seu

> Isn't it obvious that an app will not be around for as long as a bike can last?

That's the softwarization of everything, with its in-built early obsolesce: they clearly expect you to start replacing your bike as frequently as you replace your phone, irrelevant of how long the hardware itself is still functional.

> I don't see how this would work given modern supply chains. It can be extremely difficult to track down all of the owners of a particular IP and when you do, many of them may not even exist any longer making it near impossible to get any sort of permission to do something like this.

Exactly the reason to force manufacturers to change their supply chains.

Human or AI generated, it's clearly SEO optimized. I think that's the real problem.

> Within 5 months, I single-handedly launched 5 iOS apps.

> Staying in any company right now is a negative return; you are wasting personal leverage.

Isn't it obvious that this doesn't work if _everyone_ does it?

Also, if the bar we use to measure how useful a tool is for society, is that it allows an individual to release 1 app per month, then we're doomed whether before AIs take over or not.

Why is it that in every other development, these days, one reads a quote like "researchers think this would be used for <insert thing that benefits humanity, but will remain underdeveloped because nobody wants to invest enough money in it> but they warn that it could also be used for <insert very negative possible use, in which many with the resources and power will gladly invest if given the possibility and lack of regulation or control of any type>" and yet, they continue developing it because it might "benefit humanity"? Where the hell are you going like this?!

(I mean, their title is "Photorealistic Renders for Buildings")

None of the renders from their examples look "photorealistic" to me, rather "sci-fi/cyberpunk themed, high contrasted, high-quality videogame renderer".

Something is not clear, or does not make sense. Do they compare the consumption of crypto mining in the US, with the amount of power consumed by all computers in the US? How can the first be bigger than the second, which is the upper bound for any computing task in the US? What is this crypto computed on, if not on computers?! (of course, the energy consumption is outrageous, but this article doesn't make much sense)

Free market economists are followers of a cult full of animistic creatures, like the "Free Market" and "Inflation", which have their own volition and just choose to "stick around" or "fairly distribute goods", without the need for absolutely no human to many any decision at all.

"This damned inflation is so sticky!" I imagine one of them complaining, while trying to wash it off their hands. "Yeah, if only Free Market could solve it," says the other, while praying the Corporate Profits to raise even more.

AI will not replace humans. IBM's CEOs and managers will replace humans with AI. Shareholders will force IBM to replace humans with AI. Let us stop blaming the only thing that is _not_ making any decision. Capitalism is a powerful idea that will kill the same people that vouch for it.

There's something I really, really don't understand.

> The fabricated leaves did snag the bugs, but they didn’t hinder the insects’ movements quite as effectively as the living plants. But the researchers are not deterred by these initial results. They plan to continue working on the problem and improving their product by more precisely incorporating the mechanical properties of the living trichomes.

Why not grow leaves and use those? Why do we need to make artificial replicas of the real thing, when we could grow the plant and A) get rid of bugs, B) Enjoy the beans and C) benefit from the nitrogen-fixing properties of the plant.

This obsession with creating artificial replicas of things that we know, because we want to have perfect, lab-conditions control of everything, is just crazy.

>> How Much Notice Can You Give? >> It depends on a lot of things:

The list misses what's most important for me: depends on how good am I feeling at the company, or I appreciate its people. Then, I want to make it also easier to transfer knowledge or help them finish things that were dependent on me, etc. Especially on project management.

> The differential value of being better at putting words in a row just dropped to nothing. Anyone can now put words in a row pretty much as well as I can.

People seem to overvalue "putting words in a row" and undervalue "saying something interesting or new" these days.

Surely this knowledge is worth preserving on Wikipedia.

There are projects out there to build or retrofit cargo ships with sails, have you looked at them, and what makes you different?

e.g.https://www.dykstra-na.nl/designs/wasp-ecoliner/

> "The industry is contracting," said Cook

In other words, even Mac people don't feel an urge to upgrade their systems so often anymore. A slowdown of consumption, in these times of climate crisis, is nothing but good.

In Berlin, it's mostly youth having fun, tourists being touristy, or people with enough money that they could either rent a bicycle or purchase one, but find it cool, don't want to sweat, or share public transport with others.

It's a pity that cooperative broadband is usually ignored, while people and local governments expect venture backed companies to solve their problems. They work for themselves, not for you. Cooperatives tend to have reasonable prices, reasonable speeds, and work by reasonable principles. They might not be the cheapest and fastest, but will be there for you because you're a member/co-owner, not a customer.

> We have right now 1.3 billion cars (that are) internal combustion engine powered on the planet. We need to replace that with clean mobility.

