Lutger

Last thing I read on it, it was confirmed to originate from a wet market. The Wuhan lab theory has become a conspiracy theory lacking substance.

The main focus of the article is not biofuels, but plant based plastics. We can replace most of the need for fuel with EV (or hydrogen fuels), but plastic is a harder problem. Micro and nanoplastics are also a problem that urgently needs to be addressed.

I don't know if it is clear headed. It disregards scientific consensus on introversion / extraversion being a real thing, and it also speaks against the actual experience of many people. Furthermore, you conflate introverts with hermits.

A lot of introverts actually like contact with other people. They often prefer smaller groups and a certain connection, they are more picky. And need some time alone afterwards.

But that doesn't mean they are hermits.

I used to think I like parties. That I have to like it. That something was wrong with me for not liking it. Now I know it is ok to not have fun at a party, and prefer a walk with a good friend or my wife. I am much happier this way.

As someone who had many years of depression, I know social isolation too. And it is just not the same.

That said, I admit it can at the same thing also be true that people cop out of a healthy way to stretch their boundaries or even expend just a little effort by mistakenly labeling themselves as introvert. Such misuse of the label doesn't mean it doesn't refer to a real thing and a real experience.

Won't a nuclear winter kill 100% of humans? Or runaway climate change (5+ degrees)? Or do you think some people in bunkers will live through these events?

Exactly. A mesh network of all the worlds phones and other battery powered devices with some form of radio. Good luck unplugging that one.

> win a time were we solved all the other problems

You don't mean this literally right? We still have hunger, diseases, slavery, poverty, crime, war, climate change, pollution, microplastics, etc. For me it feels like we are very far away from solving these problems.

Richard Rorty describes liberalism as the idea that cruelty is the worst thing that exists. Cruelty, of course, has just as many forms as suffering.

Universal income protects only basic needs and it does so in part. Even if you have income, you need to have housing, clean water, food that isn't poisened and some form of healthy environment to live a good life: income doesn't guarantee it.

On the other end of the income spectrum is the unlimited amassing of wealth. After some point, wealth turns into power. For example, Musk is able to buy twitter influencing public opinion, and Starlink can make or break the battlefield.

If we are talking only about income, I think we would need both a minimum (universal) income and a maximum (a cap on wealth). If we do not, then we will eventually lose democracy.

It doesn't need to cover the usage, or even be able to fully charge it when sitting idle parked.

There are two ways to make it viable:

- adding a bit more range to soothe the range-anxiety people

- adding enough kWh in its lifetime to offset the cost plus extra

If its not adding an off putting amount to the cost of purchasing the car, it should be commercially viable.

Its not as bad as in the US I think, but yeah, most of the laws are actually (literally) written by corporations. I wouldn't call them puppets, but EU corps have an outsized influence on the outcome of the process.

Contrary to what most comments seem to indicate, my takeaway from this is that it doesn't really matter all that much for the agents what language you pick. If humans are still to be involved in the process at some point, then its imperative that the language can be read by them, so the preference or skills of the developer(s) are of primary concern, not the agent.

I think the conclusions are a bit overstated and lopsided. Regardless of the sycophancy (which you can tune), LLMs have infinite patience and attention to details. They also have very little inherent bias - it just mirrors your own mostly. They are, in those aspects, vastly superior to even the best therapists, who can't listen for even a couple of minutes and can't think outside of their limited frames. They are only human.

Try listening to somebody and merely repeating the literal words that they say. I guarantee you, most people can't even reproduce two or tree sentences correctly. And I am not even talking about understanding the words, just the literal reproduction of them, copy-pasta. Humans just can't do it, we are not good at it.

Talking to an AI about your problems is a bit like talking to yourself, but with the added superpower of hours of google searches compressed in seconds. Of course it is dangerous and incomplete, but in a way it also beats talking to humans if you know what you are doing and are looking to and able to solve your problems yourself.

Yes, but that didn't translate to 'lots of free time'. We went on to do other stuff, like fast food, advertisement, entertainment, financial work, etc.

Why? What is he referencing? I can't find anything as controversial as this with an online search.

Robots being able to perform any task a human can do, physically, doesn't seem that far off. They would be powered by AI of course.

The question is: do we still have to work? If not, who will take all the wealth?

We thought the washing machine would have giving us so much free time, because it used to take a full day a week. Instead, we only got more frantic it seems and started putting in more labor. But what will happen when that labor is worthless?

In a dystopian world, the elite may be better off just killing the lower, middle and even the higher classes. Keep just enough people to have an interesting gene pool around. Because even in the space mines there will be no need for human labor anymore.

or 3: cease your assault of the international order, drop the zero sum paradigm and take the opportunity given by these crumbling US-build institutions to build a truly global network of lawful cooperation, where everybody can win. Admit that it wasn't fair to begin with, and start anew. It is in the best interest of everybody, also the US and China, and therefor the most rational thing to do.

Exactly. The 'whole self' also includes a deliberate thinking mind. People often equate feeling free and being yourself with losing all inhibitions and restraint. That may free great for a while, to unburden yourself, but its a strict subset of your capabilities.

A computer not, but a LLM model does learn. The original text in no way exists 'in the model', and the model does not copy-paste it and resell the original text. Not the same, but reasonably similar to a human.

