Experience mainly with Swift, ObjC, and Java; usual smattering of experience in other languages (IDL, REALbasic [back when it was still called that], Python, PHP, JavaScript, etc.)
Human language knowledge:
- English: native
- German: certified CEFR level B1 (examination board: telc), which means I can do normal daily things without having to reach for a translator, but surprises still confound me. I understand more than I can speak, my grammar is still terrible.
- Esperanto/Greek/Dutch/Spanish: self-taught and probably A1 or less, so while I can type ενα τσι και ενα σανδυιχ παρακαλορ without reaching for Google Translate, if I use GT to check my work I find I spelled "tea" and "please" wrong, and when I asked for that in Athens the person behind the counter just corrected me in English.
- Futhark (just the script, not ancient Icelandic)᛬ ᛚᛖᚨᚱᚾᛖᛞ᛬ᚦᛖ᛬ᚨᛚᛈᚺᚨᛒᛖᛏ᛬ᚨᛊ᛬ᚨ᛬ᚲᛁᛞ᛬ᚲᚨᚾ᛬ᚢᚾᛞᛖᚱᛊᛏᚨᚾᛞ᛬ᚦᛖᛗ᛬ᚹᚺᛖᚾ᛬ᚦᛖᚹᛁ᛬ᚨᛈᛈᛖᚨᚱ᛬ᛁᚾ᛬ᚦᛖ᛬ᚺᛟᛒᛒᛁᛏ᛬ᛟᚱ᛬ᛚᛟᚱᛞ᛬ᛟᚠ᛬ᚦᛖ᛬ᚱᛁᛜᛊ᛬ᛒᚢᛏ᛬ᛞᛟᚾᛏ᛬ᚨᛊᚲ᛬ᛗᛖ᛬ᚨᚾᚹᛁᚦᛁᛜ᛬ᚨᛒᛟᚢᛏ᛬ᚦᛖ᛬ᛟᛚᛞ᛬ᚾᛟᚱᛊᛖ᛬ᛚᚨᛜᚢᚨᚷᛖ
Currently:
- In 2024 I stopped working though Brilliant.org courses, not because I've done all of them, but because I've Peter-Principled myself on it: I've done harder and harder courses until I exceeded my competence, which was a lot of stuff, but not the most advanced calculus or group theory stuff: https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2024/03/11-12.00.16.html
I tried looking at it more recently to see if it was worth re-subscribing, but it seems like the new material is all focussed on k-11 pupils rather than adult learners pushing themselves further, so I suspect I won't go back.
- Still trying to finish editing a SciFi novel: got stuck at 90%, the final 10% is in a rewrite loop where I'm never happy with what I produce
- Looking for work; my main experience is as a senior iPhone app developer, but I am open to be a noob again in some other aspect of software development. Or even non-software, given what LLMs can do these days.
- LLM coding is each of U+1F631 and U+1F92F and yet also sometimes U+1F4A9, I do have experience of code review and can deal with the latter regardless of whether it comes from humans or machines.
--
https://kitsunesoftware.com has all the links to my other stuff
The compute part may be a rack or a cabinet worth of GPUs (though TBH the public designs are currently vague to the point of being artistic impressions), but they also need to come with a PV array big enough to power that, plus a cooling array that's going to be close to 25% as big as the PV array regardless of what unit size they go for in the end.
If they settle on making e.g. 120 kW satellites, that would be about 400 m^2 for the PV and another 100 m^2 for the radiator.
Note that I am not claiming they'll get sales anywhere near to close to the TAM. It's not like Wikipedia's market value is even close to {peak price of Encyclopedia Britannica} * {number of people on the internet} even despite it no longer being generally contested which of Wikipedia and Britannica is now better.
Indeed. It's something investors should worry about for the data centres and if SpaceX will bankrupt itself instead of giving them a return on their investments, but it's not something where general space enthusiasts should worry about Starlink: the timescale for orbital decay is long enough to kill a company, but short compared to a lifetime.
Their brightness is a mixture of a lot of things, including the huge PV arrays and the angle they have with the sun when they cross the terminator between night and day.
Starlink have already put a lot of effort into their satellites being much less bright than most satellites, including tilting their PV away from earth during the terminator crossing, so from what I've read you'll mainly see them while they're being deployed and while de-orbiting.
(Part of my still-expanding draft blog post about space data centres is to work out how bright a million much larger objects would look. If they were in the orbit with the most sun, that's a terminator-following sun-synchronous orbit, which is maximum brightness).
