aj_hackman

If you were able to determine in 5 seconds whether or not a person was a violent jerk, it would take you ~28 years of around-the-clock meetings to assess >= 50% of the current U.S. population, thereby rendering this comment meaningful and true. If you needed a whopping 30 seconds, it would take ~166 years. Better get cracking!

A friend worked on Skype for many years. It's been a massive ball of spaghetti from day 1.

I'd hate to talk to you or be looked at by you.

I enjoyed the 2001 forum post style of this.

Here's another one of my favorites: pulling a huge weed out of soft, loose soil and hearing the crackle of the roots as they come up out of the earth.

Who would pay you? OpenAI has between $600 billion and $1.4 trillion in debt, and no hope for profitability. Anthropic, who have a much more modest $35 billion in debt (by using Sam Altman as a human shield), also has no chance of ever being in the black, pending some freak event.

I'm glad I'm not the only weirdo like this. I dropped an unfathomable $800 on a Jetson AGX Xavier in early 2020 simply because I was obsessed with SBCs at the time and couldn't stop thinking about it. This was before the Raspberry/Orange Pi 5 and Apple Silicon. I still use it as a graphics development workstation.

"The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass, God is waiting for you."

I have offered you a theological counterpoint to your claim, and you may take it or leave it, but you may not call me names and continue in any kind of meaningful dialogue here. It is beneath us both.

"For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven." - Matthew 5:20

Allow me to restate my point: human beings and AI both create via synthesis, but we are the only ones capable of what we could categorize as true original thought or creativity. It could be argued that nothing we do as humans is truly original or creative either, but I would counter that with the claim that an LLM could not have created any element of the society and culture that gave birth to LLMs. Maybe in six more months.

I could make a robotic picture coloring machine with truly superhuman capabilities - picking only the most beautiful color combinations and staying 100% in the lines while finishing entire murals in < 1 second. However, if you need a completely new and original image rendered, the machine is of only partial utility for you. It is very well possible that your cure for cancer (if that's even feasible) or whatever else you desire is a completely new picture.

We have these breathless conversations about the new AI frontier at the peril of losing sight of reality and our own human potential.

You forget that these models are still only interpolating between human-generated datapoints fed to them. They cannot reason beyond the data they've been given, so unless everything you want to create with AI is a synthesis of prior art, you're back to relying on the stone-age human brain that created AI in the first place.

As outlined in John 1:1, Jesus is in fact God himself, and God is something far greater and more magnificent than a humanist. The message of the Bible is a total inversion of humanism, teaching us to believe in God alone rather than ourselves for deliverance from the necessary and ultimately temporary problems of evil and suffering. It's full of stories of human beings attempting to fix things on their own and failing spectacularly (which is ironic given the history of the church).

This doesn't account for the potential instability of modern technology. If you have an efficient electric range and your neighbors are still burning wood when the power goes out, you're in dutch. This is relevant to the AI discussion, as there is still a class of people doing things "the old way", and their skills might come in clutch for a society that's let itself atrophy in convenience.