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The Rise of Whatever

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Re: The Rise of Whatever

#441

Post by pxc »

chrismorgan wrote: post #100

> Like, just to calibrate here: you know how some code editors will automatically fill in a right bracket or quote when you type a left one? You type " and the result is "|"? Yeah, that drives me up the wall. It saves no time whatsoever, and it’s wrong often enough that I waste time having to correct for it. I have not yet figured out why anyone would choose this behaviour in a text editor. You have to press somethin…

> But it’s only more of the time: your source will still be invalid frequently, including when it gets things wrong and you have to relocate a delimiter. In practice, I don’t think it’s useful on that ground.

Maybe it's like a pale imitation of structural editing? There are editing modes for some editors that more or less ensure the syntax is always valid as you edit, and they of course include this feature.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#442

Post by tromp »

m0wer wrote: post #322
moritzwarhier wrote: post #114

Cool post, but: > And the only real hope I have here is that someday, maybe, Bitcoin will be a currency, and circulating money around won’t be the exclusive purview of Froot Loops. Christ PLEASE NO. The only thing this will lead to is people who didn't get rich with this scheme funding the returns of people who bought in early. Whatever BTC becomes, everyone who advocates for funneling public money of people who actu…

Would it change your view if they mined instead of buying? If you were to create a decentralized and limited supply currency, how would you distribute it so that it's “fair”? Sounds a bit like if the world was running only on proprietary software created by Microsoft and you criticized the move to open source because that would enrich Linus Torvalds and other code creators/early adopters. Are people better off by con…

It's more fair if every generation gets to mine the same amount. You want supply to be predictable and for the inflation rate to go steadily down, but there's not much point in limiting the supply [1].

[1] https://tromp.github.io/blog/2020/12/20/soft-supply

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#443

Post by pxc »

jeffhuys wrote: post #159
matejn wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate that even more, especially since Visual Studio introducted it. I had the habit of selecting some text, and then typing to replace it. Now when my replacement starts with a parenthesis or quote, the text just gets surrounded instead! Maybe this is just an XKCD moment https://xkcd.com/1172/ ...

I think for the feature of wrapping, it is useful enough + just typing a->backspace->" is easy enough that I think it's a net win

But there have been sensible bindings for doing this forever, e.g.: https://github.com/tpope/vim-surround

There's no need to break normal editing behavior.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#444

Post by projektfu »

zpeti wrote: post #122
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>LLM isn't like calculator or microwave oven or other technology before. (Like OP's article) But it really is. I would not buy a calculator that hallucinated wrong answers part of the time. Or a microwave oven that told you it grilled the chicken but it didn't and you have to die from Salmonella poisoning.

Do you use a GPS? That sometimes gets the route wrong, but overall gets you to where you want to go in less traffic than if you didn't use it? And occasionally really delights you with new routes? (thanks Rory Sutherland for this analogy)

If the GPS routinely hallucinated the existence of places to go, not just occasionally erroneous or out-of-date data, but literally putting streets where they never existed or taking me to the nearest branch of a bank when that never existed, it would be unreliable enough that I would probably only trust maps made the old fashioned way.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#445

Post by immibis »

tromp wrote: post #438
immibis wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having currency is only meaningful if the amount of currency someone has correlates, at least loosely, to some kind of merit or work. Let's say me and my friends agree to carve off 0.00002 BTC supply and pretend that is the whole world of currency. We could run a whole country using that 0.00002 BTC as money. Except that anyone who has 1 BTC can break into our walled garden and, with a tiny fraction of their holdings…

It's such a shame that the premier cryptocurrency chose a speculation friendly emission that concentrated wealth on early adopters (its creator included) rather than a speculation resistant pure linear emission (no halvings) that would give future generations their fair share to mine.

It's by design. Either the inventor knew what he was doing, or was tricked by someone who knew what they were doing. Perhaps it was invented by someone who made a lot of money speculating on gold so they knew how the model worked.

Luckily there's more than one cryptocurrency. Many of the current generation have asymptotically constant tail emissions, which doesn't really solve the underlying mismatch between emission and demand, but at least doesn't make it deliberately bad.

Well, there was one that tried to maintain a constant US$ price by cross-leveraging all of the risk onto a sister currency, but that crashed pretty hard (partly by the algorithm not working as well as thought, and partly by deliberate rugpull).

One that I'm aware of is radically different and allows both positive and negative balances that decay towards zero; although I don't really like that one's implementation, that feels like an idea worth exploring. It's pretty much incompatible with any traditional currency though.

Last time I named specific cryptocurrencies I got downvotes for advertising so I won't.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#446

Post by rcxdude »

fsflover wrote: post #361
rcxdude wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I think for crypto to actually turn into something net-positive, Bitcoin needs to lose a lot of value. It would almost certainly be some other network that would actually solve this problem, given Bitcoin's essentially frozen in a half-completed state now (Ethereum still seems to be trying to make something that scales to a point that would be usable, but it is also the nexus of a lot of the scams for the same…

> Bitcoin needs to lose a lot of value Why is that? You can just buy 0.00000001 BTC.

