Which, unironically, is just one of the many reasons why it's a bad idea.
28,472 karma · joined May 16, 2014
Pai was CEO of a couple of Enron subsidiaries who had an affair with a stripper.
His wife divorced him, and he was forced by court to unload $250m in Enron stock just before the price crashed.
He was never charged with criminal insider trading, but he did agree to pay just over $31m in a civil suit.
He also married the stripper.
Leading with a step sequencer, automation recording, a loop mangler, and a basic drum synth in 2026 isn't pushing the creative limits of DAW design.
IMO Live is a tolerable product rather than an exciting one. Back in the days when I was making loop-based music I got more done more easily with Sonic Foundry's (then Sony's) Acid, which is still my gold standard for ease of use for that idiom.
And I still think Vegas is the best video editor I ever used.
I think with vibecoding the days of the big DAWs are numbered. A few years from now people are going to be rolling their own designs. We're going to see a lot of slopware, which won't matter because it's single-user, and some rare but incredibly inventive and inspiring completely new takes.
There was a period in the 70s/80s when computer music meant raw code, original DSP experiments, and real creative weirdness.
The companies that sold core infra during dot com mostly died, because they invested in fiber etc far too quickly. Likewise with server factories like Sun.
The B2B and B2C survivors were patchy. A few did extremely well but there were a lot of casualties.
The biggest winners offered B2G - business to government - disguised as search and social media. They were actually selling individual user profiling and targeted ads, and that turned out to be the biggest money maker.
The reason Anthropic and OpenAI appear wildly overvalued is because their offering isn't AI in some abstract sense, it's the next generation of surveillance and persuasion technology. But now with corporate surveillance in addition to the traditional profiling and targeting.
You can tell a lot about what someone is doing - and the industry is doing in general - by looking at everyone's code bases. You don't need to train on them or steal keys to extract immense value.
Potentially there's also the option to eventually make claims on corporate IP developed with AI tech.
Anyone who thinks the companies who pulped and torrented whole libraries of books for their training data would never, ever, pinky promise, try to extract value from the code they're generating is being very naive.
The bubble exists because c-suite people are sheep. They follow the herd, and the frontier CEO wolf-wannabes have been trying to herd them in a profitable direction.
But herds are easily frightened, and there's always a danger they'll stampede in a different direction.
And the risk of a catastrophic AI-enhanced online blackout is increasing.
https://en.cppreference.com/cpp/language/pointer
When I started C++ nearly 15 years ago this was already a huge problem. I bought some books and looked up online references and after a while I discovered that both were already out of date.
C++ is a chimera. And it hasn't improved since.
Other languages are far more stable, conceptually. New features rarely undermine or reinvent the older ones.
C++ is unique in the way it keeps modifying its own core. There is no formal deprecation or EOL process, so the language is more like an archaeological dig than a living standard.
Can we assume this was a one-off because she was uniquely persistent and persuasive?
Anyone who believes he personally agonised over this alone in a darkened room is being rather naive.
Not before time. Apple's software is a bland directionless nothingscape compared to the hardware.
There are no moral winners in war.
But it remains true that if Japan or Germany had had the bomb, they'd have bombed civilians without compunction, discussion, or regret.
We literally have people running around convinced the earth is flat. And a president who is both senile and delusional with access to the nuclear codes.
Hostile ASI wouldn't look like a rogue individual. It would look like a faction, group, or cult which gradually infiltrated and took over political power.
Or possibly inserted itself into critical elements of the tech industry. A digital adversary could do huge damage just by taking AWS offline.
That's just one possible attack vector among many others, most of which aren't well-defended. Especially if the AI itself is being used to harden their defences.
The reality is that in most industries competence and impact has very little to do with compensation. Compensation is the result of political status games, not demonstrable ability.
Occasionally they do something that surprises you. If you put them inside a search loop and spend huge sums of money you'll get some nuggets of value, but for most hard problems the cost isn't worth it.
And they work best with a lot of steering.
From that POV they're exactly like human culture. Most scientific papers are trash, a few are gamechangers. Same with the arts, etc.
