pdonis

That's one use case, sure, but not the only possible one.

> Reading the PR the change was needed because the old undofile format was fundamentally broken.

That's a good reason to have a new undo file that's completely separate from the old one, and use the new one instead, and tell users "Hey, whatever undo information you had in your old undo file isn't accessible any more through neovim, you'll have to use vim if you need to get to it."

It's not a good reason for just deleting the old undo file with no warning. All the new version needs to do is ignore it, not nuke it.

From what I can gather, you can use the same vimrc file to control both vim and neovim.

If that's not your point, then I have no idea what you're trying to say.

If it's going to nuke vim's undo files, it can't hide behind "another program".

The only way to "fix" this from a source code perspective would be to fork Neovim.

Even a gift comes with an implicit promise that it will do no harm. Deleting important data of yours without warning is harm.

"It was him -> it was her" -- both are direct objects (at least as you're using them here--once upon a time the correct English would have been "it was he -> it was she", since the verb "to be" is not a transitive verb, but that seems to have gone out of fashion).

"It is his -> it is hers" -- both are possessives, but they're not directly modifying anything (they refer to "it", but the verb is in between).

"It is his thing -> it is her thing" -- both are possessives, but now they are functioning as direct modifiers of "thing", which is a different usage.

I don't know if there is a fully specified algorithm for determining these things, and even if you got one that worked in English, I don't think it would map very easily to any other language, because English is such a hodgepodge of things cherry picked from various languages over the centuries.

The WMD analogy doesn't quite cover this, yes. Maybe a better analogy here would be toxic waste. Yes, someone might not have intentionally set up a factory that puts dioxin into the water, but they're still responsible. Which means they need to take precautions to make sure such accidents can't happen. Similarly, those who build AI need to take precautions to make sure the AI they build doesn't accidentally cause serious harm.

I personally am not concerned about that as far as an existential threat goes, because I don't think AI, in itself, poses one; I think it will hit diminishing returns. But of course it is still capable of serious harm when humans misuse it.

The best analogy we have is probably weapons of mass destruction--we have international treaties about them and we don't let just anybody have them. That's the kind of framework I think we need, and it goes beyond "regulation" in the ordinary sense.

Use of such weapons is considered by international treaty to be an act of war; use of AI by, say, China and Russia against our infrastructure should be the subject of a similar international treaty with the understanding that it would have similar consequences.

Domestically, humans who misuse AI to do serious harm could be treated like, say, the people who tried to spread anthrax years back.

No, it's an example of why you have to allow people to pursue what at the time look like "curiosities", even though most of them don't go anywhere--because the very small portion that do go somewhere, end up changing the world, and we don't know in advance which ones those are going to be.

It's quite true that the funds we have for this are a finite resource. But that doesn't mean that "foreseeable practical applications" is a useful filter for how to deploy that resource.

Also, there is always the alternative explanation that the reason other physicists have not paid any real attention to the author's claims is that those claims are, as I said in another post upthread, too vague even to criticize. (Wolfgang Pauli used the phrase "not even wrong".)

As for the actual article, I think it's too vague to even be able to criticize anything specific. It's words strung together, but no actual testable model that I can see. (One key red flag: the page where he says the "mathematical details" are--does not even have a single equation.)

While this is true, it's also true that out of all of his published work in physics (which you can find at the "Google Scholar" link on the Author page of his log), none of it, as far as I can see, is about the hypothesis described in this article. All his writings about that appear on his blog. Which means that, if he has tried to get any of this published in peer-reviewed journals, he's failed.

This could mean that he is a visionary whose insight is not recognized by the establishment, which is the story he tells. It could also mean that his speculations actually don't lead anywhere useful. My Bayesian prior is heavily on the latter.

Only in models that actually have such an initial singularity. Not all models do. Eternal inflation models, for example, do not.

And there is also one huge reason to not think such models are viable. The Wikipedia article skates right by it:

"According to such scenarios, our observable universe was born in a black hole existing in a larger universe, where this black hole may, at some point, appear as a white hole."

The problem with this is, a white hole has a past horizon. In other words, it is an isolated system with a horizon around it, and infinite empty space outside the horizon. We have no evidence for any such thing, and how would it be possible anyway? The past horizon would have had to be "built in" to the universe from the start. It's not something that can be produced by a physical process, the way a black hole, with its future horizon, can be formed by gravitational collapse.

Because breaking the stranglehold that the tech megacorps currently have over devices is not going to be cheap. In the end, if users won't pay for it to happen, it won't happen.

> the actual thing which is necessary, i.e. for the user to not be denied control over their own device.

My point is that as things currently stand, users don't care about this. To them their device is not a computer they should control. It's just an appliance. They have no clue what "general purpose computing" means or why they should want it (to the extent they should) on their devices.

Framing it as "we'd like to give you ad blocking apps but the platform vendors won't let us" might be an improvement, but I'm not sure even about that. Ads vs. ad blocking is a perpetual arms race, and it will continue as long as the ad supported business model is the primary one the tech megacorps use, and the incentives that lead the tech megacorps to use that business model in the first place are also the ones that lead them to lock down what apps on their platforms can do.

The real solution, as the last statement suggests, is to do away with the ad supported business model. But that would require users to be willing to pay for apps that they use; and right now, it seems like most users won't. They've been conditioned for at least a couple of decades now that everything they use on their devices, like everything they use on the web, should be "free". And since those things aren't actually free, it costs a lot of resources to provide them, they have to be paid for somehow.

Or, alternatively, users could simply stop buying devices that are locked down, and buy open ones instead. There are ways to do that--but they're outliers, and I don't see how that's going to change any time soon.

Note that I was talking about my county's government, not a company. My sense is that whatever level of technical competence county governments have is pretty much the floor on technical competence. If they can do it, any company that can't doesn't deserve to be a company anyway.

What's really crazy about all this is that it isn't even necessary. I get emergency alerts from my county for things like severe weather warnings, mosquito spraying, etc. You know how I get them? Text messages and email. And you know how I find out more if I want to? I go to their website.

Depends on what you mean by "capitalism". The current definition, at least among the big-time capitalists, seems indeed to be "do whatever it takes to get me more capital, by hook or by crook".

But that's not what actually built most of the wealth in the modern world. What built most of that was cooperation, specialization, and positive sum trades, in which everyone involved became better off, but nobody obsessed about counting down to the last penny exactly how much better off they were than the next person, and complaining about unfairness if things didn't balance out exactly the way they thought things should. In other words, focusing on creating wealth, not on grabbing whatever you can, or making sure you grabbed more than anyone else.

And then it turned out that all that was a long con by the companies, who started reneging on all their promises of lifetime employment, good benefits, and retirement pensions as soon as the costs of those things began to exceed the profits available to them by using those promises to attract employees.