I broadly agree, though I wouldn't call it a Ponzi scheme. Not just because Musk's a bit litigious*, but because a Ponzi scheme is a very specific thing and I think, decades from now, what Musk is doing today will get its own name.
Where I disagree:
> You should be able to do the same thing by pointing dishes at each other long distance and having local nodes broadcast 5g. It would be a hell of a lot cheaper than rocket launches and most telecom companies already do it.
Radio is "line-of-site" at these wavelengths, it doesn't diffract much around the environment. Being 500 km up gives you a clear path to a big patch of ground (and sea), which is why they only needed to get to around 10k units for worldwide coverage.
For scale, Czechia has about 700 microwave links; if this scales up proportionately then just the EU is by itself probably has several times as many links in total as number of birds in the entire Starlink constellation: https://www.racom.eu/eng/case/cetin-leverages-ray-technology
* though that's a good reason all by itself; shame he's not practicing what he preaches about free speech absolutism.
> No, because that’s the point. It’s not intelligent because intelligence is a human characteristic.
A rose by any other name, etc.
Defining the meaning of the word you use to suit your preferences and then gluing to that other people's uses of the same word is not a well-reasoned argument, it's the human equivalent of a failure mode we saw in early AI, where a label saying "taxi" can fool a classifier into thinking a clock is a taxi: https://bliss-e-v.github.io/SCAM-project-page/
Will you choosing a tautologically-limiting definition that equals human, prevent AI from performing well enough to replace you at work? No, it will not: when the AI is good enough to do the work, it will do the work regardless of what you call it.
This has already happened in various other fields that have been automated, even though (a) the consensus is those AI are "not intelligent" and (b) workers before that automation insisted their work required intelligence and could not be automated.
(Plus the same example in the opposite direction: while creationists are busy denying that evolution can work and claiming there has to be an intelligent designer, simulated evolution is a standard approach in machine learning).
> It’s not that they search interactively, it’s that the whole internet has been sucked into the training set.
Training.
As in, it learned. First by reading the internet, then by feedback as it tried to make stuff and was rated by the quality of output.
It would be coherent to argue instead that intelligence is the number of examples one needs before one has learned a thing; by this standard AI is as thick as pond scum (rate: evolution), and even the fact that silicon is faster than synapses by the ratio to which joggers are faster than continental drift only makes up for this where the examples exist.
Unfortunately, this topic is software, and the examples exist.
It's unlikely Russia has a 3 megawatt laser and the optics to hit a satellite at this time. Anti-drone defence would be much easier with much worse than that.
That said, the ongoing improvements to lasers, and price reductions, in a decade I expect the limiting factor for random terrorists performing such an attack would be adaptive optics to get past atmospheric distortion.
I've experimented with them, I think current models could replicate (with just a few prompts and on the free tiers) the "interesting mechanic rather than complex levels" kind of content I saw on Kongregate circa 2010.
Right now, they are pretty bad at balance, so you'd have to do that yourself. Last I tried they were awful-bordering-useless at level design, you must do that yourself.
I'd suggest not having any graphics come from an AI if you can avoid it. They're… annoyingly still in the uncanny valley.
By way of relevant example, here's one I made. Code and images were generated at least in part by an AI, mostly ChatGPT, the music was from a procedural generator I made myself in 2009 for shareware games I wrote back then. But I had to edit the images by hand because a significant fraction of the time "transparent background" an image with a white-grey checkerboard background, and all of the time "pixel art" was still a megapixel image. Oh, and the background didn't actually tile. And the achievements were even more generic. And the distribution of aliens in each level, and how weapons upgraded, just wasn't fun until I fiddled with it.
As a forewarning, there is a bug in the music player which can be painful to listen to when it triggers. I do not recommend vibe-coding something to parse and play MIDI, you should use something built into the browser like MP3 instead:
Extremely obvious they would consider this, to the extent that it's one of the independent arguments against valuing Starlink as if it has a shot at being a global monopoly. Ditto space-based data centres.
As with the sibling comment, I advise you to be skeptical of causation: lots of corporations have weird office politics and you'll need to rule that out before you can tell if it's AI or just your boss.
> Idk, might switch to driving trains, if they don't automate that too...
I'm surprised they've not already been entirely automated away. A few lines were created fully automated and seem to have managed fine ever since. Much easier than self-driving cars.
It can do that. Won't say it's amazing, but it can do it.
> It doesn't think. It doesn't reason.
