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x-complexity

755 karma · joined April 13, 2022

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x-complexity··on AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)
> Yes, it's messy and unpolished, maybe even a little hard to parse, but it's so much richer for it.

...This part immediately made me link it to the hipster stereotype:

"oh, it's sooooo much better on vinyl because you can hear the cracks & pops"

Neither pieces in the chat log work for me: The prompt was a wall of ramblespeak. The output was a presentation that should've been an email.

x-complexity··on Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy
> How do you cut any of these without everyone losing their minds?

> medicaid, medicare

You can't. You're dealing with the inevitably increasing costs of human labor as it becomes more valued over time.

To decrease the costs without devaluing human labor inherently requires the use of labor-magnification tools to perform cost amortization, or use machines to move the performance of labor up by one layer of abstraction (directly performing the work -> maintaining the machines that perform the work) and amortize the costs that way.

> social security, and welfare

Both schemes require a sufficiently large working population that is multiple times larger than the recipient population to remain sustainable & relatively painless (Ratio of > 3).

In scenarios where the aforementioned ratio is lowered, whether incrementally or suddenly, the total supply from the working population decreases whilst total demand remains the same. As told in conventional economics, this results in an increase in prices as the same amount of resources chases a decreasing amount of labor.

x-complexity··on Decoy Font
It took me defocusing my eyes to read the hidden text with normal ease. When I tried it, squinting only made it focus in on the thin lines instead of the background.
x-complexity··on Cloudflare Drop
> Now tell me what is cool

Not immediately being a copyright bootlicker.

The fact that you went straight to "BuT pIrAtEs" already shows who you actually care: Corpos, not people.

x-complexity··on U.S. science is in chaos
> Less motivation for people to be racist if they have their needs met.

If and only if what they'll be given is not taken away by anyone under any reason.**

Loss aversion bias innately exists within us for a reason: How can anyone live if someone else seeks to take what they have away?

x-complexity··on FCC wants to kill burner phones by forcing telecoms to get all customers' IDs
> No privacy is valued other than their own, and they will always use "think of the children" as an excuse.

Until they lose an election using "think of the children", they'll always continue to use it. In terms of political weaponry, it's currently unstoppable.

x-complexity··on U.S. to dismantle system tracking Atlantic currents that are at risk of collapse
The tax money shouldn't have been collected in the first place. It should've stayed with the people.
x-complexity··on U.S. to dismantle system tracking Atlantic currents that are at risk of collapse
I'm dead serious.

Where are the charities who're supposedly aligned wuth such a mission? Where're the blue states?

x-complexity··on U.S. to dismantle system tracking Atlantic currents that are at risk of collapse
> 1) it's not hard to do your own research. If you're here, I assume you know how.

Assume the opposite direction. If you don't bring the data, then you're not doing your part to convince others on your position. Assumption of "default data" is a significant contributor in the breakdown of communications.

> 2) does that answer satisfy you?

No, in fact it leaves open more questions than before. From the article provided (https://archive.is/fZ9CN):

>> The $48 million annual budget for the observation network was small compared with the value of the data it collected for understanding the oceans and the climate, Dr. McLean said.

- Why didn't aligned charities step in to plug the gap? Billions flow through charities each year, and yet none have stepped in? One or 2 stepping in and still not being able to plug the gap, I can accept. None at all?

- If the data is that important, then there should be multiple efforts in collecting it, not just one. Why did everything get lumped into a single basket?

x-complexity··on U.S. to dismantle system tracking Atlantic currents that are at risk of collapse
All the more reason as to why it should be Canada monitoring that portion of the ocean.
x-complexity··on U.S. to dismantle system tracking Atlantic currents that are at risk of collapse
> ... “removal of all in-water infrastructure” belonging to the Ocean Observatories Initiative at sites along the coasts of Oregon, Washington, Alaska, and North Carolina, and in the waters between Greenland and Iceland.

...Why is Europe reliant on the US for monitoring oceans between Greenland & Iceland, i.e within European territory & therefore European monitoring? Shouldn't they have their own infra to work from?

x-complexity··on U.S. to dismantle system tracking Atlantic currents that are at risk of collapse
...Unironically in complete agreement.

