Also, the amount of “ChatGPT is basically AGI already” people in the comments is alarming.

They prob should do a video on this effect as shown by the early ELIZA experiments. That even the smartest people could get fooled by a dumb program. Doubt they will though if they are into EA stuff.

Fwiw, this is also why I -do- think it’s important to talk more frankly about where science is moving towards ala things like FEP or scale free dynamics. An alternative story on things like what energy, computation, and participation really means, is useful, not for prescribing the future, but the opposite: putting ambiguity and the importance of participation back in it.

The current world view, that some how things are cleanly separated and in nice little ontological boxes of capability and shape and form, lead to closed systems delusions. It’s fragile and we know it, I hope. Von Neuman’s “last invention” is wrong because most, unfortunately, most “smart people’s” view of intelligence has become reductive in liu of a bigger picture.

In addition to our sneers, we should want to tell a more robust story about all of these things.

using Hatsune Miku but with my voice would save on having to maintain a video setup

we need to bring back machinima

I call dibs on being represented by the left pong paddle, lovingly recorded from the analog output of an Atari Pong TTL standup (or FPGA equivalent)

more a sort of ‘I love science’ youtuber I think.

A lot of what Biden did was based on the wide margins the executive had. But now with Chevron deference dead people can sue those efforts and will win via the 5th Circuit or SCOTUS, because they’re institutions bought by people who most vehemently hate antitrust laws. Similar reasoning applies to right-to-repair efforts.

In other words, USA will never have nice things unless Harris pulls off a major court reform.

I do remember part of the appeal for SETI@home back in the day was the ability to analyze the data that heuristics had ruled out but not conclusively, so it’s not like there’s no precedent. Of course the other benefit of BOINC was using the “spare” cycles in consumer hardware rather than purpose-building more massive power and water-hungry datacenters, so the cost was arguably negligible even if the benefits were similarly small.

(it is a fucking hilarious tweet tho)

Anything that takes the edge off a possible Great Recession sequel’s fine in my book

Dammit, you caught me again! Time for another go-round…

i assume the shirt is ironic haha

It only shows it like that to you because it’s your password.

ah yeah, the well-known nter2 Rust function that lets you… enter the number 2, you know?

Walks into the room, hits the top of the doorframe, making sounds like a gallon of water being sloshed around

You called?

didn’t think anyone would catch this! I might have to at this rate, there’d be no shortage of material…

probably a couple of them, too :|

(I can speculate a few off the top of my head as-is, but not sure I want to enumerate them)

I’m sure such blatant and unrepentant price gouging won’t end in any violent altercations from infuriated customers!

(Ah, who am I kidding, somebody’s gonna blow their lid over Kroger jacking up water prices on a hot day. They’ll be lucky if nobody gets shot before they ditch the idea.)

it’s the USA, it’s near certainly going to be multiple ways of legal

and if they get kicked in the teeth, they’ll get around it by putting up a little sign somewhere near the door (visible, but unobvious) which claims that “by shopping there you accept the possibility”, and that may be enough

I never really got the (E: thanks froztbyte, I meant user complaints here, there certainly are job complaints re self-checkout see reply below) complaints of self checkout, works great in most places in .nl I tried it.

And then the local Lidl got a self checkout. I now get why people hate those things, somebody really designed it with the idea of ‘people in our stores are criminals we must catch’ in mind. Turns out those styles of self checkouts are more common in EE as well. A small example of a problem with it. The part where you in other self checkouts would put your bag to put your stuff into was a scale, and because of that I couldn’t put my bag there as I thought I was trying to sneak products through, and every item had to be placed there on the scale after weighing. (And then it didn’t always work correctly). You could almost smell the security person who designed it going ‘im gonna catch all those baddies!’ (that could have also been me, I need to remember to wash my clothes). The machine also felt cheap, and the way the employees had to interact with it (they had to physically touch the machine with some key, and not use a tablet like all the other self checkouts (I had gotten something with alcohol in it)) didn’t help this feeling.

Moral of the story, there are ways to do self checkout better than others.

ah heh, that would’ve been the other leg of this plan, I imagine

“sorry about the unfortunate pricing” says the dead-ending support flow, which doesn’t have the ability to contact an actual human anywhere in the tree

In a couple of generations of LLMs ChatGPT will tell you you can just draw your own stamps and it will be perfectly legal.

I think a human would probably recommend priority mail atp. You’d get tracking, wouldn’t waste 19 stamps, and shipping is already included in the cost

Also checks, lol???

the US (banking system, but not exclusively that) is living in the past to a stunning degree

couple years back when I visited (mid 2010s), in DC I had someone make a physical imprint of my CC for a payment, and in NYC doing card transactions on the subway ticket machines it doesn’t ask for card pin but instead for zip code (and as a non-resident, you just enter 0000 (never tried to see if others work))

checks/cheques are still a rather frequent way of inter-business/inter-person value transfer

the nuanced take nobody wants to hear: farts are a tool, and like any tool they can be used for good or bad. that’s what progress is. we can’t let the possibility of a few bad uses of farts overshadow how farts can unleash the futures of truly creative individuals, businesses and societies.

to address another common point: yes, there are kinks to be worked out. sometimes farted information can be wrong. farted music doesn’t always come out with the clarity we want. farted art is sometimes missing details. but farts are already revolutionizing and democratizing the arts, science, and even the concept of human interaction. we can’t lose sight of the great potential of farting - just like the early days of the internet, we don’t know what amazing things we’ll end up with because of it.

idk if this will mean anything to you but matt yglesias is the muppet version of ezra klein

the donkey is dead but we prop it up with dollar stacks

dude donkeys are awesome

It is the not totally bad idea that you understand a different perspective if you can reliably write pieces of text in such a way that somebody from that perspective cannot tell you don’t hold that ideological position.

It fails pretty quickly when tribalism comes into play (aka do it a few times, conclude ‘our side is better at passing this test, so we are better’, ideologies being broad and people not always realizing which ideology they really are in/differences in definitions. And other issues like it is just a bit of intellectual masturbation, depending on finding neutral people of that perspective. ‘you failed the intellectual turing test so we can ignore your criticism of our side’. ‘You would fail an intellectual turing test so we can ignore you’. It being debate bro culture with extra steps. People are not actually interested in the test but use the test as an argument to bash people (you once failed at detecting sarcasm and misattributed a sarcastic joke from a leftwinger to the far right? This shows the entire left fails the intellectual turing test and should not be listened to). etc etc. /rant

I made the mistake of reading the comments on that substack and I’m beginning to actually feel the raw desperation of these sycophants for someone of “note” to notice them.

Innumeracy is the opioid of the masses.

This is the genius-level discourse that Bryan Caplan foments in his marketplace of ideas.

Is he ever going to specify which booster? If he refused Tdap he is a menace to society not because of risk of tetanus but spreading pertussis to the vulnerable.

Still, anyone that took him seriously before this should be embarrassed.

It’s really really hard for me to take grown men who make a show of being deathly afraid of a little jab you can barely feel seriously.

Practically is there much difference?