SamBam

Most of the sails in the article seemed to be rotor sails, but the suction sail mentioned by GP seems to be a type of turbosail.

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

I was thinking an apt analogy might be making stock -- you filter out all the solid food you don't want to keep in the liquid.

And it's a doubly-good analogy, because I have occasionally gotten that confused in real-life as well. Twice in the past ten years I've had a stock boil away for three hours, and then set a colander in the sink and poured it through, only to watch my beautiful stock swirl down the drain because motor-memory made me forget that I wasn't draining pasta but should have put the colander in a bowl...

TL;DR, one of the main scientists and Nobel Prize winners for his work on the Kuru disease and discovery of prions, Carleton Gajdusek, was also bringing home (essentially kidnapping) young boys from his expeditions, in theory to experiment with how well they could adapt to Western civilization, but in practice to sexually abuse them. And the NIH department that was funding him basically knew it and didn't care.

Wild that we accept that OpenAI didn't want to deal with the social/political fallout of people realizing that their tool was responsible for flooding the internet with misinformation and bigotry?

Sure, now that all seems quaint, but I can definitely see how a fledgling AI company would care about their reputation.

I don't think it counts as brute forcing unless you're resorting to trying every possible solution. And clearly the LLM didn't do that here, because there would be near-infinite possible solutions.

I don't think we can really call "trying lots of different ideas for an extended period" "brute-forcing," unless we use that term for lots of humans who have struggled with hard math problems for years.

Agree. It was more a worry that someone would create a bot posting lies and bigoted ideas to Facebook/X etc.

Can you point to a recipe you liked, or rough instructions? How was it savory?

> The problem isn't that AI could never be capable of causing real world damage. It is that there is absolutely no fucking path towards human extinction.

I think the "humanity will go extinct" discussion is a silly strawman being propagated either to try to spread fear, as the article suggests, or to make the anti-AI folks look silly, but it detracts from your first point which is that it may be "capable of causing real world damage."

We can be worried about real damage without having to defend the idea that every one of the planet's humans will die.

> "superhuman AI is unlikely to be much of a match against severing fiberoptic cable"

I think that the realistic scenarios all involve humans with an intent to do harm -- creating bio-weapons, finding vulnerabilities in infrastructure -- and using AI to help, so "severing the fiberoptic cable" doesn't apply.

I tried following an authentic Southern pickled watermelon rind recipe, and they were so sickly sweet I couldn't stomach them.

I should try again sometime with a regular cucumber pickle recipe, just replacing cucumbers with watermelon rinds, but I don't think my family wants to humor me again.

Were your geometric figures Form Constants? I learned about those from the novel Blindsight.

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

I should have scrolled down to your comment first! I spent 10 minutes debugging.

Nice work GP if that was air-coded, though.

I'm a software engineer turned public middle school science teacher.

At the moment, I would never encourage any of my students to go into software engineering. It seems to me that's rapidly becoming a field where a small competitive handful will be making millions and everyone else will be unemployed.

That said, I have no problem teaching some programming. We're going to be making autonomous greenhouses soon, with windows that open or whatever, and they'll be using Scratch to program their micro:bits.

Anything that empowers you to do stuff is a good thing.

Preferring books that have stood the test of time is totally different from just avoiding everything published in the last few years because you're worried it might be AI slop.

There's more to Fantasy than a single boolean "does it contain something that is not real?"

Fantasy gets applied to the work as a whole, to its dominant tone and structure, not to one element. A work of fantasy usually has other elements that show it to be such. Is there world-building? Is it a quest or a hero story? Is there some kind of lore that grounds the whole universe? Not all of those are necessary, but usually you can clearly define the whole work holistically as Fantasy.

From Dusk till Dawn in particular is a straight crime thriller that turns into a horror movie.

Ok, I got nerd-sniped into trying to define Fantasy after saying I wouldn't.

You're not the only one to be taken aback by that. Yes, the Hugos do fantasy, but I'm not sure I would have even thought to categorize Sinners as fantasy.

I mean, yes, it has vampires. Was From Dusk till Dawn fantasy?

But as a sister comment suggests, categorization is never easy, and probably just reinforced personal biases. (See Old Town Road being reminded from Billboard's country music list.)

Never heard that this is stopping anyone from reading recent books.

Maybe someone whose only method of selecting books is to scroll through Kindle and look at the titles, maybe they need to pay attention to publication dates. But the rest of the world picks books because they get a recommendation, they look at reviews, they know the author, etc.

