I haven't used it as much recently, but to be honest I think low volume could be one of the best things for it. The aggressive moderation that a lot of people complain about was largely a consequence of the colossal traffic that existed in SO's heyday, with people posting duplicates of basic questions constantly. A quieter site based on the same concept might be more useful to all concerned (except maybe venture capitalists, but screw them).
It's not correct that Basque is the only non-Indo-European language in Europe; this is also true of Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, and some other minority languages in the far north of Scandinavia. However, it has been hypothesized that Basque is the only language in Europe that is pre-Indo-European, having existed there before Indo-European languages spread to that area (although it's hard to know this for sure). Either way, you're right that it's a fascinating language!
I think there is a meaningful difference between an Intel 486 and a portable device like a tablet, especially if the former is not connected to the internet (or is connected to the internet as it was circa 1995). I think it could be fine and even beneficial to give a kid a desktop computer to write games using QuickBasic, and at the same time very harmful to give them a tablet.
Total time of what? Like what is the end goal that people are trying to achieve? All of the examples I can see in the post are similarly about development-internal stuff like tests and performance (or games). What I mean by true ambition would be stuff that is actually aimed at helping people in the world at large, not just helping developers develop.
Ambition doesn't scale with the number of small things you get done. Ambition is the size of the big thing you are trying to do. It's true that improving small things can help you do that big thing, but that's not the same as the ambition itself. Wanting to build a better mousetrap is just a modest technical ambition. The kind of ambition I'm talking about is wanting to eradicate the plague, and then maybe building a better mousetrap as a means to that end.
> In other words, the primary impacts of AI art will be on culture and society rather than the macroeconomy.
In that case we're in deep shit. It's already worrisome to see the effects that various technological "advances" (like smartphones) have had on culture and society. This is likely to make things even worse.
Amen to that. I was surprised to see yours seems to be the only comment with this sentiment. This post was kind of depressing to read. Like if AI is so amazing and can one-shot so much astounding stuff, why is anyone wasting their time on pointless "projects" like making ripgrep faster?
"Small" as in tens of thousands of users on a site that has existed for 10 years. I don't think most people in their lives wind up making a decision that has as broad an impact as that.
Another lo-fi site trying to create friendly community without corporate greed bites the dust, in this case apparently due to burnout on the part of the main person running it. I hadn't used Pillowfort much but did browse and explore some blogs on there and it seemed like a positive community. Always sad to see stuff like this happen.
We'll never get past this as long "well you didn't update" is considered an acceptable rebuttal. The problem is created when vulnerable software is released. We would be better off slowing things down by a factor of a hundred or more rather than continuing the current approach of "update every day to fix the new vulnerabilities introduced by the last update that fixed the old vulnerabilities".
> fair point. it depends on how fast you want to get it done.
I want it yesterday. :-)
> going to fast will produce to much resistance. instead of attacking the rich, let this generation die out, and make things harder for the next generation.
But this generation will just pass their wealth, and their determination to protect it, to their heirs. There has to be some point at which the flow reverses and the accumulated wealth of the super-rich actually begins to decrease, not just increase at a slower rate.
I agree, although I think it goes beyond that in a way. What you said also shows that it's not just a matter of whether the base activity is legal, but what kind of apparatus grows up around it. The tricks you mention (gamifying, ads, endorsements, VC, etc.) have also been applied to all kinds of other markets (food, cosmetics, music, cars, "wellness", etc.), and they are all worse for it. It's true that when you combine something inherently destructive like gambling with these amplifying factors, you get a particularly toxic result. But I think that, for instance, we would be a lot better off if 90% of current ads, VC, and big corporations were themselves banned.
This is what we get when we go all in on a monolithic bloated platform, and then let its direction be primarily determined by one company. We'd be better off with a simpler, albeit less featureful, platform, or at least one that's more modular.
I mean an obvious reason is that people tend to write rationalist blog posts if they're really into overanalyzing things and if you're into that you're likely to write a lot about what you're overanalyzing.
The real "how" is in the last section: Amazon pushes up prices by being so big that people feel they have to sell there. That is the root of the issue and the place to solve it, by destroying Amazon and breaking it up into small pieces.
In my view all of the conveniences that people are referencing in the comments (e.g., easy returns) are also consequences of that, and they are also bad, in the same way that it is more convenient to eat a bag of potato chips than it is to cook a meal, but the potato chips are worse for you. The convenience derived from large market share (Amazon's or any other similar excessively large market player) is not worth the downsides. We need to rip the band-aid off and accept that less convenience is better.
That isn't a problem with AI writing per se, at least not in the sense that it's a problem in a particular instance of a person encountering the writing. It's a problem with the existence and availability of the tools. I agree it is a problem, though, and it should be addressed by drastically curtailing the development and availability of the tools.
It seems to me there's a massive irony here that the article misses: the education system was supposed to cultivate "moral and cultural formation", "a brave, helpful, truth-telling Englishman, and a gentleman, and a Christian", "religious and moral principles" . . . and the result was an elite that believed above all in the rectitude of its own supremacy and had no scruples about exploiting and oppressing millions of people across the globe. If the purpose of the Victorian education was to produce good people, it failed miserably.
Those are good ideas, but they are ways to prevent wealth accumulation, not to undo it. I think we also need to consider direct transfers of existing wealth to remedy the current situation.
> And our community will need to explicitly re-evaluate its criteria for education, publication, and career advancement, to reflect the "Math 2.0" era.
I think most academic disciplines would benefit from such a re-evaluation. AI is still a scourge on the earth, but I suppose if it spurs such changes that's a modicum of a silver lining.
There is a difference between "read my content and make it available to your users" and "make money by reading my content and making it available to your users". Terms of use like this are trying to say "we are the only ones who get to make money from this", and therein lies the problem.
I remember getting Tufte's book ("The Visual Display of Quantitative Information") and being really excited because I'd heard all these great things about it, and then being disappointed because it had no real justification for its claims. The "data ink" thing is a typical example. I'm willing to accept the general concept that many graphs are too cluttered. But there's no particular reason to suppose that quantifying the proportion of "data ink" and trying to optimize it is the best way to handle that. A lot of the book is just taking subjective aesthetic judgements and trying to frame them as some kind of objective truth.
If we really wanted reliable guidelines on how to format graphs, we would want to ground them in psychological research that actually demonstrates that, for instance, some versions result in better understanding or recall of certain information. But as far as I can see Tufte's book makes no attempt to do this. (Perhaps he or those who built on his works did it later on?)
A lot of the tests have the form of a goal ("the AI can do X") with a qualifier ("and the AI does not do Y"). I think a lot of the worrisome aspects of LLMs concern these latter qualifiers. We are used to human failure modes and those failure modes are to a large extent embedded in the complex system of physical reality, evolution, etc., giving them a certain stability. The LLM failure modes are often much more surprising. I'd like to see goalposts along the lines "people ask an LLM to do X 1000 times over a period of three years and it never does something bizarrely catastrophic". It's no good having it solve Navier-Stokes as long as it might also do the Huggingface breakout thing.