api

Nothing I love more than fingerprints on a laptop screen.

Useless feature for laptops unless it’s a flip around convertible or something.

Cloud equals not your computer, folks. Any cloud company can be legally subpoenaed and required to hand over any data they have, and they can also be legally gagged from telling anyone about it. Doesn't matter if they support it or not, they are a corporation subject to the laws of their jurisdiction and disobeying can expose the directors personally to civil or criminal penalties. Every corp will comply with a legal subpoena, and those are often easier to get than warrants.

For you they at least require a warrant. Usually. Unless you're crossing the border or are undocumented or something.

They might mean SSH TCP traffic logs, maybe?

Also SSH isn't a perfectly opaque protocol. There's stuff you can use to fingerprint e.g. client/server versions and often narrow it to architecture, OS, even OS version. That helps.

Prove me wrong then.

What's GenZ doing that is comparable to what any previous generation was doing in their 18-30 age bracket years artistically, musically, culturally, etc.?

I don't think it's their fault BTW. I think it's previous generations fault for creating the system that stole their attention. Every previous generation passed to the next generation a vocabulary and a set of tools to build new culture... until GenX and Millennials (my own cohorts) passed tools to stare at small rectangles and scroll.

That’s less alarming since they are young.

I still feel like the cultural output of GenZ or lack of it is worrying. Compared to every previous generation by their age, I just don’t see a lot.

I will wait though. Maybe they will get over whatever it is.

“Plot based media” you actually heard someone say this? Like it was a bad thing?

GenZ is culturally destitute. It’s shocking and sad. Every time I think no I must just be old and I don’t know, I go and dig and… very little. There’s just not much there except brain rot and blather and music that’s absolutely derivative of previous music at best. At worst it’s musical brainrot, like “phonk” inspired stuff.

I fear GenA will largely be in the same boat.

It’s scrolling and algorithms. People blast weapons companies and stuff like Palantir or Flock or whatever here, and for rational reasons, but infinite scroll plus engagement algorithms has done more harm to humanity at scale than any of those.

That’s what led me back to books. Character, plot, ideas, coherence. I also love great prose.

You occasionally see thoughtful movies. Many of them are unsurprisingly based on books. The horror genre has become this weird eddy of creativity too with interesting characters and plots and some surprisingly good acting. Of course you’ve historically had innovation in that genre, often ignored because it’s horror and thus low brow by definition.

My take on horror being creative is that it’s like old school punk, pulp novels, zines, underground music. The key there is that these are genres and styles that give you permission to suck, and therefore permission to try stuff.

If it must be high art or it must gross nine figures, you can’t suck. So you can’t innovate.

This is a general trend with technology, and is why the industrial revolution never gave us an age of leisure. First people are worried it's gonna take all the jobs, then they realize no it's actually going to create a ton more jobs and more work by expanding the overall economy and creating dozens of new niches for new stuff that didn't exist before. Some old professions vanish but new ones either get created or get expanded a lot.

My comment was US-centric, though I have gotten the sense that now trad rebranded Russia has helped push fossil fuels in Europe.

Why you shouldn't hang out in echo chambers, at least not exclusively. I'm sure in this guy's echo chambers it's all great.

The right's opposition to it is mostly rooted in the fact that historically the fossil fuel industry has been a major funding cornerstone of the right.

It goes all the way back to this kind of thing:

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

The pamphlet from which we get the term "fundamentalism" was published by an oil industry tycoon.

So the right is incentivized to protect this industry even if it becomes obsolescent and is no longer the most economical or practical way to generate at least much of our energy needs (electricity).

While the right has often sounded pro-nuclear, in practice they tend not to be that enthusiastic about it when they actually get into office. Obama supported the first new nuclear plant in decades.

https://politifact.com/factchecks/2012/mar/02/barack-obama/o...

CEO warns of need to regulate to protect them from competition or their IPO valuation makes no sense, also generates hype by edgelording.

He accumulates vast amounts of money and AFAIK isn't very into charity or helping the poor, which directly contradicts Christian teaching. By the most direct interpretation of the Christian gospels he should be giving most of it away, but even a more moderate interpretation says he should be doing a whole lot more philanthropy.

