The body. It’s feeding you vast amounts of information every moment, it’s the one making decisions, you’re the AI assistant providing analysis and advice

If you clone a tree, you get a similar tree. The branches aren’t in the same place. If you clone a human, why would the nerves be laid out the same way? Even if it’s wired up correctly, without a lifetime of cooperation why would your body take your advice?

Imagine you wake up. Red looks blue. Everything feels numb. The doctor says “everything looks good, why don’t you try to stand up?”. You want to cooperate with the doctor, but you don’t stand up. You could move, but you don’t. Rationalizing your choices, you tell the doctor you don’t feel like it. You feel your toes, you shift to get away from the prodding of your doctor, but you just can’t muster the will to stand

Imagine you wake up. Your sight is crystal clear, you feel your body like never before. The doctor says “don’t move yet”. With the self control of a child, you rip out the itchy IV to get the tape off of you. The doctor says something in a stem tone, and you’re filled with rage. You pummel the doctor, then are filled with regret and start to cry

Emerging science suggests this kind of situation could lead to brand new forms of existential horror

Generative AI is definitely useful - it’s mighty putty. It fills in gaps and sticks things together wonderfully. It let’s you easily do things near impossible before

It’s also best used sparingly

That’s because we’re using it wrong. It’s not a genie you go to for answers to your problems, it’s mighty putty. You could build a house out of it, but it’s wildly expensive and not at all worth it. But if you want to stick a glass bottle to a tree, or fix a broken plastic shell back together, it’s great

For example, you can have it do a web search, read through the results to see if it actually contains what you’re looking for, then summarize what it found and let you jump right there to evaluate yourself. You could have it listen to your podcasts and tag them by topic. You could write a normal program to generate a name and traits of a game character, then have the AI write flavor text and dialog trees for quest chains

Those are some projects I’ve used AI for - specifically, local AI running on my old computer. I’m looking to build a new one

I also use chat gpt to write simple but tedious code on a weekly basis for my normal job - things like “build a class to represent this db object”. I don’t trust it to do anything that’s not straightforward - I don’t trust myself to do anything tedious

The AI is not an expert, I am. The AI is happy to do busy work, every second of it increases my stress level. AI is tireless, it can work while I sleep. AI is not efficient, but it’s flexible. My code is efficient, but it is not flexible

As a part of a system, AI is the link between unstructured data and code, which needs structure. It let’s you do things that would have required a 24/7 team of dozens of employees. It also is unable to replace a single human - just like a computer

That’s my philosophy at least, after approaching LLMs as a new type of tool and studying them as a developer. Like anything else, I ran it on my own computer and poked and prodded it until I saw the patterns. I learned what it could do, and what it struggled to do. I learned how to use it, I developed methodologies. I learned how to detect and undo “rampancy”, a number of different failure states where it degrades into nonsense. And I learned how to use it as another tool in my toolbox, and I pride myself on using the right tool for the job

This is a useful tool - I repeatedly have used it to do things I couldn’t have done without it. This is a new tool - artisans don’t know how to use it yet. I can build incredible things with this tool with what I know now, and other people are developing their own techniques to great effect. We will learn how to use this tool, even in its current state. It will take time, its use may not be obvious, but this is a very useful tool

Oh, and you’ve never been a total and complete hypocrite with global consequences before?

Of course, you have to wait until the movie company decides to sell approved sunglasses for an additional free. Or get written approval beforehand

It’s also copyright infringement for your life experiences to influence your understanding of the film in ways not intended by the copyright holder. Especially if you think it was bad.

