12_throw_away

helllll no

> AKA eventually everything runs on a potato.

If we're talking web servers, sure. Video games? For the most part. Numerical high performance computing? ehhhhhhhhh i'm not sure history bears that out

They are absolutely trying to deny their competitors necessary hardware, or at least drive up their costs substantially. And users running local models are, well, not not competitors ...

> This is what makes a market.

What is "this" referring to here?

I had a little homebrew CI system, and decided its first use case would be building itself. Seems like an extremely obvious thing to do, right?

The problem happens when you have bugs and test failures. The hoster and hostee look the same, behave the same, and emit the same error messages. So I had unknowingly opted into spending a big chunk of my debugging time being confused and wrong about A) where errors were coming from and B) what they even signified.

Basically, self-hosting too early, before the thing was stable and trustworthy, was a disaster. (It's obvious in retrospect, really, but was still pretty awful at the time.) I tried again later, after everything had stabilized and it was routinely building other projects routinely, and it was fine.

> We actually studied leadership via Star Trek at the Air Force Academy. There were a lot of practical lessons to learn about decisiveness versus being too rash, or performing your specific role well to help the team. It was an interesting study in real-world leadership through this fictional show.

- Col. Terry Virts, USAF

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/star-trek-...

So, I've heard many AI boosters say that current-day AI is probably "conscious", "sentient", etc. They occasionally invoke "Measure of a Man", as you've done here.

And yet .. I've never once heard the thought continue with "and so they deserve rights and some degree of self-determination," which is, you know, the entire point of the episode you're referencing.

Why is that?

Right, exactly. All those disclaimers in front of various AI applications have made people forget that in fact, AI cannot fail, it can only be failed.

Thanks for saying the quiet part out loud, glad some of you people are finally courageous enough to own your beliefs.

"I stole some art" great good for you i'm sure that took a lot of effort

This is a PR-style "refutation" that uses a lot of words to make it seem like it has addressed some issue. I'll just quote one of the reddit comments that is also exactly my reaction:

  if OP isn't some PR account (or andy's alt account) I will eat my hat. none of OP's responses deal with the actual complaints.

PS: cliches like "breaking my silence" / "speaking my truth" etc should result in an automatic 20-point deduction to all bayesian priors for authenticity and trustworthiness

> If so, what specific steps do you suggest I take to acquire a similar understanding?

School! Teachers! Classes!

Seriously, the traditional higher ed system is still a very good place to learn things like this. (I honestly tend to forget about it since academia hasn't really caught up at teaching software engineering, but that's really the exception rather than the rule ...). For traditional subjects like finance/economics, you can absolutely find inexpensive extension courses taught by people who care about pedagogy.

boss: did you just send $5B of our company's liquid capital to a nigerian prince?

me: no worries boss, our market cap is $100B

boss (who is also the tooth fairy): oh right cool np

No, this is a great idea! No more wacom tablet, no more going back and forth between the mac and iPad! I'm looking forward to having a mac where I can just swivel the screen to lie flat and use my apple pen to draw!

Right? ... right? ... wait

oh

oh wait what

wait seriously?

tim. wtf is this shit, tim

I mean, if your multi-year-old project is ever asked to just take a moment to write out a quick formal roadmap and justification ... it is doomed, 100% of the time. The actual content of the request doesn't really matter, it's dead.

To be clear, such a request doesn't even mean that someone is consciously attempting to kill the project (although in the corporate world, ime it probably does). It just means that something went critically wrong. In this case, it appears like python's development process really required a PEP for this sort of work, especially since it was happening on the main branch.

> Using real member accounts to post the fake AI content is so much worse.

Yeah, that part seems not just ethically bankrupt, but also really really stupid and counterproductive?

It all made a bit more sense to me when I learned that the guy who did all this is not, in fact, a physicist like I had originally assumed, but rather an "SEO lead at Shopify". [1]

[1] https://www.mkedmc.org/people/greg-bernhardt

> Is it somewhat convoluted to setup? Absolutely!

Kubernetes™

Wait, but how does that help? Are text templates any better suited for creating JSON than they are for creating YAML? Trying to manipulate well-structured data as if it were syntax-free text seems downright deranged to me, regardless of the specifics of the format ...

> at what point does a tool remain merely a tool, and at what point does it become an end in itself?

As technological animals, our tools are IMO never "merely" tools - we adapt ourselves to them at least as much as we ask them to work for us. E.g., the process of making art is, often, the 2-way process of integrating yourself with your tools. (Maybe art is just the point on the spectrum where the use of the tool is in itself the point of the tool?)

And anyway, every occupation (professional and otherwise) that I can think of fetishizes its tools, at least a little. Or, in a different direction, we might consider how the nature of policing has changed as they've been given more and more military-style tools.

> There are no repetitive puzzles in The Witness or Braid.

I'm sorry, I really like both games, but this is unbelievably false.

just last night I was playing a game on steam, and at a seemingly random point in gameplay (it was Death Stranding, I was just pressing forward like always), every single button on my controller spontaneously remapped to a different button. Turns out my steam input profile had just spontaneously been completely randomized?

All this to say: steam is better than the alternatives, but still has some objectively insane problems.

I think the idea is that blas + lapack are still at the foundation of basically the whole stack. Back in the day (or at least when I last looked), numpy was very much built on of them, and the rest of the data science stack was built on top of numpy. No idea how much these things are still the case.

I mean, I think it's best in class in its niche: writing numerical algorithms that compile to highly optimized machine code, while being reasonably readable and intuitive (at least from F90 on). It's arguably still the easiest way to write compute-intensive numerical extensions for python (well, if it's single-threaded, and if numpy can't do it, and if you're not using GPUs ...).

combine these domain aliases with the caching goproxy you're supposed to use, and they're well on their way to reinventing a traditional package index from first principles

Exactly! There's a quote I like to remember: "If I had listened to all the negativity and putative experts who expended so much energy telling me 'this is impossible, it will never work' I would never have gotten to where I am today." - E Holmes (Founder and CEO of Real-Time Cures)

> [em-dashes are] the first thing others point to being LLM-generated

this isn't true and hasn't been true for a while

> I didn’t put words into anyones mouth

literally read your first sentence again, and notice the word "others"

> It's unfortunate, but to come across as genuine now I think you have to actively avoid AI-isms.

I actually think this might be a good thing? I'm way more aware of cliches and filler in my writing these days, and it almost always reads better when I just remove them and plainly say the thing.

> Are you asking if I think Elon had this person's website on an 80" screen in a conference room whilst they collude how to send traffic to their site?

i cannot fathom how you could possibly arrive at this reading of the gp's comment, what are you talking about

> Since Amazon took (and as far as I know still takes) voice privacy incredibly seriously

lol no https://apnews.com/article/amazon-privacy-echo-7fb3c19fa7f66...

> When I worked for Alexa

Look I know it's easy to believe these things when your paycheck depends upon it, god knows I've convinced myself of a convenient fact or two when it was necessary for me to get through the day. But afterwards, without a financial interest, you owe it to yourself to go back and think about it again.

> there are already (pre AI) machine-generated proofs that we've pretty much agreed not to try to explain fully, like the four-color theorem

Algorithmic verification is a very unsatisfying answer to the problem (e.g., surely it's not just dumb luck that every single case happen to have this exact property), but that's an entirely different issue than saying that no one follows logic of the proof method itself.