alexwebb2

Yeah, this self-indulgent writing style always irks me. It’s like the journalistic equivalent of smelling your own farts.

> QGIS is trusted by organisations because they know they can contribute back, they can hire contributors for support, training and feature. As a community project, this is something we really want to protect

Ok, so there’s a financial motive here, where they’re worried that allowing more open contributions will diminish the value of their expertise and reduce their employability. To be fair to them, that’s probably true.

So if god himself comes down from the heavens and hands you the answers to major unsolved problems, but doesn’t walk you through them and you’ll have to still put in effort to understand them, then that’s “not contributing”?

My steak is too juicy, my lobster is too buttery, my industry shaking mathematical proofs are coming too quickly

In what world is OpenAI not “genuinely contributing to mathematics”?

I’m getting whiplash from the speed at which people are suddenly accusing them, and AI in general, of not doing enough.

I’m not familiar with A/I, but this sounds pretty damning – the ideological vetting of users in particular seems to discount any sort of neutral utility defense.

I can't get that to load at all. Hug of death, maybe?

Might’ve gotten a temp hold put on it since it’s a perennial repost. I’ve posted it myself a few years back!

It’s a classic, and bears resurfacing occasionally, but it would make sense to flag it for admin approval.

This actually fits quite nicely with the idea that the graph network of humanity has meaningful emergent properties/challenges/phenomena at various densities or subnetwork connectedness thresholds.

It's the same fundamental network problem: the infrastructure that allows unprecedented levels of commerce and ideas and travel will also allow disinformation, plagues, and homogeneity. The double-edged sword of graph density.

Surprised to see this is the only uv reference in the comments!

Feels like an obvious comparison to me, and a very welcome development for the JS ecosystem.

uv made me actually _enjoy_ working in Python again.

> So if your brain was somehow cloned, you'd exist in two places at the same time?

There’d be two Mes – two instantiations of the Me pattern co-occurring. And that would likely be confusing for both of us!

> To illustrate, two instances of a programs can share the exact same binary code (the "pattern") and yet they are separate instances.

Exactly! If we suspend a Docker image, transfer it to a new compatible host machine, and fire it up, we consider it a resumption of the same process (pattern) in a different instance.

Likewise, say we found a mathematical function that would compute the entire state of that Docker image at that moment, and then wiped the image – such that there was no current physical instantiation of it anywhere, on any machine – and subsequently used the function to regenerate it bit for bit.

A dualist would say there’s something fundamentally different about the human analogue of that; that the Mind has a separate existence Elsewhere – and not just in the mathematical sense of patterns not requiring instantiation to still be patterns, since that would apply to all patterns, Minds or not.

As a monist who holds the view that you’re claiming monists can’t legitimately hold, I don’t see any difficulty at all in squaring these ideas:

- there is no separate “stuff” that minds are made out of, no privileged plane of existence specific to minds; minds are just patterns like everything else

- destroying an instantiation of a pattern != destroying the pattern

And speaking of squaring ideas – if I draw a square on a piece of paper, and then light that paper on fire, I haven’t destroyed the concept of a square. I can always draw an identical square on another sheet of paper. If the square had consciousness, it’d be none the wiser.

If your ticket description is large enough to put a dent in your context window, or otherwise end up as a meaningful share of total token expenditure, then something is very, very wrong with your ticket workflow. Nobody needs a 50-page ticket.

> "security through obscurity" has been a well understand fallacy in open source circles for decades

The times, as they say, are a-changin’.

Open software is not inherently more secure than closed software, and never has been.

Its relative security value was always derived from circumstantial factors, one of the most important of which was the combination of incentive and ability and willingness of others in the community to spend their time and attention finding and fixing bugs and potential exploits.

Now, that’s been the case for so long that we all implicitly take it for granted, and conclude that open software is generally more secure than closed, and that security through obscurity falls short in comparison.

But this may very well fundamentally change when the cost of navigating the search space of potential exploits, for both the attacker and the defender, is dramatically reduced along the axes of time and attention, and increased along the axis of monetary investment.

It then becomes a game of which side is more willing to pool monetary resources into OSS security analysis – the attackers or the defenders – and I wouldn’t feel comfortable betting on the defenders in that case.

> The idea that hallucinations are somehow less likely because you're asking meta-questions about LLM output is completely without basis

Not sure who you're replying to here – this is not a claim I made.