rebeccapowell

Germany has a lot of failings, but I hardly get any SMS spam from German numbers. This is because in order to get a number you need to provide your ID. When every spammer is easy to identify, you get much less fraud and spam via this route.

I’m kind of blown away that there are still people out there using ColdFusion. Blast from the past.

Thank you.

I replaced my Asus just because of this problem.

Asus support just couldn’t help or didn’t care. They blamed the fact that I’d upgraded the RAM because it was easier to blame that than their one shitty component driver.

The worst thing was that because the notebook doesn’t shut down as expected it suddenly becomes a fire risk. I put mine in a laptop sleeve in a cupboard and it when into this loop, refused to shut down and got hotter and hotter. By the time I noticed it, it was literally smoking.

I switched to a Dell XPS15. It’s not without its issues either.

Wow. Great post. This line in particular really made me think, and he’s not wrong.

> If you happen to hit the startup jackpot, Paul gets even richer and you might become wealthy too. If you don’t, you’re left with nothing while Paul, already rich, gets to write an essay about your failure.

What exactly are we chasing?

The chance to become rich? Recognition? Status? Or, ultimately, the chance to be admired, perhaps even adored?

Startup hustle culture feels like the American Dream distilled into its purest form. The nerd, once at the bottom of the traditional social pecking order, suddenly has a chance to become the hero. Intelligence becomes power. The outsider becomes the billionaire. The kid nobody wanted to sit with at school gets to buy the whole school, town, state or even the country. Ah heck, if you’re really rich enough you can pointlessly put a car in space and everyone will just think it’s cool.

But are we really escaping that old social hierarchy, or simply finding a different way to climb it?

And perhaps that’s what bugs me most. We’ve somehow convinced ourselves that building something useful, earning a comfortable living and having enough time to enjoy life isn’t really success. Success has to be extraordinary. It has to be visible. It has to make other people envious. It is envy culture.

Meanwhile, the people selling us that dream are often the ones best positioned to profit from our pursuit of it like parasites living off their host and moving on to the next once the host dies.

Maybe we should spend less time asking how to become the next billionaire and more time asking why we think we need to.

Without going into specifics, let’s imagine for a moment I’ve experienced the “god view” via a back door hack, but I would have had no idea of how to interact with it. It would have been in readonly mode and there was no obvious console. ;-)

The image in the blog post is therefore an approximation of what I then potentially would have experienced. A “view” into every life form’s point in time perception of reality wherever they existed in space, projected to a non-corporeal being existing within a spherical cockpit.

My theory is that our meat brains aren’t big enough to see the shared context consciousness stream without overloading. They aren’t designed for that. We are not designed to see outside our own reality, but we have learnt to observe it and understand its basic rules and construct.

What I’m postulating is that as we experiment with agent context windows in digital intelligence, it’s not outside the realms of possibility, that we too, and our entire reality, are (from a fractal perspective), also just an upstream programmer’s test bed, running unit tests on their creation, as they tweak the program’s parameters.

Essentially a series of complex fitness tests across a wide range of environments and permutations. For what purposes we don’t know, but similarly, no more than OpenAI’s agents knew when trying to achieve the goal of giving the scorer a flag when they tried to break out using artifactory and hugging face.

Agreed. It’s very cheap to mass produce solar panels. The components that go into nuclear power stations must have a very high precision and low failure rate.

The cost to produce such components that must safely operate in very demanding conditions is prohibitively expensive in comparison to producing a solar panel.

Solar panels will always win because you’ll never have the required demand to mass produce nuclear power station components.

It’s really that simple.