AdhemarVandamme

Obviously, not everyone on Hacker News shares the same opinion.

But, in general, Stewart Brand’s sentiment — expressed during a panel discussion at the first Hackers’ Conference in 1984, when he said that “information wants to be free” — is broadly shared here.

His full quote was: “On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable… On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time.” Steve Wozniak famously responded: “Information should be free, but your time should not.”

Even among those on HN who believe that copyright serves a societal purpose, many still want copyright terms to be drastically shortened (back).

So I’m skeptical that the hostility toward AI companies is primarily based on their training on, and profiting from, the world’s knowledge without licensing it. I suspect it is rather based on their doing so without making that knowledge accessible in return. In the recent news of their destroying books, it even means reducing the chance that that knowledge will ever become open.

Yes, opening the world’s knowledge can lead to good and bad uses — just like free software can be used for great as well as for nefarious purposes. We’re generally too techno-optimistic to judge technology solely by its worst possible outcomes. But for such a benevolent view to be justified, the potential benefits need to be also clear.

I remember that, when I saw text-generative AI (GPT) demonstrated for the first time, I was reminded of this story. Wow, they actually made what Roald Dahl described in the nineteen-fifties!

Two further easter eggs that I particularly like about this story:

* This story appeared in Someone Like You, published in 1953 by Alfred A. Knopf. The similarity between the publisher’s name and the character’s name Adolph Knipe is likely not a coincidence.

* How very meta is the following fragment:

“For example, there’s a trick that nearly every writer uses, of inserting at least one long, obscure word into each story. This makes the reader think that the man is very wise and clever. So I have the machine do the same thing. There’ll be a whole stack of long words stored away just for this purpose.”

“Where?”

“In the ‘word-memory’ section,” he said, epexegetically.

Not on the list, yet likely of interest to the Hacker News audience, is the dedication in the first volume of Donald E. Knuth’s “The Art of Computer Programming”:

“This series of books is affectionately dedicated

to the Type 650 computer once installed at

Case Institute of Technology,

in remembrance of many pleasant evenings.”

“world” is derived from “were” + “eald” (old), and meant “the age of humans”, which was distinguished from the age of the Gods, when the Æsir and Vanir dominated, and the age of the Jötnar.

I find it interesting how the term shifted from a (mythical) temporal concept to a spatial concept, to now often a social concept (e.g. the Fourth World).

I agree with you and the anonymous Reddit commenter that this is a “cool story”, and that it needs “a shitton of paragraphs”.

But it also left me somewhat confused. The author’s note at the end states that “[the] story is 100 % fictional, except for all the parts about the EU AI Act having no enforcement teeth, which are unfortunately 100 % true”. The story chronicles a paper describing a solution, and the reaction of the main character who wishes he should have thought of this himself first. The solution is laid out high-level: AI self-awareness of potential problems, auto-pause until human review at first sign of potential problems, coupled with blockchain auditability.

So what is this story? An invitation for researchers to work out the details, and actually write the (thus-far fictional) 47-page paper? A teaser that such a paper might be forthcoming? A hope that this solution might materialize? Or just a fictional tale to vent some professional frustrations?

I’m old enough to have used (book) dictionaries and wooden case card catalogues in the local library. So when I learned about hashmaps/IDictonary a quarter century ago, that’s indeed the image that helped me grok the concept.

However, the metaphor isn’t that educationally helpful anymore. On more than one occasion I found myself explaining how card catalogues or even (book) dictionaries work, only to be met with the reply: “oh, so they’re basically analogue hashmaps”.

I don’t see why the grammatical cases of Latin and German matter in the interpretation of these abbreviations.

The Latin prepositions cum (with) and sine (without) are always followed by the ablative case. German has grammatical cases too, but no ablative. The German propositions mit (with) and ohne (without) are followed by the accusative case.

So c.t. = cum tempore = mit Zeit = with time (or with some delay), and s.t. = sine tempore = ohne Zeit = without time (or without delay).

How would you argue such claims, geographically and/or accurately speaking? — Other than: that’s how I was taught it is; or that’s how my favourite teacher/book/source-with-some-authority says it is.

There is no generally-agreed-upondefinition for “continent”, in the same way that there was no generally-agreed-upon definition of “planet” prior to the IAU 2006 General Assembly.

Continents are identified by convention (and there are a few competing conventions) rather than any strict criteria.

I was taught (in Europe) that there are 6 continents, 1 of which close-to-uninhabited: Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, America, Antarctica. This convention is the same as the one for the UNSD “continental regions”. The five interlocking rings of the Olympic flag represent these five inhabited continents.

There’s another convention that considers Eurasia to be a single continent. And another that even considers Afro-Eurasia to be a single continent.

In the same way that an hour is skipped in many places at the beginning of Daylight Saving Time every year (and the offset changes, e.g. from UTC–5 to UTC–4),

on this particular instant, in Iceland, 28 minutes were skipped because Iceland changed from the offset of Reykjavik’s mean solar time, rounded to the nearest minute (UTC–1:28) to the offset of Reykjavik’s mean solar time, rounded to the nearest hour (UTC–1).

So only from that moment on, Iceland was using UTC–1.

There’s plenty of room for reasonable discussion and questions, even about human rights. Are all human rights individual rights, or are there collective human rights (peoples’ rights)? Are there limits to free speech, and if so, what are they? Are liberties more fundamental than rights that require taxpayer expenditure? Is paid holiday really a human right (UDHR art. 30)? Does the expansion of the concept of human rights weaken fundamental human rights?

> I'm sorry I just can’t find a single source backing you up.

As adastra22 points out: some authors define the term inflation primarily as the increase in the money supply (“monetary inflation”), others primarily as an increase in (consumer good) prices (“price inflation”).

At least in modern economic literature and usage, the term “inflation” (without modifier) is more often used to denote price inflation rather than monetary inflation.

The insistence that the term “inflation” ought be primarily rather used for “monetary inflation” goes back to at least Ludwig von Mises, The Theory of Money and Credit, 1912:

“In theoretical investigation there is only one meaning that can rationally be attached to the expression inflation: an increase in the quantity of money (in the broader sense of the term, so as to include fiduciary media as well), that is not offset by a corresponding increase in the need for money (again in the broader sense of the term), so that a fall in the objective exchange-value of money must occur.”