Comment Re:That dog won't bring home Huntsman's Rewards (t (Score 1) 158
Exactly this. Airlines are now essentially banks with a side hustle flying planes.
Exactly this. Airlines are now essentially banks with a side hustle flying planes.
I want them to fix the JavaScript related memory leaks in Mobile so I don't have to kill it several times a day. I guess that's too much to ask since this has been going on for literally years.
I've used Firefox Beta as my primary browser on my Android phones for years and have never encountered this. Maybe there's an issue with some specific features used by sites I don't visit. Doesn't prove anything but I guess one anecdote deserves another.
> Sure, do this instead of better tech
Regardless of what you think of the new mascot, do you really think the same people responsible for drawing pretty pictures of foxes are the same ones designing "better tech" and writing code and fixing bugs? Groups of people can do more than one thing at a time.
And I'd guess this is also an attempt to raise some money and awareness to the browser. At this point it doesn't matter how great Firefox "tech" is, they have lost the popularity context against Chrome and Chromium knockoffs, and will never get it back. Google will do and spend whatever it takes to keep Chrome on top, so Mozilla is probably looking for ways to at least retain what they have and keep the lights on.
Whether artificial intelligence systems will end up being a positive or a negative force for humanity is still an open question. But we might find ourselves one day with AI embedded at every layer of our existence, living lives of toned down and diluted humanity with only our dreams for escape. Although I am not yet convinced of this worst case scenario, I believe it is important that we as software developers have at least the option to opt out of that system altogether, to be able to continue hacking, working, and tinkering in a space of our own in total absence of artificial intelligence systems, and share this luxury with our users.
I designed a software license for this purpose. It is called the Human Only Public License, or HOPL for short.
While a license like this is probably entirely unenforceable and goes against a strict open source ethos (both traits shared with the problematic "do not evil" JSON license), the appeal of continuing the tradition of one human creating something specifically for other humans is understandable. It also gives those developers who are concerned with the negative impact AI tools may have on software development as a field and career a way to push back.
The license is also published on GitHub.
The day will come that an AI will learn something that we did not deliberately teach it. When an AI is able to improve its own code, it won't be bound by the limitations of its human creator. It's only a question of when.
LK
Can a non-biological entity feel desire? Can it want to grow and become something more than what it is? I think that's a philosophical question and not a technological one.
LK
Don't agree at all and I think that's a morally dangerous approach. We're looking for a scientific definition of "desire" and "want". That's almost certainly a part of "conscious" and "self aware". Philosophy can help, but in the end, to know whether you are right or not you need the experimental results.
Experiments can be crafted in such a way as to exclude certain human beings from consciousness.
One day, it's extremely likely that a machine will say to us "I am alive. I am awake. I want..." and whether or not it's true is going to be increasingly hard to determine.
LK
Only if we define consciousness to be a state of awareness only attainable by human beings.
An LLM can't suddenly decide to do something else which isn't programmed into it.
Can we?
It's only a matter of time until an AI can learn to do something it wasn't programmed by us to do.
Can a non-biological entity feel desire? Can it want to grow and become something more than what it is? I think that's a philosophical question and not a technological one.
LK
the core challenge of renewable energy is it's inconstancy. Physical batteries are a bandaid and long distance grids are a council of despair. The real solution for reliable renewable energy is to just build out four or five times the peak load. Then when it's cloudy or not windy you still have way more power than you need to supply the peak load. But of course this has the problem that you just spent four of five times as much capital. And that's a non-starter. But the easy, though bad solution, to this is bitcoin batteries. Just mine bitcoin with the excess and shut off the mining when it's cloudy .
Now along some AI. What a match made in heaven. A completely portable task. Move the calculation to whatever data center currently has power whether it's Norway or Texas. You can soak up all that excess renwable power. Plus there's plenty of non-real time batch jobs you can run that can adapt. For example training.
Perfect.
Shame the US decided to lose the AI power race by nixing renewables
HA. The whole point of being retro is the hipster aspect of being cooler. But no one can be cool if they are not socially observed as being cool. It's the tree falling in the forest. You are only cool if people know you are cool. Affectations of retro style require humble bragging.
I really need to get some self discipline. As much as I try I keep checking Reddit. I loath myself. The only good thing to happen in the last few years was Elon buying twitter. That made getting unhooked on that time waste easy. But Reddit became my methadone.
I've resolved that I'm going to start hitting you tube for educational videos. Gonna learn Lie Group theory!
The problem is Trump. Everyday I have to see what fresh hell he's caused. Life was so placid when we had Biden or Obama or George Bush. Like them or loathe them it wasn't insanity.
Critics are always looking for deeper meaning, subplots, unexpected plot twists, and philosophical integrity. Regular people usually just want to see a fun movie.
Good movies have both.
