taylorius

If I could somehow really trust an AI not to have been spiked by some billionaire to manipulate me in one direction or other - I think I could enjoy using it as a sort of P.G Wodehouse Jeeves character in my life. Letting it access the web and giving me the gist, answering my questions / advising me etc.

No, because it's an inauthentic message. Your're speaking to your AI, like a politician who only hears about developments from his advisors. How can he know if he's getting the real truth of things?

>More plausible than "British National Party".

Maybe they were using Grok :-)

If it were me, I'd be putting a piece of graph paper underneath, with a light behind it, and using it to trace the grids.

I wonder if this would work for python.

Those were my thoughts exactly - though it is 2024, and I have a sinking feeling it could be just as the article states.

Indeed - it's full of pedal tones, and slash chords. love it, love it.

In what universe is "We built this City" the worst song ever? I love that song. Awesome bit of 80s power pop.

I'd rather hear We built this City 10 times in a row than any 10 songs of Taylor Swift's. How about that?

Thanks for responding. You'll be happy to hear I have disagreements with what you've written! :-)

"Given the semantic overlap it's very easy to see why they'd be conflated." - I agree with the definition you gave, but I think such conflation is often intentional. The accusation of "Being defensive" is used to shut down a much broader range of responses.

" it's not clear who's "fault" it is. But that doesn't actually matter in terms of resolving the conflict." - This is technically true - but only a sufficient analysis if resolving the conflict is the sole concern. I posit that there are often broader issues that mean justice is not being served by just resolving the conflict at any cost.

"Assertive & empathetic me: " - I hate to say it, but your last paragraph doesn't sound very assertive to me. It sounds like someone who is hoping to resolve an argument quietly regardless of the cost, rather than have it blow up.

Anyway, thanks for listening, man. I hope you take my answer in a spirit of honest debate. I'm not trying to be rude or anything.

" for example if a mistake that I've made is pointed out,"

If it is unambiguously your mistake, then fair enough - but in my experience, "stop being defensive" is often used when defending oneself is a perfectly legitimate thing to do in the circumstances.

They figured out that if they get a load of hot girls, and cool goofy guys to entice people, and don't mention the spying part - it works a lot better than a bunch of government goons in badly fitting suits telling you to betray your friends and neighbours, or else.

"this apparent step backwards"

When optimising globally, sometimes a backward step is required to escape a local minima. It is possible that progressive politics has made a misstep, and that correcting that is the right thing to do.

"From my German point of view, our nation has plenty of energy to protest what's going on in Haiti or Syria etc"

That's because your politicians can't really be blamed for Haiti / Syria etc. And it's not directly their job to fix it. So they're happy to speak passionately about it all day, and hopefully direct the populations attention away from what they ARE responsible for, and might be held accountable for. (This is the case in many Western countries, of course - not just Germany).

Perhaps it is a question of the different meanings the word care can take. Care in its normal everyday usage is indeed a natural human emotion, however this was not the subject of my post.

"Carers", are people who perform functions for people unable to do them themselves. Whether they "care" or not for their charges is not directly relevant (though often they are relatives, and certainly do care for, and love the people they are helping very much). Not always though - consider a "care home", which is essentially a dumping ground for the old and inconveniently frail. Having seen the inside of a few such places, I very much do not want to end up in one.

Enter the Robots, and technologies such as the LLM. In my imagination, a robot equipped with some facility with language, could act as an assistant for an elderly person, allowing them to maintain their independence for much longer without a human carer. This is not a replacement for human connection with their loved ones, but it is a replacement for putting them in a care home, or having ones own children spend part of their lives unable to have a job, or a normal social life, due to complex care requirements of some relative.

For what its worth, I doubt we disagree too much, I think it was a misunderstanding. However I'm interest to hear your thoughts.

Psychopathic? I think that's a ridiculous statement. No-one said anything about automating any human connection. I can tell you that my wife is a full time carer for her parents, and though she does it willingly and with love, it exerts a great toll on her, both physically, and mentally. So if we're going to far-too-easily use words like "psychopathic" - I could just as well say that ignoring that cost is psychopathic. Knowing what her role as a carer has cost her in terms of quality of life, I would never want to subject my children to the same. That is entirely different to maintaining human connection with older relatives.

I think in the future, descendants of today's LLM models and some future version of Tesla's Optimus could create a paradigm shift in how care is given.

I'm hopeful that when I get old, and inevitably come to need some help with living, that such a solution will be available.

Sorry for what is probably a stupid question. Does pretty.c act as a preprocessor or sorts, converting your pretty.c script into actual c, that is then compiled? Or is it a virtual machine that interprets your pretty.c script?

They've gone and created Douglas Adams' Total Perspective Vortex

I don't think that's right. Movies use all sorts of devices to engage their audience. And a lot of them rely on surprise. If they tell you what they're about to do just before you see it happen "for real" - the effect is obviously compromised.

I agree 100% with the author. I've seen Alien,but I haven't watched it for a long time. So if I go to see it in the cinema now, while I technically do know what's going to happen - it isn't completely fresh in my mind. So to be shown all the suspenseful, scary bits I'm about to watch, out of context, immediately before the film, is absolutely detrimental to the experience.

Nah, such a body would surely be the beginning of the end. Anarchy in the UK, including its language!

So it was a death-duty style tax - that makes more sense. For a minute I was imagining a lawyer reading a will. "And lastly, I leave my entire 7 billion dollar fortune to... the U.S. Government."

It's a multiplier. The strength of faith it brings will unite people in single mindedness, for good or bad ends.

I stopped drinking years ago, and have recently tried several of the different non alcoholic beers available. However I always notice something suspiciously like a minor hangover an hour or two after drinking one, which seems odd. Has anyone else noticed anything similar?

I think the internet and the general ascendancy of computer science,and algorithmic thinking has a part to play in this. There is a certain notion of efficiency (perhaps also expressable as convenience) which has become a well trodden path to success in the market. This has been widely beneficial of course, but amongst it's side effects are a marginalisation of anything other than the most focused, popular artistic offerings. (Think Mr Beast, Taylor Swift etc).

To paraphrase Dilbert's boss - "discussions go a lot more smoothly when no-one present understands any of the details."

If absurdity made us despondent or desperately sad instead, that probably wouldn't do much for the ol' evolutionary fitness.

I would question the distinctions significance in the context of my original post, to be honest.

And I would not categorise Leonard Cohen as pop music, by your criterion, as it would not be useful. "Pop music" as a term used by the music industry changes it's definition along with people's musical taste. If you take the right moment in time, an extremely broad variety of music would be "pop music".

I am a counter example that rule (though perhaps it is indirectly in agreement). I grew up alone, in the middle of the UK countryside without much regular contact with other kids. My inner monologue grew constant and loud - it acted like a companion, urging me to create things and ideas.

I'd say so for sure. I've lived in London most of my adult life, and in my experience the air is a lot better than it used to be.