Hah. That too. Then again, I think the last Apple commercial I actually remember is the dancing iPod silhouettes. Or Ellen Feiss (beep beep beep beep beep)? Do they even make commercials any more?

I have not followed it very closely, but there seems to be some strong progress in getting LLMs involved in decompilation. Nothing may be safe!

When you just make stuff up and argue against a strawman, it becomes awfully easy to win arguments.

The term "singularity" used in a technological sense goes back to the early days of computing--Von Neumann (this was news to me!). Interestingly, in 1993 NASA held a conference on "cyberspace" and future issues. https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/3001391. Link to the paper https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19940022855/downloads/19940022855.pdf

Vernor Vinge:

Let's see..1993 + 30 = 2023. A few months after ChatGPT 3.5 was released! A funny coincidence (or not?), and nobody would claim that ChatGPT is superhuman, but Vinge was on point. You might read the article, it's (deliberately) provocative, but it's interesting.

You frequently accuse those you disagree with of magical thinking. IMHO, the real magical thinking is the belief that human-type intelligence is unique and can never be replicated, simulated, or surpassed.

AI growth has more or less tracked computing capacity over the decades. I'm excited to see what comes next.

What hubris!

Knuth: "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it."

Here's an ACM article on the epistemology of bugs: https://dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3662730

What's your definition of "insight"?

Don't forget the gun charge. Why haven't any republicans stood up for Hunter's second amendment rights? They admit that question on the federal firearm forms is unenforceable to begin with.

Healthcare that doesn't cost thousands of dollars per month does sound temping.

Pointing out hypocrisy is not destroying anything. We pretend we're better but it's all the same at the end.

Let's not forget that the head of the DoD and FBI are both drunkards. https://www.nbcnews.com/politi...

Kash isn't even bright enough to realize the lawsuit discovery process is going to fuck him royally.

Bush I: Gulf War 1.0
Bush II: Gult War 2.0
Trump: Gulf War 3.0

I'm seeing a pattern here.

An actual kool aid drinker in the wild.

But then they text the video and it becomes 240p resolution.

It kind of feels to me like it's hard to get excited about things these days? I mean that if you think a particular breakthrough is cool, well you didn't consider problems X or Y. And it was done better, by Z. And it's going to destroy the environment. And people on the opposite side of the political spectrum like it, so that's a problem too. Etc.

I'm not sure if we're really in an unusually negative-thinking period if history, or if it just feels that way to me, in the current political climate, in my own state of life, etc.

Either way, as a GenXer it's kind of relaxing! Back to the days when caring about things was SO not cool. ;-)

David Brin is a science fiction author who wrote a collection of books in the "Uplift" universe. The 30-second summary is that there are countless sentient species around the universe and a galactic civilization spanning billions of years. before humanity was discovered, no known example of evolution creating advanced intelligence was ever discovered. Instead, superior advanced species "uplifted" primitive species to be intelligent through gene modification, selective breeding, etc.

One of the species in the book was kind of a like an organic wheel chair that had evolved in a close-to-weightless environment--short stub legs to accelerate and hardened wheel-like structures with some kind of magnetism involved.

Very interesting books and very creative in exploring just how different evolution in radically different environments might be.

I agree that we shouldn't feel that we need to contain robot designs to humanoid or humanoid-esque shapes and mechanics, but I would disagree that there are only a very few niche cases where walking on legs make sense. Legs (limbs more generally) have millions of years of evolutions behind them, and they work very well in many situations (walking on the ground, running, climb trees, ascending a cliff, swimming, etc). They may be considered jacks-of-all trades, and they may be less efficient than wheels or treads when moving on flat generally regular surfaces, but limbs are incredibly versatile.

I'm waiting for humanoid spider robots...

Excuse me, my error. Half marathon, 13 miles.