If the data is economically valuable, mbgerring, then the private market and aligned states/charities should be the ones shouldering the costs.

x-complexity··on Flipper One – we need your help
The capability isn't there yet. Some of it is there, but not to the level of reliable reverse engineering.

https://programbench.com/

x-complexity··on SpaceX wants to launch a million satellites
> And that will never be true, so it’s meaningless.

The math is simple: The total cost for building on Earth is X, the total cost for building in space is Y.

If X > Y, building in space makes fiscal sense.

To say that it never happens, MagicMoonlight, requires X to always be less than Y, which cannot hold true forever. Eventually, X will grow to be more than Y, simply due to (rightfully placed) increased regulations for building on Earth.

> It would also be cheaper to build one on the moon, if it was free to build them on the moon.

Arguably, that should be the original goal: Build the DC on the moon.

x-complexity··on A Brief History of Lab Notebooks
> the author lost me when he implied socialism is synonymous with authoritarianism.

To enforce the socialist cause at the 100+M level, a stricter level of enforcement is required in order to forbade a breakout of inter-party bartering & thus the subversion of the socialist cause.

Such bartering is allowed under capitalism as it is considered arbitrage for at least one of the parties involved, but under mainstream understandings of socialism, such value surplus is disallowed to be kept to the private parties involved as it should be given out to the benefit of the wider population.

Caveat: There are variations of socialism that still allow for private bartering & exchanges, but they're typically disallowed at larger scales as they allow for the subversion of the socialist cause through the accumulation of private means of production, even if the "private" means "my town, not yours"

x-complexity··on Forking the Web
Whenever someone talks about forking/rebuilding the web, I'll always link to my favorite Dylan Beattie talk about such a hypothetical alternative:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JOD1AQGqEg

x-complexity··on SpaceX wants to launch a million satellites
> I don't see how orbital datacenters will ever be able to compete with terrestrial.

An orbital DC makes fiscal sense when the cost to launch one to space is lower than the cost to build one on Earth.

Key point: The cost of building on Earth will inevitably trend upwards as more restrictions & costs are (~80% rightfully) placed onto Earth-bound datacenters.

x-complexity··on Louis Rossmann offers to pay legal fees for a threatened OrcaSlicer developer
> The earlier F2I scheme instead had a contest where the party that is the most ambitious in fabricating lab notebooks to backdate their invention gets the patent.

The implementation of F2I is then the issue. It should be the first to fulfill all of the following requirements:

(1) physically show at least 2 patent clerks the invention,

(2) that the invention works & operates as outlined, with the clerks being the ones to operate the machine, and

(3) a detailed step-by-step guide to the clerk about how the machine works

The date that the patent is awarded should be the date where the last of the 3 actions occurred.

x-complexity··on PS3 Emulator Devs Politely Ask That People Stop Flooding It with AI PRs
> If someone can’t write their own Agent.md for a project how are they going to validate the auto-completed text?

> This strikes me as the ideal LLM first contribution/PR, a file explaining the projects standards and testing and structure.

Why should the project maintainers write such a file, when the info already exists within the README? It is duplicated work at best, and a definitive sign of the incapabilities of the agent to properly parse the project's contribution guidelines.

https://github.com/RPCS3/rpcs3/blob/master/README.md#contrib...

https://github.com/RPCS3/rpcs3/wiki/Coding-Style

https://github.com/RPCS3/rpcs3/wiki/Developer-Information

x-complexity··on PS3 Emulator Devs Politely Ask That People Stop Flooding It with AI PRs
Forks need to be normalized again.

Logistically & brand-wise, they're messy to deal with, but they result in a "filter" of sorts that the original project can pick & choose to upstream back into their code.

x-complexity··on PS3 Emulator Devs Politely Ask That People Stop Flooding It with AI PRs
> Should the barrier of entry be someone who knows how to code? or should the barrier of entry be someone who is motivated to help with open-source software.

The motivation to help the OSS project should also come with the obligation to learn how the software operates, at least on a conceptual level. The desire to help does not grant people the pass to sledgehammer their way into adding in a feature.

x-complexity··on PS3 Emulator Devs Politely Ask That People Stop Flooding It with AI PRs
> Is it that if you write enough buggy code you get banned as a contributor?

If this is a consistent issue, your contribution would (ideally) be continuously put into a backlog until someone else with no connection to you verifies that it's as bug-free as it appears to be. (Excluding non-obvious security & performance issues)

> Is it that you're not allowed to say Claude ate my homework?

