asimpletune

It's a little sad and funny to think that if the people of Akrotiri hadn't escaped with their possessions then we'd know a lot more about them.

The purpose of the strikes is to increase the cost to continue the war. You said in another comment that Putin is a psychopath who will always find a way to more money, but what you have not considered is that at a certain point this will become more and more difficult. Resources are finite. It’s the proverbial immovable object vs irresistible force, except without the poetic license: at some point, it will be clear that either immovable and/or irresistible are just words, and that underlying them is a reality that is not just words but made of a finite amount of will, manpower, and firepower. It’s too early to say the war will go one way or another - and it’s a big mistake to underestimate Russia - but to answer your question, the attack is “good” because that’s how you fight a war. Most of the world wants Russia to lose and therefore it is good, for us. Us is someone, just like for some Z people out there it’s good when Russia destroys a hospital, school, Ukrainian print shop, etc… bc terrorism is part of their strategy. We will see what happens.

> All this new knowledge is arriving at a pace much greater than the field’s ability to process it

That’s the whole issue: it’s not knowledge, it’s data. AI can not provide an account for the proofs, or be questioned about them, or organize a talk exposing the idea because there’s no understanding behind any of it.

This is what Tao has been saying; that the results, in the strictest sense, were never the goal. It is ultimately the understanding (that previously was required to form a proof) that is valuable.

Well that is one way, but how about this?

It currently costs 100€ to buy something. 90% of their customers pay card and the rest cash. Their profit margin is 5% and the payment processor takes 2%, leaving 93% other costs not part of this discussion.

Now, the same item is still 100€ but some Europeans are paying with their cards by these cheaper payment processors. They charge only 1% per transaction. Also half of the card payers use these rather than the status quo. Therefore the merchant gains a percentage of profit on 45% of their transactions.

They can now lower their price to compete better. So the new price becomes something like 99.55€ for everybody: cash, visa, European cards.

Then, visa and Mastercard will lower their prices, to not lose customers in Europe, matching them, and now the price has fully gone to 99€, for everyone.

In Italy the price is the same by law regardless of how you pay. So it stands to reason savings go to the merchants and eventually the customers, rather than having a multi-tier price.

We may be talking past each other. If card processing costs a business money, that cost is passed onto the consumer. It therefore stands to reason that the converse is also true with savings. The question remaining is just at what time scale.

I think you’re taking about a single transaction in the near future, whereas I’m talking about the effects which are felt, in aggregate, over a long period of time. Absolutely things will get slightly cheaper.

> What I'm asking and nobody wants to answer is what the benefits for users are.

I answered that it will lower prices, does that not count as a benefit to users?

Even if merchants pay the processing fees, those prices are inevitably passed onto their customers. With more competition among payment processors there will be pressure to lower processing fees.

All of this happens automatically. It’s the beauty of markets.

I’ll rephrase your own question in a different way that I think actually supports my point: Since there is no difference, as a product, between visa, Mastercard, and this new European alliance, then there is very little reason to not want more competition.

Payment processing is essentially a commodity in this sense. It’s all the same, with the differentiator being supply. If we increase the supply the price will go down. That’s it. It should honestly be stupid to not want a European alternative.

Probably lower prices since there’s competition between payment processors

Power just means capabilities not results. Often it just magnifies the wielder’s capabilities to harm themselves and others.

Giant steps is a triangle, Central Park west is a square

Ovid's Metamorphoses

Plato wrote about a lot of these kinds of words in the dialogue Cratylus. The dialogue is about more than just etymology, of course, but it’s worth looking at if the subject is interesting to you.

Very well put. I've also heard it said like this, "abusing the truth is the easiest way to lie".

The pattern is 1. take something that's true then 2. use it to imply the Truth. Step 3. is if anyone doubts 2, challenge them to disprove 1. Even if you don't deny that 1 is true and just challenging that 2 doesn't follow from 1, the waters have already been muddied in the eyes of many onlookers.

It's silly that this works but there's so much over-communication now that simplicity is very effective. People often repeat the fallacies verbatim too.

Has anyone seen the corridor crew's green screen ML project? They're on YT and they trained a model by using 3d objects, which have perfect transparency, and then adding post facto green/blue screens. Surprisingly, very little training data was needed as the data that was used was perfect by construction. I think right now it's the best plugin of its kind in the world, and they built the prototype in like a weekend.

What I think this illustrates very clearly is this type of technology responds very well to good data, and that to have good data you need to have a clear goal.

This is why it seems that alignment for a generalized, chat-style AI is a very hard problem, perhaps impossible. You can't align it to solve a certain kind of problem and keep it general to any question. The two goals are in conflict with each other.

I think it was Sam Altman himself who said (I don't remember when or where, sorry) that the reason he was so confident in this technology was he noticed the gigantic leaps it made in certain areas in response to even a small amount of training.

(This is why LLMs are so strong at coding, because it's overrepresented in training data. My guess is that if you ask a frontier model about makeup, you will see it repeat cosmetic company's copy rather than getting a chemistry lesson.)

