mr-wendel

And yet it reads better than quite a bit of non-fiction and invokes some interesting questions. Maybe its worth asking yourself what qualities in writing can make a “fake” story engage so many peoples interest? It’s also a bit odd to call it a fake when it’s never pitched as being true.

There are some good points here, but I think the take away is incorrect. Don't stop arguing with people... change your strategy away from winning. Much of the advice given still holds.

A well-conducted argument serves important purposes.

- It flushes out good counter arguments to consider, or at least valuable historical context to help build empathy.

- You can set a better example for others to follow, as we all have this nearly irresistible urge.

- You're quite unlikely to change the mind of the debaters (yours included, hat tip to Dumblydorr's comment!) BUT you might sway someone on the fence who is a witness.

- Finally, I'm a firm believer in the idea that it's nearly impossible to change our mind in the moment, and only by taking a public (even if with just one other person) stance and holding it seriously (even if... ESPECIALLY if it's a ridiculous stance) can we move past it. If the idea perpetuates itself forward only in your head, you'll never dislodge it.

Don't stop arguing, but argue with humility, style and respect.

Maybe a low value comment in the context of the article, but structurally I think it's a great comment that strikes a nice balance between curiosity, doubt, hope, and concern. I think a huge amount of SWE resources are tied up in the entertainment (broadly speaking) industry that drives an astonishing amount of money but little social utility.

I think it also touches nicely on what appears to be the take away of the article: people feel powerless to stop what may be a massive misallocation of resources that is only barely successful enough to avoid self-imploding.

My bias is heavily pro-AI, but I find articles like this to be much more informative and interesting than anything that aligns with my views. I'm extremely skeptical of voting-in positive change, and while "if you can't beat them, join them" seems practical in theory it also feels extraordinarily narrow in reality. I'm still doing all that I can to be proficient in adopting AI (also driven by self-interest in assistive/accessibility capabilities).

The result? I'm will be unsurprised by (but unsympathetic to) crudely aimed vigilantism (e.g. earth libration front style stuff).

“Engaging in” isn’t the same thing as doing. It was meant to imply a degree of separation from the act itself. Statements like “I will murder your family unless” are exactly that. Obviously you would never do anything remotely close to that.

Except... stating who is a better person is exactly what you just did. I've never attempted to compare myself to others. I've stated that I think negative behavior inhibits growth, even when done to nobody, and positive behavior sets you up for additional successes elsewhere.

I've no desire to try to change your mind. I can't. But clearly you do care because you've been both quite defensive and assertive in tackling opposing points of view.

My hope is to inspire others to be more creative in their use of AI. It interesting (but not exactly unsurprising) that prompt politeness can inhibit accuracy. Surely there are lessons here than can translate into how help other people out through clear, direct language that avoids the pitfalls of being rude or coddling.

No, I don’t think it’s going to make you a meaner, more negative person. There is no tangible harm being done.

I genuinely believe it’s preventing you from becoming a better person by engaging in psychopathic behavior. If I were writing the things you describe in this thread I would be ashamed to have my loved ones read over my shoulder.

You could not pay me enough money to spend 10 minutes a day to write that stuff, even under full certainty it went into the void with no association back to me.

"Treating a machine like a human" is a two-party interaction. Of course the layers of matrix multiplication is unaffected by this, but I think that we are not. It's a great opportunity to exercise consistency and dedication to the beauty humanity is capable of and this extends to the entire gradient of conscious/sentient entities.

It's as silly (to me) to argue that it's degrading to people to treat non-people well. It seems self-obvious that the inverse is true. It benefits the do-er of the deed and makes it that much easier to spread good will when applied to situations where it doesn't matter on the other end. It shows good stewardship as well.

I'd also make the argument that as inference becomes a feedback loop into training, it only reinforces that we're probably going to benefit from future models ingesting data containing unnecessary politeness.

Gotta plug nightride.fm as an online station that is fully fueled by artist-submitted, non-AI music. It's all 80s/synth-inspired with one main channel, but there are more niche channels (e.g. chillwave is a popular one) too. The site itself is also a real pleasure to stumble upon.

