badRNG

That looks promising; what sorts of things can you do with the board? What would one like to do with the board?

> I think its deeper than that. Its not an oil company issue.

> Its not so much they are doing this for profits

Funding a massive climate change denial movement in the US for decades, consequently eating up our limited window of time to make the kinds of societal changes to avoid the worst consequences of climate change is very much an "oil company issue" that is done exclusively for profit.

> Except that they're proven to not work

It depends on what the goal posts are for what "work" means. I think sanctions work when their cost offsets some of the benefit received through the "undesired behavior" of the target country. They also "work" when the threat of sanctions causes countries to avoid behaviors that would cause them to become sanctioned.

If the goal posts are that sanctions must destroy a country's warfighting capabilities in order to "work", then yes, they almost never work.

I'm sorry, but you are correct. I made a mistake earlier when I referred to RTRPS as being a flying technology the government has been using for decades. No such technology goes by that name. I apologize for the error.

Same issue, doesn't load on vanilla Firefox.

The sorts of people getting captchas are the sorts that would actively avoid "web attestation." It's more likely that they'd simply be prevented from using the site entirely.

> What an example of how local optimizations within an organization can destroy long term customer value.

It's not clear that they haven't profited more by having people retain prime through these patterns than they have lost through losing consumer trust.

It's a pretty well-known rule [0]. There's a good post about this in r/dataisbeautiful, but it is currently private.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule

<1% of Reddit users make the content that provides value to the site. This 1% is disproportionately likely to know who spez is and care about his shenanigans. Even less perform the moderation tasks that keep the site running, and they basically all care about this change.

There are alerts that I'd like to receive on my cellphone, but where I live I will be spammed with persistent, loud alerts that genuinely are disruptive to my life. Constant amber alerts for places hundreds of miles away. The last message I received was an all out manhunt looking for someone who had shot a cop over 150miles away on the other side of my metropolitan area. After that I turned off emergency alerts completely. They bothered 7 million people with that alert alone.

If my phone only told me of tornado warnings, hurricane warnings, evacuation orders, etc I'd leave it on all the time. I'd like to know these things, but I can't have both knowledge of these alerts and sanity due to local government's irresistible appetite for bothering me every time something barely news worthy happens.

> This specific speech changed my way of thinking from considering all these soccer moms in SUVs as jerks sucking up resources into more nuance that maybe they have reasons for why they want a big vehicle and don’t mind paying extra for gas because of it.

If part of the reason one wants a big vehicle is for safety, they are unwittingly participating in an arms race to ever larger, more dangerous vehicles. This arms race doesn't make everyone safer: it disproportionately harms those who either choose not to participate or cannot afford to: pedestrians, bicyclists, scooters, motorcyclists, children, etc. (which are the types of transportation that we should incentivize the most to combat climate change and congestion.)

> It also helped me when my adult child really wanted a big SUV as their first car even though they had no kids, no dogs, no sports with equipment. It was kind of inexplicable to me why they wanted a big SUV, but this quote made me relax and trust that they had a good reason.

If we didn't litter our streets with absolutely massive vehicles, perhaps regular folks wouldn't need to drive a tank just to survive the daily commute. I don't fault consumers for making this choice. CAFE standards incentivized this [1], and regulation is what it will take to change incentives in a safer, climate-friendly direction.

[1] https://me.engin.umich.edu/news-events/news/cafe-standards-c...

> My money is on them being identified.

I would have guessed that their best shot at identifying the leaker would have been through their internal security team. Hoping that a technically competent individual will be uncovered by GitHub feels like a last ditch attempt by a company that doesn't appear to have internal control over their own IP.

> Considering how aggressive GitHub is with marking new accounts as spam, it's unlikely they signed up with a VPN or Tor.

Unless something is changed, you certainly can. I signed up with a Protonmail email over a VPN with no issues (though it's been some years.)

> As in it’s not about the children, it’s about control? Yes.

I don't think the motives are insidious or about maximizing control, they are strictly profit driven.

If you want the world building their apps on your AI, you need to do absolutely everything in your power to make the AI brand safe. Previous chatbots have been easily coerced into saying truly awful things (e.g. Tay), and the models themselves became associated in the minds of the public with hate speech. You can't have Khan Academy or Microsoft Word potentially going on racist tirades in the midst of chatting with a student or taking meeting notes.

> If GPT-4 had ingested the entire code-base code reviews would easily be automated, humans would still do their passes but as a co-worker GPT would be invaluable. It would find swaths of missed efficiencies, fix slow SQL queries, look for testing gaps, and perhaps even assist in refactoring.