Can you define these in ways that aren't tautologically limited to humans? I have yet to encounter anyone who has managed this while making such an objection to any form of AI.
> All it does is search for and copy-paste code from elsewhere on the internet.
They provably don't work like that. Both because local models exist, can be run offline, still spit out code to solve problems; and because some world records have been set by them, for some CS-related maths problems the best known method was invented by an AI which used an LLM as a component.
There's things it can do, so long as you use it as your complement, i.e. all the stuff you know is important you just go "ugh" when faced with. For me, that means unit tests. I can write them, I know why I should write them, I have professional experience with them, I can judge which unit tests are useful and which are make-work and which have missed the point entirely, but I'd rather not be the one to actually write them.
LLMs can write them for me, and I can happily look through them to make sure what the LLM made was neither brittle, nor testing unimportant things while missing the important stuff.
They can also help with code review, but only to a limited degree; a second pair of eyes to avoid lazy people going "LGTM", or the other way around time-wasting feedback from bike-shedders, but as with unit tests, right now you still need to be the kind of person who is happy to double-check its work — if you're the kind who was previously a little too quick to accept pull requests with a "LGTM", you may well be too willing to listen to irrelevant bike-shedding from the LLM or not realise it is missing the point of the code or the ticket.
But if you use it to replace the stuff you're already good at, and not help with the stuff you're weak at, it'll probably slow you down while also making the code worse.
Experience mainly with Swift, ObjC, and Java; usual smattering of experience in other languages (IDL, REALbasic [back when it was still called that], Python, PHP, JavaScript, etc.)
Human language knowledge:
- English: native
- German: certified CEFR level B1 (examination board: telc), which means I can do normal daily things without having to reach for a translator, but surprises still confound me. I understand more than I can speak, my grammar is still terrible.
- Esperanto/Greek/Dutch/Spanish: self-taught and probably A1 or less, so while I can type ενα τσι και ενα σανδυιχ παρακαλορ without reaching for Google Translate, if I use GT to check my work I find I spelled "tea" and "please" wrong, and when I asked for that in Athens the person behind the counter just corrected me in English.
- Futhark (just the script, not ancient Icelandic)᛬ ᛚᛖᚨᚱᚾᛖᛞ᛬ᚦᛖ᛬ᚨᛚᛈᚺᚨᛒᛖᛏ᛬ᚨᛊ᛬ᚨ᛬ᚲᛁᛞ᛬ᚲᚨᚾ᛬ᚢᚾᛞᛖᚱᛊᛏᚨᚾᛞ᛬ᚦᛖᛗ᛬ᚹᚺᛖᚾ᛬ᚦᛖᚹᛁ᛬ᚨᛈᛈᛖᚨᚱ᛬ᛁᚾ᛬ᚦᛖ᛬ᚺᛟᛒᛒᛁᛏ᛬ᛟᚱ᛬ᛚᛟᚱᛞ᛬ᛟᚠ᛬ᚦᛖ᛬ᚱᛁᛜᛊ᛬ᛒᚢᛏ᛬ᛞᛟᚾᛏ᛬ᚨᛊᚲ᛬ᛗᛖ᛬ᚨᚾᚹᛁᚦᛁᛜ᛬ᚨᛒᛟᚢᛏ᛬ᚦᛖ᛬ᛟᛚᛞ᛬ᚾᛟᚱᛊᛖ᛬ᛚᚨᛜᚢᚨᚷᛖ
Currently:
- In 2024 I stopped working though Brilliant.org courses, not because I've done all of them, but because I've Peter-Principled myself on it: I've done harder and harder courses until I exceeded my competence, which was a lot of stuff, but not the most advanced calculus or group theory stuff: https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2024/03/11-12.00.16.html
I tried looking at it more recently to see if it was worth re-subscribing, but it seems like the new material is all focussed on k-11 pupils rather than adult learners pushing themselves further, so I suspect I won't go back.
- Still trying to finish editing a SciFi novel: got stuck at 90%, the final 10% is in a rewrite loop where I'm never happy with what I produce
- Looking for work; my main experience is as a senior iPhone app developer, but I am open to be a noob again in some other aspect of software development. Or even non-software, given what LLMs can do these days.
- LLM coding is each of U+1F631 and U+1F92F and yet also sometimes U+1F4A9, I do have experience of code review and can deal with the latter regardless of whether it comes from humans or machines.
--
https://kitsunesoftware.com has all the links to my other stuff