But we've gone from 'Can write sentences' to 'Can do frontier math problems' in maybe five years.
We absolutely do have AGI now. It's not very good AGI, but it's probably better than a lot of people were expecting.
Being better than humans at everything isn't AGI, it's ASI. A lot of the comments here seem to be lamenting that we don't have that yet, which is an interesting data point about how far the goal posts have moved.
Edit: also it makes things like this possible. So...
But it's a fair bet that any kind of RSI will improve efficiency, possibly by a lot. And it's also very possible that 2056 AI will be running on some other substrate - maybe photonics, or something even more exotic - that wouldn't map cleanly to 2026 hardware.
Unlike chess, AI isn't a constrained problem, so there is no single higher ELO metric that would make performance comparable.
Computing in general has always become smaller, cheaper, faster, more portable, more energy efficient, and more connected.
So there may not even be a concept of discrete computing devices in 2056. Or of discrete software and services. Compute may be everywhere, in everything, all networked, reinventing itself continually.
5.5 Sol would anticipate what I wanted and get it right more than often than not. 5.6 Sol kept anticipating, but would do things that made no sense in context. 6.1 Sol seems to like that but even more so. It spends a lot of time thinking, but the quality of the decisions isn't outstanding.
In Polish '...ski' is masculine and '...ska' is feminine. The prefix stays the same, so a brother and sister have slightly different surnames. (Like 'Wolski' vs 'Wolska.')
In the US some immigrants forgot this, so you get American women with a '...ski' surname.
The crater shows the road was destroyed. Aircraft skins are much thinner and less robust than road coverings.
Be realistic - we've gone from "You, yes you, will be able to do an incredibly new and fun thing with Shiny New Technology™" to "You probably won't have a job or drinking water, your TV and phone are tracking you, all creative work is now worthless, the planet is on fire, AI may kill us all, but buy into our IPO anyway" in less than ten years.
TNG is very, very good, but it wears its heart on its sleeve. Picard never struggles with existential moral ambiguity. Even when he (rarely) fails, he's always The Good Man.
The utopian slant is appealing and we can't help cheering for him, but DS9 revealed there was some sleight of hand behind the narrative.
Of the series since, I think only Battlestar Galactica approached similar complexity. Maybe Westworld, which got quite abstract and interesting towards the end.
The Expanse is more by the numbers. It's basically class war in space, with the military, the aristocracy, and the peasants slugging it out, while a dragon rolls in and threatens to eat everything. The writing is very challenge -> response -> partial solution over and over, and for me it just doesn't have the depth or the emotional reach. (Or the acting chops.)
Getting agents to deal with their own versions of these issues is an interesting experiment.
Systems can have goal-seeking agency with zero self-awareness. Very simple systems can do this surprisingly well. There's an entire branch of engineering called control theory which has mathematical tools for modelling and building these systems.
Systems can have abstract self-awareness through introspection loops, but no subjective human-like consciousness.
We don't know if a mechanical system can have a subjective human-like consciousness. We likely never will, because there is no objective measurement device for human-like consciousness.
We tend to assume humans have subjective awareness by default, because life would get very complicated it we didn't. But really all we see are behaviours.
Intelligence - which pretty much reduces to pattern recognition and abstraction, and effective modelling of future outcomes from past inputs - is orthogonal to all of these.
Time keeping is a solved problem. Why would anyone spend varying shades of fortune on something that is functionally inferior, but explicitly labels itself a "superlative chronometer"?
It's an actor's job to dramatise our projections, so from that POV he did a legendary job with TNG.
But there's a certain amount of learned skill involved. I know someone who used to work backstage at the Royal Shakespeare Company. She said that she'd all these famous names playing cards backstage, they'd get their call, turn on the juice, stride on stage, say their lines with the appropriate presence and gravitas, then turn the juice off again after the scene and pick up the card game where they left off.
Stewart's choice of roles and support for causes suggests there was more than that involved for him.
He wasn't Picard in real life, but he wasn't just acting either.
Different people may be on top, with different aims (...arguable, but let's pretend.)
But there will always be a government of some sort making the big decisions for the benefit of its ruling clique.