I'm not affiliated with it, nor am I against AI-generated music. Just a huge fan who admires the hard work people pour into making the scene work.

This is very reminiscence of the whole LMGTFY (let me google that for you) phase of things. At a job in a while back, when front-level support reached out to senior staff for help the two golden rules were:

  1. Do NOT answer right away. If they wait, there is a good chance the next message is "Oh wait, I figured it out" (e.g. they googled it finally)

  2. Send them a google link w/ the search term showing the first result.

Granted, this was a bit tongue-in-cheek and we did a LOT of trainings to help facilitate actual learning. Still, it was far too easy for senior staff time to get burned up by folks making minimal effort to think for themselves so friction remained.

While the site makes a good point, they miss the most important point, IMO, which is inferable by the example of a good response. The good response is better principally because it contains business-contextual information, which AI can never provide without proper prompting (and if you know to provide that, you prob don't need the AI answer):

  "We need pub/sub for the notifications feature."

I'm not anti-AI, but good answers include historical business context to explain decision making. Sometimes if you're lucky, code comments contain this in relevant sections :).

Here is my beef. I'm pro-VPN. The ability to gain more control over who can track your online communication is a net-positive to me, personally and philosophically. However, I can't justify their existence from a utilitarian perspective.

Practically speaking, when I look at the actual number of people affected by VPN I estimate that:

  - Very low: Protecting political activists and dissidents
  - Low: Circumvention of overzealous blocking and surveillance
  - Low-to-Medium: Hiding abusive and malicious behavior
  - Medium: Additional layers of trust and network security (mostly business related, which makes it tangental to the consumer VPN market)
  - VERY High: Enabling piracy and avoiding geo-content restrictions (no judgment on good-vs-bad, just asserting magnitude)

I believe that management at VPN companies are extremely pro-consumer protection (if only because their cash flows depend on this). I absolutely trust the system and network administrators. They don't want to track or look at the data flows because the odds of seeing something nasty is quite high. I have a fair amount of professional industry experience to back this up.

So... conundrum! If I take the position that piracy-related stuff isn't a net drag and that business VPN use is fundamentally a separate beast, VPNs in this context are hard to justify.

Let me add more! PIPES.

It's a bit more abstract and useful than "character-selectable" when viewed at the byte-level abstraction.

The ability to chain together utilities with no complicated data structures is extremely flexible. One of my favorite current use-cases is using FFmpeg to process RTSP streams that send output (e.g. high quality stream for recording, low quality low FPS for processing, max quality low FPS for stills, etc) to separate file descriptors. FFmpeg doesn't care whats on the other end (e.g. redirect to file, read via Python, etc) due to these lovely abstractions.

Reliability translates directly to scriptability. Yes, you can create monsters, but through the use of sub-shells and pipes I think it's the fastest, cheapest, most concise way to pull off some really cool multiprocessing tricks.

Hard disagree.

Maybe there is a time for difficult outreach, but recommending someone to celebrate a person (and one of the most significant people in their life) whose primary emotion is disgust in response to unchosen personal attributes is remarkably insensitive. No need to salt those wounds.

Let's hope things get better for anyone in this circumstance, but IMO it is the parent's job to make an attempt.

--

Nobody wants to or tries to be this kind of person, so here is my shout out today to the moms who DID find a way to work through the challenge of accepting a child whose sexuality, spirituality, politics, etc. are different than they hoped for.

True that, and therein lies the difficulty in generalizing. No clue what the exact situation is here (Vietnam, perhaps?), but at the human-to-human level I'm glad for it and hope it brought her strength.

Rather than try to score points for team X (or against team Y), I'll quote one of my favs. Please generalize as needed to suite your perspective.

  "I don't get all choked up about yellow ribbons and American flags. I see them as symbols, and I leave them to the symbol-minded." -George Carlin

My pet theory is that network protocols will evolve to require some kind of certificate-based signing to uniquely identify individuals and groups. Hardware and operating systems will have legal mandates to enforce this. Penalties for carrying unsigned traffic will be stiff.

The “upsides” will be plentiful! User verification schemes will be streamlined like never before. If you think there are downsides… well, just think of the kids, damn it!