Recent submissions

Comment · 1 year ago
This feels very similar to the register used on placards in contemporary art museums to me so I don't think there's reason to suspect an LLM.
Comment · 1 year ago
"remix culture" required skill and talent. Not everyone could be Girl Talk or make The Grey Album or Wugazi. The artists creating those projects clearly have hundreds if not thousands of hours of practice differentiating them from someone who just started pasting MP3s together in a DAW yesterday.

If this is "just another tool" then my question is: does the output of someone who has used this tool for one thousand hours display a meaningful difference in quality to someone who just picked it up?

I have not seen any evidence that it does.

Another idea: What the pro generative AI crowd doesn't seem to understand is that good art is not about _execution_ it's about _making deliberate choices_. While a master painter or guitarist may indeed pull off incredible technical feats, their execution is not the art in and of itself, it is widening the amount of choices they can make. The more and more generative AI steps into the role of making these choices ironically the more useless it becomes.

And lastly: I've never met anyone who has spent significant time creating art react to generative AI as anything more than a toy.

Comment · 2 years ago
I tried zed for a few weeks because I'm generally sympathetic to the "use a native app" idea vs Electron. I generally liked it and its UX but:

1. VSCode is pretty damn fast to be honest. Very rarely is my slowdown in my work VSCode loading. Maybe I don't open very large files? Probably 5k lines of typescript at most.

2. Integration with the Typescript language server was just not as good as VSCode. I can't pin down exactly what was wrong but the autocompletions in particular felt much worse. I've never worked on a language server or editor so I don't know what's on zed/VSCode and what's on the TS language server.

Eventually all the little inconveniences wore on me and I switched back to VSCode.

I will probably try it again after a few more releases to see if it feels better.

Comment · 2 years ago
Isn't the reverse of God In The Gaps just as ridiculous? Just because we have been able to use a materialistic, scientific approach to get this far doesn't necessarily mean it will keep working forever on everything.

Using your metaphor at the end: "There's dragons just over the next hill" and "There haven't been dragons so far so there will never be dragons" are both just guesses.

Comment · 2 years ago
It's hard to ignore when it takes up my entire screen and I have to scroll to see anything else. AI artwork is popping up everywhere and I don't think it looks as cool as people seem to think. It comes off incredibly tacky.
Comment · 2 years ago
Hello yes it is I Mr. Big Business CEO and could someone call up Fox and tell them to run an article that says "more money doesn't make employees happy, returning to office does", thanks.
Comment · 3 years ago
1. Not _every_ human is capable of creating a false dataset. 2. No human is capable of creating 1000 false datasets in a day or whatever.

The same reason it's cool that AI can make a recipe for a cake or draw a picture of a boat is the same reason it's bad when it can do bad things. It's not as if people were not capable of making recipes for cakes or drawing pictures of boats. It's just now _anyone_ can rapidly do those thing on demand +/- some efficacy determined by the sophistication of the AI.

Comment · 3 years ago
> Before we can select a function to convert a string into a number we must first pick a numerical type

Except this has literally nothing to do with static typing and everything to do with whether or not the language you're using cares about numeric types.

For instance in typescript you'd just have `number` as the type. You could conceive of a dynamically typed language like python where adding a u8 to a u32 would cause a runtime error. In which case it sure would be nice to have the compiler tell you to convert before you called a function.

>The other problem is that when you write such trivial programs

If only I had a career writing trivial programs that would make a lot of things easier.

Comment · 3 years ago
I've dabbled with Svelte and find it pleasant to use and I think this is a step in the right direction. The main reason I ultimately keep coming back to React is I find the compile-time alterations to the semantics of my code difficult to reason about.

I've spent a lot of time building an intuition for how Javascript code executes and how I can combine its primitives to make reasonable abstractions. The fact that this _looks_ like Javascript but suddenly operates differently is almost more confusing to me than if Svelte was just a non-Javascript language.

React's `useState`, `useMemo`, etc. are perhaps more verbose but they're just functions. Dependency arrays are messy but it's fairly easy to extrapolate their behavior from a basic description.

Comment · 3 years ago
If we boil the definition of of socialism vs capitalism into "who owns the means of production?" Capitalism answers "a small group of people by natural right" and socialism answers "everyone, collectively". These definitions leave you with the only alternative being "a different small group of people" (arguably the USSR did model this, ergo allegations of "state capitalism"). Given industrial production (assuming no one is advocating for a return to feudalism) it's one or the other, there's a privileged class or there's not.

If you mean why has no one come up with different ideas for _accomplishing_ socialism post-Marx (or Lenin or Mao), well they have. There's all kinds of weird and wild ideas out there. Searchable terms for interesting ideas on organizing society include "participatory economics" and "democratic confederalism".

Comment · 3 years ago
The article even reaches the conclusion that granting more ownership to employees might be a solution. What an idea! You could make a new mode of production out of this.
Comment · 3 years ago
Assuming you mean "Big Bang" in the sense of the beginning of the universe, not necessarily.

>doesn't the fact that the Big Bang happened imply that there was some kind of state-change: from Big Bang is not happening to Big Bang is happening

Language is incredibly bad at describing this because we did not develop it when such a concept as "outside of time" existed. The word "happened" is misleading you I think. If we define "something that happened" as an event with a before and after then the Big Bang did not, by that definition, "happen".

I've had it explained to me that asking "What happened before the big bang?" is akin to asking "What's north of the north pole?"

Comment · 3 years ago
We can safely add plenty of liberal democracies to that list if the criteria is "willing to cause the deaths of millions to realize their political project". At the very least Britain and the US.
Comment · 3 years ago
As the other poster mentioned they're referencing treatment of trans children.

They are also factually incorrect as surgical intervention is not and has never been part of the recommended treatment for children. As such their intentions are either misinformed or malicious.

Comment · 3 years ago
If not having access to "super reactions" or special avatars on Discord make you feel a genuine and affecting sense of envy and self-consciousness I uh... don't know what to tell you. It's some gifs, you just can't post some gifs.

This feels monumentally overblown to me. I don't pay for nitro but I clearly benefit from all the people who do and if they get some fun, silly little perks that's fine.

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