely, the extra address bits are already there; only 2000::/3 is assigned for public use so far, and the new addresses would fit in the current IPv6 packet format already.

The slow adoption of IPv6 by many older companies is at least in part a paradoxical result of the success of IPv6 elsewhere, particularly in new builds where there is practically no overhead in deploying IPv6 in a green-field environment - see for example the mobile telecoms market in developing countries, where new builds are IPv6-first.

This has taken pressure off the IPv4 legacy address pool, reducing the urgency for older providers.

End-users are typically completely unaware of whether their traffic is being carried over IPv6 or IPv4, and so simply do not care one way or the other. (This particular post is more than likely being made over IPv6, since news.ycombinator.com has an IPv6 address and my OS, browser, router and ISP all support IPv6 straight out of the box, as is now true for the majority of users in my country.)

"Yes the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders." [0]

The mindset behind private equity takeovers is exactly this. They know, but they are really well paid to do it, and they don't care.

[0] https://x.com/Benioff/status/549339156854214656

In-person written exams and classwork are really the only solution for this, either handwritten or on dumb devices locked down to only being a word processor.

This is a fascinating study that shows the massive disconnect between our moral choices and our actual hehavior, showing how many people are willing to accept the risk of killing children in exchange for a car that makes them feel good, even if they have been explicitly informed of that risk.

I just took a look at the page's own 'town square'. At the moment, it's largely full of people saying offensive things for the sake of it.

This sort of boring grind is where the real work of systems engineering is done. Big infrastructure projects like this work on making the Linux kernel more reliable while still keeping it workable throughout the process move on the scale of decades, not months.

What you are describing is option types, which are an entirely valid and very useful construct that helps make programs more rather than less reliable. But you need proper language type system support and compile-time enforcement to make it work, and C does neither of those.

This is Sturgeon's Law: "ninety percent of everything is crap".

But the corollary to it is the fact 10% of everything isn't crap, and just as there always has been crap, there always has been excellence. Just less of it.

The term for these is "mockbusters", and the term has its very own Wikipedia article, linked in the first paragraph of the page you cited:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mockbuster

I experimented with turning out complete airport thriller novels this way, using earlier LLMs. It's not terribly hard to make this happen, the hard part wasn't gunning out prose, it was plot arcs and internal consistency, but even that was suprisingly easy to solve.

Of course I didn't do anything with the idea, for what I hope are obvious reasons.

This is exactly what DMCA takedowns are actually for.