forgetfulness

Data collection is a worry of the previous decade, the recommendation algorithm is the battle ground, the US has decided that it much prefers having Meta push its white supremacist and gender wars drivel non stop than what was being shown in TikTok (Israeli atrocities)

They must be planning on milking what value can be had from the web to which they used to be the entryway, and clash with OpenAI, MS and Apple over AI trained on curated datasets, to layer some semblance of a business model over it. And I say milking because the relationship to websites is now parasitic for the most part.

The benefit being that you will still be able to use the things you purchased even if your licensor goes down or you are not in good standing with them, which is what people used to call "owning" software back in the day anyway.

A lot look like CGI, but I wouldn't be able to tell that they weren't created by an actual animator.

But companies will merrily "prescribe" AI companions as _a_ treatment, not as a sole treatment, but having even less of an obligation, and not even an unenforced ethical code to act on behalf of the patient's best interests, they'll just let people use them unsupervised and not accompanied with a method to stop relying on the bots.

Instagram.

I was completely fine using a well-taken-care-of iPhone 8 until Instagram's input boxes became unusably slow on it, now I have an iPhone 13. I'm guessing that there'll be a race to make more powerful AI assistants, but makers of far more mundane apps will gobble up the computing power readily.

Mean of me to say, but you're just better off using Jupyter as a local notebook sandbox, for one, the relevant development Docker image does bundle Spark[1], making it more convenient to fire up, and more importantly, it's used way more than Zeppelin, as orgs not using Jupyter are probably using Databricks notebooks instead, and it's split between those two.

Zeppelin does make it easier to run Scala Spark, I find, but Scala Spark usage has declined rapidly.

1. https://hub.docker.com/r/jupyter/pyspark-notebook

The hacker ethos is a pretty old concept that hasn't been written all that much about much since the early 2000s except by Paul Graham, and that's precisely the sort of "suit" association that the old hacker ethos antagonized, so the concept lost luster.

Regardless, the old hacker ethos was very much about individuals creating and disseminating knowledge to empower other individuals, copyright was derided when it got in the way of that.

What does OpenAI do? It uses knowledge to disempower the individuals holding it and sharing it, and giving it to themselves to sell to companies and create power dynamics that are extremely un-hacker-like. Now knowledge has less power to set you free from the monetary or coercive power of the suits and the Government.

This one's pretty clean for Clojure code, due to the simplicity of the data model, in the most conventional sense, as the state of the program is just the word, the guesses, and the grid of colored characters for the guesses.

External dependencies you manage like in most other applications nowadays, you don't hit external services in the "guts" of your code unless you really need to, for performance, testability and to keep the less reliable parts of your code isolated, you keep the interactions with external services as close to the "main" of the application as you can.

When things break down is with more complex data models of the application, not even as much because of the language itself but because Clojure programmers actively reject using record types and interfaces, and just pass dictionaries around. You wind up with some code that, bafflingly, gives the impression of being very simple and neat, but you can't tell what it's actually doing.

Also, what about the converse? Corporations or governments doctoring images where they show undamaged and safe environments with happy people where there's a crisis they're trying to cover up, isn't it just as damaging as the images conveying negative emotions?

Wouldn't an authenticated linked list data structure be a very simple append-only database? That's the whole critique, as storage technologies they are very bare-bones, and they make trade offs that just don't come up organically in most software development, you normally are building distributed systems for performance and availability, blockchains provide availability at the cost of performance to satisfy the requirement that writers be downright adversarial in nature, and you normally simply don't allow untrusted parties to access the database.

It comes down to how many of these offerings can deliver value worth $X/month to fund the multi-billion dollar ventures behind them, where companies find that they are willing to pay that $X per seat for it.

There must be at least 6 major players among OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Apple, Stability, and more that I haven't kept track of. NVIDIA has no way of knowing how viable all these businesses are in the medium term, they know how many GPUs they're buying while investment capital is flowing to them.

If gen AI companies and gen AI initiatives within major players start shutting down, there might be a glut of graphics card flooding the market, though the supply might fuel another crypto bubble, so NVIDIA may not be in trouble after all thanks to market irrationality.

And I blame squarely business majors for their blind faith in assets whose price goes up with no explanation, they are the ones who always push the hardest for adoption of these fads with no understanding of what the actual value behind them is.

Chilean intelligence being the black hand behind the protestors rising up against a stolen election is pretty far fetched, South American countries haven't meddled to that level in one another since the XIX century, which was more of a diplomatic free for all in much of the world, so you also saw secret treaties, sponsored coups, puppet Governments, and all that.

Maduro had promised to let international observers in, but began withdrawing the invitations a few months ahead of the elections, and the Carter Foundation was one of two to be allowed a restricted "technical" observation.

