Viewing profile — TheOtherHobbes

All of the above, plus death threats. Trump isn't the weakness. The weakness is the almost complete collapse of the checks and balances around the president. If those were in place…

Tax payers don't fund governments, governments fund tax payers. Taxes are there to encourage certain economic activities and discourage others. Today, many of those activities are …

You're not sequencing notes you're sequencing multiple parallel levels of musical information which are eventually rendered as notes. One of those levels could be context-related m…

Plenty of people have been using AI to write books for a couple of years now. The successful ones already knew how to write books - which directly contradicts the standard line abo…

You've had years of listening to music and practicing a very rudimentary form of sight reading. I'm not aware of any studies proving or disproving that this gives beginners a head …

Globally, fossil tax breaks and implicit subsidies are at least $6tn. The entire sector is a catastrophic, institutionally corrupt scam. https://www.imf.org/en/topics/climate-chang…

If this is your working environment, it sounds like quite an unusual place. I literally can't imagine generating a script with an LLM without testing it at all. Bash is one of thos…

Copyright law only considers illegal ownership of a work, so the crime - or tort - was making/acquiring copies without permission or payment. Training from copies has been ruled fa…

Which the US has anyway, albeit in a patchier form than other countries, and with welfare handed out more to corporations and "sponsors" than individuals.

My feed suddenly started showcasing far-right lunatics and grifters. It didn't settle down until I blocked them all - which was drastic, but did the job.

Because the point of power and wealth is to avoid accountability for harm. That is literally what "freedom" means in the US. It's not the pursuit of happiness, it's the pursuit of …

'What-if' mode is a game changer. And underrated. The cost of prototyping has crashed. So you can A/B/C... various ideas, test them in the real world or by personal preference, to …

I don't get asked about access for Chrome at every update. I have bigger issues with the way a lot of MacOS apps are just poorly designed. Like screen capture - I want to be able t…

The expectation is always that employees will do more for less. Employees are considered a cost, while their productive value is considered an entitlement, so the economics always …

It was explicitly socialist in the UK. There was a paternal element of duty-of-care-and-welfare to factory/business ownership in the UK - patchy, but very real - which flared brief…

The areas with the highest wages are disproportionately more expensive, and the personal risks forced on both workers and the unemployed are far dangerous. (Esp lack of healthcare.…

US inventiveness peaked in the 50s and 60s, when corporate taxes were much higher, education, housing and healthcare were far cheaper, wealth was more evenly distributed, and gover…

Which of these apocalyptic landscapes contain traffic lights?

No, they used to call that "illustration." The belief that we were living in a golden age of hand-made visual beauty before AI arrived is obvious nonsense. The golden age of illust…

You drop a black hole the size of a bowling ball into a frontier AI startup. At what point does NVIDIA give you $200bn?

My "aesthetic" sense is more about how modular the code is, how DRY (which is also an aesthetic balancing act), how clean the abstractions are and how well they fit the domain and …

Infuriatingly, computation is subjective. The experience of the inputs, the results, and the processes depends on qualia. So does logic itself. Automating the processes doesn't cha…

JG Ballard, John Brunner (and others) were writing miserabilist dystopias back in the 70s. Also, Dune, which is certainly not a "The good guys win" story. And movies like Soylent G…

Different context. One social register is extreme understatement, which may be laden with passive aggression, but could also be approving. "That's not a bad idea" is likely to mean…

The point about large word lengths is you get higher data throughput, and faster processing, because everything is going through fat pipes into a big parallel machine with multiple…