madaxe_again

Synonym is the word you’re after.

The market has more confidence in Nike than Nvidia, however - the former trades at a higher forward PE.

I guess it’s easier to believe in a shoe brand turnaround than it is in an AI future.

Thanks - that was an excellent read!

I gate it exactly as the parent says - automation only runs between 0530 and 0800, and when we’re home.

I literally couldn’t do without HA - I live off-grid, and it manages everything from monitoring water tank levels & running pumps to a power grid distributed over three independent and geographically distributed battery banks. Monitors for anomalies and tells me what is acting up - for instance today I got sent on a mission to find out why an array of PV was underproducing by 33%. Wouldn’t have noticed until it started having energy budget impacts otherwise. Makes decisions on whether today is a passive cooling/heating day or whether we have the energy budget to run climate control, when windows should be opened/closed to maximise efficiency, which blinds to close when depending on where the sun is to prevent or encourage passive solar gain, when to run the partially pumped storage hydro and in which direction, when to pull the pin on the deluge system and where if it’s set to wildfire mode. It has literally saved the house - not our lives, as we’d already evac’d and left it in charge of firefighting.

Stuff like the coffee machine and opening the blinds in the morning are just easy quality of life improvements, something less to have to manage manually, as my days are full enough that removing any point of friction is useful.

And yeah, I’ll take slightly stale coffee now over fresh coffee in ten minutes.

Yeah! If you’ve got nothing to hide you’ve got nothing to fear!

looks at you suspiciously

Are those… curtains?

They aren’t 20-30 years old - they are 160 years old.

Samuel Butler wrote Erewhon in 1872 - which was based on an essay he wrote about RSI and superintelligence - in 1863.

I did similar with our coffee machine a year ago - I was bored of getting home from the school run to a cold pot of coffee because the machine automatically turns off the hot plate after 30 minutes, and it seems there is no such thing as a WiFi connected drip coffee machine. Kettles, yes, coffee machines, no.

Dead simple. Cracked it open, chucked an ESP32 in there connected to the soft power button, and to the “machine is on” indicator on the display, which was conveniently on its own pin. No need for any thermal protection cleverness as the machine does that itself.

Now I just turn it back on when I’m heading home, and no longer have to wait for the pot to warm up again.

I then decided to stop using the “make coffee at time” functionality baked into the machine, as the kid gets up when the kid gets up, and the machine would either start early and wake her, or she’d get up before it and I’d have to go start it. Now, she opens her bedroom door, I get “kid is awake” alert on my phone, and the machine brews the coffee.

Yeah, transparency on gifs is binary, so you always had a crunchy edge. Plenty of use cases, but nice looking text wasn't one of them.

And position: absolute did not behave the same way across IE, NN, FF, or safari.

For some reason I feel the sudden urge to have a drink.

Just don't tell the kids about how eCommerce used to work. Credit card number in an email, courtesy of Mal's eCommerce? Pretty much industry standard. shudders, swigs

Basically, it was easier. Or even... barely even possible to do what you describe. Maybe you could, but it would have been nightmarish whack-a-mole, and a good chance that the next update to any given browser would break it completely.

In ‘05, you had IE6, plenty of folks still on IE5, IE5 for Mac was still in use (don’t be fooled by the name - it did not behave like IE5 on windows), safari was 2.0, respectable but still a minority browser, and Firefox was on 1.0. Plenty of folks were still on Netscape navigator, which by that point was actively decomposing.

IE6 was what you built for, as it was the majority browser by a country mile. Transparency was hit and miss. Alpha PNGs just weren’t supported, you had to hack them in via JS.

Most websites were laid out using <table>. Using a <div> was new and exotic.

Oh, and you could only do custom fonts using… flash. sIFR, if you want to delve into the hell that was web dev back then. Most folks would just end up with TNR. Transparency on sIFR you could only achieve by replicating your background into the SWF, and good luck getting it to line up.

