pmontra

Why not? Or maybe it's the wrong question.

Look at us. We generally agree that we are conscious and our rack is atoms, molecules, cells. Those atoms of Na and Cl I had yesterday have been in a rock for most of their existence. Did I make them conscious by moving them into my body? Or is consciousness some property of the electric fields inside my brain and the biological layer is only a way to keep them going?

The same words that form a book can be printed on paper, carved on rock, drawn on sand, stored on a HDD, punched cards, SSD, learned by heart and never written down, etc. But it's the same words. So are the media really important?

That 1-2-3 framework can't be applied to LLMs because they are full of human bias by definition, as they are trained on human language. We will have to find another way.

Alphago is an example of an AI that has no human bias, because it learned go with self play without seeing any human game.

Would Anthropic be allowed to sell LLMs in their current form, and us to use them as we use them, if their were deemed to be conscious? I know that they are not human so maybe slavery would not be an issue but consciousness would open a number of issues.

CDRW is a totally different technology that happens (by design) to be compatible with the same reader. CDs are moulded, much like the box that holds them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_disc_manufacturing

They are the backup. A music CD can last for a long time. Proof: my father CDs from about 35 years ago still work.

That's a very loose definition of feudalism. However if you take in account nepotism and bribery, which are more and more widespread around the world, maybe we get close to that exchange of land for loyalty that was the basis of feudalism.

The biggest revolutions since the Industrial Revolution were probably trains first and everything related to electricity later. Telegraph, radio, lightning, TVs spanning over about one century. And advances in health care, agriculture. But it's hard to tell without having lived through all those changes.

Then computers of course, but not as impactful as the other ones. And cars and mobile phones (mobile dumbed down computers) have been more important than AI so far IMHO.

I'm not sure that it can work anymore outside of its own web page ("works best in chrome or firefox 4") but you must check Katamari! at http://kathack.com/

Click the Katamari link at the top.

Edit: I managed to post this comment, went back to the Katameri page, played a little more with it and my Firefox crashed. It didn't use to.

I checked right now: I installed both NewPipe and PipePipe from F-Droid but both apps notify me about new versions and I always download and install them from the notification message bypassing F-Droid.

You bring your phone or tablet to the bathroom, or are you playing YouTube on an unmovable TV set?

I did without a TV set since I moved in a larger home. Previously I could listen to the TV anywhere in my home, now I can't so instead of pinning me in a place I moved my TV into my phone and tablets. Everything is in an app anyway and for free to air TV I got a couple of RPi 3 with a TV hat and the TVHeadend app.

And when I have guests everybody is watching something different on their phones most of the times.

The issue with native apps is that you have to convince people to install them. If I had one app for each tab I open in my browser my phone would be a mess and out of free space. Then you slow down the delivery of features and bug fixes because you have to go through the app stores. You can't deploy something every day or more often.

So even if we can generate an app easily now, is that a wise choice for every business?

Don't most people do that on their phone, maybe because they don't work on a Mac all day long? Anyway, being able to do it also on the computer is OK.

Replacing a part voids warranty, this is common and well understood by everybody.

I can't help thinking that they want to sell maxed out devices to max out margin.

Maybe I knew how they explained the change back then but I forgot about it. If I must take a guess now, maybe their legal office had a word with marketing about the risk of becoming a publisher, with responsibility for what their users shared publicly on the internet.

Yup. I'm also working more and more in a terminal typing English sentences to my computer. It looks like a very smart adventure game UI from the 80s.

A little git log, show, diff almost always in another terminal.

A customer of mine wants to standardize his developers on a Jetbrains IDE for python but I think that he is late by one year. Furthermore he is using the subsidized plans for Claude, not paying for token, so it makes sense to keep using the Claude TUI.

I see "Jul 12, 2023, 5:56 PM GMT+2" right before "After this week's NATO summit in Lithuania..."

Map maps a value into another value. It's a function call. Easy to understand.

Filter picks values according to a rule. It's a select from where condition. Maybe not as easy as map but familiar.