If by "clean mobility" he means "more cars", then I'd ask: why? These analyses are based on replacing all current ICE cars 1:1 with equivalent BEV. Why? Smaller personal vehicles, (electric) bicycles, public transport, better train infrastructure, car sharing are all alternatives to having the same number of cars on the roads.

> Our societies are losing a lot of great potential by not having a technology-neutral regulations.

hahahaha. "technology-neutral regulations"? As long as different technologies have different effects on the world, there is no such thing as "technology-neutral" regulation. You cannot say all cars are equal if your objective is to have clean air and less CO2 emissions.

Reminds me of an art project I made in 2018: Faceliza, the chatbot psychologist from Facebook that shows ads instead of being helpful. (based on a javascript implementation of the Eliza chatbot from Joseph Weizenbaum and never actually finished... ads are triggered by some keywords which I don't even remember)

https://sebastian.uribe.online/faceliza/

> This has interesting implications because it means people will gravitate towards languages/frameworks/libraries that GPT knows well, which means even less training data will be generated for the new stuff. This is a form of value lock-in.

That's the kind of problem that most people are just failing to see. The usage of this models might not in itself be problematic, but the changes that it bring are often unexpected and too deep for us to see clearly now. And yet, people are rushing towards them at full speed.

"Model designed to guess next tokens from a sequence, based on its training data, fails to guess next tokens from sequences not similar to its training data."

What's the news?

Why isn't it possible to find the monthly cost for this service anywhere on duolingo's website?

In my writing, I find world-building to be a very enjoyable activity and would not delegate it to a bot just because of that. I would also like to say that employing ChatGPT or similar tools for this task would make all worlds feel the same, but the sad truth is that most amateur and hobbyist writers' world-building feel kind of the same anyway. :(

So the reasoning seems to be: 1) We can create such tools 2) Then we must create such tools 3) They can be used to harm others 4) Then we must change the rest of society and the laws to adapt to them, alter publicly available images and impose restrictions on (preexisting) non-harmful actions

Beyond bizarre.

What is more interesting for me, is why anyone is surprised that an algorithm based on choosing a statistically probably combination of words, trained with whatever random crap appears on the internet, happens to choose some combination that makes grammatical sense, but doesn't match reality.

I have a degree in computer science and worked in a technical field for over 20 years. I don't call myself "rational and scientific", though I do think that the Scientific Method is a great way of creating useful models of the world. But those models - like all models - are wrong. Maybe it's just semantics, but one of my points is exactly that some people believe that they are "rational and scientific" and ignore that we are not just computers; experience, emotions and unconscious bias plays an important role in our decisions. Thinking that the whole world (and themselves) can be perfectly rationalized, makes them miss the point that there are non-rational reasons for them to think the way they do. That's why I refer to when I talk about dogmatism.

I suggest everyone (who wants to hear me) to read Joseph Weizenbaum's "Computer Power and Human Reason"; he does a much better job than me at raising similar arguments to mine. Also, Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow", for the ways in which we _all_ are so _not_ 100% rational in our everyday decisions.

Let me correct my sentence: there's a blind belief that _technological_ progress automatically equates to better life conditions.

And to clarify: I'm not saying "all technology is bad", but rather "not all technological progress is automatically good for humanity".

As an example, living conditions of hunter-gatherers were way, way better than living conditions of the first people in cities, and I'd argue, depending on which parameters you use, might still be better than our modern, big-city living conditions (except maybe for the richest 1% of the world)

> Well, you can tie that into a lot of questions, like, ‘Is human population a good thing?’ ‘Is immigration a good thing, where we seem to have been able to take advantage of new sources of humanity that are willing to engage in economic activities and be directed by the markets?’

> The world is a hugely better place with our 8 billion people than it was when there were 50 million people kind of like living in caves and whatever. So, I am confident that the sum total of value and progress in humanity will accelerate extraordinarily with welcoming artificial beings into our community of working on things. I think there will be enormous value created from all that.

The problem with Carmack and many like him, is that they think of themselves as purely rational beings operating within scientific frameworks and based purely on scientific results, but whenever they step outside the technical fields in which they work, they are ignorant and dogmatic.

He seems to ignore a lot about what the living conditions for people were throughout history, and have a blind trust in the positive power of 'human progress'.

These people don't stop for a second to question the 'why', just the 'how'. They just assume 'because it will be better' and build their mountains of reasons on top of that, which just crumble and fall down as soon as that basic belief does not hold.

I have a LOT of respect for him, and I'm sure he's a very decent, honest human being. But he's unfortunately another believer of the techno-utopianist faith which only asks for more 'blind progress' without questioning whether that is a good thing or not.

Kind of my thought, too. With that title, I expected the article to be about the real thieves: Shell.