simpaticoder

It says you can't ban AI and shouldn't try. There is no general solution except a worldwide ban of technology itself. What you can do is local and incremental and based on good judgement, patience, intelligence, etc.

This sounds like a short-term strategy at best You only need an agent to click things long enough to build an API on top of the thing it's clicking on. And running a full windowed virtual machine is expensive!

I'd also caution against saying things like llms are doing most of the work I don't think that's true. And where it is true it shouldn't be. These things are still new tech and they need a lot of hand holding and oversight still.

Why don't banks use PKI? It doesn't have to be in the users face. It might be that your app generates a keypair on startup and sends the public key to the bank server, and the bank server sends you a public key, and you talk to each other with a shared secret. Maybe even you have to go in physically to the bank with your device to set it up and attest the legitimacy of your private key. Personally I'd really love that.

Great question - until just now I didn't realize there were different types. Looking at the physical switch itself doesn't give me any clues. But it looks older so I'd guess no.

Did you try contacting the provider? It looks like a bug to me.

Well I guess we can agree to disagree because I think there's a lot about Trump to crash out about. It's difficult to understand how someone who so obviously a villain is so popular. It's disorienting and frustrating, like walking out of Star wars hearing people praise Darth Vader for how wonderful he was and how nasty Luke was to him. How The empire is a staple job Creator and the rebel alliance a bunch of filthy blooded miscreants who don't appreciate what they have...

Peterson fallen in a profoundly sad, but also illuminating, way. He obviously had a bit of NPD even from the start, which is true of virtually every public figure. The crack widened and finally split with the help of powerful drugs - fame, money, and Xanax, with a side of audience capture. He quickly went from "liberal Canadian rationalist with the gumption to push back against the left on principle" to just another unthinking right-wing parrot. His view of strength hurt him here, because he was in a crucible that broke him and yet he clearly could not admit it. Contrast him with someone like Sam Harris who, IMO, has been in the crucible for longer but who is far less pugnacious and has managed to maintain his sanity and his nuanced principles despite the forces that want bimodal commentary only.

I agree, and I find it sad that so many people and companies are in a rush to take the human out of the loop. But for agentic/human hybrids not even all of those work out well - and the error modes have more to do with the "alignment" of the human. That is, humans with strong knowledge, an aesthetic sense for structure, strong curiosity - those humans do well in this loop. Humans that just want to "make money" using the LLM as a slave, interacting with it as little as possible, taking no interest in what it does (bad company leadership in miniature) get poor outputs. When the human is an invested, knowledgeable curator of code, someone who has a vision that goes beyond the external, you get some really great stuff.

So what language would you use to require parity between making and breaking the consumer relationship? You can always construct situations where a rule is genuinely ambiguous, construct situations where the counter-party is held to an unreasonable standard, or the company is risk-averse and overreacts, or they hate it so much they engage in malicious compliance, etc. Many error-modes. But that is true for every law, which is why you have case law, and why laws get revised. This happens with every law, because they are ALL ultimately ambiguous, and they can ALL be used by malefactors, and they must change in application over time with society, technology and all the rest.

What bothers me most is that these companies are actively deviating from the ordinary, obvious, symmetrical path in order to fleece customers. So to comply with the law is really to stop going out of their way to commit petty, pervasive, stochastic fraud against their customers. That is, it doesn't require positive action so much as negative action. Which makes it even less objectionable.

The other day I went to cancel Comcast. And you know what? I first logged into my acount. From there I could literally do everything instantly - sign up, add services, upgrade, everything - but I couldn't cancel. There was no button, no link, no wording. I had to Google it. And it was a phone number hidden on their website that was business hours only. And I called it and spent ~10 minutes cancelling my service. Comcast had to ideate, design, implement, staff, build organization around this behavior. Its transparently wrong, it's too common, and it's a practice that should be stopped.

There's a funny thing when people don't like something where they can intentionally misunderstand it or impart artificial complexity onto it painting a picture like the rule is hard to comply with. I suppose to variation of a straw man argument. I honestly don't think this is one is hard to understand at all. If you can sign up through the web you should be able to cancel through the web. If you can sign up through the phone you should be able to cancel through the phone. Companies knowingly an intentionally make it harder to cancel than to sign up for obvious reasons that have nothing to do with doing right by the consumer. This is a very good law and it should be adopted everywhere.

It may be time to revisit cosmopolitan (https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan) and redbean (redbean.dev - although the tls certs are expired and it seems scrubbed off of github).

The qualification "on paper" was important, and seems to have been lost on you. BTW democracy itself is not okay - backsliding is rampant across the world, as are education scores, and the one commonality is the internet. The problem with America specifically is that we do have a lot of money, a lot of power and so the destruction we specifically can cause is much greater than, say, Turkey or the UK.

It's worse than an embarrassment - it is an indictment of democracy itself. It is difficult to imagine a people - on paper the richest, most educated and healthiest in the history of the world - intentionally choosing a real villain as their duly-elected leader. They elected a man whose outrages, corruptions, selfishness, malice and outright crimes are so egregious and obvious that the problem becomes organizing so long a list into a workable taxonomy. But he's not done this alone - SCOTUS is in his pocket and truly made him above the law. The Republicans have enabled him by staying silent and riding on his coattails - the most "principled" of them have retired. Media is consolidated and owned by the oligarchs he calls friends. He has a personal paramilitary force (ICE) roaming the streets, killing people, and who will be "observing" the mid-term elections.