He openly supports and funds elitist ideologies like neoreaction that propose that all human life is not of equal moral value and that some are "just better" than others and more or less that might makes right, which is very contrary to Christian teaching.

Those are two that come to mind instantly. There's many more.

He's pretty clearly a political reactionary who believes in religion as a tool to organize a society. That's a secular belief. Belief in religion as a political tool does not require belief in God. (And on the flip side it's entirely possible to believe in God but not to like or trust religion, which is a secular human institution.)

> energy into giving birth to a Superintelligence, and that Superintelligence will fix everything

Beware of any and all plans with a huge (magic happens here) step.

Overthrow the capitalist class, declare a Communist state, and (magic happens here) and then workers' paradise!

Pour loads of investment money in this company, they put everything into marketing and scaling, and (magic happens here) and they are profitable!

Tear down the system and overthrow the government and (magic happens here) and everything will be better!

Elevate a strong leader, give them all the resources they need, put all our support behind them, and (magic happens here) and America is great again!

Etc.

Magic does not happen. Problems are solved by solving them.

I'm not a believer in the doom scenarios, but lets say we do build a superintelligence. Who says it fixes all our problems? To get that to happen we'd have to work with it, align it, and apply it properly, and that's fixing all our problems with a new tool. It is not "magic" and would require a lot of effort and work.

Ultimately the attraction of these kinds of ideas is they let us off from thinking and working. Magic means someone or something does it for us. Unfortunately I don't think the universe lets you do that. Thinking and working is mandatory. New tools, even superintelligent AI tools, just changes the nature of the thinking and working and might allow more to be accomplished more easily or quickly.

Sorry folks. The flying saucers are never coming.

The simple explanation is that von Neumann architecture sucks for intelligence. It's not a von Neumann machine at all. It's an analog neural network (plus other systems in operation) with colocated memory.

A more far-out explanation is that some form of stochastic quantum computing is going on, which has been proposed at many levels by biologists. There's some work being done on this idea. It would not be the discrete qubit form we are trying to do, which is impossible in a noisy wet environment, but something analog and stochastic.

Both are possible.

Also note that our current chips, in spite of the tiny feature sizes and a ton of optimization work, are not even close to the lower limit for energy cost of computation. They still are not very efficient.

Makes me wonder if the brain just does it with brute force.

The neocortex would be akin to something like a 100T neural network, and that’s with the maybe overly reductionist assumption that only synapses are doing anything when there’s a lot of biology happening in there. Every cell is filled with its own computation and state. It could be closer to a 10E model if all that is in play.

The neocortex is nowhere near the whole brain.

Architecturally the brain could be described as a slow but ultra-wide machine with colocated memory and thus an effectively enormous memory bandwidth. That lets it evaluate its whole parameter set continuously.

I keep thinking the brain must be algorithmically doing something super clever but maybe not. Maybe old mother nature just found the “bitter lesson.” Maybe it’s algorithmically inefficient and messy but there’s just a whole lot of it.

“All” is doing a lot of work there.

Also there are real trade offs. Food would be cheaper if, for instance, it were legal to cut it with any old cheap substance regardless of health effects.

But I totally agree that some regulations are dumb or are regulatory capture monopoly schemes.

Unfortunately like many other things there is no absolute simple rule to save us from thinking. Each case must be evaluated in depth hopefully with domain expertise.

Or they are corrupt. Corrupt advisors are as old as civilization.

You don’t get it. When Biden blathered and fell asleep he was senile. When Trump spews word salad and falls asleep it’s clearly some brilliant strategy.

That’s because Trump sends better primate dominance signals than Biden, therefore everything he does is right. That’s how it works. Just ask the brain stem.

Devils advocate ish reason:

People understand what a plank of wood is and how it works.

People, including the vast majority of politicians, don’t understand our technology at all. It’s magic. Why does a light come on when they flip the switch? Magic. Computers are deep black magic.

How can they write effective regulation? Or tell the difference between proposals that are good or bad written by others?

If politicians regulated big tech more we’d probably end up with a ton of regulatory capture that legislated monopolies for big tech and shut out open source and startups, because who has the money to influence the ignorant lawmakers at scale?

We are now in a world where small groups of high priests understand certain things, and few others. We’ve been there for a while but it’s gotten far more opaque in the last 25 years or so.