Reduce is, what? Even the name is ill fated. Who wants to be reduced? Hence, harder to understand and probably not as common as the other two.

It works well enough with plain Ruby and plain Javascript. It ported a Rails 7, Vue 2, vuetify 2, vuex app to Rails 8 (ok, easy, I did it myself at least once), Vue 3, Vuetify 4, Pinia. I had to visually check the SPA, of course.

That's expected (the index out of bound). You have an array, and maybe it grows, you read a number from input, you don't check it against the size of the array because you want to torture the language, use it to get the element at that index and... I'm sure that there is a surprisingly number of different designs of what it should happen and a number of designed ways to ensure that it doesn't happen. But a runtime error is expected.

There are several ways to get hold of tech and of any other thing. Russia did not have access to the H-bomb too, until it was handed to them. Ideals or money are very effective.

When they tell you that Linux has issues with suspend, reply that Windows has issues with paste /s

The sort of things that a human developer can do better than an AI is telling a founder that it is a bad idea to use country flags to select UI languages because languages have names and don't have flags and somebody will be pissed off by having to select the flag of some other country, maybe one they don't like much. I've been doing this today for the nth time probably because crappy sites spoiled a lot of people. I provided plenty of examples (check the EU web site locale selector) but it's not settled yet. An AI won't put much of a fight and will soon comply. I will too, I advise, customers put money on the table. Their privilege.

The issue of critical software is not much different. The people with the money eventually decide how to spend them and what to prioritize.

The Wizard of Yendor.

The point is that it is hard to prove that that 5 days code will never break. In the eyes of a customer a feature ready in one morning and in production before evening is a truly great thing and they know that even before AIs developers were shipping a lot of bugs. Some of them were evident only weeks, months or even years after the commit that added them. A customer of mine got a few hours of downtime a few Saturdays ago because some code from 2021 did some potentially long operation in the threads serving requests instead of doing them in a background job.

So what can one do when they expect that you use an AI to speed up development and they manually check features before they are deployed? You develop with an AI, check that it works, deploy to preprod, let the customer do its tests, business as usual.

Sometimes it is handy when doing something like ASCII art or drawing ASCII diagrams. Imagine editing a much more complex variant of this

   ----
  | AB |
   ----

Finally, Shift-INS pastes from clipboard on Linux. A keypress saved compared to Control Shift V in a terminal. However they don't paste from the same clipboard: one is the primary selection (middle click) the other is the actual clipboard. However when I Shift INS into this textarea on HN I paste something else so I don't really know the rule and I stop here.

I always use middle click, which is a hardware button below my touchpad and it is one more saved keypress.

I agree that "privacy is not the currency Google deals with."

However when I run an adblocker and Blockada on Android, when I use alternatives to the YouTube app (and Google is technologically fighting them) when I don't log into Google, then those exchanges happen with very little of the currency Google is interested in.

I thought it was enough to add please and thank you to every prompt.

It's two totally different matters.

I won't be first, second or third in the AI race. I'm not even participating in that race. I don't care who wins. However my private data are mine and I do care about them.

It's Google and those other companies that may not care about my privacy, because the AI race is more important to them.

If AI is going to cost too much, I will use a cheaper one (Ferrari or FIAT?) or if every AI will cost too much, no AI all and there will be billions of people like me.

I'm willing to pay time or money to avoid ads, not to be spied and harassed by companies making me offers to buy something that almost certainly I don't want to buy. Those companies should pay me a percent of what I make them save by not buying ads to serve me.

And eventually when I want to buy something I research it and buy it and nobody had to pay anything to Google.

Emacs does it. I don't remember which package I'm using and my laptop is out of reach now, but it leverages LSP. However my point is that I never used that functionality in the last months. I discovered today that M-. doesn't work anymore. It's the key combination to jump to the definition of something. Of course I used to hit it all the times. Maybe I broke it weeks ago with some configuration change. To give you some context, I'm a web developer, frontend and backend, currently Ruby, Python, Vue. I've been doing this job for more than 30 years.