The US would benefit from international observers these days, frankly, casting doubts over its electoral system has been used to ill effect to its political stability by bad actors.

The thing is, that the absolute number of votes work out to give the announced percentage with 6 decimal digits, just as if they put "51.2%" on a calculator and worked backwards. The point is that they didn't actually round the percentage, it was actually 51.199999 for the President and 44.199999 for the opposition, the only credible explanation is that they picked the percentages and then cooked the absolute numbers to line up, so the numbers look "ugly", but the percentages are neat.

Maduro is also saying that the mass protests he's facing are the product of Chilean-trained operatives acting against him, he says many things.

Yes, indeed, a lot of plants and fungi aren't edible until cooked, but that's a pretty direct and simple process from e.g. raw bean to whole bean in your stomach, which has a lot of nutritional value. Best case scenarios here are cooking oil and protein isolate.

Not super hot on replacing food crops for what's a raw material for frying oil, cattle feed and maybe protein bars, to be frank. It was kind of a bad thing in sci fi media when working class people were living off that kind of stuff rather than proper meals.

Man this tree seems to have so many useful properties, why isn't already a crop then?

> Its disagreeable taste and odor are due to bitter flavonoid constituents, including karanjin, pongamol, tannin, and karanjachromene.[11] These compounds induce nausea and vomiting if ingested in its natural form

Wikipedia on the beans it produces.

> Outside of tech, AI isn't making any friends. It's an unexpected threat on the horizon for the bearers of accumulated privilege, such as monopolies and nation-state autocrats

How so? Generative AI has developed in a way that's very amenable to the bearers of accumulated privilege, it requires so much capital expenditure that it's in the hands of a few companies that can be variously negotiated with or strong armed. This is not at all like the computer and internet revolutions of the 90s.

> The worst possible outcome is that we end up with an all-powerful AI cartel which negotiates massive deals with IP conglomerates, locking out competition and open and free alternatives.

What's the difference with the status quo if the main players are Microsoft, Meta and Google?

The more nightmarish thing about Clojure is realizing that, in truth, you have no idea what all these dicts you are passing around the terse, nil-punning functions of your codebase hold at any given time.

There's also the not all small factor that there was glam to Lisp.

Early Internet discourse around programming was dominated by people who had ties to elite universities in the 1980s, who yearned for the times when the US Government was throwing an abundance of money to the AI industry of the time.

They were the ones rubbing elbows with researchers from MIT, Stanford, Harvard, and Berkeley, who were using specialized hardware and software beyond the capabilities available to that of developers working on more mundane applications, all graciously funded by DARPA initiatives.

That experience was, in truth, unrelatable to young people reading the recollections of ESR and RMS of the period, the in-jokes of these people, their ideas and interactions, but the tales of Lisp, the Lisp hackers and their fabled Lisp machines would be extremely appealing to someone who was very passionate about programming, striving for excellence as a programmer, and to advance in life through merit. Paul Graham would seal the deal with his essays.

Since then it's been dominated by advancements in generative AI, which mostly appeals the get-rich-quick types that were also into cryptocurrency speculation. At least generative AI does produce _something_ today, at the cost of tremendous amounts of electricity and pushing humans out of office jobs to food preparation and delivery.

After all this proletarization of knowledge workers is normalized, hopefully the new AI Robber Barons will leave us some sick public libraries or some equivalent, at least.

Pretty different if it's semiconductor engineers instead of the business school guys that would be covered by that sentence 99% of time.

The correct term is "non-avian dinosaur" for the ones that died en masse, but making that point in the first place is already pretty pedantic, doing it with snark is just being annoying for the sake of being annoying.

Stack Exchange is downright malicious in having you click it on each subdomain.

No, I don't care that one user created the Math forum and another created the Sysadmin forum, it's all run by you Jeff, that's who I am engaging when clicking the popup, not MathFan1982

The author of the paper invented SQL

Joel Spolski told us all to hire, and aspire to be hired, as he did for his bugtracker written in a secret language that transpiled to VBScript.

You have to dig around a bit to see that this line has a plastic frame, what a waste of their old reputation to put this in the ThinkPad brand, but in truth it's not even deceiving anymore, it's damaged enough that few would trust the name blindly.

https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkPad/ThinkPad_P...

Some manufacturers can be quite a crapshoot with the keyboard layout (fortunately that's plainly visible when shopping for a laptop), but Lenovo is pretty consistent with the ThinkPad layout, even if they're dubiously creating these low end plastic frame lines that pointlessly devalue their brand.

Nobody remembers that brand as being "IBM's laptops", they don't have that to borrow value against, they should take care of the ThinkPad line's reputation.