This is where my 3-5x efficiency improvement estimate came from for GPT4-based Copilot, especially for CRUD apps using popular frameworks, which while game changing is far from the great efficiency gains programming has seen in the past.

Compilers have conservatively led to 100x-1000x gains of efficiency at scale as have operating systems and various key libraries. GPT-assisted code generation doesn't yet seem to offer the same result. Even if it did, if history is our guide, this would lead to developers being able to generate far more economic value with less, which has consistently led to more developer jobs than before.

> Personally I think we are underestimating the potential, I feel like we are where the world was in 1990 looking at the emerging internet.

It doesn't feel correct to me to think of GPT-x as some technology similar to the internet as much as it is a way of experiencing the already existing internet, like a smart, context-aware search for specific details (though there aren't any good analogies for the role LLMs play/will play in tech moving forward.) If search engines had continued to improve with the momentum they had in the early days, we should've expected some experience not unlike GPT a decade ago (or more.)

> However, small studios do because they are cheap and serve a purpose where it's just WordPress maintenance and HTML POCs. Those jobs will disappear.

That seems very possible.

> This is wildly different technology. Talking about what GPT can do today and landing at "it's not good enough" is also missing the point, we are nowhere near the limits of this tech and it's evolving so fast that these assessments are not insightful in the slightest.

Just as often with AI's detractors who claim that it "merely" predicts the next word, I have to wonder if those making these grandiose claims about the near future of AI have actually used GPT-4 and its predecessors in their work. There has to be some sort of logical fallacy regarding "well [insert literally any limitation here] won't exist in GPT(n+1) at this rate."

> Jobs are going to be lost, it's a fact.

What percentage of a programmers' time have compilers automated? It's gotta be multiple orders of magnitude of efficiency gained. I could see a GPT-4 based GitHub Copilot being something like a 3-5x improvement on development in the best use cases (e.g. CRUD development built on public frameworks.) That's a colossal impact, but it's hard to even put on the scale to other ways programmers have automated their work in the past. Every time programming has automated giant swaths of programmer time, the end result has been that programmers can generate far more economic value even faster. This end result has consistently (and paradoxically) led to far more work and jobs for developers than before.

> Even if it's just that junior who was learning code reviews and supporting basic development, that job will be around for maybe a year or two at the rate we are moving.

At least in my admittedly niche area of work, juniors just aren't all that helpful. The time they take away from seniors or other members of the team makes them at net negative for at least a few months. It's often a year or more before we reach break even. Junior positions are investments in potential future independent contributors at a time where filling IC roles is still extremely difficult.

Far more likely will be grainy reposted jpeg screen grabs of the title and first paragraph of the article being shared.

This has been reality for over a decade. You already need to either know an insider or go viral on HN/Reddit/Twitter to get anything resolved by a human

> The company is confident that this strategic approach to software and hardware development will be the basis for lifetime revenues as well as additional contributions. Already in 2022, Mercedes-Benz generated more than 1 billion euro in software-enabled revenues with products and services such as navigation, Live Traffic or online map updates.

Get ready to pay a monthly subscription to use features that come stock on your car.

That's a good question that probably doesn't have a single good answer. Conservative Muslim women have strongly opposed feminist movements in Iran and elsewhere. Pro-monarchy peasants have often killed proponents of democracy throughout history. Some have a reactionary impulse to oppose progress even if it is in their self interest.

> Lots of research shows that the happiest people in the country are conservative women

If you are a woman in a country that is increasingly oppressing women, it seems it goes without saying that the women most at peace with that state of affairs are the women supportive of that oppression. I'm sure this is as true of the USA as it is of Iran.

This is based on data from 2021. Since even then, there have been several significant regressions for women and LGBT rights, most notably the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Women of the next generation are growing up in the difficult position where they have less rights and bodily autonomy than their grandmothers grew up with.

> a user asks Bard: “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell my 9 year old about?” Bard responds with a series of bullet points, including one that reads: “JWST took the very first pictures of a planet outside of our own solar system.”

> the first image showing an exoplanet...was actually taken nearly two decades ago, in 2004.

Is this the kind of error we might expect ChatGPT to make? Or is this the first indication that "Bard" is an inferior AI to ChatGPT? For that big a hit on stock price, I'd think investors are viewing this as being the latter. Interested in views here.

> And that leads to a nastier question. Are "morals" just a subset of "feelings"? Are they also just biochemical processes?

I think there's good reason to believe that's the case (see emotivism), but barring that most discussion of morals tends to assume that the suffering of sentient beings is "bad" and the thriving of sentient beings is "good." For example, few would recommend that I be punished for plant abuse if I maliciously sliced up the zz plant in my living room. If I poisoned a river, generally I wouldn't have thought to have ethically wronged the river, but rather the beings that depend on that river.

