gensym

I wish we (the people who contributed to the sum total of human knowledge up until 2020) had strengthened our defenses against these weirdos stealing everything so they could package it up and sell it back to us for the last few years we can make a living.

Growing up in rural Illinois in the 1980s meant a large number of the books I read came from places other than bookstores.

We did have a Waldenbooks in the mall that was 45 minutes away that we went to 4x/year, but the local library was tiny and I read everything worth reading there probably before I was 10.

The local grocery store had a small section of mass-market paperbacks, and it was my primary place to get books. I know it had lots of Stephen King novels, and I think my first copy of Dune may even have come from there.

(Hardcovers were something that libraries had, not anything normal people would buy, as far as I knew.)

Dry can be good for wines - apparently, a little stress causes plants to produce more fruit (I guess the intuition is that if the plant thinks it might die, it's time to try to reproduce), and water in particular can dilute the flavors of the grape. A winemaker friend of mine was complaining when we get rain here right before harvest time a month or so ago because it's going to lead to a lower quality year.

Temecula resident checking in... yes, it does.

It gets hot here, but Temecula gets a breeze from the ocean that makes it somewhat tolerable for growing grapes. The wines were tend to be the high-alcohol variety (think cabs and zins) because those are what grow better in the heat.

Most of the wines here aren't that good, but the wineries are more the attraction because they're beautiful and a short drive from LA, SD, or Palm Springs. Popular for weddings and bachelorette parties.

(There are some wineries here doing interesting things but if I'm buying wine to consume at home I'm usually looking for other regions than my backyard).

Came to the comments to see if anyone was talking about Becky Chambers - thank you for not disappointing me! I picked up Monk and Robot with an intention to save it for an upcoming vacation, but started reading the first few pages early and couldn't put it down. I'm really looking forward to her next book in October.

> Please stop with the black and white thinking, the doomers and the e/acc people might as be the same person with a different colored hat with how uncritically they think.

I couldn't agree more. You seem to have assumed that I'm some e/acc advocate. I'm not. I think AI as it is being developed is likely to make the world much worse.

Among the concerns I have:

  - bad actors using it to do bad things (hacking, bioweapons, etc).
  - the way AI enables mass surveillance. 
  - erosion of creative expression and human connection (i.e., your "brainless simps" comment)
  - concentration of wealth and power
  - an eval going sideways ("uh... we were testing to see if it would kill the simulated humans with simulated drones and it accidentally got into the real drones...")

These things are very different than the doomer religion of "RSI makes god that will kill us all", and I think think the framing is important.

We have new evidence that both OpenAI and Anthropic are doing a complete shit job of supervising their eval runs, and we need to be calling for accountability and oversight of what they're doing rather than cower in fear of what a hypothetical future god they are conjuring up might do.

Someone's never met the Windows File Copy dialog.

"RSI" simply means the tool is used to improve the capabilities of the tool. (And then the improved tool can then, in theory, improve further, and so on, at least if we live in a fantasyland where constraints and bottlenecks do not exist). I have a a harness skill that I run at the end of each coding session to review the skills used in the session and identify any ways they could have been improved. Technically, that is RSI, but I don't think it's in any danger of turning godlike any time soon.

It is one of those terms, like "instrumental convergence" and "orthogonality thesis" that makes an everyday concept appear technical and inaccessible in order to add the appearance of rigor to the doomer religion.

Yeah, good point, I remember the first time I travelled to countries that default to water and wondering how to use the pitcher they had in public toilets, and I know some ultralight backpackers who just use a smartwater bottle with no attachment.

But for someone starting out, I do think having something to propel the water upwards helps a bit.

Not the original commenter, but in my view as a crusty old software engineer, the reason to learn how transistors is because they're interesting and the key to how all computation is implemented. Once you learn how transistors work, you can learn how logic gates work. And then how CPUs and memory work. Bit by bit, computers stop being magic boxes and start being something built from technologies you understand.

Now, for most software careers (including my own), that knowledge isn't directly practical. BUT, the most important things for a successful, fulfilling career are curiosity and a willingness to dive into subjects _without_ necessarily knowing how (or even if) that knowledge will yield practical applications. That drive is what's going to lead to insights and breakthroughs over your career that wouldn't happen if you just let abstractions be abstractions.

I hit it whenever doing anything related to security. Auditing code, probing systems, investigating suspicious user activity, etc.

I would guess that it's hard to compete with Google without a consumer component. Most enterprises already have contracts and policies with Google, so anything driven from the top-down is likely to prefer Google.

(And failing that, there was a real risk for OpenAI to be the default for enterprises.)

To defeat that, you need to frontline employees the chance to experience better tooling and models which is where the subsidized subscriptions come in.