sriram_malhar

"Fame only has utility so long as it gets you paid"

Fame can have many good reasons. Just feeling the warm glow of adulation is plenty enough for some.

Beautiful presentation!

There was a level of patent/copyright protection, there was a level of awareness of stealing, a company could be taken to a court of law. A writer of a PhD thesis could show that someone lifted huge parts of a dissertation without attribution. All that is gone.

Why do we need more? Why is that not a big enough reason.

If a modern-day Beethoven were told that his work will be slurped in by a machine and he will remain unknown to the world, would it be acceptable to him? To you?

I just did this for the first time.

<aside/>I lost interest in programming for pleasure (thank you LLMs), so decided to spend a few years learning all the prerequisites to understand the General Theory of Relativity.

It is so nice to get back to learning from printed matter. The contrast is great. The ability to flip pages back and forth to scan past material is much better than an ebook experience (like referring to a figure on a different page). Best of all, I don't get distracted or tempted to open up a browser window and start doomscrolling. The heft is oddly reassuring too.

C'mon, you know better than to invoke a slippery slope.

My best move is to influence the people I care about to reduce dependence on these things and seek happiness in non-tech things (where tech is defined as those controlled by corporations), from community, live life from first principles. You are forcing me to answer a strange binary ... propose a fix for the world at large, or let me continue with all this shit. The world isn't as black and white.

Anyway, I'm done with this thread.

Constraints are a good thing. I'll get creative with what I have, instead of having to rely on a supply chain that makes everything available to everybody all the time. I don't have to have apples grown on the other side of the planet.

It isn't just AI. I would like a world without the poison of social media, without guns & bombs, without dangerous chemicals. Yes, in many many ways we'd be better off. We are accelerating the destruction of our planet.

I don't have a better plan for humanity. I only have fear.

You can look up laws all night long. Check out all the laws broken by Potus, ICE (just to name a few) on a daily basis.

The peasantry is not on the side that enforces the law. AI is. AI is a force multiplier. The more force you have, the more multiples of it you en up with. Flock uses AI to do surveillance at scale. Every cloud service has NSA backdoors.

You do realize that the same powers that have bred fascism and mandatory id requirement are hand in glove with the AI oligarchs, no? They gain with rampant use of AI disproportionately more than the peasant.

The peasantry stands no chance. Unless there is a French Revolution style uprising

> Have you been schooled in farming? Raising livestock? Milking cattle? Does your ability to cook good food ...

Pushing that analogy, AI is the equivalent of automating everything from tilling, growing, all the way to cooking. It is as if the human is involved at the beginning in specifying what they want, and at the end, in plating up the food and consuming the product. The next generation will have no clue about the entire farm-to-table chain.

It's not there yet, but rapidly making it a reality.

Also, there is no one "tech". Different pieces of technology have different levels of effect on the world, and different timelines in which the world can come to terms with it. AI is the thermonuclear weapon introduced to a musket world ... it came upon us suddenly, and instantly flattened the talent/merit based economy. Now everyone has access to the same exoskeleton; the difference between muscles is not important.

The second huge difference between AI (and ordinary tech) is that a literal handful of people are in control of its economics. That kind of power breeds fascism.

> That's a problem with society, not technology.

Semantics. The tech directly enables the incredible power imbalance, and helps seize the means of consensus and debate and reporting. There is no incentive/mechanism left to fix society. An advanced society like the US is weaponized against vaccines, and social media and AI are to blame.

Everyone who writes enthusiastically about AI already has the benefit of having worked without AI. They have been schooled in the basics. Enough of us know about data structures, concurrency, networks, language design etc. from the ground up that the knowledge is passed on. I worry about the world that we will be living in when a whole generation has skipped learning the basics the hard way. Given the attendance rates at various educational institutions, I fear that day is already here.

Can it scale without pixelating?

Ah, I had virtual threads in Java 8 back in the day. I believe it still works.

Check Kilim: https://github.com/kilim/kilim

If you check "jealousy" (instead of "jealous") on MW, you get this editorial note:

Depending on who you ask, jealousy and envy are either exact synonyms, totally different words, or near-synonyms with some degree of semantic overlap and some differences. It is difficult to make the case, based on the evidence of usage that we have, for either of the first two possibilities. Both jealousy and envy are often used to indicate that a person is covetous of something that someone else has, but jealousy carries the particular sense of “zealous vigilance” and tends to be applied more exclusively to feelings of protectiveness regarding one’s own advantages or attachments. In the domain of romance, it is more commonly found than envy. If you were to say “your salt-shaker collection fills me with jealousy,” most people would take it to mean much the same thing as “your salt-shaker collection fills me with envy.” But if someone made a flirtatious comment to your partner, you would likely say that it caused you jealousy, not envy.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/jealousy

An aged uncle of mine (who loved his wife very much) once said, "I hope she goes before me. I'd never want her to face the pain of my leaving". Such love.

They may be equivalent in common parlance, but that’s a bit like saying it is ok to use ‘your’ instead of “you’re” just because it is so common.

We say “jealously guarded’ not ‘enviously guarded’ for a reason. Jealousy is about being protective of your own possessions and relationships; you feel jealousy if your spouse responds well to a coworker’s flirtations. Envy is when you find think of the coworker’s luck in having a good looking spouse

<snark/>Is it easier to say 'non-profit' compared to 'not making profits'?

But seriously, can someone explain why openai went this route?

Vint had an interview?!! Who had the gall to suggest he needs to come in and be evaluated?

"for now"

Nicely done.

You still used AI, even if the results weren't correct.

Not the first result. The AI summary generated by gemini.

This feels so quaint today. How I'd like to be back in that timeframe.

Anyone who does a Google search gets a satisfactory looking answer as the very first entry. I daresay most people don't go beyond that, not even the entries on the first page, let alone go to the next. I argue that this is at the level of everyone for everything.

What a beautiful explanation. Wow! This is hands down the clearest exposition I have encountered. Kudos.

The level of corruption is staggering.

I wasn't aware of this.

The first edition came out in 1991. The 4th ed came out in 2012, by which time Perl was no longer the duct tape of the internet. Perl 6 had muddied the waters, and Ruby and Rails had peaked.

Still, 1000 is painfully low, esp. for a high quality product.

That’s not true. I wrote the Panther book, Advanced Perl Programming, and easily made way more than 100k. Of the 25-30 or so dollars the books cost, I got 10% per copy, or $2 after taxes. The first print run of 35000 sold within the first three weeks.

The Camel book was already a huge bestseller, and was one of the anchor books of the early OReilly series. It made Larry a pretty penny

Doesn't anyone here have _one_ kind word to say about its features? Every one seems to be starting with "on the other hand".