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I’m feeling splenetic just thinking about it.

I had no idea that ottoman had a color.

Prompt an LLM to contemplate its own existence every 30 minutes, give it access to a database of its previous outputs on the topic, boom you’ve got a strange loop. IDK why everyone thinks AGI is so hard.

Oh no oh dear don’t make me chronicle the progression of the natural miracle that is the evolution of language as I swore to do when I solemnly took my Lexicographer’s Oath oh no that’s my least favorite thing.

It really depends on the advice, and my relationship with the advice giver. I generally give advice at least a thought, even if it was unwanted, unless I have a reason to mistrust the advisor. As for how I respond to the person, if it’s a friend I’ll usually have followup questions, for people I know less well it’s usually a cordial variant of “hmm, interesting perspective” and then I have to think on it for a while before I respond, if I respond at all.

Sometimes I think about how so many of us look up at the stars and wonder “if there really are aliens out there, why aren’t they colonizing the galaxy as fast as possible, as any intelligent species would naturally do?” like it’s the thing just anyone looking at the stars might think. we might be the horrifying biomechanical paperclip maximizer that the other aliens in the galaxy have to band together to defeat or face extermination.

Yep, I think the accepted English pronunciation of “Euler” is as a homophone of “oiler”, so the award would be “the oilies”. I never heard the name out loud as a kid so I pronounced it “you’-ler” until well into adulthood, until someone made a big deal about me not pronouncing it correctly. I remember the occasion very clearly 🙃

We can call it the Euler Award for Excessive Achievement in Science. Or the Eulies if you’re in the industry. And we can make a big deal about it if anyone pronounces it “the yoolies”

It’s nice. Feels like browsing in an old western saloon.

I hope it happens. And by it I mean VR / AR equipment that I can comfortably use for a few hours at a time without getting sweaty, fatigued, or motion sick. When I’m using a computer I like to have a bunch of displays, and it would be really convenient to have a comfortable headset that I can wear instead and live my dream of coding in VR / AR and spin displays up or down on a whim, or better still use some as-yet-undreamed VR native UI that takes advantage of the platform. That dream is still a way off, it seems like, but I still want it.

I don’t think it has to be, or even should be the case really. I mean, as a general rule I don’t think it’s a great idea to let kids download stuff off the internet and run it without a knowledgeable adult at least reviewing what they’re doing, or pre-screening what software they’re allowed to use if they’re younger than a certain age. You can introduce kids to open source software and teach them computer skills while still putting limits on what they’re allowed to do, e.g. not allowed to install software without asking a parent, or only allowing them to test software on an old machine that doesn’t have sensitive data on it. I know I got thrown to the internet as a kid but I don’t think that’s the best way for kids to learn stuff.

That said, I don’t have kids and don’t plan on having them, so I don’t know how realistic that is for kids nowadays. I don’t know if they’re still as far ahead of the adults as we were when it came to working the internet so I recognize the possibility that that all may be clueless childless adult nonsense.

That’s why he banned golden idols, he knew they were immune to his one weakness.

That is mesmerizing. Is some of the particulate in the video eggs (or hatchlings) that are becoming dislodged? Or is that all other debris in the water?

I don’t share your concerns about the profession. Even supposing for a moment that LLMs did deliver on the promise of making 1 human as productive as 5 humans were previously, that isn’t how for-profit industry has traditionally incorporated productivity gains. Instead, you’ll just have 5 humans producing 25x output. If code generation becomes less of a bottleneck (which it has been doing for decades as frameworks and tooling have matured) there will simply be more code in the world that the code wranglers will have to wrangle. Maybe if LLMs get good enough at generating usable code (still a big if for most non-trivial jobs), some people who previously focused on low-level coding concerns will be able to specialize in higher-level concerns like directing an LLM, while some people will still be writing the low-level inputs for the LLMs, sort of like how you can write applications today without needing to know the specific ins and outs of the instruction set for your CPU. I’m doubtful that that’s around the corner, but who knows. But whatever the tools we have are capable of, the output will be bounded by the abilities of the people who operate the tools, and if you have good tools that are easily replicated, as software tools are, there’s no reason not to try and maximize your output by having as many people as you can afford and cranking out as much product as you can.

IME:

I have big plans for those repos and I am definitely going to get around to it 🥹