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WolfeReader

787 karma · joined April 16, 2014

Any discussion of AI that fails to mention its tremendous cost to Earth should be regarded as suspicious. Like talking about the pros and cons of tobacco without mentioning cancer.

https://unu.edu/inweh/collection/environmental-cost-of-AIs-Enrgy-Use-Carbon-water-and-land-footprints

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WolfeReader··on How to read more books
Easy: counting letters in a word. There are tons of examples where AI confidently presents incorrect letter counts as fact. Search it up, really! Good example article: https://wonderfulengineering.com/googles-new-ai-search-think...

If AI was learning and understanding, this would have been solved in 2024. As it is, it's just predicting words that are likely to answer the question.

You're slurping up the excrement of corporations if you think AI is "learning" from reading others' experiences. All it is learning - all it can learn - is what words are likely to appear one after another, with no semantic understanding.

WolfeReader··on How to read more books
Wow, you are drinking the corporate kool-aid eagerly.

The brain understands concepts. I can say, for example, "a penny saved is a penny earned" and understand that I'm talking about money and savings in general. I've felt the satisfaction of a full bank account and the panic of a near-empty one.

The AI knows that someone once wrote the words "a penny saved is a penny earned" in that order. It has ingested volumes of wise sayings and economic texts to facilitate the statistically accurate words which will follow previous words in the conversation.

WolfeReader··on How to read more books
They may have been implying it; I'll say it.

Token prediction machines do not produce meaningful output.

It is much more likely that they will regurgitate, without attribution, something meaningful that a human wrote (in their plagiarism/training data).

Meaningful "output" is only meaningful if the author understood the meaning, instead of predicting words in sequence.

WolfeReader··on A new way to reflect on how you use Claude
It is inevitable that a post criticizing grammar or spelling will, itself, contain a grammar or spilling error.
WolfeReader··on A new way to reflect on how you use Claude
Search engines without ads exist.

Try noai.duckduckgo.com. Decent search results, actual sources, no risk of hallucination, no extreme energy cost.

WolfeReader··on Changes to Our Contribution Policies
Good on them! AI-produced "content" is a DDOS attack on human cognition. It takes more time to review than to produce, and the original coders rarely review the output before creating the merge request. And the planet is paying.
WolfeReader··on Show HN: Oak – Git alternative designed for agents
I legit did not know this. Thanks!
WolfeReader··on Show HN: Oak – Git alternative designed for agents
1. Ease of use. Other VCS have more consistent command line interfaces; Git's interface has to be studied. In practice, people end up using GUIs with missing functionality and then end up searching for help, and a lot of real experts come to rely on powerful wrappers like Magit, LazyGit, or JJ.

(Compare to Mercurial, Fossil or Git; those systems have consistent and usable interfaces. There's much less demand for wrappers or LLM tooling since they're easy to use already.)

2. Preservation of history. Two common commands - git rebate and git push -f - cause commit history to be lost, sometimes permanently. ("Just be careful" and "Just don't use those commands" are useful pieces of advice for an individual, and virtually impossible to enforce over groups.)

3. Conflict resolution. Git forces the user to resolve conflicts ASAP so we often lose information about A. What the conflict exactly was, and B. How the individual resolved it. Most VCS have this issue; JJ allows you to commit the conflict and solve it in a separate commit, which is nice.

WolfeReader··on Show HN: Oak – Git alternative designed for agents
"I wish commits could be folded into larger commits so that you can still capture the individual changes but also not see them by default when looking at the history of a file."

Fossil merges do this. More people need to use Fossil; it's got a ton of great ideas.

"If I split a file in two I still want to be able to see blame correctly for the author of the function, not one file as freshly created and the other with a bunch of deletes."

Now this is a good idea that I've never seen in a VCS.