So. Support an absolute soup of edge cases across a bunch of different browser engines, and deal with “IT LOOKS NOTHING LIKE IT DID ON THE WEBPAGE” from customers, or just do it server side.

Also, it was perfectly acceptable to wait for a website to load - 50% of the U.S. was still on dialup, and “broadband” was commonly 512k.

Absolutely you do. I can’t prove that I have cognition. I merely have the impression that I do, and we accept as a general axiom that others do too - but it is not provable. You are examining a system from within the confines of that system.

And you’re seriously going with “don’t ask inconvenient questions” as an argument?

And just to ice the cake, after they crashed and caught fire, PF jumped out of the window and abandoned PM to burn.

This is obviously wrong. I have no source but it’s self-evident.

How about an LLM connected to a robotic arm. What then?

As for cognition - can you prove that you possess it, to an external observer? Could you, confined to a box through which you can only communicate through textual messages, prove that you are thinking, and not just responding through a mechanistic process?

“obviously of different kinds”

What’s your basis for that “obviously”? You have a unique insight of the phenomenology of duck-ness? You can prove that your consciousness is somehow real, somehow different? A duck synthesises with its cognition, or it would be incapable of, well, anything. Synthesis is purely the process of the integration of inputs into outputs - ie behaviour, language.

Here’s an article on a paper on duck synthesis:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/ducklings-make-way-abst...

“objectively different levels of computational sophistication”

Says who? We still have a very poor understanding of how cognition works in animals, humans included. For all we know ducks have rich inner lives - a remarkable amount can be achieved with a very small neurone count - cf. insects. Can you coordinate flight? Can you echolocate? Are you less intelligent because you cannot?

“equivocation of "mentorship" as "prompting" and fallacious variants thereof”

You are arguing semantics. Take Harry Nyquist. He sent people down new paths with insightful questions. You could call this mentorship if you choose, I could call it prompting, but this splits hairs. The core idea is that a novel input can produce a novel output, that synthesis can be induced through guided and deliberate external input.

I invoked credentials only in response to the previous derogatory comments about my cognition - which may or may not exist, anyway.

As to religiosity - the idea that human cognition is somehow unique and special and impossible to replicate, which is the prevailing argument in this comment tree is religious, and anthropocentrism of the highest order. I apologise for accusing you of it - I was evidently wrong - I had mistaken you for a previous poster.

There are four Teslas in the village; FSD is likely to be available in six weeks or less, as it’s about to be homologated across the EU - I’m half considering running an informal robotaxi service with ours.

And yeah, it ain’t easy for them which is why I put up with being chauffeur - many of them still have dirt floors at home, heating via an open hearth, which is insane in the 21st century in Western Europe.

That really depends on where you live. Where I live there are no taxis, no public transport, no shops or services in the village - you want anything, it’s a minimum 30 minute drive to town - which includes collecting your mail, as they no longer deliver here.

And yeah, it falls on neighbours. Pretty much every day I give one old lady or another a ride to town and back. It’s a pain in the ass, I am not a fucking taxi driver, and I end up sitting around with my thumb up my ass waiting for whoever to finish whatever their errand is.

I dunno. Brasilia is the epitome of a city built by 50s urban planners, was highly structured around the car - and yet they managed to build a metro.

Actually, my undergraduate degree was physics and philosophy. And yes, synthesis is synthesis whether a human, a machine, or a duck does it, and people prompt one another all the time - “have you thought about trying X?” Or “I need the TPS report by EOB”.

I suppose my underlying point is that human cognition is not the unique and beautiful thing that we anthropocentrically suppose it to be - it is a physical process, with stochastic outcomes. Much like transformers.

Me, I’m just a machine made of meat. You can suppose yourself to be God’s perfect creation, and that’s your right, but I disagree.

That’s Wikipedia I copy pasted but sure, you do you.

And yes - without Grossmann, Einstein likely would never have posited relativity. Grossmann literally prompted him, saying “look at this, read that, learn this, then try this approach”. Without riemann’s metric tensor, not a fucking chance.

And for what it’s worth my PhD is in physics. You?