This makes perfect sense but it does seem to kind of be at odds with the concept of a general AI whose job is simply to be smart at any goal. How do you train for any goal?

I guess in a way the AI makers suffer from the same problem that we humans do. We would all love a solution to everything, but to do that you need to define the goal. I'm not sure if that's a tractable problem.

I'm guessing the future is more geared towards specialized AI that are very good at solving the problem they were trained to do, and a human who knows how to breakdown a larger goal into smaller ones by composing the solution out of these models. This also seems like the more efficient solution as well, and better aligned with other goals like privacy and safeguarding of IP.

It's a little like we've gone back to the problem of the customer becoming the product.

If I were a mathematician I would not my unpublished work to go into the hands of a competitor.

If I were a lawyer I wouldn't want private details of my defense to be made available to the prosecution. Anonymous or otherwise.

I wouldn't want the plot to an unreleased book to be suggested to another author.

One of them said they turned it off in June, back in the original mastodon thread.

This must have been during or near the reign of Croesus, a very interesting king who was the last to rule Lydia, as recorded by Herodotus.

Sometimes it's worth revisiting the site guidelines on comments https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments

I'm guessing people downvoted you for snark.

They're structuring the new company as public benefit corporation.

Would anyone be interested in meeting up in Rome? My contact's on my profile and I'm happy to organize.

What really matters is the claim that Apple never raised those issues in the lawsuit with them. OpenAI claims the emails prove this, but to me all the emails prove is Apple sent an email that said “please see the attached letters”. We don’t know what is in the attachments but I imagine those were the relevant issues they raised.

Moreover OpenAI says, “[Apple] now admits that Apple employees reached out to him and asked for his help to locate this information”, but the transcript they cite seems to me to show the opposite? It’s Chang Liu asking for someone to help him copy data. The part where Apple employees reach out is later and it’s not for copying data to a hard drive… it’s basically “who should I talk to about this project?” Which makes sense because when he was contacted it was after he left (so he wouldn’t have access to data)

Can someone please tell me what am I missing? None of this makes sense with what they’re saying. The fact that the lawyer emailed the wrong person is moot if they caught it and resolved it days later.

For those interested, it’s not just in Apology this comes up. In Theaetetus he does a pretty good job disproving that it is even possible to know what knowledge is.

For anyone who’s interested in this stuff: I made a FOSS commenting system for websites that accepts comments via email. https://r3ply.com

You combine your website/blog with that and you have a pretty nice setup that you own. You can even use RSS to allow people to subscribe to replies to comments, threads, a page, etc…

Because if someone spoofs an email coming from your domain DMARC tells the receiver what to do with the spoofed email.

The movie is not a retelling of Homer's Odyssey. It's a retelling of Odyssey's return home after the Trojan war. The movie will be much better if you go into it thinking that.

That's true too. So, the two things are data isolation and operational independence.

I could be misremembering this but I think Lattimore and Lombardo were once good friends until they had a falling out. I think Lattimore was so bothered by Lombardo's translation of either the Iliad or Odyssey, that he set out to do his own translation of both.

At any rate Lattimore's translation of Odyssey is beautiful.

This is what people always say but it's not really the only case, and it's not even a particularly good case. You could achieve the same organizational thing through modules, for example.

The real—and the one thing you can't replicate—is data isolation.

Of course there are other benefits, but it's data isolation is the differentiator of micro-services and other types of architecture.

What if there was a way to tax things that encouraged people to buy things that would last longer and then let the market correct?

Basically, we've done our experiment of hyper-disposable consumerism. It was great and the world has gotten richer. But not it seems like we should parlay that benefit into transitioning into a new era of quality.

I grew up learning how to write by hand, and when I was in college we were required to code by hand. It was cool. When I need to do something hard I still reach for pen and paper. Sometimes though, writing long stuff with pen and paper is just hard. It hurts and my handwriting isn't excellent.

I was curious about typewriters and so I learned about them and bought a few. They're amazing devices. Much closer to writing by hand with a pen then a printer. Composition and editing happen in separate stages. You can write very fast though with perfect handwriting.

I think from doing this, and other things, I realized that software was so well designed in the past because it was built by people who grew up with better metaphors for the work humans do. Computers were made because their benefits were so enormous that it was worth trying to get them even 1/10 as close as doing real work was. That experiment has largely succeeded. The only failure is then people grew up without seeing the computer as a metaphor for the work, but as the work itself. That's why software is so poorly designed.

Just take a cork board for example. You put your stuff on it. When you want to see something you just turn your head. If you leave for the day and come back everything is still there. There's no on or off. Everything is persistent by default. Input and output are universal. You just write on stuff. You want to share a file with someone, just give it to them. Or make a copy.

I think we have forgotten how great real life was at getting stuff done. The computer was supposed to assist them and for a time it did. That is until we forgot what it was for and made it replace life altogether.

Does this work with drop caps or could it be made to work with them? Cool work by the way.