ratelimitsteve

so as my energy bill is going up 50% we're giving people my tax dollars in exchange for them not making more energy to ease demand?

winning winning winning winning winning winning winning winning

one of my favorite youtubers but I feel like if you're linking directly to a reading list the title of your post should reflect that

I can go out today and pay $50 for a thick cut ribeye at Ruth's Chris that has been visually inspected for marbling then hard seared in a special high temp over to temp by someone who knows wtf they're doing. I can also go to Denny's and pay $20 for a t-bone cooked to within shouting distance of what I asked for on the same griddle they use for the pancakes that doesn't get the sear I'm looking for.

Point being, you're absolutely right that the goal for a company selling a product is to be barely satisfactory but they don't actually get to decide what's satisfactory.

We used to say computers can't make decisions because they can't meaningfully be held responsible for those decisions. Now the vibe seems to be that computers should make decisions because instead of anyone being held responsible we can just say "the computer made a mistake and it is very sorry" and effectively shield anyone from being responsible. But the thing is, machines don't do stuff. Not from a responsibility standpoint. My car doesn't drive, I do. It may provide the means, but I decide where we're going and how we're going there. Even with the active cruise on, the car didn't speed, I did. The car may have hit the wall, but I caused the accident. the car ran that person over, but I killed someone, not the car. The machine did what someone told it to do. If someone told it to do a bad thing, or someone did a bad job telling it not to a bad thing, that person is responsible.

When people started using Grok to make CSAM the platform's response was to paywall image generation. If we don't start making the driver responsible for what the car does, the coder responsible for what the code does, the CEO responsible for what the company does, they will continue to exploit people in increasingly horiffic ways.

I recently bought far cry 3 on steam and spent 20 minutes post-install trying to log into my ubisoft account between forgetting an old password, 2fa across multiple devices and a badly broken captcha system.

stockholders? no. stakeholders? absolutely.

engaging with the identity of the arguer rather than the argument. 5 yard penalty, loss of down.

>I mean, instead of investing so much effort to get glutamate into your food, why not use MSG directly?

Because the various uammi sources also add other flavors. I like being able to choose between soy sauce, fish sauce, worcestershire sauce, soy bean paste, mushroom powder, anchovies, chicken powder, yeast extract, and, yes, msg (with 2% i&g) because each of them affects the recipe i'm working with differently. Is your diet nothing but chicken breast, raw flour and shortening because they're the simplest sources of protein, carbs and fat?

this is a great metaphor precisely because (outside those with paradoxical stimulant response) everyone thinks they're more productive on amphetamines and there's some naive evidence to that effect. the number of things you've actually done is significantly higher. the change in value created, as measured by the decrease in distance between where you are and the the goal you're shooting for, is unpredictable at best and slowly degrades as reliance increases.

AI is like having a junior dev with an adderall addiction and an encyclopedic knowledge of coding syntax at your beck and call.

tbf rephrasing the output in my own words has become the best and most important tool in ensuring quality from AI. Whether it's an answer to a question or an implementation of some ACs that I copypasta'd in, the best sanity check is understanding and the best demonstration of understanding is the ability to redo.

the article talks about AI books winning awards and AI books on bestseller charts, but can any one of us think of a book they genuinely enjoyed that was written by an AI? this feels less like proof that AI books are good and more like proof that awards, rankings and other accolades are rife with abuse. it's a known issue across almost all entertainment media: you start by trying to find the best media to consume but the process is so subjective and gameable that it ends up being a way to pick something arbitrarily and then declare it to be the best.

anyone in the thread old enough to remember when we trusted the tobacco industry to run its own studies on the safety of tobacco which found that tobacco was definitely safe, then later found that no one knows whether tobacco is safe or not so we can't regulate it until we're sure, then eventually found that the whole time everyone knew it was dangerous?

the crypto hater mantra from day one was "this is just for drugs, bribery and money laundering". the only word I object to in that statement is "just".

like so many corrupt organizations lately, FIFA has been getting away with it for a long time and they overplayed their hand. this was a long time coming and i'm really glad to see it.

them is nasdaq and we is us. you know this, i can tell because you said it right after you asked me.

we watched them change the rules in the US to force indexers to provide exit liquidity for the spacex IPO blunder via your dad's 401k. capturing the regulators is just part of what finance does.

it does. because insurance is a bet. but it also has legislation and organized investigators behind it to drive up the risk of committing fraud (and, therefore, the necessary reward to justify it) whereas these bets-masquerading-as-financial-instruments don't. take the example from the OP: we have laws about falsifying votes and other obvious things like that, but you can bet on what time the last votes are accepted, what time the last votes are counted, which org will publish results first, will an org publish incorrect results, a lot of things that can potentially be manipulated without violating a law but would still weaken trust in our elections at a time when there is a decade long concerted effort to convince people that elections are being gamed and don't work.

>Alcohol is still lobbying hard to prevent recreational weed.

It's wild how using the drug I make is freedom and using the drug someone else makes is slavery

unfortunately the dominant ideology right now states that the ability to do catastrophic harm to both yourself and society in general is fundamental to the nature of freedom, and is therefore paramount.

The ability to bet on the outcome of any event is a guarantee of corruption in any event. We've seen the president's teleprompter operator bet on his speeches, we've seen journalists threatened in an attempt to get them to reword an article in order to resolve a bet differently, we've seen several sports betting scandals. What we haven't seen is any indication that this will get better without regulation, and now we're seeing betting markets fight like hell to introduce their rot into the institutions at the bedrock of our society. It needs to stop.

get enough software people in a room and everything becomes the fencepost problem.