Uh, he did. Marcel Grossmann.

“It was Grossmann who emphasized the importance of a non-Euclidean geometry called Riemannian geometry (also elliptic geometry) to Einstein, which was a necessary step in the development of Einstein's general theory of relativity. Abraham Pais's book on Einstein suggests that Grossmann mentored Einstein in tensor theory as well. Grossmann introduced Einstein to the absolute differential calculus, started by Elwin Bruno Christoffel and fully developed by Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro and Tullio Levi-Civita. Grossmann facilitated Einstein's unique synthesis of mathematical and theoretical physics in what is still today considered the most elegant and powerful theory of gravity: the general theory of relativity.”

But this is what we do. Nobody ever invented or discovered anything in a vacuum - all discovery is synthesis of existing ideas and concepts applied to a novel domain. We laud Einstein for instance, but his work was a logical extension of Riemann - Riemann had a neat mathematical toy, Einstein described the universe with it - should we say Einstein was incapable of unique work?

You do have control over it, but the external pressure to be “normal” is enormous and insurmountable for a majority of people. There’d be no such thing as “normal” otherwise.

I look at my cohort who I schooled with, and they are all so terrifyingly sober and adult, and take themselves so very seriously. They toil, they spin, they die.

Me… I don’t really know what happened. As a child, the more I was told to be normal, the more I dug my heels in, not out of contrarianism but out of a still indefatigable conviction that all of these people were wrong.

And the proof lies in the pudding. I am in my 40s, still a child, still stop to explore incessantly, still enjoy poking things with a stick, still finding joy, still being told to just for the love of god be normal, when will you get a proper job, settle down and become a banker or a lawyer or a doctor, and all that jazz.

Maybe it’s just the (until recently undiagnosed) ADHD talking - maybe I have been graced with a surfeit of good luck - but I’m pretty content with how being a cast iron weirdo panned out.

On the remembrance of childhood, much of it is clear to me - and now that I have a toddler of my own, I so often find her doing X or Y and going “good god, I remember being that kid”. Her other doesn’t remember her childhood at all, and struggles to relate - whereas I’ll gleefully fill my pockets with sand and run around hooting Yankee Doodle at full blast. It’s fun. People don’t have enough fun.

Because it will create enormous prosperity for capital holders. Everyone else - talk to your congressman.

“Vast economic disruption” is not quite the good marketing angle it appears to be.

I see it in much the same light - and the spending going into it leads me to infer that those doing the spending see the same thing.

Whoever gets to RSI first and has the compute to act on it, wins the future - assuming they don’t lose control of it.

Similarly to the nuclear arms race, Teller raised the reasonable concern that a detonation could propagate through the entirety of earth’s atmosphere. Thankfully that turned out to not be true, but the parallel is that the need/desire to win this race is similarly strong, and the brinkmanship and game theory in play is effectively identical.

I think we need to worry about paperclip maximisation as much as we need to worry about “Jon is having a bad day so brews up a novel plague”. There are likely ways it can go wrong that we haven’t even considered, too.

I was also recently in France, at a very similar affair - little fortnightly village fete, with a band and food and all that.

Most everyone over 40 or so, talking. Most everyone under 40, preening and posing. I saw so many people holding plates awkwardly in midair to get a picture of themselves, the food, the bunting etc. - to the extent that the organisers were having to ask people to move along so others could order.

Then again this was the Dordogne which may as well be Bognor at this point.

I’m not sure that informants are the way to go either. More often than not in history, this has just been used as a tool to mess with the lives of people you do not like.

There won’t be a next 100 years.

Did you miss the last 15 years of social media?

So many people I just stopped spending time with altogether as instead of being present they’d be posing for their 90th instagram shot by 10am - and then of course they want you to pose, too.

So no. Spending time with your friends is not enough in 2026. I’m not even convinced people have friends now - just colleagues and mutual parasites.

The actual money launderers don’t leave honking great big digital footprints everywhere, and so aren’t found by these systems.