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I'm sorry to hear that; of course it would've been be disheartening! If you're interested in sharing, I'm curious if you speculated at the time why that might have been the case (e.g. where you live, unique interests, etc.), and how you went about things after that experience.

I find this interesting but I'm not sure I understand and I'd like to. Are you suggesting that there is a psychological aversion to prediction markets when the outcomes in question are as personal as politics? Would a similar analogy be, say, reluctance to the idea of finding one's romantic partner through a formalized process like algorithmic matchmaking?

Needs can go pretty high! I'm seeing this at the level of aesthetic and self-actualization.

I wonder if that idea is compatible with something like caesium standard time. Is causality at work in the frequency of atomic resonance? (Separately, I would be inclined to disagree that we directly perceive causality.)

You could certainly argue that we do not. Perceptions are not instantaneous, and if they can be said to "take time" then they cannot have time as their object of perception directly. And even if they "take time", perceptions are ending simultaneously as they are beginning. Being aware of the passage of time does not require perception, as anyone can report when they have an understanding of how long they slept as soon as they wake. Not sure how all that relates to bees, though.

Anyway, no abstract musing about time is complete without a word from Dōgen: "You may suppose that time is only passing away, and not understand that time never arrives."

Emo Philips' joke always comes to mind about stuff like this: "The brain is the most important organ in the body... says the brain". Linguists and philosophers conclude that language is central, physicists conclude that physics is central, and so on.

Low-rise apartment buildings without parkades are very common in Calgary and (I assume) Edmonton. Block heaters, extension cords, and high-quality ice scrapers are standard fare.

Yep, I think the primary BeOS connection is Travis Geiselbrecht: https://tkgeisel.com.

Apparently this is a tree-walking interpreter, so JavaScript's handling of tail calls is not directly relevant.

Yes, you're correct about the more general meaning. But in the Scheme world "doing tail calls" means something like being "properly tail recursive" (see https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Tail-Cal... for more details). It's not appropriate to call it an optimization because it's a foundational property of the language.

The original paper is quite short and readable: https://people.ece.cornell.edu/land/courses/ece4760/Math/GCC...

Fair enough, but one of the advantages of looking at Enlightenment philosophy on its own terms is that it's easier to perceive—and thus learn from—its failures. "Current social philosophy" has the disadvantage of being both current (so are we) and social (so are we), and so we suffer from a lack of perspective. It would not be surprising to me if one could identify weaknesses of 18th century thought that persist today.

If the show was Seinfeld then it brings up an interesting point: the context of the show is that all of the characters are socially pathological. They are bad people who treat others poorly—that's the whole show. It would be fascinating if today's viewers might see it as an endorsement of those behaviours!

I'm going to agree harder: it's a thing to be aware of as a fundamental mechanism which may or may not be related to agenda or judgement in any given instance.

This is also a feature (the defining feature, IMO) of causal narratives.

Yes, surely. I'm curious if you have more to say about this. Semi-relatedly, one could read this article as a journalist attempting to convince the public to normalize a more emotionally potent form of journalism.

I'm predisposed to mysticism, so I probably read this passage a lot less mundanely than most. I'm also a minimalist and tend to view spiritual teachings as enigmatic ways of pointing out something obvious that we are conditioned to overlook. To me, this passage says: "You don't get to keep anything."

I'm not too fussy about efficiency, but one of the things about passive aggression that drives me crazy is the pretence. Passivity makes the communication as though it never happened, except everyone knows that it did. To many autistic people this seems literally insane.

I'm curious to hear more about why you feel this was the winter of sci-fi! Can you share some more besides personal preference? (I'm not a huge Vonnegut fan or even big reader in general and Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat's Cradle were pretty far from DNF for me.)

I'm amazed by how bright-eyed the prose style is here compared to Dick's later works, not to mention the gimmick! There's nothing like a few decades of literary failure to stamp out the pesky flame of exuberance and enable some really great writing.

> It's a spectrum. We've all got a lil bit of that going on.

I apologize for the specificity of the nit I'm about to pick, but the "spectrum" part of Autism Spectrum Disorder does not mean that every person is on it! ASD has very specific diagnostic criteria (https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/hcp-dsm.html) according to which an individual is either diagnosed with ASD or not.

> Mead was famous, but only one of the many voices in very long debate.

Yes, this is how voices work.

> Whatever people were thinking 90 years ago, it had already lost its influence by the time of AI's societal debut in the 1980s and is totally irrelevant to AI's impact today.

Are you making this argument simply based on the passage of time? I can think of a lot of ideas whose longevity makes 90 years seem a sneeze.

> While both may share a mindset, linking Mead to today's techno-bros is a bit of a stretch.

If they share a mindset, would that not be an obvious link? Additionally, this article is drawing a connection not just between Mead and techno-optimists (not the same as tech-bros), but between Mead and both techno-optimism and existential risk. That's sort of what the article's preamble describes as the interesting thing.

> This jay’s name, recorded in the data as WLKOSR, is an acronym for the color combination of the three bands on his legs.

I'm getting a good vibe from these ornithologists.

I'm suggesting that there are not many people who have been doing that work, at least not at the same level or to the same effect. He did it with Stripe and OpenAI, back to back.

It's the impression I got from "who have not done any transformer research", as well as the fact that sama wrote this article.

I don't know gdb very well, but I did get to chat with him a bit about what he was working on around the time of this article, which was mostly infrastructure grunt work, removing obstacles and procedural rough edges—basically anything to make the researchers and engineers as happy and productive as possible. It is so, so easy to undervalue that kind of work done by a totally brilliant and capable technologist. For an early stage startup it's gold. For a later stage startup it's gold.

No disagreement here. The main thrust of my comment was the observation that perceived fairness is a powerful psychological factor and that it might be at play in discussions like this one.

I'm wondering if one of the factors here is that the public is funding this opportunity, and that many, many non-criminal members of that public are doing the $10.50/h thing with no such support and very limited opportunity.

It took me a minute to parse this comment! I wonder how many names you recognized; it's a big list. Are you suggesting that all these folks are giving free speech a bad name by uttering the wrong kind of speech?

100% over here, too. I used more geometric thinking at the beginning but of course that shifted into gut feeling by the end. Nice job!