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wcarss

3,148 カルマ登録 18 年前
Hi, I'm Wyatt.

https://wcarss.ca

コメント

wcarss
·3 日前·議論
It's difficult to recommend things without knowing a reader's taste, but I blanket recommend The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stars_My_Destination
wcarss
·12 日前·議論
- at a minimum, your id will be stored on random servers where it can be stolen

- at a medium, you will have annoying and intrusive identity checks required to use many common websites

- at a high medium, you will not be able to use a non trusted computer and identity stack: get on a windows, apple, or google device and use their identity services in their browsers, or else you cannot use the internet

- at a maximum, all activity you and everyone takes online will be monitored and faithfully tied to your or their verified identity. This total loss of privacy will result in a total loss of freedom of speech and assembly online.

That last point is the direct aim of the people driving these laws.
wcarss
·12 日前·議論
Attestation of age should suffice; no one in a building somewhere needs to verify my age. If I tell you to treat me like a minor, you do it. Operating systems and browsers can work together to send this as a header. If you're a concerned parent: set your children's ages in their device accounts.

Done. This alternative solves the whole problem and it's been brought up a million times, but it doesn't matter, because this isn't about protecting children or anything about ages. It's about locking down anonymity, and money for a few interests who want to be the verifiers and craft a future where they hold the keys.
wcarss
·先月·議論
yeah, I have to admit I was commenting on possibilities here without having gone into the article yet -- having now looked for real, I agree that the disruptions don't seem very useful for actual jamming and repeatedly like this for years across satellites and bands in this specific way doesn't make sense for some mistaken targeting either.
wcarss
·先月·議論
Or actual jamming mistargeted for some reason, or used because it was deemed necessary.
wcarss
·2 か月前·議論
I don't disagree with you, but your example of nails and their cost reductions made me wonder whether we reached a meaningful limit in say, some fundamental material terms, or whether we just reached a limit in terms of return on investment.

Return on investment can be too low because the investment required is really high, but it can also be too low because the returns are just limited. If prices had dropped 90%, surely nails became even more ubiquitous, but at that stage there's only so much more money to dig out of the cost reduction hole. It feels plausible that there may have been ideas about more digging that could be done, but the reward just wasn't there in the market, especially versus just selling what worked.

I bring it up because the distinction in one specimen may speak to a larger trend: do new sigmoid developments tend to fail to materialize more often because of serious physical limits / lack of good ideas, or because of limitations to ROI? (Or, other things?)

In the arena of AI, the ROI on more intelligence/unit-cost seems pretty high right now. So, it seems like the difficulty of applying any potential innovations would have to be staggering for none to be pursued. Or, there'd have to just not be any good ideas to try.

Overall, I think there's ideas to try. So in my opinion, that shapes out to justify a bullish sentiment on sigmoids continuing to stack until the perceived potential gains from more intelligence/unit-cost somehow fall off.

Like I said, I don't disagree, we really don't know. But I feel it's a good bet that there's more coming.
wcarss
·3 か月前·議論
Just answering with a possibility here, but they could be seeking freedom from liability for failure to moderate content or ensuring their service is "not harmful". If it's only for consenting adults, and every adult can be pinned down with an identity, whatever happens can have the blame assigned away from meta.

edit: I took too long to write this :)
wcarss
·3 か月前·議論
I agree with what you're saying about writing something twice or even three times to really understand it but I think you might have misunderstood the WET idea: as I understand it, it's meant in opposition to DRY, in the sense of "allow a second copy of the same code", and then when you need a third copy, start to consider introducing an abstraction, rather than religiously avoiding repeated code.
wcarss
·4 か月前·議論
I don't think this diminishes your point, but, for a thing like memory, your father may be maintaining it by insisting on relying on it. It may diminish regardless, but its diminishment may slow down.

At work, we are in a certain kind of race. In life, we are in a certain other kind. To paraphrase a recent Brandon Sanderson talk about creativity in an era where AI can outpace and possibly soon, out-quality a professional, "The work you do on _you_ can be _the art_."
wcarss
·4 か月前·議論
> Jevons paradox isn't relevant to cognitive surplus

Could you elaborate on this? Is it just a claim, or is there some consensus out there based on something that it doesn't/shouldn't apply?
wcarss
·4 か月前·議論
This is the take, very well said. I've been trying to use analogies with cars and cabinet making, but building a house is just right for the scale and complexity of the efforts enabled, and the ownership idea threads into it well.

