In sense yes, previously we were engaged in "google engineering, then we went to "stackoverflow engineering" and now its "prompt engineering" - with every step, the magic and mystic increases.
I've been playing around with Node-RED[1] for a while and thought I would recreate this using Node-RED (also being a big fan of Node-RED). The flow[2], i.e. code, is online to have a look at (editable but not deployable) and the feed[3] is cached and updated every hour or so.
It's only a small Heroku server so it might well be down or about to crash, I make no promises!
Thanks to the OP for the inspiration, I did take a lot of ideas from the original codebase :)
The underlying point being made - by the comment - is that if an author is biased because they are selling a product and complaining about their competition, how can the article or the "facts" be trusted?
The orignal article is disguised advertising, advertising in the form of a "knowledgable criticism" of existing payment services.
May the force be with you even if the object isn't.
I once worked at a company where I was responsible for exclusively doing this: building internal tools.
It was one of the most satisifying jobs I ever had. It was for a mobile games company with between 100 and 200 employees. Most developers worked on the mobile games and since these were very hit & miss, developers got disenchanted working for months on a game that got canned because the numbers weren't hit or management changed the focus. Few got to work on successful games - the envy of all developers in the company.
Instead I built these tools - mostly stuff that moved data between various third party products. But also built tools for company motivational purposes. All sorts of stuff including a weather aggregated to measure air quality within the office which sent slack alerts if conditions got unacceptable.
Part of the enjoyment was the immediate feedback from stakeholders and since these were "only" internal tools, there weren't deadlines or hassle about hitting numbers or deadlines. Testing wasn't that important, as long as the tool worked it was fine - a real hack-away until it works type of job!
I also began to see how people worked and whether there might be tooling to make their lives easier - most projects were initiated by a conversationn over a coffee (or other culinary delights)!
I can only recommend this to any company to have a team that exclusively works for the employees to make their lives easier. Simple scripts can sometimes help a long way to making non-tech people more efficient.
Nature and natural resources are in fact a societal good and shouldn't be dominated by a small class of people within society. Sure someone "owns" that land (whatever that means since it was "owned" by others before the Europeans came) and they have certain rights but they should not have all rights.
Imagine a powerful landowner owning _all_ plots of land on which Joshua Tree existed, imagine that landowner unilaterally deciding to destroy all the trees. They have made a decision for future societies that is not theirs to make. The property own profits, society pays.
> The court concluded in a ruling authored by Justice Sonia Sotomayor that the works made by Warhol did not have a sufficiently different commercial purpose from that of the original photo taken by Goldsmith: Both are used to illustrate magazine articles about Prince.
> "Because the artist had such a commercial purpose, all the creativity in the world could not save him," she wrote. The ruling will cramp artists and creativity, because any artwork that uses existing materials is in danger of violating copyright law, Kagan wrote.
Indeed, the tenor of the article is that AI will not reach the levels of creativity that humans display, instead our expectations of creative process will be lowered by the sheer quantity. Our expectation on quality will decline so far that we consider what AI produces to be creative and since that is produced far cheaper than humans can, AI creativity will become the new baseline.
> AI operates by making high-probability choices: the most likely next word, in the case of written texts. Artists—painters and sculptors, novelists and poets, filmmakers, composers, choreographers—do the opposite. They make low-probability choices. They make choices that are unexpected, strange, that look like mistakes.
Interesting take on the creativity that humans seem to display.
That would imply only those that have political expertise may speak on politics. At which point would one then be allowed to speak on AI?
I think the author (Naomi Klein) was speaking on the societal aspects of AI, inparticular those that we are already experiencing. She also questions whether those driving the AI revolution truly what to make the world a better place or just a quick buck.
Also a true AGI will threaten all jobs, by definition. So we can all feel a little apprehensive over the upcoming developments in AI.
> There is a world in which generative AI, as a powerful predictive research tool and a performer of tedious tasks, could indeed be marshalled to benefit humanity, other species and our shared home. But for that to happen, these technologies would need to be deployed inside a vastly different economic and social order than our own, one that had as its purpose the meeting of human needs and the protection of the planetary systems that support all life.
Unfortunate but that comment seems to be quite on point.
Humans will always spend their time doodling or burning wasted compute cycles. Cave dwellers spent an awful lot of time throwing stones into rivers. Boredom is uncurable and should not be taken in a sorrowful manner.
Article makes an interesting point that reading and writing is killing the oral transmission of wisdom. Books get read and then forgotten as they get put into libraries.
The article points out that oral traditions can go back as far 7000 years or further.
Depends on which storyteller you listen to. The English would tell you that the Chinese were being unfair in their trade and had it coming it to them (the wars). The Chinese would tell you that they have had a century of humiliation[1].
Somewhere inbetween those stories lies the truth. However as with the current crisis, it was the English that invaded with their Navy, that would make them the aggressor and hence the bad-~guy~human. Taking todays value system and applying it to events that happened some 180 years ago.
This is was the reason for the Opium Wars with the English. The English wanted Chinas tea but the Chinese didn't want anything from the English so the English were bleeding gold and silver into China.
So the English forced Opium onto the people of China against the will of the King of China. China rebelled, the English conquered and forced the Chinese to open their ports and accept Indian-grown opium as trade for Chinese tea.
That continued until the English found the secret plants that made the Chinese tea. They stole those plants and planted them in India.
This similar to Chinas stand on IP: copying is ok so long it doesn't happen to our IP. But this is how small economies can grow quickly, by ignoring IP. So nearly every western nation had a period of ignoring copyright and/or IP.