Even something like a nuclear reactor or an aircraft is much easier to explain. The last episode of the Chernobyl series did a great job explaining what was wrong with that reactor design to a layperson. But computing… and networks… people who do understand it have forgotten just how ludicrously arcane and inscrutable it is to most.

A big difference too is that by the Church-Turing theorem there is (as a side effect of it) a provably infinite number of ways to perform any computation. Which means you can’t just legislate “don’t do that.” Physical machines are not like that.

I think this is true. I also suspect there’s aspects of human intelligence not yet replicated, but it’s not clear what those are yet.

Gold.

Beats my disappearing Chinese investor story. This was from years ago and also an acquaintance.

Company raised a bit angel party round that included several M from a Chinese investor. After series A company is sold and the angels are above water.

All attempts to find and contact this investor failed. Name may have been fake. Business entity may not have existed in China or elsewhere.

Last I heard money was put into escrow for a few years and then would be equally distributed to other investors (shares would cease to exist) but I’m not positive what happened.

It’s also correct. One of humanity’s biggest cognitive handicaps is a side effect of one of our biggest strengths: being hyper social.

Most people evaluate ideas starting with “is it popular in my tribe?”

It’s probably why every sage or prophet or great philosopher has some time of solitude where they walk out into the desert for months or something. It’s hard to think new things around other people.

Only 20?

I had a spear phishing attempt by someone pretending to be representing the Saudi royal family. Was initially tipped off by the fact that a Saudi wealth fund looking at our company would be like a lion stalking a gnat.

> I don't know how it came to be like that.

It's intrinsic to the medium. The Twitter-like format is inherently toxic and irredeemable. It can't be fixed.

The microblogging format with likes and reposts selects for short highly viral stuff that pokes at the brain stem. Rage bait, trolling, lynch mobs, and stupid brain rot stuff are all ideal forms of content for this medium. Nuanced and genuinely insightful ideas are too long.

I think short form content in general is bad. Short form video seems to be less actively toxic but more brainless and attention-destroying. Short form content is the refined sugar (or in some cases the crack or the fentanyl) of discourse.

Reddit-style sites (like this one) are better but still suffer from these problems. HN avoids the worst of it by having a culture and mod policy of downvoting trolling and low-effort crap.

They're not even renting. It's free. There's no obligation, no contract other than a EULA, no guarantees at all.

Small model becomes worse when irrelevant details are in its context window.

Big surprise.

Small models are a lot worse at meta-evaluating the importance of things in their context. To get them to work well it's a lot more important to keep context focused and compact. Larger models can deal with messy context, though they too will often perform better with focused context.

Not new at all, just probably scaled up by AI. Scams like this targeting authors have been around for ages: vanity publishing, fake agents, fake publicity, etc.

Similar scams target would-be actors, musicians, models, etc. Scams targeting models often lead into sex trafficking but sometimes they're just payola scams like this.

There's even some targeting startup entrepreneurs, usually in the form of dodgy "virtual incubators" or people who claim to be able to get you in front of investors or get you publicity.

A major problem, I think, is that humans insist on making everything a big package deal bound up with tribalism and ideology.

If you think climate change is a problem, you're more likely to be on the left of the political spectrum and hold a wide range of other views that have absolutely nothing to do with reducing CO2 levels in the atmosphere.

(I'm not just picking on the left. Everyone does this with everything. It's human primate tribal behavior.)

The constant shifting winds are a result of political shifts and power struggles, often struggles over issues that are unrelated to climate change but are linked to it by this mechanism. It makes rational discourse and consistent action hard. The more bound up an issue is with politics the harder it is to even discuss reasonably.

Of course, people with a short term vested interest in not doing anything about this problem love it this way.

The problem is simple and the solution is to switch to power sources that emit far less CO2 or preferably none at all. This remains true regardless of our political, social, or cultural beliefs. Physics doesn't care.

If you compare our impact per capita and per dollar of GDP it’s much less today than 50 years ago. There’s just more dollars and more capita.

We are getting better at this. Time will tell if we are getting better at it fast enough. Ask someone in 2126.

And no I don’t think we will be dead, but if we do too much damage the world may be severely degraded and they might be quite angry at previous generations for basically leaving them with the bill.