theobreuerweil

This happens as well, no? If you pay for anything in instalments that is effectively a loan.

How can you describe something as “objectively” horrible-looking? Your opinion on the way that something looks is precisely that: an opinion. I’d add that neither the Arabic nor Latin alphabets were designed for anything. They both evolved organically from other previous alphabets.

I guess the argument would go that your income is significantly higher in the sense that the quantity and complexity of stuff that you can afford now is vastly greater than 100 years ago (e.g. washing machines, cars, clothes, computers). I’m not that saying it’s making anyone happier, mind you

It would be really interesting to take a model like this and see if you can get it advance the frontiers of science, maths or whatever else in directions that we now understand but that it wouldn't based on the state of the art at the time.

I’m sure that he/she would ride a lot more if it cost nothing, but I think the point is valid: even if Uber could 10x or 100x productivity, they could not do the same with income, because there is a limit to how much people actually need to go places.

I do think about this a lot. On the one hand, you might be right, and it may not matter at all. On the other, we often do that kind of stuff because it makes it harder to slip up by accident and/or makes the code easier to read and understand. These things are surely helpful to AI agents in the same way that they are useful to people?

I guess it depends on whether the extra time you could invest in that kind of thing pays back in terms of context windows, code quality or speed of AI code generation.

Even if the information is technically available, a business can sit there optimising for a specific problem while individuals have to deal with tens or hundreds of separate problems every day. We have to satisfice and finer details like this are usually ignored.

It’s very possible that things were always this way, you’re right. My own perception is that politics has become more divisive and less respectful in my own lifetime, and I happen to think that social media makes this worse, but that’s admittedly just an opinion.

To the emotional statement: I think I’d get a reaction if rather than saying “I don’t think Go is a good language” I said something like “Go is objectively the worst programming language ever devised”. I get your point but if you feel emotional about something then say so - IMO the parent comment did much more than that.

There is indeed a difference and I don’t think we’re disagreeing on that.

This is exactly what I was trying to point out. You've made some reasonable points here, but that doesn't offer any evidence for the hyperbolic statement that Israel is pure and undiluted evil. Israel could be a bad place without that statement being true.

This might seem like a silly distinction to some but what I find depressing about modern culture wars is how "we disagree on these points" seems to morph into "you and everything you represent is terrible". Nuance matters.

That might be true but, even if it is, it's a far cry from the statement that the Israeli government is singularly evil.

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Wow skimmed that part - yeah I guess fair enough

I personally think it's unfair to accuse this person of sexism. I didn't even know he was talking about a woman until you pointed it out. It's possible that this comment comes from a place of sexism, and it's possible that it doesn't. It's uncharitable to just assume the former.

The models may be writing the code but I would be surprised if they were contributing to the underlying science, which feels like the hard part

If that’s a pun, it’s next level

To the extent that a character makes a joke about his relationship getting serious enough that they started sharing an iCloud account

I understood it to mean properties of large-scale systems that are not properties of its components. Like in thermodynamics: zooming in to a molecular level, you can reverse time without anything seeming off. Suddenly you get a trillion molecules and things like entropy appear, and time is not reversible at all.

I think the comment is referring to “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”.

This seems not to be an opinion that other people hold, but I never saw social media as “free speech” given that some third party can decides which parts of what you say get promoted.

If you sent letters to people via a middleman who decided which of those to forward onwards, you’d see that as censorship. I appreciate that that’s an over-simplified example - it’s meant to be a reductio ad absurdum. But control of the algorithm effectively regulates free speech, IMO.

Also (for clarity) the fact that China happens to be involved is not relevant to my point!

It’s funny, I always thought it was obviously egg. Assuming evolution, the first recognisable “chicken” must have been the product of a mutation, hence the egg from which it hatched was the origin of the first ever chicken.

You may be right, I’ve no idea. For me it’s the principle more than the specific amount. I can’t understand why a manufacturer is entitled to charge you to use something that you supposedly own. Car manufacturers charging to unlock seat heating is a good example.

When you pay for goods or services, you should expect to receive something. If you pay extra for leather seats, you’re getting leather seats. If you pay for DLC as part of a game, you’re subsidising the cost of the developer adding more stuff to the game. The pricing of digital products and add-ons may not always be fair but you should be getting access to something valuable that you didn’t already have, i.e. something that costs money to develop and/or host.

In this case, you already bought and paid for the additional RAM. The manufacturer is refusing to let you use it until you pay additional money, even though you theoretically own it already. That’s not providing a service, it’s just extortion.

If you could somehow prove that the additional RAM was not factored into the original cost of what you bought then this might be fair (albeit wasteful) - but I doubt it…

There is a middle ground between woodworking and TikTok, no? People enjoyed talking to each other and had fun before we had technology.

It’s easy to see social media as harmless, and maybe it is, but it also has the potential to act as a powerful tool for serving propaganda and brainwashing.

I’m not suggesting an actual conspiracy theory here but it’s concerning that a few huge companies have the power to broadcast (and control) the flow of information to a majority of population, who will consume that information by and large without suspicion.

If for some reason Facebook or TikTok really wanted to meaningfully shift public opinion, they probably could, and in any direction they might choose.

I have a take on this. As technology makes it cheaper to distribute things (I'm thinking all the way from printing press to VHS to streaming) the target audience grows. Each revolution in distribution broadens the pool of consumers. A book in the 1500s was only available to (and therefore likely directed at) wealthy and highly-educated people. Today, many (or most?) people can afford a Netflix account. Almost any Western person can watch a Tiktok video. I'm not trying to say that richer people are somehow better than the average person but I hope it's fair to say that, as media can reach more and more people, the target audience becomes less "sophisticated".

Out of interest, why are electric vehicles a waste of time and money in your opinion?

I’m not 100% on this but the way I understood this is by analogy to the 2D surface of the Earth. The surface of the Earth is finite yet has no reachable edge. The universe is the same in 3D. Like if the Earth grew then there would be more land but still no more or less “edge” of the world, and the same could hold for the universe. That said I think this is one theory rather than accepted fact?

Got it cheers

It wasn’t mentioned on the landing page (I think) but is this a concatenative programming language?