marcellus23

> The latter episode hasn’t aged well because of one unnecessary romantic/sex scene

Not trying to be intentionally obtuse but — what is this referring to? I watched this episode recently and it seemed fine.

The article mentions that explicitly and links to it: https://www.engraved.blog/building-a-virtual-machine-inside/

Developers can only write data into Apple Health from the local phone SDK.

Cloud import is only supported from health providers and laboratories.

> IIRC, wasn't the vampires' dominance ended by the invention of architecture, given they had some sort of right-angle-based susceptibility to seizures?

Yeah, exactly. I think that was his way of answering "if human-level consciousness is such a waste of resources, why did humans become dominant on Earth".

> Forget the galaxy, if consciousness had no benefits (or was actively detrimental), then a sapiens variant without it on earth might easily out-compete the conscious variant and spread

Isn't this pretty much what happens with the vampires? I know they're not completely non-conscious but they're clearly supposed to be somewhere between humans and Rorschach.

> It is not hard sci-fi at all

What do you consider hard SF? That term doesn't have a real definition and everyone's conception is different. But I think it's unreasonable to say that Blindsight is not hard at all. On the spectrum of SF, it clearly leans way more towards the hard side.

Or, put another way, if Blindsight is not hard science fiction to you, then I think your criteria for hardness is far beyond almost everyone else's.

Hm, you should generally be able to hit Return to close a message box on Mac. Or, more specifically, to activate the default action in a dialog (the button whose background is the tint color of the application). Spacebar activates the button that has the focus ring around it, which may or not be the default button, but you can use Tab to move the focus around.

At least, this is the way it's always been on OS X and later. I'm not sure about classic Mac OS.

I still miss n-gate so much. I wonder where that guy went. Hope he's okay.

as an American this is my favorite format. Sortable, and the mm-dd order reflects the standard American way of writing month+day, and yyyy is unambiguously the year since it's 4 letters. Best of both worlds.

That hasn’t been my experience in the US, either personally or from talking to others who took CS degrees.

Keep in mind that plenty of people on HN and in the industry did not take CS degrees in college. We did learn about PIDs, if briefly.

If I picked a human off the street and asked them to "count first two hundred numbers in reverse while skipping every third number and check if they are in sequence", I bet most would screw up.

my point is not that current LLMs are sentient, or even that LLMs ever could be. My point is that it's very difficult to come up with a way to test consciousness, and it makes me a bit nervous to see people suggesting that something could never be conscious just because it's technological and not biological.

It's very easy to say, "well, of course, a thing that looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, is not necessarily a duck." But when you're presented with something indistinguishable from a duck in every way, how do you determine whether it's a duck? You can't just say "well I know it's not a duck". It's dodging the question.

> I drink more coffee than 99% of the population

How much is that?

AI-generated UIs, at least ones aimed at an engineering audience, have a very distinct appearance. They seem to always have the following attributes:

- Dark mode design with lots of colors

- Buttons that have vibrant, bright borders and duller backgrounds

- Excessive (IMO) usage of monospace fonts for stylistic reasons

None of this proves that it's AI (the other comments have covered that) but in my experience it's always correct.

That's kind of the simplest case, though, where "theirs" and "ours" makes obvious sense.

What if I'm rebasing a branch onto another? Is "ours" the branch being rebased, or the other one? Or if I'm applying a stash?

The other comments make good points but also want to point out that that quote was written 37 years ago.

I use Windows and macOS both daily and it's truly baffling to me that anyway could consider Windows software quality to crush the Mac -- either first party or third party. macOS has no shortage of bugs but compared to Windows it works like a dream.

As one example of many, Night Light (Windows' version of adjusting your screen to be warmer at night) has been broken for me, for 5+ years. I mean literally it just never works on its own. The only way to kick it into working is toggling HDR on and then off, every single time I wake it up.

I would guess it's just my configuration but I built a second PC from totally new parts, and got a different monitor, and installed Windows 11 instead of 10, and it's still broken.

I don't disagree with you generally but does he really claim it does? The entire page only mentions US, near as I can tell.

The GP's use of the word "impose" didn't seem perjorative to me or suggest that Anthropic is the offender and the government is the victim. I think you're reading a lot into a simple word choice and this response seems way too hostile.

The iPhone 8 was released in 2017 and the Pixel 8 is from 2023.

I'm not sure that's a literal quote from their boss. It seems to be an illustrative example, probably exaggerated.

The beginning describes the formation of an intelligence and it is indeed very dense. You can figure out what's going on but it takes some slow reading, and probably best to revisit it once you have some more context from later in the book.

The whole book isn't like that. Once you get past that part, as the other commenter said, it gets much easier.

It really doesn't.

This just takes me to an information-less landing page for some unlaunched product.

He changed his mind? The comment you're citing seems partly tongue-in-cheek anyway, but even if it wasn't, how is this some kind of gotcha?

That's the real reason the conversation seems pointless. Every thread is full of comments from one group saying how useful AI is, and from another group saying how useless it is. The first group is convinced the second group just hasn't figured out how to use it right, and the second group is convinced the first group is deluded or outright lying.

All of this is written with a sense of anger and sarcastic invective that doesn't seem appropriate. This is part of learning any new language or API. Going in with an attitude of "I should already know how all this works, why am I forced to do research or look at docs?" seems unfair and will spoil the experience of learning anything.

> Why was that so hard? Why are the models here separate from the ones in the right click menu? Too many questions.

The very screenshot above this paragraph actually answers this, in what admittedly might be an uncharacteristically clear UI: "Siri and Safari will always run translations online."

There are simply so many counterexamples out there of people who have developed projects in a small fraction of the time it would take manually. Whether or not AI is having a positive effect on productivity on average in the industry is a valid question, but it's a statistical one. It's ridiculous to argue that AI has a negative effect on productivity in every single individual case.

> I'd be shocked if the developer wasn't actually less productive

I agree 10x is a very large number and it's almost certainly smaller—maybe 1.5x would be reasonable. But really? You would be shocked if it was above 1.0x? This kind of comment always strikes me as so infantilizing and rude, to suggest that all these developers are actually slower with AI, but apparently completely oblivious to it and only you know better.

I'd rather live in a universe where that money is taken out of the military budget.