The root of the problem is in the collective mind of Americans. We are the problem - we've been hacked to be both stupid and proud of that stupidity, to cease recognizing "character" or "virtue" as a signal, to cease caring about reality that doesn't support opinions that were installed on us, like malware, or anything really except entertainment. Because that's the ONE thing we do get out of all this - we get to be entertained. How funny when he says outlandish things like immigrants are eating the cats, eating the dogs! How hilarious (and macho!) when he brags about grabbing women. How wonderful it is to see the discomfiture of the libs when he parrots Nazi propaganda or when he encouraged the Proud Boys to storm the capital to overturn his loss, and then his lackeys claimed it either didn't happen or was a false flag. "Hang Mike Pence!" is what an obese, fentanyl- and TikTok-addicted mind thinks is doing something! And hey, you can say "retard" again without getting canceled.

I've got kids and I'm terrified for them.

Isn't the correct vehicle when in such a position called a "loan"?

The question seems rhetorical but I think there are two reasons in some combination. First is it there is some awareness lag here. That lag can be on the producer and consumer side. Software enterprises are pretty slow to adopt new things and slow to try new things so they might only be aware of openai and Claude as options. Plus there are some scariness because deep seek is a Chinese model and therefore export restricted - never mind that there are American in European providers.

The other reason is more interesting. Maybe the frontier providers think that price performance is irrelevant in light of very powerful frontier models that can start the RSI loop and or a huge displacement of work and a winner take all economic situation. After all if frontier providers earn everyone's money then you won't have any money to spend on any model 100x cheaper or not.

Personally, I'd make ownership of such bunkers illegal. Make them have some skin in the game.

Your post resonates, and yet nostalgia is a powerful force. Was life ever really good? After all, there were issues even during peak post-war Americana from civil rights unrest to Cold War "you could be nuked any day now" anxiety.

OTOH institutions were actually strong, and wealth-inequality not-that-bad prior to the 1980's.... Personally, I think SCOTUS and Citizens United are the root cause of recent decline. Money-in-politics has made inept, corrupt gerontocracy unassailable and safe in their unaccountable malfeasance. A revolution is needed, how sad a fentanyl- and social-media-addled American public picked an even more corrupt old man to fix a corrupt old man problem.

Sturgeon's law will need to be revised in the AI age.

I think it was actually less than that. I was doing something else too in another agent.

Sure, but I'm not interested in learning about running cpp, installing CUDA, finding the right URLs for downloading llama weights. It's the best 50 cents I've spent in 20 years.

You inspired me to try Pi out - so far it's worked flawlessly. Plugged it into OpenRouter and ~$.50 of Deepseek later I've installed llama.cpp and Llama 3.1. The local model doesn't work with Pi yet (and I know it will be bad and slow even if it does) but I'm curious to see what you can do on an 8GB consumer GPU these days...

Unless something big changes we're heading toward a period of unprecedented capital concentration, even more than we have now which is extreme. There will be a few winners out of the current frontrunners who own all non-physical human-like labor. Owning a few tens of shares in those companies will be generational wealth, so it makes sense more money is flowing into the stock market and into tech stocks in particular.

Dead Man's Walk was the best of the rest...but it even it was flawed, with all the brutality of Lonesome Dove without the beautiful interstitial moments.

I recently reread Neuromancer and I don't get why people think it's so prophetic. The real world is shaped by ubiquitous smartphones and surveillance capitalism and social media feeds. Gibson predicted none of that and not even close. Instead he predicted all kinds of things that never came to be, like neural interfaces consumer space stations. He didn't even predict income inequality - Case is in Chiba City for a very specific reason and for all we know it's quite unique. Even his predictions around the internet are way off because as far as I can tell the only medium that explains how it works in his book is telepathy - literally no one ever mentions or cares about physical connectivity, and there's no mechanism for Case to get online without repairing his nervous system. Which of course makes no sense if you could just look at a screen. The cultural aspects are way off although very atmospheric- the smoking the paper newspapers pay phones.... I think the only thing that it shaped was the cyberpunk aesthetic, which is as fundamentally retro-futuristic and silly as steampunk.

Isn't it called Stories of your life and other stories? Ted Chiang is my favorite living science fiction author. Everything I've read by him ranges from very good to sublime.

I attempted infinite jest and really tried to like it but I hated it. The prose is extremely smart, interesting and insightful and wildly connective. But the overall tone is so oppressively nihilistic I decided life's too short and put it down.

Also read Lonesome Dove this year, also my first Western. I'd watched the amazing miniseries I thought it was great. I'm honestly not sure the book has much over the miniseries which is a rare statement.

If you liked Lonesome Dove and attempted to read the prequel and sequels I strongly recommend against it.

I'm not sure this makes sense for most people who watch a series once and then never again. Physical media makes sense for movies and shows that you'll watch multiple times. So you might buy Firefly, but not Reacher (please, not Reacher). With kids it makes particular sense - kids love watching the same thing over and over (I'm not sure why). If Wreck It Ralph was on VHS it'd be worn out by now...

Wonderful. I'd be curious to read a spinoff Just-So story about how "ledgers" and "double-entry accounting" came to be. Similarly about stocks and bonds, derivatives and hedge funds.

We criticize what we control, rightly. I think heads should roll for this massive fuckup. Instead we get whataboutism, jingoistic compliance, and the default, helpless apathy. We hold ourselves to a higher standard than Hamas terrorist and Islamist mullahs, and we should. But because that's not happening it's undermining the very justification for such conflicts. It's just one monster versus another now.