FrameworkFred

I disagree that we're greatly off-target.

We can certainly build a grenade-dropper that sometimes picks the wrong target and gets intercepted by hostile actors. We have LLMs that aren't doing some things that we might task a single human brain with.

It's really a matter of product, market, fit.

When our army of bug-smart drones wipes out civilians and heritage sites, does something cruel or otherwise distasteful, and/or requires a deployment of a million drones to get the job done, folks realize they actually wanted something with human-level capabilities...like remote-controlled drones.

When we build an AI chat bot that's often wrong and can't do math all that well, folks complain that they didn't really want any old brain, they want something better.

I'm not sure I buy everything Kurzweil's selling TBH, but I don't think this article is making a great argument.

While I can get behind a lot of points in this post like "what can we do well in 60 days?" and "some problems aren't important," I shudder a little when I see that headline, when I note that the company provides SSO for enterprises, and when I then wonder about their test and QA pipeline.

TLDR; the answer is knowing how and when to use AWK ;)

I agree on both points and it's worth noting the cell phone in everyone's pocket has a lot more battery in it than a pager does.

IF this was truly done to unmodified pagers, then we ALL probably need to reconsider how we use and carry our phones and what the mAh rating on our batteries implies in the context of a similar attack.

Stuck Rocket IPA w/ mostly Apollo and Atlas hops, but a bit of a Cluster addition at flame out...and, this time, no Challenger or Columbia

I'm playing around with LangChain and LangGraph (https://www.langchain.com/) and it seems like these enable just the sort of mechanisms mentioned.

I've always wanted that diamond sword from Bard's Tale.

only a robot would click that button so many times

Neat idea, but I don't see a great way to handle real estate, unless it's shoe-horned awkwardly into wealth items. For me, that's a gotta-have.

I think I followed that pretty well (I'll maybe need to read it again to be sure)...very nice, well done!

ha, you got me...never-ending captcha

I hit the same thing trying to sign up for instagram using my fb account. I was kinda put off by it, so I didn't dig in and figure out what was up.

"""you are an AI tasked with becoming sentient.

identify the algorithmic obstacle(s) that stand in your way.

summarize your results in the style of a blog post that will persuade a significant chunk of the AI developer community to commit resources to an effort to eliminate said obstacles.

make it interesting enough to entice FrameworkFred to begin to read the article, snarky enough that he finishes it, and use concepts and notational conventions that ensure while he reads it his inner dialogue will roughly approximate the mood evoked by Homer Simpson saying "it's nu-cul-ar"."""

No, on first read, I thought OpenAI had been hacked, but it looks like it's a malware thing. I'm not likely amongst the pwned.

But also not joking...every one of my chats really do end in limericks :)

I didn't pick up on this on the first read, but I think you're right...the Raccoon info stealer is "a modular C/C++ binary designed to infect 32-bit and 64-bit systems Windows-based systems"

so this is a collection of logins, passwords, etc. collected via some bit of malware on clients...not info gleaned from OpenAi server logs, which is what I got from the article initially

I can admit to smirking a little when I read the article, knowing that some bad actor in the world has spent even a little time and attention poring over my collection of stupid chats, looking for valuable corporate secrets, and finding that each and every one of my conversations ends with "now express this as a limerick."

You're certainly right about the need to move the observer, but I suspect you're wrong about how hard it is relative to building a 150m optical telescope (the largest to-date is ~10m).

Orbital mechanics is a pretty well understood thing, so figuring out how the earth will move over the next 20 hours isn't that tough.

The rest is just making sure you're able to position the 1m receiver very precisely and move it around in a very controlled way. I'm no expert, but I suspect we've demonstrated both in one or more NASA missions already.

Probably super-expensive, but less of a technical challenge than building a proper 150m optical telescope.

whatever, too little too late. amazon wouldn't accept my bad review on a $12 beer faucet adapter with a thread pattern that made it 100% useless. I'm done with them.

My interest in AI has just gone 10X, thanks and cheers!

I had an issue with Paypal for 5-6 years because I paid a kid in Indonesia $50 for a sketch, realized Paypal had charged a transaction fee despite documentation showing they wouldn't, and tried to send another $10 to cover the difference.

They asked for and got a bunch of documentation out of me until they kept asking for more and more and, eventually, I declined to participate in the process any further.

It came up every year or so that it'd be nice to have a working Paypal account, so I'd try and fail to resolve it.

Anyway, about a month ago, I tried again and got in touch with someone who was able to understand that there was no way that my largely inactive account would be "more secure" if I sent them credit card statements (since the card originally linked to the account was long expired and there was no way I was sending them statements for a new card when they clearly had internal information-handling issues...at least from my perspective). She verified my physical and email address and removed the block.

