rhet0rica

The article is definitely synthetic. Toward the end there's a "funny bloopers" section, and it describes the GPT team reporting the round duration to 9 decimal places as a "blooper." It was funny when IBM Watson placed an exact figure for its Final Jeopardy bid, but I don't think extreme precision counts as an out-take... Unless you're an LLM, then maybe it does.

"Pace yourself" is a semi-common English idiom (rarely conjugated, usually an imperative.) It is a gentle way of telling someone not to run/work/eat too quickly, and is typically said when you are concerned they may hurt themselves due to acting hastily.

Without this idiom, "pacing" usually means walking back and forth restlessly, and is intransitive. Had the slogan been, "pacing around the frontier," it would have set a totally different tone, i.e. "patrolling the border." (Occasionally English speakers will make other constructs like "pace the work" (meaning "spread out a large workload over the allotted time instead of rushing through it") that are transitive but these can be understood as variations on "pace yourself" and are somewhat rarer.)

The sleight of hand is that "pace yourself" has come to be an admonishment against recklessness, not a commitment to any particular speed (or lack thereof.) Thus Anthropic can always claim they are meeting the goal of "pacing the frontier," provided they keep giving themselves gold stars for safety. The slogan itself is equivocation; Dario can tell the public they're going to slow down, while also telling their investors that they're going to be prudent. With enough mental gymnastics they could even claim speeding up is in the best interests of AI safety, without abandoning the slogan.

A subreddit devoted to nonsensical gizmos that solve no practical problem.

One that wouldn't mind manually typed page numbers that would have to be adjusted were the document ever updated.

They also inexplicably used Windows 95 Paint to draw a rocket ship during the main video demo.

Of course it does! Really, though, what it really wants to do is make restaurant reservations. The primary concern of AI researchers has always been, and will always be, making restaurant reservations.

Parsing natural language and solving climate change are downstream of making restaurant reservations.

Universal Paperclips should have been about making restaurant reservations.

It's good that you don't have to call it "Muse." That's kind of a weird name for a servant; how exactly is this email-parsing bot inspiring works of art? Perhaps it was re-used from another project.

Perhaps the conclusions simply weren't mooving.

I was thinking of the functions as described by the Common Lisp HyperSpec. Reading it makes me cry.

It is not unreasonable to call that a 'standard library.' The term 'standard library' is often used to describe built-ins.

The age of the CL core functions is a genuine weakness, specifically in terms of performance. No matter how many libraries you download from Quicklisp, they still have to be implemented in something, and if that something is antiquated or clunky, you're essentially asking the compiler to optimize the entire language out of existence to keep up with the state of the art. The same applies to npm, pip, cargo, and all the rest.

That is... honestly an insane reaction. I spent half an hour writing that.

I'm sorry you're scared by em-dashes. They were cool when I was young, alright?

This is an inevitable result of small dataset size. As recently as the start of this year, flagship models struggled with Objective-C unless the target was Apple's latest API. (This is per GNUstep lead dev Gregory Casamento, who has every reason to be an expert in these things.)

The "when" isn't a mystery or gradual in the slightest—we have concrete dates.

The death of the button occurred on October 21, 2010, when Microsoft released Windows Phone 7 to the international market, beginning the Metro UI era.

Apple wouldn't catch up until September 17, 2014, when they unveiled iOS 7, ditching Steve Jobs's beloved skeuomorphism in favor of Jony Ive's signature flat style.

Google followed up on November 12, 2014, with Android 5.0 Lollipop's introduction of Material Design—arguably the least flat of the three, though it wouldn't stay that way forever.

I prefer a more tongue-in-cheek theory than a mere preference for the word's shape. Perhaps "load-bearing" is structurally necessary—if it is ablated, the whole model will collapse!

The road to hell was paved lovingly, foolishly, naïvely, arrogantly, optimistically... load-bearingly?