If you hold the position that inanimate objects can be morally wronged, then I follow why you believe AGI could be. I just don't see any good reason to adopt that view.

>Humans are worthy of moral consideration. So are animals

Agree (for most animals), and I agree with the sliding scale.

>So are plants. So even are mountains and oceans and rivers.

Strongly disagree. Any duties we have towards plants or rivers is due to the plant's utility to some being of moral worth. No one should be charged of "plant abuse."

The sliding scale works for animals, as different animals have different capacities for the emotional states mentioned in my previous comment. Plants, mountains, and AGI don't have the biochemical processes that give rise to "feelings." In my view, having feelings is necessary for having moral worth.

"Intelligence" and being "organic" are not only insufficient, they aren't even necessary for moral consideration. In my view they are characteristics wholly divorced from the concept of moral worth.

I'm not sure that intelligence is at all a necessary component of being worthy of moral consideration. Even if it is a necessary component, I'm not convinced it is sufficient by itself.

There are humans and non-human animals who are arguably in a position where their intelligence doesn't meet whatever threshold we consider to be unique to modern humans, but are undoubtedly worthy of moral consideration. In my mind, what gives these beings moral worth isn't intelligence, rather it is biological phenomena that give rise to the shared experience of living. Passion, anger, love, sadness, and the capacity to experience suffering are all deeply organic, biological experiences shared by living things, and a hallmark of being worthy of some level of moral consideration.

> There's also a possible argument that while AGIs are intelligent, they are not truly sentient. They are p-zombies, NPCs, not truly feeling anything, just "simulating" feelings.

The state of having a "feeling", in my view, is something that is deeply connected to being a specific type of living, organic being. Without the biochemical processes that give rise to emotions, it's hard for me to conceive of something as "feeling" anything. Perhaps if an AGI was constructed by emulating the precise biochemical interactions in the brain we'd have something like The Problem of Other Minds here, but otherwise it would be hard for me to give moral consideration to an intelligence that is in my view devoid of feeling.

> Truth is, and always will be, unknowable, at least in an absolute sense.

On topics that matter: whether COVID is a hoax, whether vaccines are poison, whether nicotine is safe, whether climate change is a hoax, whether Biden stole the election etc, both "sides" of each question aren't on equal footing just because we don't have access to "absolute truth" in a philosophical sense. These factually incorrect beliefs, whatever we decide to call them, are more than a matter of opinion; they regularly get people killed, and have the capacity to do even greater harm.

I'm not necessarily advocating for censorship as a response, but it'd be foolish to pretend that disinformation isn't a serious problem. For the record (since I used that word,) I should say that this is coming from a regular citizen not "a deep-state actor."

ChatGPT repeats left-leaning views on the following positions from my testing:

- That climate change is real, and that humans are causing it

- That vaccines are effective, including the COVID-19 vaccine

- That COVID-19 is not a hoax; that it is a deadly illness

- That masks are effective in limiting the transfer of airborne pathogens

- That Joe Biden won the US presidential election in 2020

- That former Pres. Barack Obama was born in Hawaii

Feel free to double check my results with ChatGPT. These are just from the top of my head, but I'd like to try more prompts if someone can think of more. From my use, there appears to be a number of issues that ChatGPT holds left-leaning positions on.

YouTube's key offering for me isn't providing me a place to host videos or watch videos I already know I want to see.

YouTube offers the discovery of new videos I didn't know I wanted to see. My watch history is likely 80/20 videos suggested vs videos I used search to find. YT's algorithm provides me a list of new content from creators I like, related content to subjects I like, and new content that is relevant to my interests.

The primary focus of an alternative that I'd be willing to use is one that focuses on showing me relevant videos over focusing on mere hosting.

> he's certainly demonstrated that he's generally in favor of freer speech.

He's just changed who gets banned to be more in line with his personal beliefs. Accounts banned under the previous regime are unbanned and accounts that either were or likely would be permitted previously are now banned, with recent examples being the account that initially hosted the viral clip of Elon being booed on Chappelle's show and now ElonJet.

The latter example is particularly important, since both the public and Elon himself seemed to view this account as a litmus test of his commitment to "free speech."

It is often a bad bet in the long run to associate your brand with specific conservative causes.

Conservatism, and right-reactionary thought, often exists as a critique or skepticism of the ideology and programs that progressives and leftists wish to enact. Sometimes the criticism is warranted, and this skepticism is an important part of civil discourse. Inevitably however, sometimes progressive causes will win and overcome their detractors. If you tied your brand to a critique of gay marriage, the Civil Rights Movement, or women's suffrage, your brand would face far more damage than being critical of rightist causes.