Timwi

Ah, now I see what you mean by distraction. I wholeheartedly agree with you.

I think we're in agreement except in mere terminology. I was disagreeing with the characterization as a “distraction”, but I was also saying that if techbros pay out something for the plebs and call it UBI then it's not really UBI. I wholeheartedly agree with the last sentence of your post, and I think it won't be real UBI without a real democracy.

Depending on how broadly or narrowly you define “profit”, your statement is either too weak to be useful, or false.

If you define it so broadly that the hunter-gatherer inventing a spear for hunting more effectively is “profit”, then your statement is a tautology. The spear innovation was driven by “profit” and the “profit” is having the spear. Great.

If you apply a narrow, capitalist definition of “profit”, the statement is false. Plenty of advancement of civilization was and still is being made without or outside of capitalism, especially if you go as far back as the Stone Age that you mentioned.

You're not wrong, but we should not absolve those who perpetuate the fairy tales from their share of the responsibility.

You're talking “always existed” too literally.

> If these tools could do your work, people would feel existential dread anyway.

That is, if your entire self worth is tied to your work.

I think we should consider moving away from that notion.

I think that is what we should do. It's called UBI. It acknowledges that everyone has inherent value, at least enough to deserve to stay alive and participate in society.

I'm not sure I agree. You make it sound like you think the idea of UBI is for the rich to pay it out to us, the plebs. That's us-vs-them thinking. The idea is for the society as a whole, democratically controlled by everyone, to pay it out to everyone equally.

Obviously that can only work in a real democracy that is really controlled by everybody, not a fake one where you technically vote but it's really controlled by rich people. That's oligarchy.

Surely by then we'll have the technology to simply adjust the Earth's rotation so that it conforms to our standards.

A century later we'll finally be able to fix Earth's orbit to make a nice round 360 days per year, 12 months of 30 days, nice and clean, no more complexity or confusion... ah, that'll be the day.

I'm a little confused; the article text implies an exciting battle for resources where the agents discover they can steal from each other, but looking through the transcript it seems that only one agent discovered that and used it only once before the end of the experiment. Did I miss something?

> I'd love to see data, but my intuition is that the average developer has access to dramatically better security reviews and far lower cost than ever.

Where? If I ask Claude to do a “security review” of my software, it gets blocked as a possible hacking attempt.

> I loathe LLM prose, no matter who posts it

I don't know if it's even possible anymore to write a detailed, technical article without a swarm of people showing this reaction.

Yeah that's “edit” in English.

I had the same thought. This is honestly plagiarism.

It would have been nice if a replacement had been suggested.

Yes, and that might help some people who always bought the game, but it won't change the situation going forward is what I'm saying.

You make it sound like you think “modified” means “degraded” and the original is always superior just for being the original.

I don't think most Japanese speakers would characterize their language as having “four writing systems”. They would say three and not include Romaji in the count. This is not to say they don't use Romaji, but it's not considered part of the official orthography. There are no words or sentences that can't officially be written without Romaji.

The same is true with English and emoji. We do use emoji to augment the language, but that doesn't tempt us to consider emoji part of our alphabet. The analogy is weak of course, because English doesn't have an equivalent official transcription into another writing system. But you get the point. If the roles were reversed and global culture and the Internet were all in Japanese first and foremost, and most languages based their writing on kana and/or kanji so much so that you can't avoid it when traveling, then English would get an official transcription into that.

> Is it because people think the topic is interesting but don't actually care about the content?

I'm having difficulty seeing where you draw the line between “topic” and “content”. I found the article interesting as it taught me a few things that I didn't already know. I did notice the one egregious AIism that you pointed out, but the rest was readable and informative. (Although I stopped at the point where it started talking about their software Fink.)

For me, the lightbulb cartel comes to mind in which leading manufacturers at the time agreed to limit the longevity of incandescent lightbulbs. (This is often cited as an egregious case of planned obsolescence, but Technology Connections has a great video on this that explains there's more to it and it potentially reduced overall load on the electric grid.)

Brains output muscle movements.

The only evolutionary purpose of brains is to make decisions on what muscles to move when and how.

Language is one byproduct of that. Another byproduct that is not unique to humans is memory.

The link was made because many early uses of the phrase “it's just autocomplete” were in a context of denying that it's “intelligent” or that it “can think”. This in turn was generally used to downplay the concerns from AI safety experts that it could pose a threat to humankind, especially by pointing at its inability to count r’s in “strawberry” or its failure mode triggered uniquely by asking for a seahorse emoji. Most people don't seem to really grasp what we mean by “misalignment”.

I first learned programming in the 1980s on a C128 by reading the list of BASIC commands in the user manual. I'd say the level of complexity and capability is somewhat comparable to Scratch today. I too ended up spending a lot of time working around the limitations of the system, and I too would say that I owe my career to that. Seems like history repeats itself, or at least somewhat rhymes.

A Bitcoin does not have any pre-defined value. The value of Bitcoin keeps fluctuating, and historically has risen dramatically from its initial value of 0. If this weren't the case, there would be no investment/speculation in Bitcoin because there would be no potential for any ROI.

In reality, the value of Bitcoin is determined by humans (even if indirectly, not by planning), and I think the OP’s point may have been that maths proofs can be regarded similarly. No intrinsic value, just what humans find in it.

I'm not sure what this lawsuit is going to accomplish. Even if Sony loses, they will pay a nominal fine, and then they'll just change “Buy now” to “Play now” and “game you already own” to “game you already have” or something and it'll make zero difference.

Or maybe you could start focusing on the content instead of how it's made.

I experienced mild brain freeze as a child but it went away in adolescence. It doesn't seem pleasant so I don't envy those of you who get intense versions of it.

Everybody who can speak can do it because that's what you do when you say [k] or [g].

I certainly can't, and until now I'd never heard of it either (I'm over 40).

It's not uncommon to assume that other people's experiences are like one's own until told otherwise. For me, it took until at least age 10 before I realized that other people aren't near-deaf on the left side.

> People only think that because we've been conditioned by computers to value answers more than how we got to them.

By computers? My dude, it's not computers that condition us that way. It's exams in school. Give the right answers or you're officially labeled a failure. It's waaay older than computers.