ignirtoq

The thing is it’s been like that forever. Good products made by small- to medium-sized businesses have always attracted buyouts where the new owner basically converts the good reputation of the original into money through cutting corners, laying off critical workers, and other strategies that slowly (or quickly) make the product worse. Eventually the formerly good product gets bad enough there’s space in the market for an entrepreneur to introduce a new good product, and the cycle repeats.

I think what’s different now is, since this has gone on unabated for 70+ years, economic inequality means the people with good ideas for products can’t afford to become entrepreneurs anymore. The market openings are there, but the people that made everything so bad now have all the money. So the cycle is broken not by good products staying good, but by bad products having no replacements.

I think the labels on the axes of the bonus panel are flipped?

The technological progress LLMs represent has come to completion. They’re a technological dead end. They have no practical application because of hallucinations, and hallucinations are baked into the very core of how they work. Any further progress will come from experts learning from the successes and failures of LLMs, abandoning them, and building entirely new AI systems.

AI as a general field is not a dread end, and it will continue to improve. But we’re nowhere near the AGI that tech CEOs are promising LLMs are so close to.

I don’t know. I feel like if I lived 150 years ago and was very lucky, I might have been one of those people who invented a ketchup of ketchups. If I had more free time, I would probably experiment a lot more in the kitchen.

Oppenheimer was already really long, and I feel like it portrayed the complexity of the moral struggle Oppenheimer faced pretty well, as well as showing him as the very fallible human being he was. You can’t make a movie that talks about every aspect of such an historical event as the development and use of the first atomic bombs. There’s just too much. It would have to be a documentary, and even then it would be days long. Just because it wasn’t the story James Cameron considers the most compelling/important about the development of the atomic bomb doesn’t mean it’s not a compelling/important story.

There was a crazy amount of variety in at least American recipes and cuisine until the turn of the 20th century when modern grocery store practices replaced older ways of managing a food store and food distribution. Innovations in canning, refrigeration, and other food preservation technologies allowed for the creation of larger, centralized factories that could mass produce products that could be shipped further away. Food prices and meal preparation times dropped, but so did variety and unique food cultures across most home kitchens.

This is the ultimate Texan dog-that-caught-the-car moment. I remember talking about this in school in Texas 25 years ago when Republicans were complaining about immigration. Several students brought up that the farms are all tended by “seasonal workers,” which meant immigrant labor, so what was the Republican answer to that? They didn’t have one, of course, not a realistic one. It was the same talking points then as now of “American workers” filling the gap, and even then those jobs didn’t pay a living wage, so no American would take them. I bet they pay worse now.

They had 25 years to figure this out, but of course they had no intention of figuring it out.

They keep tasking these LLMs with things that traditional programming solved a long time ago. There are already vending machines run by computers. They work just fine without AI.

Honestly the computer controlled vending machines are already over-engineered since many of them play ads when you walk up. The last customer-focused feature added was credit card support, and that just needs a credit card reader and a minimal IoT integration. They really shouldn’t even have screens.

Why are they… why are they having autocomplete recommend medical treatment? There are specialized AI algorithms that already exist for that purpose that do it far better (though still not well enough to even assist real doctors, much less replace them).

The change doesn’t reflect unprecedented temperatures, with Fairbanks having reached 90 degrees twice in 2024, Srinivasan said. It’s purely an administrative change by the weather service.

I think this is a bit disingenuous. Sure, it’s not technically “unprecedented” because it has happened before, specifically last year, but the change is because they want to better help people, and better helping people means making this change because hotter temperatures are happening more because of climate change.

Thoman also clarified that the term swap doesn’t have anything to do with climate change.

They may not be directly citing climate change, but it’s absolutely the root cause. I wonder if they’re just trying to stay under Trump’s radar so he doesn’t make them roll it back because they said the C phrase. In bad political times doing good sometimes means speaking the party line while doing good works behind their backs.

Where’s the satire? This is just rephrasing what he has actually done. Is rephrasing factual statements satire now? Or have these satire sites given up and just resorted to real reporting?

The human brain is not an ordered, carefully engineered thinking machine; it’s a massive hodge-podge of heuristic systems to solve a lot of different classes of problems, which makes sense when you remember it evolved over millions of years as our very distant ancestors were exposed to radically different environments and challenges.

Likewise, however AGI is built, in order to communicate with humans and solve most of the same problems, it’s probably going to take an amalgamation of different algorithms, just like brains.

All of this to say, I agree memorization will probably be an integral part of that system, but it’s also going to be a small part of the final system. So I also agree with the article that we’re way off from AGI.

The size of the cut is what they use for the appeal to the public to build their social narrative, but legally/economically speaking it’s not really the problem. The problem is that Apple effectively forbids developers from having any other mechanism to transact with customers except through their marketplace where they take the 30% cut, hence the lawsuit being about monopolistic practices, not the amount they’re charging.

Valve handles things completely differently. Sure, listing on the Steam store requires giving Valve a 30% cut of the purchase price, but Steam doesn’t demand a 30% cut of any and all transactions that happen within or related to the game like Apple does. You also don’t have to buy a game from the Steam store to load it and launch it from the Steam client. And Proton works with a lot more games and applications than just those on the Steam store.

The fact that the two companies charge a similar price for a single relatively similar business case oversimplifies a lot of how the two companies operate.

He looks more like he’s thinking “Really? It got this far? Enough people thought this was a good idea that we’re all here doing this photo shoot for the promotional image?”

(I think the only part that looks like he’s on the verge of crying is the reflection of the studio lights in his eyes look like extra moisture.)

“Almost half a dozen times” seems like a weird way to say 5.

This is great, but the devil’s in the details. What’s covered and what’s excluded?

I’m afraid there’s a typo in your title. It’s “a two-hoo.”

The article talks about “Ultraviolet (UV) light boxes, which emit only a narrow bandwidth of light that is not linked to skin cancer,” so it’s possible the UV treatment and the drugs can be combined.

According to Hui’s attorney, she hoped to gain permanent resident status in the U.S. after paying “an American citizen $2,000 to enter into a sham marriage.”

She needs to get a new attorney.

Appeasing authoritarians only delays the inevitable, if it even delays it at all. Trump wants direct control over the Fed to enrich himself. Killing useful groups over the culture war issues he uses as a (weak) cover for his actions doesn’t solve this core problem.