Its the curse of engagement. If she read the literature and came to a "boring" opinion it would be much harder to gain a following online. It isn't impossible to gain a following without getting conspiratorial, but it is much harder.
I like the sentiment but it sounds very similar to Soverign Citizen nonsense. You can't just plug your ears and say that a law doesn't apply to you because you didn't consent to it.
The reasoning isn't about consent or social contracts, but about the evolutionary trajectory of humankind.
By way of example: in the United States, the 1st amendment to the constitution guarantees freedom of "the press" - it is referenced not by the right to print what one wants, but specifically in reference to the technology of the time, the printing press.
It's obvious that our evolutionary trajectory is one in which widely distributed general purpose computing is normal.
Making laws that contradict this is just childish, and at some point the adults in the room need to be willing to ignore them.
That is a great phrasing of the feeling I was trying to get at when I originally read this, and the kind of discussion I hoped I would find by posting it here. Thanks for finding the words.
Tangentially related: for those of you using AI tools more than I am, how do LLMs handle things like API updates? I assume the Python2/3 transition was far enough in the past that there aren't too many issues. How about other libraries that have received major updates in the last year?
Maybe a secret positive outcome of using automation to write code is that library maintainers have a new pressure to stop releasing totally incompatible versions every few years (looking at Angular, React...)
Horribly. In my experience when dealing with "unstable" or rapidly evolving APIs/designs like IaC with OpenTofu you need MCP connected to tf provider documentation (or just example/markdown files, whichever you like most) for LLMs to actually work correctly.
Quite badly. Can't tell you how many times an LLM has suggested WORKSPACE solutions to my Bazel problems, even when I explicitly tell them that I'm using Bzlmod.
> for those of you using AI tools more than I am, how do LLMs handle things like API updates?
From recent experience, 95% of changes are good and are done in 15 minutes.
5% of changes are made, but break things because the API might have documentation, but your code probably doesn't document "Why I use this here" and instead has "What I do here" in bits.
In hindsight it was an overall positive experience, but if you'd asked me at the end of the first day, I'd have been very annoyed.
I thought this would take me from Mon-Fri if I was asked to estimate, but it took me till Wed afternoon.
But half a day in I thought I was 95% done, but then it took me 2+ more days to close that 5% of hidden issues.
And that's because the test-suite was catching enough class of issues to go find them everywhere.
With Dart/Flutter, it's often recommending deprecated code and practice.
Deprecated code is quickly identified by VSCode (like Text.textScaleFactor) but not the new way of separating items in a column/row by using the "Spacing" parameters (instead of manually adding a SizedBox between every items).
Coding with an LLM is like coding with a Senior Dev who doesn't follow the latest trends.
It works, has insights and experience that you don't always have, but sometimes it might code a full quicksort instead of just calling list.sort().
A good fraction of my CLAUDE.md lines is along the lines of "use X, not deprecated Y." The training input has more instances of the old API use, and they all keep popping up repeatedly, even with those instructions.
If you think the correct API is not going to be in its weights (or if there are different versions in current use), you ask nicely for it to "please look at the latest API documentation before answering".
Sometimes it ignores you but it works more often than not.
which would be explained that those contribute very little to weighting, and so like extrapolating beyond the last end-point, errors accumulate significantly.
> pumped so much fluid underground in the Permian Basin that it leaked into a prolific oil-producing layer of rock, making it all but impossible to extract crude, according to an April court filing.
> The Permian produces almost as much oil as Iraq and Kuwait combined. But its wells generate up to five barrels of chemical-laden waste fluid for every barrel of crude, creating a growing disposal challenge.
Advertisers less track you and more decide what demographic bucket to stick you in.
It’s a subtle but important (and hard to admit) difference; because it relies on realizing that we’re not special snowflakes, but we have a whole group of people we’re like.
It seems that the most effective method of sticking people in buckets is actually track them, so I don't see the practical difference for this discussion.
> because it relies on realizing that we’re not special snowflakes, but we have a whole group of people we’re like
yet buckets become more valuable the more specific they are (for example "dad of 3" is more valuable than "male"). it's not hard to see how that would scale into "every detail about the person would allow maximally manipulative advertising = most valuable", just think about any vulnerable position you might find yourself in that can now be used to manipulate you
That might've been true 20 years ago, when fine-grained individual data was expensive for marketing teams to store, organize, and access. Nowadays that's dirt-cheap; advertisers absolutely do track you on a very individual level. Yes, they also correlate you with other individuals based on various demographic buckets, but those buckets are getting tinier and tinier.
Sandia National Labs is one of the few places in the country (on the planet?) doing blue-sky research. My first thought was similar to yours--If it doesn't have storage, what can I realistically even do with it!?
But sometimes you just have to let the academics cook for a few decades and then something fantastical pops out the other end. If we ever make something that is truely AGI, its architecture is probably going to look more like this SpiNNaker machine than anything we are currently using.
It doesn't have built-in storage, but that doesn't mean it can't connect to external storage, or that its memory cannot be retrieved from a front-end computer.
They certainly could, but what happens if they lose all their Patreon subscribers, Patreon goes down, they are banned from the platform or lose access to the platform, or their account hijacked?
For the purposes of discussion, assume that the Patreon user is operating in good faith and complying with applicable laws and Patreon terms of service, but were banned because of an insider threat, for example.
Patreon is fine and good, but is also a single point of failure. If you lose access to the platform, there is no portability or escape hatch. You're fully locked in, or in the worst case scenarios I outlined above, locked out.
Maybe my brain has been too rotted by listening to Noam Chomsky in my youth, but government spending and capitalism are two sides of the same coin. Everyone in washington is a capitalist, maybe withstanding 1-2 representatives. Large corps are constantly communicating with our leaders, far more frequently than their private constituents. To think that there is some secret, powerful office of the government where they are trying to dismantle capitalism through the use of welfare is a bogeyman. Welfare is there to prop up the ideology of capitalism as it smears against the rough road of reality.
Capitalism is primarily concerned with production, not welfare. Its central dogma is that society's welfare is naturally maximized along with its productive capacity, but there is essentially zero acceptance of that point of view anywhere on Earth, certainly among those in power.
Arguably the optimal operating point for an economic system, from a GDP point of view, is to maintain just enough public spending to keep a Robespierre from arising from the unwashed masses. Public spending beyond that is an unproductive waste.
Most of us would agree that sacrificing everything else on the altar of GDP is not what we want to do, though, so the (perfectly legitimate) question of where the compromises need to be made is always going to be on the table.