We may need some new legislation. An LLM is not a person, but its also not just a storage solution.

Ideas are not protected by copyright, nor are facts. You need to have a very specific and 'creative' / 'substantial' expression of an idea for copyright to apply.

The output of an LLM can be easily be such, but usually not.

Thank you for this, I've noticed this often in politics and didn't know it has a name. Some politicians do this so often, that any accusation to me reads a confession instead.

A more rigorous definition of software quality can be found in ISO 25010.

> The quality of a system is the degree to which the system satisfies the stated and implied needs of its various stakeholders, and thus provides value. Those stakeholders' needs (functionality, performance, security, maintainability, etc.) are precisely what is represented in the quality model...

Here is a decent summary: https://iso25000.com/en/iso-25000-standards/iso-25010

Not exactly software quality, but adjacent, is the capability catalog of dora: https://dora.dev/capabilities/

Dora is about 'software delivery and operations performance' and has a vast body of empirical research underpinning it.

The money isn't really for the researchers personally, but for doing the research. They are merely offered a job at a time where their jobs are on the line in the USA. And not even that, they still have to apply and compete with top researchers from other parts of the world. Really hard to call that a bribe, even in a morally neutral way. At most you could say the Netherlands - and other European countries - are taking advantages of the situation where the USA is abandoning their top researchers.

But for years it has been the other way around. Top talent from the Netherlands has been moving to the US in order to get funding (and a bigger salary).

> figuring out exactly how to work it into our particular business

This is the most crucial bit. Neither ramming it down developers throats nor rejecting it wholesale is particularly productive. You need the conservative people onboard as well, to discover critical edges and failure modes. Including their criticism in the adoption process instead of bluntly banning it is the smarter move. Of course, there will be a few people who just don't play, they will fold eventually or be let go.

And not few of those 'productivity improvements' for farmers have had disastrous consequences, even though what I think you are referring to has been implemented with far greater discernment and empirical basis than the current AI revolution.

People are stubborn, but sometimes for good reason. Let the stubborn people hold on to their practices, if the innovators are right they will eventually fold anyway.

I have a different mental model because I live in a high trust society. Well, at least higher than the US. In my model, the government is basically a virtual contract between all people to take care of each other. One side of the bargain is tax and following the law, the other is what you should get out of it: protection against criminals (police) and hostile countries (defense), universal healthcare, education, roads and stuff, consumer rights, the rule of law, etc.

I think that is a pretty good deal and I see no inherent reason for why 'the gov is out there to steal from us' (makes no sense), because it basically IS us. Corps on the other hand, they are explicitly there to get your money.

So in my model the only reason the government is bad is because it is influenced by corporations (and because people vote for rightwing parties), and the only reason corporations are good is because the government makes them so. This is a bit black and white to make it very explicit, but basically that is the idea.

And there are some flaws here of course and a lot of nuances, but I don't think this is wrong or biased at all. In fact, I think everybody else is wrong or biased and am ready to argue why, but that should come at no surprise.

That's the worst thing. You need to take a job to have money. You need to buy food to eat, pay housing, clothing, insurance, etc. Yet you don't get to determine these prices. The 'free market' story is just a way to make it look like being poor is your own choice, because you agreed to these transactions. You are just being gaslit into blaming yourself for your conditions, while the rich extract every last penny out of society without even working for it.

You don't need no guarantee nor even trust if you have openweights, that's the beauty of it.

The real question is: what guarantee do we have from Trump that he won't pull away the software (and hardware) our society is built on?

Previously we could pretend to rely on the international order as shaped by the US itself, and as an extension on the guarantees of the US president. But with Trump, even Xi sounds like a standup guy.

So as Europe, we must scramble to disentangle the core of our societies from AWS, Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc. etc.

No doubt there are some feelings involved in geopolitics. However, if your mental model of global trade and politics doesn't go beyond comparing Europe to a toddler having tantrum, then you just might miss some important nuances.

Imposter syndrome maybe?

In a way, nothing is complex at the point where you have untangled it, by definition. Software development is, after all, the art of untangling complexity. The real challenge is (re-)imagining something in the simplest way that fits the goal you are given. When you have arrived there, everything seems obvious and simple. But not everybody could have done it.

> Private companies don’t have the ability to ruin your life in the same way your own government does. They just want your money.

And what happens when your money is gone? What happens when the government has no money anymore because the super rich took it all? Your life turns to shit real fast when you can't afford housing, healthcare and food.

I get when you are in an authoritarian country, or one on the path to becoming so like the US, that the government looks to be the most dangerous actor. But in the west that is still free, its the corps that I worry about the most.

When people say they prefer 'the syntax', I think they usually mean a bit more than just that: at least a fair bit of this is semantics. Python provides a lot of features out of the box, and if you work superficially along the happy path, it is very easy to understand how these work and read code using them.

Take list comprehensions for example. It is mostly syntax: you can do virtually all list comprehensions with just a map and filter function. But the way that it is integrated and presents the code, makes is vastly easier to follow for most developers, which tilts the balancer in favor of doing away with loops and mutable state. Is it syntax that made them do so? Yes, maybe. But its the actual semantics that provide the value.