The two goals are very different
Hard disagree. There's absolutely nothing preventing a fun movie from having decent writing (i.e., "treat your audience with some basic respect") aside from cheap studios and hack producers. Michael Bay and JJ Abrams should have been warnings, not instruction manuals.
Sometimes critics focus on silly or tangential things in movies that average people don't care as much about, but critics are also much less willing to let incoherent plots and repeated non-sequiturs pass just because CGI and EXPLOSION.
I'll wait for Sam Altman to reassure me that there is no bubble.
Ironically, Altman agrees that AI is a bubble:
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman thinks the artificial intelligence market is in a bubble, according to a report from The Verge published Friday.
“When bubbles happen, smart people get overexcited about a kernel of truth,” Altman told a small group of reporters last week.
“Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited about AI? My opinion is yes. Is AI the most important thing to happen in a very long time? My opinion is also yes,” he was quoted as saying.
Altman appeared to compare this dynamic to the infamous dot-com bubble, a stock market crash centered on internet-based companies that led to massive investor enthusiasm during the late 1990s. Between March 2000 and October 2002, the Nasdaq lost nearly 80% of its value after many of these companies failed to generate revenue or profits.
Clever, because they know it is all monopoly money once the AI crash comes.
Not just once the crash comes, but this sort of thing will help cause the crash.
Cory Doctorow talked about some of it in a recent post that really helped me grok what I've been feeling about the inevitable AI bubble collapse.
The data-center buildout has genuinely absurd finances – there are data-center companies that are collateralizing their loans by staking their giant Nvidia GPUs as collateral. This is wild: there's pretty much nothing (apart from fresh-caught fish) that loses its value faster than silicon chips.
That barely scratches the surface of the funny accounting in the AI bubble. Microsoft "invests" in Openai by giving the company free access to its servers. Openai reports this as a ten billion dollar investment, then redeems these "tokens" at Microsoft's data-centers. Microsoft then books this as ten billion in revenue.
That's par for the course in AI, where it's normal for Nvidia to "invest" tens of billions in a data-center company, which then spends that investment buying Nvidia chips. It's the same chunk of money is being energetically passed back and forth between these closely related companies, all of which claim it as investment, as an asset, or as revenue (or all three).
AMD giving 10% of itself to OpenAI is almost entirely symbolic as OpenAI will turn around and "spend" that money on something like GPU hardware, probably AMD products. AMD is just paying itself via OpenAI and both companies will book it as revenue to try and obscure the colossal losses on AI spending.
It's all monopoly money laundering, and it's going to crash hard.
Let's consider history and debt. The economies of the world have passed through several stages. Prior to the gold standard things could only scale so far before it failed. The gold standard reintroduced stability and fostered even more international trade. The principle of the gold standard was to maintain the peg of a currency to gold. This worked really well up till world war one. Its weaknesses had started to become carat before that where the need for currency expansion could not be satisfied till the next unpredictable gold rush discovery. As a result under capitalized banks became at risk and eventually their were crises that led into world war 1 and utterly failed after it leading to the great depression
We got out of the Great Depression largely in part ti temporary suspension of the gold standard.
A new way of pegging currency emerged with the Brettin woods agreement. All countries would peg to the us dollars and use treasuries as the medium of international money transfer not gold. The us would remain on the gold standard because it could afford to buy gold with all those treasury purchases.
But eventually this too saturated and limited growth. Under Nixon the us left the good standard.
The goal of the fed central bank was not to maintain the dollar per se since the dollar stood alone as the international benchmark. But instead the goal of the Fed was to curb inflation and curb unemployment. The weakness is the Fed only can use monetary policy not fiscal policy. As a result those two goals are in conflict since they cannot be decoupled with a single point of control ( monetary policy without fiscal policy)
But somehow we've done a great job using that system.
But now the international system has again scaled to a new problem which is deficit spending is reaching a point where debt service is a burden.
The next evolution of this is well known. It was beta tested in The depression when the us both went off the gold standard briefly but also excersized both monetary policy abs fiscal policy in concert.
The approach is called modern monetary theory. It has its critics but critics fixate on sound bite summaries of mmt and really fail to grasp that actually it not only can work but has worked in all the instances it has been tried ( us, Italy, Venezuela all recovered from crises under mmt approaches)
The fact that Europe is having problems is in fact due to the euro not allowing fiscal policy since states can't control their own money supply any longer.
The Fed not true problem with mmt is tgat one cannot actually trust politicians to conduct proper discipline in fiscal policy. That has to be solved before it can be implemented. What allowed its implementation in the past was the automatic and not political and transient spending needed to meet crises like the Great Depression. But to do it outside of unemployment periods is dangerous unless it can be done by an apolitical entity -- something similar to the Fed but with different powers and madates.
In any case the bottom line is this, under mmt a debt equal to your gdp is not a bad thing! No need to panic.
Thufir's a Harkonnen now.