Yes. As the contributor, you should be the first one to look over the code, not someone else.

x-complexity··on PS3 Emulator Devs Politely Ask That People Stop Flooding It with AI PRs
> what is the appeal of blindly blasting open source projects with high-volume PRs?

The prestige of being "the one that added feature X to OSS project Y". The things that would've been actually useful (bug diagnostics/troubleshooting, merging duplicate issues & PRs) do not offer the same level of prestige.

x-complexity··on Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard
> It's surprising that Visa and Mastercard are even private companies.

Asianometry provides a great summary as to how both of them came to be: For Visa, a 1976 rebranding of the BankAmericard program. For Mastercard, a 1966 meeting of banks as opposition to BankAmericard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2rKS4l6MAk

x-complexity··on I want to live like Costco people
> Indoctrination via decades of advertisements in clear demonstration. The imagery from this description are taken directly from coke advertisements. Either that or this is a parody.

How can you be so sure you've broken free of the indoctrination, when what you have written is also the product of indoctrination? The only practical difference is the banner under which the indoctrination happened under.

x-complexity··on Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard
> > Pix is already 100% surveilled

> And Visa and MasterCard aren't surveiled?

Who is doing the surveilling is the difference. In the latter, the surveillance is done by the private sector, in aims of better targeted advertising.

In the former, it's done by either the government or by a government-tied organization, and thus invites a left-hand-passes-to-right-hand scenario, wherein the data & metadata obtained from the system could be passed to law enforcement for prosecution (doubly so if the transactions could be bundled as evidence).

> Isn't one of their selling points that they surveil every transaction and automatically block anything suspicious? And increasingly, the parameters for suspicious include anything pornographic or even 'pornographic' (see: the bullying of steam to remove explicit games).

The censorship pressures made onto Visa & Mastercard was done not by the government, but by PACs & non-governmental organizations. It is through the use of "think of the children" that they push them into censoring transactions, under the implicit threat that lawsuits will be filed if such transactions remain allowed.

x-complexity··on I am worried about Bun
> Both claim better performance, but that only seems true in cherrypicked benchmarks, and in my tests (granted about a year ago at this point) both alternatives under-performed Node in my workloads.

1) You need to retest again, mainly because Bun's own native tools should be faster than Node's.

2) My experience is the opposite: For the niche uses I'm on, the rendering process is done 2-3x faster with only a few changes to use Bun's tools.

x-complexity··on Alignment whack-a-mole: Finetuning activates recall of copyrighted books in LLMs
Modern copyright duration is the actual problem: It should've never been longer than what was outlined in the Statute of Anne. (28~14 years)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne

The Lord of the Rings should be in the public domain.

The original Harry Potter book should've been in the public domain.

Star Wars should've been in the public domain.

Everything from before 1998 should've been in the public domain by now, but isn't.

x-complexity··on Alignment whack-a-mole: Finetuning activates recall of copyrighted books in LLMs
> Copyright is what facilitates copyleft.

Chesterson's fence. The existence of copyleft is the result of being forced to live within the domain of copyright, not the other way around.

> Getting rid of IP protections also rids us of GPL, which gave us a few things including the most popular OS in the world.

Linux became popular because of the persistent effort of Linus & the Linux community into making the kernel better, not because of copyleft.

> It’s one thing to reject the specifics of IP laws as currently implementated; it’s another thing to celebrate the dismantling of the entire foundation of open source by for-profit corporate interests who sought to do it for decades.

There are similar corporate interests who profit off of hoarding decades-old works so they can charge fees to what should've been in the public domain, under the original durations that should've stayed (28/14 years).

What has resulted from the endless extensions of the original terms has been the societal lobotomization of human creativity, with an untold number of works now being forever lost simply because they were derived from what should've been in the public domain.

When having lived in such a society, and recognizing existing copyright laws as the reason why it is creatively in such a state, the celebration of its destruction should not be treated as illogical.

x-complexity··on Alignment whack-a-mole: Finetuning activates recall of copyrighted books in LLMs
> A digital library needs almost no funding.

Clarification:

To maintain the library still requires resources & effort to do so. It only appears to need no funding because the donators of said (disk space / bandwidth / dev effort) are subsidizing it in aid of a goal they believe in (i.e. the church model).

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