Another big one is climate change. Ask the ASI how to solve that, and it's just going to say make a huge push for more renewables like solar, and strongly disincentivize GHG emissions. We already knew we had to do that. But the people in charge of the economy don't wanna.
> We already knew we had to do that. But the people in charge of the economy don't wanna.
I've often heard it said that <big corporations> often use consulting firms to recommend unpopular decisions they were already planning to make, thereby offloading the culpability to the consulting firm.
Maybe the LLMs are going to be the ultimate "consulting firm" for our societal issues.
I say this mostly tongue-in-cheek, but we're already offloading a lot of lower-level responsibilities (e.g., "write my email") onto these AIs.
Large organizations also offload decision making when they don't have a clue, and simply want to point to some action taken. The answer doesn't even matter, they just don't want to be responsible for something, or waste their own time making something (that other stakeholders care about) a real priority.
People downplay the value of consultants, but they have many uses!
Exactly. It's not about us NOT having the knowledge, understanding or capability to solve the issues that we have. We just don't want to do the right thing. That doesn't get fixed even if we invent time machines.
IIRC, a non-AMD contributor was working on adding HDMI 2.1 support to Linux's AMD driver, and then AMD managed to get the HDMI Forum to see that their position was moot and was making things very awkward for AMD.
Oh this makes sense! Obviously, it can't be illegal for a non-forum-member to add HDMI support; it's just an HDMI forum policy after all, not law. That's certainly the link I was missing for this to make sense.
presumably someone at Valve said "either you do this or we will pay an open source contributor 100k a year to reimplement every spec you make for the rest of time"
It's not like the policy ever made much sense to begin with. Hard to try to keep track of what a rationale might be enough to convince people who are already being unreasonable!
Valve very obviously isn't enjoying a fat margin on Steam Machines, but they're not a public company so profit is profit. And people who buy Steam Machines are more encouraged to buy games on Steam and pay that nice juicy 30%.
The point of a canary is that it's cryptographically signed, and it's possible to set up a duress passphrase that will delete the key when entered, so if everything works correctly an unauthorized party can't keep posting signed canaries.
Even if locked bootloaders weren't a thing, not being able to just buy a phone with an open Android pre-installed means it would get relegated to the Linux Zone, with a whole lot of "security alert" and "device not supported". Also, low popularity leads to fewer development resources, so it would probably suffer from lack of polish.
I would argue the term "gatekeeping" is being twisted around when it comes to AI. I see genuine gatekeeping when people with a certain skill or qualification try to discourage newcomers by making their field seem mysterious and only able to be done by super special people, and intimidating or making fun of newbies who come along and ask naive questions.
"Gatekeeping" is NOT when you require someone to be willing learn a skill in order to join a community of people with that skill.
And in fact, saying "you are too stupid to learn that on your own, use an AI instead" is kind of gatekeeping on its own, because it implicitly creates a shrinking elite who actually have the knowledge (that is fed to the AI so it can be regurgitated for everyone else), shutting out the majority who are stuck in the "LLM slum".
To be fair, and to offer context to non-hams: the morse requirement dated back to a time when morse code was _mostly_ the only way to communicate over radio. The problem is that it was held over as a requirement well after voice modes became commonplace on the air. Far longer than it probably should have.
I'm pretty sure quantum mechanics already forgoes conventional causality. Attosecond interactions take place in such narrow slices of time that the uncertainty principle turns everything into a blur where events can't be described linearly. In other words, the math sometimes requires that effect precedes cause. As far as we can tell, causality and conservation of energy is only preserved on a macroscopic scale. (IANAQP, but I'm going off my recollections of books by people who are.)
Einstein laid the theoretical foundations for lasers in 1917, and it took over 40 years of "impractical" scientific work before the first functioning laser was built. It took decades more for them to become a cheap, ubiquitous technological building-block. The research is still continuing, and there's no reason to assume it will stop eventually bearing fruit (for the societies that haven't decimated their scientific workforce, anyways). Look at the insanity required to design and build the EUV lasers in ASML's machines, which were used to fabricate the CPU I'm using right now, over a century after Einstein first scribbled down those obscure equations!
I sincerely wonder how someone that is unaware of any of this finds their way onto HN, but at the same time it is an educational opportunity. 'nothing practical' indeed...
What's interesting is how many things can be made to lase, and how many ways there are to do it. The list appears to be never ending and new entries are made all the time.
That's one of the reasons I built zlob. It literally has an endpoint to do this but if you are talking about glibc there are 2 options
1. fnmatch function which is not ideal because it doesn't take into account all the path specific optimizations and does not support BRACE
2. ALTDIRFUNC flag for globbing let you simulate file system which absolutely sucks
in zlob you can simply call zlob_match_paths(<pattern>, <list>, flags, ptr)
where list would be either c string or rust/zig like slices
As I understand it, compiling each source file separately and linking together the result was historically kind of a hack too, or at least a compromise, because early unix machines didn't have enough memory to compile the whole program at once (or even just hold multiple source files in memory at a time). Although later on, doing it this way did allow for faster recompilation because you didn't need to re-ingest source files that hadn't been changed (although this stopped being true for template-heavy C++ code).
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