possiblydrunk

Dammit! I was hoping for advice on improving and maintaining my backyard shed. My shed is not a means, it is an end. And it, too, brings me peace and joy and sometimes despair or a great laugh. Sometimes I even apply principles from work (but orthogonally) to development of my shed.

Nitpicky comment. The article says > "We call this the “light and shade” of AI: the same capabilities that lead to > benefits also produce harms. The two sides are entangled."

Why not call it a "double-edged sword" or something else? Light and shade are opposites but not necessarily two products from the same tool. It just irks me.

Nicely done! Scale matters. If you make something big enough relative to its expected size, it will impress and captivate, even if it's simple. General observation, not that the construction here was by any means simple.

Fair assessment, but you seem to love "creating" rather than "programming", not that there's anything wrong with that! Pondering the merits of AI has made me realize the opposite -- I love the process and challenge of creating (the programming) even more than the final product. AI is undoubtedly helpful, but when it solves my problem for me I'm not nearly as satisfied? as if I'd solved it myself. It's like copy-pasting an answer from StackOverflow, but for a whole program. I doubt my employer will share my feelings, and I'll have to use increasingly more AI to keep up the productivity.

Optimization usually trades complexity for speed. Complexity hinders debugging and maintenance. Don't optimize unless you have to and not before you know where the bottleneck is. Straightforward common sense advice as long as hardware is not persistently constraining.

Inevitability implies determinism and assumes complete knowledge. Forecasts of inevitable things are high probability guesses based on the knowledge at hand. Their accuracy is low and becomes lower as the level of detail increases. The plethora of wrong guesses get less attention or are forgotten and right ones are celebrated and immortalized after the fact.

It's like a protocol handshake, of course. Why transmit information until you've established that the connection works? Consider it a text modem :)

I had the privilege of designing a small 4 office space exactly like this for our small bioinformatics developer core. It was beautiful and worked very well. Then the company's legal department decided Legal would benefit more from it and kicked us out. It goes back to how much a company values its developers.

So when Google Glass came out, people using them were "Glassholes" because of the ability to record surreptitiously, albeit for a very short period. And there was no mistaking Glass. Meta's look normal and I doubt the LED indicator will draw enough attention this time around. Plus as others have noted, by the time you notice it's already too late and anyway the onus is on you to ask the wearer to stop. And this is worse, as it streams directly to social media. There should be some (legal) way to jam these devices within a certain proximity radius.

The best we can do is infer. We can't even know for sure what goes on in others of our own species -- we either accept what they say or infer what they might be experiencing based on our own experiences and the fact we're so similar. The further we get away from things "like us", communication falls away as does inferring based on similarity. I mean, how do you know that we even experience/"see" the same color when we both see something orange -- we agree on calling whatever we see as "orange"; but is my "orange" the same as yours? Consciousness is fascinating!

Cosmicomics is excellent. A beautiful blend of science and fantasy. So poetic.

I look stupid, but wearing blue-blocking yellow lens glasses while driving at night has helped deal with the blinding glare.

Engaging in activities you feel you have control over, in general, will make you happier.

Wow, that's like banning a photorealist because their work looks too much like a photograph.