NYTimes said that the new Marlon James book might be the book of the century so far. Hyperbole, I'm sure, but it's now on my reading list and I'm pretty sure it wasn't written by AI.

It's not about whether it makes rational economic sense, it's whether people are happy about it.

It could make economic sense to be the world leaders in the next drug that turns everyone into mindless worker drones ("if we're not making the factories that make the drugs the Chinese will!") but people still won't be happy about what it means for their futures.

Because (a) that vision of utopia is not party of any "self-proclaimed communist" philosophy that I've ever heard of, and (b) no one believes that's what's going to happen.

Instead the evidence of our own eyes tells us that AI seems to be worsening the K-shaped economy: a handful of Elon Musks will become trillionaires, a slightly larger number of engineers will become billionaires, and the rest of us will have fewer jobs and fewer prospects of upward mobility in a world where AI can do most entry-level work.

Besides the data center itself, many people in the US are against what the data center is bringing: more AI.

Most regular people have not been sold on the idea that more AI will be good for them or their families or communities personally. Instead all they hear is AI taking away jobs, and AI preventing high schoolers and college kids from learning how to read a book and write an essay. Most people think a world with more AI seems bleaker.

So people wonder why communities don't want this hulking, loud, energy-expensive data center whose main benefit is to hasten the arrival of this world they don't want?

And yet the bubonic plague did indeed exist and kill people between large outbreaks.

Even in Massachusetts most people I know tend to know the seasons of many fruits and vegetables, and I definitely mostly eat apples in the fall when they're much better.

When I lived in Europe people were even more aware of the seasons of fruits and vegetables.

There isn't great evidence to suggest that electric toothbrushes are much better at removing plaque than manual. E.g. this metaanalysis [1] found basically no difference.

There are also studies that show that electric is better, like this meta-analysis that found a small effect [2] and this Cochrane review. [3]

What I generally read in articles is that the single biggest thing that makes a difference is brushing for the full 2 minutes, and electric toothbrushes can help with that by having a built-in timer.

1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38348549/

2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34877772/

3. https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...

I'm curious whether individual-word highlighting is best for people with reading disabilities, or a broad, whole-sentence highlighting might actually be preferable.

When I'm reading my eye is jumping back and forth across the sentence. The demo made this abundantly clear -- it was actually very hard to just track the highlighted word.

Just using the fact that I consider myself a very good reader as an example, I wonder whether there are advantages to the eye being free to skip back and forth across a sentence.

I assume it might be as simple as a user-preference toggle, since you're already highlighting the sentence.

You could also try UIs where the highlighting was more "spread out," focused on the word being said but bleeding into the other words on either side (maybe up until the hard stop of the sentence boundary) to lead the eye toward it. I'm imagining something like the red-blue text color of the BeeLine editor.

If you're in New York and you look due East across the Atlantic, what country are you looking at?

Most people would assume Portugal.

Nope, you're looking (over the curve of the earth, of course), at Morocco. Look just a tiny bit to the south and you're looking at the rest of West Africa. Look Southwest and you're looking at Australia, or even Brazil.

Desktop only (to save you frustration).

I feel like that's the benefit to the creator having made this a dog (even if a demon-possessed dog). As intelligent as a dog can be, can we ever truly understand why they do the things they do?

The Uncanny Valley effect would be too big if a human companion randomly started talking to you while you were sneaking up on an enemy. But a dog? You'd be pissed off at it for a bit, and then forgive it because it's a dog.

It's a heartfelt apology to the UN, but, as the article says, too late.

Ha! I love how all the community highlights are highlighting this.

Hmmm, so if you are looking for some news item, you'll only find AI-written clickbait articles covered in pop-up ads, rather than any news sites that employ journalists?

I have this same idea about why it's hard to remember dreams, but even more so, why it's hard to remember my kid's or spouse's sleep-talking.

Sometimes I'll check in on my sleeping kid and she'll sit up in bed and say some utter nonsense. I'll find it hilarious, giggle silently to myself, and kiss her goodnight again and she'll close her eyes and lie back.

Why I try to tell her about her sleep-talking in the morning, though, I find that the words she said have completely disappeared from my memory, no matter how funny I thought they were at the time.

In my head-canon, this is because it's dream language, and slips away as easily as dreams. But, like the AI art, it could be because it's bullshit: completely devoid of content, all signifiers and no signified.