If it's just making powerpoint presentations why do AI companies whose whole raison d'etre is that they can make these powerpoints in seconds for pennies spend millions on lobbying instead? Lobbying is cheap because it identifies the relatively small number of leverage points it takes to send society down one track instead of another and targets the spending there. Buy the right guy dinner and you get what you want just the same as if you'd spent billions on ads to convince millions of people to vote for the guy who's gonna do what you want.

I thought the play was to travel with a burner and mail the real phone to a drop somewhere in the destination country. Supposing you could just put all your sensitive data on a microsim or microsd and do the same thing, but this all feels like different colored wrappers on the same piece of candy: don't bring data you want to keep secret to the place where they're allowed to use force to steal secret data. Obv packages are subject to search and seizure at borders the same way you and your phone are but a package in the mail has the advantage of volume and relative anonymity. There are a lot of packages and not enough resources to seize and search all of them, and it's harder to tie the package to a person or entity that warrants increased suspicion if it's mailed anonymously from another country than it is to tie a phone to the guy whose pocket it was in when he tried to cross the border.

that's the ideal case, as then I would have no pointless interruptions to keep me from my real work. the fact that that real work would include reinventing the entire universe of software from scratch is a trivial detail.

>I would assume almost nobody encounters

That assumption is incorrect. There are a lot of people doing academic research and of those people the vast majority of them encounter this situation a lot. This is like insisting that a strap wrench is stupid because most people don't ever need one.

>The only reason that exists is because of a power discrepancy where the people with powers to create new characters are also the ones who do enough writing that they feel such a specific and niche pain.

Counterpoint: the people who use tools the most should be the ones designign and creating them. All you have to do is continue not using it just like you did before it existed, but instead you insisted that its existence make sense to you as someone who doesn't need it and doesn't do what it's meant to help with.

>There is no greater joy in life than typing a sentence, realising it needs a clarification, a caveat, an addendum — but in the same sentence, not a new one — and, guess what, the em dash is right there for you.

this is several sentences bound together in a rat king and furthers my theory that the use of more exotic punctuation like em dashes is the linguistic equivalent of a code smell. It may do the job, but it strongly indicates that your writing would benefit from rephrasing the entire sentence.

I think it was Woz that said something along the lines of 'the problem with making a computer that stupid people can use is that only stupid people will want to use it'. arrogant, no doubt, but also also rather prophetic now that we're in the era of "Whoopsydingdangdoodle, we made a booboo with your request" meaninglessness. I think we've traded being intimidated by computers for being completely agnostic as to how they work and just not caring. They've gotten easier and more reliable, sure, but they've also gotten more opaque, less transparent, less extensible and less fixable because of it. Those of us who grew up in the era where you had to become pretty intimate with the details of how a computer worked in order to get it to do anything at all developed a lot of skills for dealing with issues and now those skills are being intentionally obsoleted by design decisions that remove our ability to actually fix things ourselves by hiding everything about the apps we run except the interface.

I am doing my best to implement a rule with apps where the third time in a single session you bother me about something that has absolutely nothing to do with the workflow I opened to app for, I uninstall the app. I don't want to update my spreadsheet app, I want to work on this spreadsheet. I don't want to tour the new features from the last update, I want to work on this spreadsheet. I don't want to sign in in order to access an AI companion (which I also don't want), I want to work on this spreadsheet. I damn sure don't want to leave a review in the app store for you and at this point you don't want me to either. You want me to work on this spreadsheet.

Between that and this insane thing MacOS does where when I click an app in the dock any random app opens up (and, per above, begins barraging me with things designed to "direct" my attention) I'm ready to switch to something whose primary feature is not acting like the dev team spent the last ten years trying to arbitrarily bump the number of features up and ending up with a giant pile of buggy features that nobody asked for.

And for my final gripe, at least for the next 15 minutes, trying to teach a computer how to do what I mean instead of what I say was a mistake. I learned computers back in the day where there was no attempt at interpretation of intent and instead the machine did exactly what I told it to, and that's how I prefer it because it simplifies the problem space when the machine is misbehaving. I told it to do the wrong thing. That's the only possible answer. But now there seem to be so many layers attempting to interpret meaning from actions that the problem space expands to make room for the idea that I told it to do the right thing, but it guessed that I meant something different and then did that instead. As an example, just trying to highlight something in my Mac's terminal app so that I can copy/paste it. I click the terminal app on the dock, and focus switches to that terminal app but also docker desktop, which is on top of the terminal and doesn't go away when I click into the terminal. Instead I have to interact with docker desktop. So I minimize the app I never asked for, and actually have access to the terminal. I'm using the built-in touchpad and have to select an entire line, so I start from the right with one finger, click and drag. But another finger, or perhaps the heel of my hand, gets close to the touchpad and MacOS is SO EXCITED TO HELP that it decides to interpret that as a right click which results in my selection getting interrupted halfway to bring up the right click menu, whereupon I'm presented with the option to do several things with this approximately 40% of a CLI command including: search for it in webster's dictionary, convert it to spoken word, convert it to Chinese (my choice of traditional or simplified), or try to open it in finder despite it being a portion of a command and not a file.

All of this points to a Goodhart's Law situation where someone decided the size of the pile of features was the measure of the quality of a piece of software, rather than how elegantly it does the job the user bought it for. AI has also significantly increased the speed with which a feature that no one asked for and that doesn't work correctly can be delivered.

not the OP but I'd say that google crawls you once and AIs scrape your page every time someone asks them a question that they think your page might be relevant to.