WolfeReader··on Show HN: Got sick of ads, so I made my own logic puzzle site
Unfortunately, these days, "Show HN" is a code phrase for vibe-coded and untested projects. I was optimistic for this one because I love puzzles.
WolfeReader··on Show HN: Got sick of ads, so I made my own logic puzzle site
The "Hard" big diamond nonogram was not hard at all. Are you vibe-coding these?
WolfeReader··on I need your clothes, your boots, and your motorcycle
We are in "the future" relative to both works. The current intelligence threatening our planet is an unconscious token predictor, much more like the hostile non-entity in Blindsight (which even speaks to humans via token prediction) than the mechanical persons in Terminator 2.
WolfeReader··on Your ePub Is fine
Every Kobo reader is capable of running KoReader ( http://koreader.rocks/ ). That's the first, and probably last, step I'd take to render a book that the default reader takes issue with.
WolfeReader··on The Butlerian Jihad Has Begun
Evidence?
WolfeReader··on The Butlerian Jihad Has Begun
This is a great example of commenting on the headline without reading the article.
WolfeReader··on The new bibliomaniacs
Those are some incredibly minor advantages. The advantages of ebooks - easy backups, infinitesimal physical storage requirements, searchability, accessibility for people with visual needs - each one of those outweighs every advantage you listed.
WolfeReader··on Leak Reveals Microsoft Wants Its AI to Be 'Addictive'
The source site (404 Media) requires a login to read their article. Kotaku's coverage is plainly readable.
WolfeReader··on Changing how we develop Ladybird
Where "better" means you and your maintainers spend all your time scrutinizing volumes of code from token prediction machines?
WolfeReader··on Changing how we develop Ladybird
Opening lines: "Today we’re changing how code enters the Ladybird project.

We will no longer accept public pull requests. From now on, code changes to the Ladybird codebase will only be introduced by project maintainers."

Seems like a good bottom-line-up-front to me.

WolfeReader··on Ad Blocker Test – Check If Your Ad Blocker Works
Using uBlock Origin and nuMatrix on Librewolf got me 98% - some cosmetic ads got through.
WolfeReader··on U.S. to dismantle system tracking Atlantic currents that are at risk of collapse
The USA is consistently in the top 10 of nations with the highest incarceration rates. Prosecuting fewer "crimes" is a move in a better direction.
WolfeReader··on U.S. to dismantle system tracking Atlantic currents that are at risk of collapse
That makes no sense whatsoever. Voting for Trump (or anyone with an R by their name) is wrong; sitting out a vote is wrong. Why save all the blame for the side that actually put up resistance, however ineptly?
WolfeReader··on Elixir v1.20: Now a gradually typed language
Don't tell OP this - he doesn't want to install multiple things. You'll scare him away from Java.
WolfeReader··on Elixir v1.20: Now a gradually typed language
Nah, I work on a team that has multiple microservices written over the years in different versions of Java. "Just click the installer" is not sufficient. That's why programs like jenv, SDKman, nvm, and others even exist (and are popular). Your lack of real-world experience is showing.
WolfeReader··on Elixir v1.20: Now a gradually typed language
I think the issue is "I have to install two things instead of one thing" which is a pretty weird way to judge a programming language.

I guess we know how he feels about TypeScript.

WolfeReader··on Elixir v1.20: Now a gradually typed language
Here's what you need for Java:

Download SDKMan/Jenv

Install the version(s) of Java you need for your projects

Make sure your JAVA_HOME environment variable is set

Ensure your IDEs locate the correct Java home

Compared to all that, Elixir's two installers are trivial.

And if you have a competent package manager, you can just tell it to get Elixir and it'll handle Erlang for free.

WolfeReader··on Elixir v1.20: Now a gradually typed language
Wonderful. I know several devs who were turned off of Elixir because of bad experiences with dynamic typing. Hopefully this helps!
WolfeReader··on DuckDuckGo makes its 'no-AI' search engine easier to access as its traffic booms
I'm not sure why you refer to the useful noai URL as a "marketing" URL.
WolfeReader··on DuckDuckGo makes its 'no-AI' search engine easier to access as its traffic booms
Can you give an example of what you're talking about? I just ran a search on an author I started reading, and the results had no AI and no obvious link to AI. Using Android and IronFox if that has an effect: https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?ia=web&origin=funnel_home_websi...
WolfeReader··on DuckDuckGo makes its 'no-AI' search engine easier to access as its traffic booms
I don't owe the benefit of the doubt to a comment that says "this is just marketing" and "are people this stupid?". If OP is going to make dismissive, vitriolic comments like that, he should probably make sure that the article is actually saying anything like what he claims.
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