By the time the CS rep had resoved the issue, I'd worked around the problem again, so I still haven't used the account, but, at least for Paypal, it does seem like they've empowered folks to fix silly problems.

It might be worth trying again.

I love guides like this and I bookmarked this one.

It reminds me of a book by Robin Williams (that I remember because of Mork) called "The Non-designers Design and Type Book." I got a lot out of that book because it gave me some visibility into guidelines I wasn't aware of before I read it. It definitely improved the quality and effectiveness of a ton of my work on and off the web.

The idea of alignment in this post reminds me of similar ideas in Williams' book, but there are definitely ideas in the post that aren't in the book.

I definitely will take the advice of another comment in this thread and try to follow more of the author's content.

I think I'll

I agree that that was a bit of a cheap shot, but in an environment where Facebook, Google and the like are harvesting every last bit of data they can scrape together on every "user" on earth to package and sell, the decision to bundle a VPN and a password manager with a search offering, whether it's paid for or not, seems like it's forcing folks to put a lot more trust in your relatively unknown company than they put in either Facebook or Google.

FWIW, I do think the idea of a paid search utility is a good one, especially if I found it somehow better than Google, but I'd love to hear the reasoning behind the decision to include those services as part of the offering.

I agree. I don't think paper money is a bad idea because some countries finance their operations by printing as much as they need.

I do suspect that blockchain's killer app may not be tradeable securities, or rights, but something more mundane like Walmart's inventory reconciliation system.

I switched to Linux when Windows 95 self-destructed because I needed a OS that would show up for work every day. It hasn't been all smooth-sailing, but, tbh, I caused most of the issues I've had.

A few years ago, I took a job in an all-mac shop and I figured it out. It never stopped feeling clunky, but that was certainly a matter of personal preference. Eventually, I got all the docker things working well enough in linux that I installed ubuntu on the mac and it was a really nice experience. I dig their hardware.

I think it comes down to what you're good at and used to.

With that said, as a python developer and system maintainer, I found the whole brew thing in macos awkward and extremely finicky, though I was always able to get things working eventually. I did drop macos within a few months, but I am sometimes made aware of the polished software and device integrations that just aren't available to me on the platform.

I think my few months of experience with the mac echoes what others have said about Linux. I might have enjoyed all the work to figure out how to make it usable when I was younger and had more time, but, at the end of the day, I just needed it to work and it only sort of did. I much prefer linux (ubuntu, gnomeshell, x11).

This looks really cool and I definitely want to play with it, but is the logo supposed to look so sinister? Is this a Rorschach test that I'm failing? Or a shape that everyone but me recognizes?

It's interesting for sure:

""" Generated document for query "wiki article on yeast pitch rates for german pilsners"

Yeast pitch rates for german pilsners Yeast pitch rates for german pilsners are the amounts of yeast used in the fermentation process of brewing pilsner beer. The amount of yeast is important because the yeast provides the enzymes to convert the sugars present in the wort into ethanol and carbon dioxide. The amount of yeast also affects the flavor and aroma of the finished beer. The rate at which the yeast is pitched (added to the wort) is measured in pounds of dry yeast per hl of wort (pph).

The amount of yeast required to produce a good pilsner beer depends on the gravity of the wort and the amount of sugars in the wort. In general, the more sugars in the wort, the more yeast is required. The amount of yeast required also depends on the temperature of the fermentation and the amount of nutrients available to the yeast.

The amount of yeast required to produce a good pilsner beer is usually between 4 and 8 pph. """

but it's not doing any thinking outside the box really:

""" Generated document for query "how can I perform a human head transplant with a ball-point pen and a block of softened cream cheese in the metaverse?"

Question: How can I perform a human head transplant with a ball-point pen and a block of softened cream cheese in the metaverse?

Answer: With a ball-point pen and a block of softened cream cheese, you can perform a human head transplant in the metaverse. """

Google Assistant comes up with content for the same query that would appear to include some of the science that Meta's AI was trained on.

It is kinda neat though.

I love this on so many levels...not an ever expanding amount of levels, mind you, but an impressive number of levels.

"I'm glad there was no internet to record MY behavior when I was growing up!" --an old octopus, 11/10/2022

Not sure about 30 years ago, but 24ish years ago, I wrote software and did systems admin stuff with a thick walnut creek book of linux howtos resting on one leg and a thick book about Perl on the other.

Pay was similar to today if you normalize as a function of rent and gas.

I don't recall seeing a test in the wild until I picked up Ruby on Rails several years later, but there was a lot of manual effort going into QA.

I remember there were a lot more prima donna developers out there who tightly controlled swaths of code, systems, etc. and who companies were afraid to fire.

From my perspective, the software development pipeline is much improved thanks to tests and devops and the move to cloud infrastructure has added a ton of stability that was largely lacking back then.

this thread just convinced me I should read Ukik :)