bbor
Joined 4 years ago
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Member since
May 6
Recent submissions
Comment · 3 hours ago
For media bosses, copyright is a pseudo-property† right
Regardless, 'I agree with these people I always disagree with are somehow right this time despite acting like they always do' should be a sign that some reflection is needed!
Comment · 1 day ago
Am I miffed that something I've tried multiple times with the latest models has been accomplished here so beautifully, and in LUA (!!!) nonetheless? A little! But it's worth it to know that it is indeed possible...
Great work. I doubt you care, but try not to get caught up in the idea that you might have violated someones god-given property rights by making pretty flowers for fun in the margins of PDFs.
Comment · 1 day ago
I was gonna wax poetic, but I think this explains it pretty well -- the bulletin and the campaign dirs get more usage than the rest of directory combined, I think. I've completely disabled all harness-internal memory mechanisms, as they're too opaque, make weird assumptions about TTL for random one-off comments, and (obv) aren't cross-harness.
~/ai/...
campaigns
dispatch
evidence
reports
scratch
telemetry
worktrees
quarantine
BULLETIN.md
README.mdComment · 2 days ago
I... yes, I know. But see the entirety of my comment above, I guess?
To clarify in good faith: what percentage of Android development do you think went on before 2005 in, let's say, mythical man months. 5%? 1%? Less?
Comment · 2 days ago
Android was made in 2003 by other people.
Comment · 2 days ago
I don't think the question of "good products" is really relevant here; the important aspect is profitable products. And in that arena, nothing beats the money printer!
They used to have a second minimint in AdSense et. al. ("Display Advertising"), but that shrinks by the year economy-wide as the vicious cycle of data tracking, ad blocking, and paywall dodging continues. Now it's a mere $7B[1], compared to $11B for Youtube (technically also Display Advertising but it gets its own segment now, I guess) and $63B from the money printer proper.
[1] Actual report here: https://s206.q4cdn.com/479360582/files/doc_financials/2026/q... Interestingly, display revenues are slightly up! But still, in Google land, "slightly up" is potentially a scandalous failure. Perhaps they settled into better agreements with big publishers ("sell side") after it became clear that they wouldn't actually be punished for having a Display Ads monopoly, despite losing the antitrust case brought by Biden's DoJ.
:(
Comment · 3 days ago
Oh my GOD -- great catch! Maybe the most Paris Marx thing I've ever heard of. You literally just made my day.
I do wonder how these radical skeptics --Paris Marx, Ed Zitron, Emily Bender, Alex Hanna, Arvind Narayanan & Sayash Kapoor, etc.-- will be viewed by posterity, assuming such a thing exists. When the first catastrophe(s) strike, will they just fade into obscurity, or catch some of the blame?
...on second thought, the most likely answer is that they'll just seamlessly slide into a different brand of "Anti-AI"-ism, neither acknowledging nor facing redicule for the fact that they'd have to completely abandon their core arguments to do so. If I die of a molotov thrown in 2029 from someone in this crowd after spending years begging them to look up, I'm gonna be so miffed.
Comment · 3 days ago
This is just another sense of "take X seriously" :). In this context we're assessing the truth of political arguments, not assessing whether those arguments relate to consequential political events.
Comment · 3 days ago
Thanks for the support, RightNutWingJob :) That's a great example of non-linguistic communication!
Comment · 3 days ago
Hmm, not sure how to respond, sorry — that’s the point of the entire comment. No these systems cannot think every possible thought, but neither can humans. We have no reason to think their cognition is unsustainable in a way that ours isn’t.
The end of your response seems to be about fears of “model collapse” from a few years ago, but I am convinced those are strongly oversold. For one thing, there’s no need to gather new training data ever again; the training data for Opus is clearly sufficient for instilling reason, and that’s a sufficient condition for AGI -> RSI -> ASI.
Comment · 4 days ago
“To put me to work that way, without remittance, is a form of slave labor,” said Wolff, professor emeritus of English and winner of the National Medal of Arts.
Yet again, Anthropic is the good guys. Though I think this is just the same story from a while ago but told through a Stanford lens, AFAICT?
Comment · 4 days ago
To me, goals without plans behind them aren't really goals at all
As usual, though, I might just be biased by default towards defending the Python aristocracy; they seem to pretty much always be on the right side of history, even in the little ways!
Comment · 4 days ago
This is one of my favorite topics recently — a bit of a guilty pleasure. Please share other procedural flora growth if you know of examples!
I’ve found it’s a lot, lot harder than I expected, though I’m targeting aroids (monstera, philodendron, pothos, anthurium, etc) rather than trees, which adds the tricky requirement to get the leaves to unfurl naturally from their petioles. Not quite completely discouraged yet though, sadly!
Comment · 4 days ago
Ok my original comment was snarky (apologies to all three mods), but you've raised one of my favorite topics so I can't resist engaging a bit more seriously! In the second clause, that is -- the first is trivially true in some senses and trivially false in others, so it doesn't seem very productive to nail down.
So Chomsky thought of himself as a philosopher of science more than anything, and his life mission is/was to answer a fascinating question: what kind of creatures are we? There's been a growing consensus going back to at least Darwin that we're separated from the rest of Animalia by our "reason" (!= intuition != understanding != judgement != volition), but he helped popularize an old theory[1] that puts it kind of beautifully: human language is only possible in beings capable of producing an infinite set of meaningful outputs in response to a finite input.[2] And so far, that list includes only two definite members: Homo sapiens sapiens, and computer programs built upon large language models.[3]
So all that to say: yes, I think you're wrong; the programmatic ensembles that brought us today's breakthroughs are an "infinitely deep well". As long as we have questions to ask, they are not theoretically constrained from answering them.
Of course, this invites some obvious follow-ups on practicality; even the most impassioned ASI boomer wouldn't argue that the exact ensembles used here could answer every question in the universe. But A) that's possible because some infinities are bigger than others, and B) the exact same caveat applies to humans, whose cognitive capabilities are thoroughly determined by accidents of biology, culture, and episteme. The latter is the thrust of Chomsky's famous debate with Foucault, which is absolutely worth a watch for anyone who hasn't seen it (starting around ~18:00, AFAIR): https://youtu.be/3wfNl2L0Gf8?t=1080
---
TL;DR: I ultimately disagree on both points, yes. In the ways that matter, machines are no more constrained than animals.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_von_Humboldt
[2]: Many animals are capable of communication, often quite complex and fascinating communication at that; even flora and fungi communicate! But language is qualitatively distinct. You may have heard this in the pithy-yet-mindbending sentiment "we've taught many apes to communicate with sign language, but none of them have ever asked a question."
[3]: It's no surprise in hindsight that trying to build better autocorrect got us to AGI; I find it unspeakably tragic that Chomsky never got the chance to see how thoroughly he's been vindicated, in this regard. He had his stroke mere months into the singularity, and had a quite negative view of the approach before then.
Comment · 4 days ago
Yeah it’s just one Millenium problem, no big deal. I was gonna crack quasi-Reimann next year anyway, just hadn’t gotten around to it.
All AI is good for is remixing frontier mathematics, there’s no way it could ever make its own. Right?
https://doering.ai
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