wrinkl3

"Explain the harness" is apparently the new "explain LLMs" genre of slop blogging, I now see articles to this effect on HN daily.

Whenever a game of this kind has a massive launch, a bunch of criticism will come from people who are either unfamiliar with the genre or just plainly don't enjoy it. That said, there's a very legitimate conversation to be had about difficulty in Elden Ring's DLC - I love FROM games and I genuinely couldn't enjoy the final bosses of SOTE due to the amount of bullshit they throw at you.

In general these games have an issue where each new entry (1) gives the player more tools to use, and thus needs to up the difficulty to balance it out, and (2) caters to a fanbase of people who have spent hundreds of hours playing the previous games, and thus expect increased challenge. The end result is that if you go to Dark Souls 3 after completing SOTE you'll be pretty amazed by how easy that game is by comparison.

Another (very) short story that plays with this idea is Neil Gaiman's Other People: https://xpressenglish.com/our-stories/other-people/

Scott is a lot more accessible and engaging as a writer and did a lot to turn SSC/ACX into a platform for other like-minded bloggers. Gwern’s content is a lot more niche and he’s also less consistent with his output, but what he does put up is great. I don’t think anyone reads Yud anymore - all of his best writing was 10+ years ago and nowadays he’s a furry mascot for the scene who occasionally engages in apocalyptic screeching

Yandex Search is decent, but over-indexed on Russian content. They’ve also suffered major brain drain since the war began so I don’t expect them to keep up with the AI arms race.

Not clear how to deal with this either - you can improve authentication but it won’t prevent the properly auth’ed users from running LLMs. You can watermark the output of officially vended LLMs (Scott Aaronson seems to be working on that) but nothing is gonna prevent people from running non-watermarked versions

The quote in the title doesn't appear in the body of the article, I can't tell if either of these CEOs actually said that.

A simulated hurricane would kill simulated people.

Eh, Armenia losing its war wasn't particularly detrimental to the Russian interests in the Transcaucasia - if anything it helped bring Pashinyan back into the fold, as evidenced by him embracing CSTO during the Kazakh unrest.

Minsk is also hardly "swallowed by protests" right now, they've succeeded in driving all resistance back underground.

I agree that the post-Soviet world is in a bit of a crisis but it's not particularly more crisisy than normal. Putin's just getting older.

I've been thinking about Starlink too. Rural Kazakhstan should actually be pretty good for reception with all that barren steppe.

Afaik HPPD and schizophrenia are distinct conditions, most people with HPPD don't report any symptoms common in schizophrenia.

That line doesn't mean anything - should we make any type of computation that contributes to a pyramid scheme illegal? How do you even define a pyramid scheme in a way that doesn't also cover traditional financial institutions and academia?

> Humans have been playing games literally for thousands of years - there is a value in entertainment, especially with our busy lives of 21st century.

Who gets to decide that? You see value in entertainment derived from a gaming rig, a person in Argentina sees value in mining a unit of make-believe currency which they can then sell on a speculative market. Should we form a global committee to decide on which types of computation have value, and should therefore be allowed to execute?

> BTC mining is just one of those operations that is resistant to a carbon tax since the price of BTC and therefore the mining rewards can just rise to compensate.

But if it's still taxed proportionally to the generated emissions, does it matter how big the rewards are?

But Brexit hasn't really changed that - most of Eastern Europeans you're describing aren't EU citizens and needed work visas even before Brexit.

Which legitimate projects are you referring to?

The common thought seems to be that large scale decentralization can only be achieved with the kind of incentives cryptocurrencies provide (i.e. people get rewards for running their own nodes). You mention IPFS, but they actually implemented Filecoin a few years back as a way to incentivize storage.

I mean, Telegram also supports fully-fledged microblogging (with personal channels) in a way Whatsapp just doesn't.

Those types of jobs typically require the employees to get a security clearance.

That's my question as well - does EEG have any compelling everyday use-cases that aren't already covered by a heart rate monitor?

The Soviet withdrawal was a bit different since the Union was actively falling apart and the occupied territories were pushing for independence. It wasn't all that smooth either - Georgian civil war and the first Nagorno-Karabakh War directly resulted from USSR's dissolution.

A Latin language website from 2004.

> The interesting thing is that the same kinds of comments were made about GPT-2 and I guess we'll see them with GPT-4 and so on, also.

What was exciting about the GPT-2/3 was how much better they were compared to their predecessors. It's that delta that's fueling the hype among the enthusiasts, as well as the anticipation of what might happen if the delta holds for another few rounds of iteration.

How will you know that the generated code doesn't have any bugs?

Codex in its current form is meant to be used as an assist for someone who can already code/debug, not as a replacement for a contractor.

That's about as advisable as asking it to write firmware for a pacemaker. Smart contracts are some of the most delicate codebases - even a tiny bug can cause you to lose a lot of money. With a model like this bugs are very likely, especially in such a niche domain.

> I really want to see whether this model can write a correct binary search method without seeing one before.

It has almost definitely seen a lot of coding problems so I would expect "write a function to binary search a sorted array" to output the intended result. I don't think anybody expects it to come up with algorithms it hasn't encountered.

Would you also chastise someone for getting an iPhone because it comes with Apple's walled garden?

There's currently a huge push online to make Solarpunk a thing, as a kind of an optimistic counterpart to Cyberpunk, but I'm skeptical about whether it can attain the same level of cultural traction as the other big *punks.

Cyberpunk and steampunk both fetishize aesthetics from the past - 80's corporate Japan and the Victorian Britain, respectively, - there's a sort of nostalgic longing that keeps them culturally relevant. Solarpunk tries to fetishize sustainability in a similar way, but I'm not sure if there's enough foundation there to build onto.

> I see many famous athletes who go to their hometown in America and invest in under developed neighborhoods they grew up in, and see that as a model for investing in communities on a global level.

But those athletes became famous and successful precisely because they were allowed to leave and pursue their dreams - had they been stuck in their hometowns they wouldn't have achieved anything of the same caliber. If it's okay to leave your hometown, why isn't it okay to leave your home country?

The notion that people are beholden to the country they're born in is absolutely braindead. You're basically saying that a person born in a gutter should stay in that gutter because the gutter might benefit from it.

> RT's current approach seems to be to focus on Protasevich's alleged role as a propagandist for the neo nazi azov brigades in donbass and, of course, the whole Snowden/Morales affair.

They're deflecting because Lukashenko's official narrative (the bomb story) is too absurd even for them to peddle. They can't really say that the plane wasn't hijacked so instead they're falling back to "well he had it coming". This is definitely a new low for the Russia-Western relations, they normally bother with at least some plausible deniability.