reedf1

It's funny actually, I totally get that Office Space and Dilbert are pisstakes of office culture, but it has never really worked on me because I'm actively envious of their work arrangements. I work in an open plan office where, everyone can see everyone's screen, you can see who is at their desk. I would die for a cubicle. Every job I've had my line manager sits next to me, and their boss sits nearby, etc. Work seems to end when they clock off. They seem to have time for sit down out of office lunches. Their work hours seem shorter.

I do feel like gen x was the last generation to be given any significant autonomy in the workplace. I'm a millennial and I feel like I've always been 10 years away from autonomy. It seems the tide recedes as I go out.

To be clear - I disagree with both the implementation and the idea of verification. I believe one is criminal and the other is misguided.

Phishing for material for sextortion has never been more trivial. The implementation of this is going to lead to mass fraud. Walk into parliament, ask who is willing to go to jail in defense of the act if and when the first lot of randy pensioners are bankrupted, or kid commits suicide out of shame - and if no one raises their hand, repeal it.

Chesterton's Fence always bothered me as an argument unto itself. Without providing (or attempting to a provide) a test for the destruction of the fence along with the argument, you are performing a bit of a rhetorical sleight of hand. When you do this you are shifting a potentially infinite burden of proof to the other side. It's Chesterton's fence not Chesterton's infinite fucking barrier.

Mike Woodward - I'm looking forward to your AI Summary/Posting Bot post.

I had honestly not considered that the author might have been talking about the visual aesthetic of the dunder methods themselves. Honestly that has me a bit stumped; all I can say is that if you don't like underscores, don't pick python.

> Python has done a good job of hiding its legacy ugliness (such as __init__, __new__, and similar aberrations), swettening its syntax to accomodate developers with good taste.

What exactly is the problem with __init__ or __new__? @dataclass is very nice syntactic sugar, but are we arguing here that having access to initializer/allocator/constructor dunder methods is "legacy ugliness"? This is the core of pythonic built-in aware python. Bizarre.

> The framework difference comes from people believing in short-term gains (like revenue, abusing the novelty factor, etc.) vs those trying to reasonably minimize harm.

OK - so your framework is "harm minimization". This is kind of a negative utilitarian philosophy. Not everyone thinks this way and you cannot really expect them to either. But an argument _for_ AI from a negative utilitarian PoV is also easy to construct. What if AI accelerates the discovery of anti-cancer treatments or revolutionizes green tech. What if AI can act as a smart resource allocator and enables small hi-tech sustainable communes. These are not things you can easily prove AI won't enable even within your framework.

> To me, overusing AI, destroying ecosystems, covering up fuck-ups, and hating minorities are all “bad” for the same reason, which I can mostly sum up as a belief that traumatizing others is “bad”. You cannot prove that AI overuse is “bad” to a person who doesn’t think in this framework, like a nihilist that treats others’ lives like a nuisance.

But you haven't defined the framework. You know a bunch of people for which AI is bad for a bunch of handwavey reasons - not from any underlying philosophical axioms. You are doing what you are accusing others of. In my ethical framework the other stated things can be shown to be bad, it is not as clear for AI.

If you want to take a principled approach you need to define _why_ AI is bad. There have been cultures and religions across time that have done this for other emerging technologies, luddites, the amish, etc. They have good ethical arguments for this - and it's possible they are right.

I would like harder evidence that Japanese business owners hate high-spending tourists. From my personal experience small business owners have at least appeared to very much appreciate my custom. There is a sordid history of Westerners defending Japan from itself - I'm not saying that is happening here, but I would like to see more systematic evidence.

I have my own misgivings about AI - but this article certainly misses the mark.

> I buy games from Epic Games Store, Microsoft Store and GOG precisely because those stores have no bloated features unrelated to DRM crammed down your throat.

Absolutely unhinged opinion.

Of course large stocks can be manipulated like this. But there is also normal oscillation, repeatable human psychological behavior (e.g. momentum, mean reversion), and just crowd murmuration. Be careful using your eyes to gleam patterns from graphs; you may find if you try to monetize these they vanish before you.

Then die from a yet unknown cancerous additive in nutritional yeast.

We have made the food chain too complex.

4x is a number I pulled out of thin air. I'm not sure I even yet believe there is a net positive effect of using AI on productivity. What I am sure about in my own workflow is that is saves me time writing boilerplate code - it is good at this for me. So I would say it has saved me time in the short-term. Now does not writing this boilerplate slow me down long-term? It's possible, I could forget how to do this myself, some part of my brain could atrophy (as the MIT study suggests). How it affects large teams, systems and the transfer of knowledge is also not clear.

I think it is possible that the widespread introduction of ChatGPT will cause a brief hiatus on hiring due to the inelasticity of demand. For the sake of argument, imagine that ChatGPT makes your average developer 4x more productive. It will take a while before the expectation becomes that 4x more work is delivered. That 4x more work is scheduled in sprints. That 4x more features are developed. That 4x more projects are sold to clients/users. When the demand eventually catches up (if it exists), the hiring will begin again.

I don't think a cross-cultural meta-analysis properly controls for the cultural effect of gender attractiveness given we live in a (progressively more) globalized, interconnected, world.

Presuming you can create an alloy with the same density as gold, I imagined you could also test it's conductivity. I think performing both tests would be enough.

If your friend goes to an ATM for $20 and their bank fines them with a large percentage fee on their income; are you likely to also choose this bank?

"Anything to declare?"

"Yes, 40kg of trinitrotoluene"

I have seen multiple articles pushing for GO as agentic language of choice; does anyone else feel like this is quite forced? I have tried agentic coding in several languages and I didn't have a particularly good or productive experience with GO.

Do yourself a favor and read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Khun.

Hopefully you wrote this ironically otherwise... QED?

While this is strictly true - measurement of calories gives the upper bound of possible energy absorption. This makes it sufficient to calculate if TotalCaloriesIn >= TotalCaloriesOut. Obviously there are some biological complexities - but within the boundaries of the system the outcomes are constrained by the laws of thermodynamics.

The idea that a night out with 4-5 pints might clear my daily total requirement for calories was not something I had really considered until my late twenties.

Much better

"Grins happily", feels awkward, stiff, bloated, and prompts me to expect bad dialogue. The contention is one of style. I can think of a dozen or so logical reasons why this sounds off, but for me it simply smells like bad writing.

So, a specialist with ketones published a study related to ketones; which they stand to benefit monetarily from.*

That doesn't necessarily mean the research is suspect in itself - but there is a reason we need disclosures like this.

"Competing interests: The intellectual property covering the manufacture and use of the ketone ester is owned by the University of Oxford and the NIH and is licensed to TdeltaS Global Inc. K.C., as an inventor, receives a share of the royalties under the terms prescribed by each institution. K.C. is a director of TdeltaS Ltd., a company spun out of the University of Oxford to develop products based on the science of ketone bodies in human nutrition."

Did they release the code or the model itself?