I mean, bitcoin needs to not be the biggest cryptocurrency by market cap. It's a comment on the utility of bitcoin compared to other networks, not about how it can be subdivided. As long as bitcoin is the most valuable coin, the cryptocurrency market is unconcerned with utility for everyday transactions and far more concerned with line go up by finding more and larger bag holders.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#447

Post by immibis »

Semaphor wrote: post #168
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in my 40s and don't have a microwave oven because I don't see the point of it... when I lived in a rented apartment, I got gifted one because how could I not have one? I tried it for a few days and just didn't find it useful. When I bought my own apartment and renovated the kitchen, I didn't bother to install one.

The use is heating up single portions of leftovers.

Ordinary ovens also do that alright. Takes 20-30 minutes instead of 2-3, but that just trains your delayed reward system a little. Also, don't use a plastic container.

They do a lot more things though, which microwaves don't. Pizza, for example, has to be cooked properly, not with a microwave. If I can only have one, I'll take the mini conventional oven.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#448

Post by CursedSilicon »

I was late to this blog post but I added some of my own thoughts. Copied below for those just stumbling across this post

The bigger picture that I think too few people focus on is the desperation of it all. The slop machine is just the latest in tech's desperate attempt to recapture what they did in the 90's where they connected a chunk of the planet to the fucking internet at large. Of course, they forget the part where "buying pet food on the internet" doesn't mean we want to be in Zuckerberg's legless dystopic "metaverse" for fucking standup meetings. Even when we had SecondLife 20 years earlier (and I guess VRchat and friends today)

I think the only people that really know this are Nvidia and AMD. The same way the only people who made money in the California gold rush were the people selling pickaxes and supplies and all that. Nvidia's stock price soaring to the size of half the fucking planet like Nortel or Standard Oil before them.

But the dogfooding, good god the dogfooding that is already going on. It feels like that the majority of people have either resoundingly rejected using the slop machine, or, much more troubling for capital. Their uses of it simply aren't "profitable". In the same way that having a speaker on your kitchen counter you can ask "what's the weather today" doesn't actually make you any money but we're going to pretend because we manufactured billions of these fuckers and if we just grin and pretend the musical chairs won't stop just yet. Right? Right?

So you've got an unprofitable product that you dumped hundreds of billions of dollars into. The only thing you can do to stave off your own demise as a C-suite (for making the line not go up. Or, heaven forbid making the line go down) is to feed one end of your workforce into a woodchipper and shackle the remainder of them to the slop machine you bought by installing it on all their desks and demanding they use it so you can pretend your workforce is some order of magnitude more productive now. If you as a C-suite (somehow) come from a tech background you might even know, deep down. Where you push all those feelings down into that it's all a lie, a farce. A distraction for the forces of capital that are even bigger than you are. Unless you're someone like Intel and they push you out the door for not making the line go up fast enough, of course.

But the question I keep coming back to is if there'll ever be a point of reckoning. When does this money black hole escape confinement and suck all the players into oblivion with it? That's been the historic reality of everything from tulips to houses. Or has tech found a way to truly become so inescapable, so irredeemably beyond understanding that they've escaped financial reality for their own mistakes?

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#449

Post by immibis »

rolandog wrote: post #427
zwnow wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell me how is it going to be useful to the many? Even better marketing emails? More precise targeted advertising? Even more automated job application rejections? Mass firings due to AI replacing most office jobs? Whats the benefit of LLMs to the many who barely can operate a search machine? I am sorry but thinking this will benefit the many is delusional. It's main use is making rich people richer by saving expenses…

Exactly... Why is it that every time a science fiction writer comes up with a new dystopian future to warn humanity about something, there's always a bunch of psychopaths that go "ooh, blueprints for a get-rich-at-the-expense-of-everyone-else scheme!"?

Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale

Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus

(Original source: https://xcancel.com/AlexBlechman/status/1457842724128833538?... )

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#450

Post by madmask »

raincole wrote: post #44
gyomu wrote: post #10

Broadly agreed with all the points outlined in there. But for me the biggest issue with all this — that I don't see covered in here, or maybe just a little bit in passing — is what all of this is doing to beginners, and the learning pipeline. > There are people I once respected who, apparently, don’t actually enjoy doing the thing. They would like to describe what they want and receive Whatever — some beige sludge th…

People will write lengthy and convoluted explanation on why LLM isn't like calculator or microwave oven or other technology before. (Like OP's article) But it really is. Humans have been looking for easier and lazier ways to do things since the dawn of civilization. Tech never ever prevents people who really want to hone their skills from doing so. World record of 100m sprint kept improving even since car was invente…

The point is what value can the common man reasonably provide in the free market to support a family when most of white collar work is also automated?

The industrial revolution automated a lot of blue collars, AI is starting to seriously automate white collars to the point less people are needed.

They are automating the mind, there’s not much else to compete with to provide value. Which color people should pivot to?

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