Going into the vault!
wcarss
·4 か月前·議論
This is not true.

When you spend Canadian dollars at a business owned by a Canadian, you're sending that owner and the Canadian government your money, in exchange for their goods or services, normally at a surplus of value for them. You are 'helping' them; you are 'investing' in the Canadian economy. You are justifying the existence of their business and the jobs of the people who work there.

Especially insofar as you're making this choice versus American options, you are putting money into the hands of Canadians rather than Americans. This is the underlying concept behind boycotts and voting with your dollars or feet.
wcarss
·5 か月前·議論
lol, uh, I'm pretty sure they actually can't.

You or a business with legal owners can have a bank account, and you can give access to that account to an agent, but real banks work in the real world, and "know your customer" regulations need a real person somewhere in the chain.

But, hey, maybe I'm wrong.
wcarss
·6 か月前·議論
For anyone else who briefly got very lost at PFC, probably "prefrontal cortex".
wcarss
·6 か月前·議論
https://www.courtlistener.com/ is run by freelaw.
wcarss
·6 か月前·議論
All fair points, I think I agree with your take overall but we might each be focusing on situations involving different levels of capital, time, and skill: I'm imagining situations where AI use brought the barrier down substantially for some entrants, but the barriers still meaningfully exist, while it sounds to me like you're considering the essentially zero barrier case.

My Glad example was off the cuff but it still feels apt to me for the case I mean: the barrier for an existing plastic product producer who doesn't already to also produce bags is likely very low, but it's still non zero, while the barrier for a random person is quite high. I feel vibe coding made individual projects much cheaper (sometimes zero) for decent programmers, but it hasn't made my mom start producing programming projects -- the barrier still seems quite high for non technical people.
wcarss
·6 か月前·議論
That might be true, but it doesn't have to be immediately true. It's an arbitrage problem: seeing a gap, knowing you can apply this new tool to make a new entrant, making an offering at a price that works for you, and hoping others haven't found a cheaper way or won the market first. In other words, that's all business as usual. How does Glad sell plastic bags when there are thousands of other companies producing plastic bags, often for far, far less? Branding, contracts, quality, pricing -- just through running a business. No guarantee it's gonna work.

Vibe-coding something isn't a guarantee the thing is shit. It can be fine. It still takes time and effort, too, but because it can take lot less time to get a "working product", maybe some unique insight the parent commenter had on a problem is what was suddenly worth their time.

Will everyone else who has that insight and the vibe coding skills go right for that problem and compete? Maybe, but, also maybe not. If it's a money-maker, they likely will eventually, but that's just business. Maybe you get out of the business after a year, but for a little while it made you some money.
wcarss
·6 か月前·議論
I experienced the exact same thing: I needed a web tool, and as far as I could tell from recent reviews, the offerings in the chrome extension store seemed either a little suspicious or broken, so I made my own extension in a little under an hour.

It used recent APIs and patterns that I didn't have to go read extensive docs for or do deep learning on. It has an acceptable test suite. The code was easy to read, and reasonable, and I know no one will ever flip it into ad-serving malware by surprise.

A big thing is just that the idea of creating a non-trivial tool is suddenly a valid answer to the question. Previously, I know would have had to spend a bunch of time reading docs, finding examples, etc., let alone the inevitable farting around with a minor side-quest because something wasn't working, or rethinking+reworking some design decision that on the whole wasn't that important. Instead, something popped into existence, mostly worked, and I could review and tweak it.

It's a little bit like jumping from a problem of "solve a polynomial" to one of "verify a solution for a polynomial".
wcarss
·7 か月前·議論
Singing copyrighted Billy Joel to make your footage unusable for reality television; thanks 30 Rock for an early view into this dystopian strategy
wcarss
·7 か月前·議論
Yeah, getting into the car with the guy holding the gun doesn't become okay because you have a great argument you're waiting to use down the road. He's already got the gun out.

We should have started arguing when he just said he had a gun, indoors, in the crowd. We shouldn't have quietly walked outside at his demand. But that all happened. Here we are now, at the car, and he's got the gun out, and he's saying "get in", and we're probably not going to win from here -- but pal, it's time to start arguing. Or better yet, fighting back hard.

Because that car isn't going anywhere we want to be. We absolutely can not get in the car right now, and just plan to argue the point later. It doesn't matter how right the argument is at all.