dirkt

Look at what happened to Digg. Digg "won" in the end, but people moved elsewhere (actually, mostly to Reddit).

Reddit is making money off their unpaid backs, and on top of that they want to deprive them of the tools the moderators use to do moderating, and make them pay for using those tools.

That's the reason the moderators in particular are all very much for the strike...

> lock down content in the face of its increased value as private ML training data

That's easy to fix: Give out API keys; moderator tools, accessibility tools and third-party readers get free API keys. ML training data scrapers have to pay.

No need to go to war with the community over that.

Reddit has been constantly nagging users to use their App, so I really don't think it's about ML training data. It's about monetizing users by forcing them into their App.

Supermarkets are already doing that in Europe.

> There isn't, and there has never been, a large (hundreds of millions of active users) online community that wasn't run by a for-profit entity.

Usenet.

There are plenty of people on the internet (including here) who think ChatGPT is a "smart expert" and who don't understand that ChatGPT can easily make up stuff that looks very convincing at first glance.

And if you challenge them, they also double down and say "ChatGPT is the future" etc.

So the lawyer is not alone...

> One way to resolve this surprise is to find some reason to believe these strange abilities are fundamentally not an understanding of the world.

An easy way to test this is to ask questions and followup-questions that actually require understanding, and compare this to the answers. I recommend to try that.

> If you have to verify every detail of its responses, what good was it to ask it in the first place?

It's awesome for brainstorming, or for getting a first draft of something.

> It does work for coding as you can -- usually -- immediately test the code to see if it yields the desired result, or ask it to provide a unit test for it.

Exactly. Though there are still too many people who somehow think they can use it as an "expert assistant", without a validation step with a human.

The difference to a person is that most (though not all) people actually have an understanding if they know something, if they guess something, if they are making something up, or if they are outright lying. Which is about the first thing you train during a scientific education.

And in an honest interaction, they will tell you.

ChatGPT etc. does not. So basically it acts like a pathological liar (who happen to be right as long as it has been trained on something that comes close enough).

Bunnie Huang already built himself a laptop with on-board FPGA back in 2012.

[1] https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=2686

[2] https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3597

So if you have to babysit it anyway (which is actually a correct way of using it, instead of getting fooled into assuming it's an expert: Use ChatGPT for brainstorming, have a human in the loop to validate): Wouldn't it be faster to write the code yourself?

And if you have to come up with the code yourself, wouldn't that allow you to come up with a better architecture for your whole project?

And I am still waiting for the Russians to "accidentally" blow up Zaporizhzhia [1] while conducting their military operations there. Which will cause a nice fallout in the rest of Europe.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaporizhzhia_Nuclear_Power_Pla...

I've also seen this in many books.

When I learned it at university, we had lots of examples, but you need to be already familiar with a lot of somewhat abstract mathematics (monoids, groups, rings, sets, homomorphisms, ...) before you see how it unifies those.

Category theory is called "general abstract nonsense" for a reason.

You can think of it as "expressing other mathematics in terms of arrows and commuting diagrams".

> But my argument is that humans are also, at some level, sufficiently advanced stochastic parrots.

But humans have a feedback loop called "consciousness" that sits above the stochastic parrot level, can reason about it, and can separate the wheat from the chaff.

AI still has to reach this level. ChatGPT cannot judge if its answers are right or wrong. It just claims things confidently, and as long as it is parroting correctly, it is right, and that's why humans get fooled into thinking that maybe they can trust it. (That's also why humans get fooled by human bullshitters who claim things confidently).

So if you don't use ChatGPT as what it is, a lookup-tool trained on the content of the internet, which can't even tell you where it got the information from, and the onus is on you to verify if the information is correct or not, and if instead try to use it as some kind of expert you can trust (which I have seen quite a few people do), then you are doing it wrong.

The Apple II keyboard had very similar keycaps (if not the same).

I haven't seen them anywhere except for Apple keyboards.

> disposing of power plant waste has never been a real problem.

Germany has been trying to find a location to safely dispose power plant waste for about 40 years or so. All the solutions so far didn't work out [1], they are still searching.

If you have a recommendation that actually works, I am sure they'd be happy to hear it...

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endlager_(Kerntechnik)#Endlage...