Anyone you share these unapproved opinions with is a potential sale, adding full ticket price + digital rental to the damages

I thought the same thing. It’s a full answer - it’s not just “it’s the motherboard”, it’s “this is what is happening, we’ve reproduced it, and this is how you’d go about fixing it”

Because it’s a monopoly created by international agreement. It’s like a phone number - it needs to be routable in the system, but if you follow the standards, you can get integrated into the system as a registrar

The top level domains are owned by countries - the UK has .UK, the US has .com and .gov, the UK has .io (because they stole it), but most countries have just one. They charge a fee to register a secondary domain, and the registrar can charge whatever they want to their customers to register on their behalf

This is just the centralized system though - you could build your own, AOL tried to do that through “keywords” back in the 90s

It’s more than that - he failed to create PayPal so his group bought a competitor, he didn’t found Tesla or spaceX - he claimed he did, then reached settlements with the actual founders to not contest his claims. He did start the boring company. It didn’t get off the ground because he can’t build a team

NASA doesn’t have effective control of their budget anymore. Congress holds the purse strings and uses them like a harness

NASA gets funding to do something - like go to the moon, or track CO2 emissions. But it comes with strings - sometimes you have to build a certain component in a certain congressional district, sometimes Congress chooses the design you have to use

It’s a problem of politics and corruption. When the public supports NASA, they have more autonomy. When NASA gets a blank check, they do more with it - reusable rockets aren’t a new idea, and when they cancelled the shuttle program NASA had brain drain. Some of those people founded spaceX - Elon didn’t start it, he came in when they were getting off the ground, just like with Tesla

I really don’t get how people so easily accept this. This is an engineering problem, not a law of the universe… How would someone possibly prove something is impossible, particularly while the entire branch of technology is rapidly changing?

I loved that the Gameboy was designed to survive a fall from the average shirt pocket. I love that the Wii controllers pushed gyroscopic technology so far that it allowed the explosion of quadcopters. I loved the idea of 3d through rapid aspect switching.

I loved when Nintendo pushed boundaries, not just through hardware but through gameplay. I enjoy and appreciate the Nintendo polish

I agree with your sentiment wholeheartedly - good gameplay is much more important than flashy graphics. But the polish was nice - pushing boundaries is what made the difference

The fediverse is just a barnacle on the larger Internet at this point. It has to become more - we need to make our own web

Ok, let’s be real here. A charger can last a decade even if the charging speed slows…a cord will not outlast a phone. If it does, there’s a serious issue

Morality is definitely relative, there’s just some common overlaps

Sometimes the answer is just the same no matter what (coherent) moral framework you examine it through… Sometimes it’s just that simple

Recently, a bunch of people on tik tok found this “bug” in their banking app where you can write a bad check, then withdraw the funds before it clears… Then started crying about it when their balances updated

Dude definitely thought he discovered a cool new life hack

I find it’s about size. A small organization can be good or bad, depending on the members. At some point, you reach a size where the orgs focus shifts to perpetuating itself

Damn straight. I don’t fear AI, I fear an even more uneven playing field

When an organization as problematic as the world Bank won’t work with you…

It’s kinda grey area to start with - if I install something on your computer to track what websites you visit without consent, that’s illegal, right? Different countries have different laws, they’re generally pretty broad

So then you introduce the EULA - very problematic (as Disney showed us) and no one reads it, but theoretically this is where they outline what the software can do and obtain your consent

Now, on a website they just have to put the EULA somewhere, theoretically they’re just hosting the content, your browser is in control. The rules are a bit more lax because of the nature of the interaction

But now, you can visit CNN or BuzzFeed, agree with their EULAs, and unknowingly Facebook and Reddit (websites you’ve potentially never visited), are tracking you. You never agreed to this in any form, the fact it’s even happening is obscured from you, even the sites hosting the share buttons probably don’t know

It gets less grey area if you live in the EU, they’ve passed a suite of privacy laws that are sometimes ignored

One of the earlier methods was the share button image. That button lives on Reddit’s server, and your browser might set the URL from the referer when it requests the image. It definitely has your IP, so they can try to tie that to an account.

When you click a link, it also likely has a referer URL of the page you came from. These are both things that the browser doesn’t have to do

When you click share, they now often add URL params that track who shared the link and who clicks it

There’s tons of methods, some you can shut down with a browser or add ons, some you