As early CD players were intended for audio playback, your CD player can lie to the software. It doesn't tell if it's reading at the exact beginning of a sector (because timing information is multiplexed into the audio stream, and some CD players were not byte-exact when interpreting this), and it also doesn't tell you when it silently corrects some errors. Because for a human listening to the audio won't notice.

But of course it makes a difference if you want to make high-fidelity copy.

That's why there always have been copy apps (cdparanoia on Linux, EAC on Windows) that do overlapping reads, and then detect and compensate these problems.

We just used cdparanoia back then (on Linux, on Windows you used EAC). Actually, this Python app uses the cdparanoia library for the ripping itself.

It's actually more like an analog record than a tape. It's even layout in a spiral (instead of circles, like for a DVD, or like tracks on a floppy or harddisk).

Most recent fail: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/aquarium-berlin-hotel-radisson-...

There's a theory that "eeny meeny" just means "one two" in some original language when humanity spread, and it was conserved in children rhymes, that get transmitted mostly unchanged from generation to generation.

Your Russian version is very interesting, because I also see similarities between "kvinter/finter" and latin "qinque", greek "penta" (both mean "five"), and "zhaba" may relate to Latin "sex", English "six" and so on. So the Russian version may remember even more original number words. The German version "ene mene muh" is sadly degraded compared to the others.

There is probably a reason they put that in (as in: they had an incident where this apparently wasn't standard...)

It's just building elevation though, no terrain elevation at all (though the data is there).

Also, elevation for many buildings just seems to be a guess.

> working in a functional language and claiming they don't need design patterns because they're the same as having first class functions

The point really was that you need different design patterns in a functional language, and most of the GoF design patterns are useless in a functional language, as they either deal with state, or they deal with something that had some better solution in a functional language (e.g. through algebraic datatypes, which were built-in).

So if you amend "we don't need design patterns" to "we don't need most of the GoF design patterns", it's actually a true statement.

> Monads? A design pattern.

Exactly.

And now the pendulum has swung back, and instead of providing primitive language features that would make using the Monad design patterns easy, we have half-assed async/await implementations in lots of imperative languages, just because people didn't realize async/await is just a particular use of the Monad design pattern.

> This means they go through their career building up all sorts of design knowledge, but rarely naming and sharing it at a useful level of granularity.

Which is really sad, because the GoF book really emphasized this point.

But for some reason programmers seem to have a desire to turn everything into some kind of cult...

There is a difference between a nuclear reactor blowing up in a country with low overall population density (e.g. the US; in Chernobyl also it wasn't that taxing to designate an exclusion zone for a few centuries), it happening in a very densely populate country (where it would be a desaster), or it happening in a military sub where the owning state doesn't care about collateral damage [1]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/19/us-depleted-ur...

Calibre actually does horrible things to the HTML source that hides in each epub. While Standard Ebooks do promote awesome HTML. If you run Calibre on it, it's ruined.

An epub is just a zip file. Open it up, look inside, see for yourself.

Germany can get coal from somewhere else. Germany cannot get gas from somewhere else, at least not in sufficient quantities.

In 2021, gas was used for 17% of the generated electricity [1]. This percentage is artificially high, since CO2 offsets for gas compared to other energy resources made it very attractive.

Adjusting that down, the remaining 10% or so can easily be replaced by other sources, or imported.

OTOH, about 50% of German households are heated with gas. You cannot replace all 200 million of those installations with electric heating (even if we wanted to, electric heating wastes the most energy).

The industry is also highly dependent on natural gas, e.g. to produce glass (including solar panels), or as a raw material, e.g. to produce fertilizer, or other chemicals. That cannot be replaced by electricity. Should those industries not be able to continue working because of a gas shortage, this will have a ripple effect for the whole German economy.

Yet the internet echo chamber mob continues to claim that Germany has an electricity problem, and could just instantly turn off the Russian gas if they'd just switch to nuclear... and you have to tell every single one of the to do some research. The internet has truly become an ugly place.

[1] https://www.destatis.de/DE/Presse/Pressemitteilungen/2022/03...

Which seems more a problem with Github tooling, and less with git submodules.

They don't realise they don't understand it, and firmly believe in the nonsense they make up.

The goal of a type system is not to prevent all bugs, or to prevent all bad things happening at runtime.

The goal is to catch as many bugs as possible BEFORE it runs in production. And even if you just catch a single bug, you have already won. In particular if the type system is balanced in such a way so there's not much additional effort involved (e.g. by using type inference).