TheOtherHobbes

7 ms·

61.
by TheOtherHobbes 2mo ago
Classic software was constrained by classic hardware. AI couldn't happen until there was enough compute to make (this entry level iteration of) it possible. I'm fairly sure - ask me again in a few years - that most of the compute
62.
by TheOtherHobbes 2mo ago
Word's Track Changes is very transclusiony. It's not a bad UI metaphor for limited applications, but it makes no sense at all for a global document store. Humans like boundaries. Even ignoring the copyright issues, we like our cul
63.
by TheOtherHobbes 2mo ago
The default oligarch orientation is to treat workers as slaves to the maximum possible extent. Firefights with guns, hand-to-hand violence, and real deaths were needed to give unions the leverage they had. For some reason this history isn&#
64.
by TheOtherHobbes 2mo ago
Most of the industry is running on bullshit. The concept of running a productive service that meets genuine user needs in a clever, delightful, and satisfying way has been replaced by grifting, scamming, hyping, manipulating, and outright l
65.
by TheOtherHobbes 2mo ago
A lot of people had a strong nostalgic attachment to DEC PDPs because they were their first experience of hands-on computing. So SV always had a community of very wealthy nerds who could afford a used PDP-10 and its insane running and maint
66.
by TheOtherHobbes 2mo ago
It's exactly how it works - at least potentially. Lean text is harder to watermark because word choices and meanings are tightly constrained. Low-entropy text is fluff and filler. It's very easy to synonym-substitute words witho
67.
by TheOtherHobbes 2mo ago
LLM writing has always had a problem with economy. A good human writer will nail a point with a few memorable words. LLMs overwrite. Ridiculously. I assume this is to increase token usage, but at this point a model that understood economy
68.
by TheOtherHobbes 2mo ago
If you live in a Western democracy your politicians are very accountable to media owners and corporate donors. Voters are a very long way down the influence list, because media owners and corporate donors have sophisticated and very expensi
69.
by TheOtherHobbes 2mo ago
I wouldn't call it ironic. The forces behind Leave were - still are - far-right nationalists and wannabe autocrats. They consider democracy an annoyance - ideally a temporary one. Their idea of sovereignty is telling everyone else what
70.
by TheOtherHobbes 2mo ago
Cameron put a Eurosceptic in charge of the Remain campaign, and Nick Clegg - supposedly an arch Remainer - went to work for Meta after Cambridge Analytica and its contribution to Brexit became public knowledge. The public were conned. The
71.
by TheOtherHobbes 2mo ago
I'm increasingly convinced there's going to be a technological AIpocalypse within the next five years which makes all of these issues - and many others - redundant. ChatGPT 3 was released nearly six years ago, and the models are s
72.
by TheOtherHobbes 2mo ago
The media are responsible. The media are responsible. If the media barons wanted to end Trump they could take him down tomorrow. Never mind full-throated investigative journalism - a tiny shift towards accurate reporting would be enough.
73.
by TheOtherHobbes 2mo ago
Narcissists don't lie so much as self-soothe. One of the keys to understanding narcissism is that everything they do - all statements, transactions, relationships, all of it - is an attempt to make themselves feel as good as they can,
74.
by TheOtherHobbes 2mo ago
'Antifa' is a wholly imaginary organisation, and always has been. And the biggest riot was Jan 6. The Antifa nonsense is classic DARVO.
75.
by TheOtherHobbes 2mo ago
Not much to add except that The Economist pontificating about morality is like a vampire complaining blood tastes funny.
76.
by TheOtherHobbes 2mo ago
They took something workable and Arial-ised it. And now they're using a bland, mediocre font. Fonts are weird voodoo. Good and bad choices can both make a measurable difference to ROI. So I'm not convinced this is going to be the
77.
by TheOtherHobbes 2mo ago
They're de facto superhuman. Even with the friction and stupidity, they still have more agency than an individual human and process a much bigger entropic footprint for both information and physical resources. You occasionally get Grea
78.
by TheOtherHobbes 2mo ago
Hi Claude [waves from the EU, which appears to have been forgotten]
79.
by TheOtherHobbes 2mo ago
Points are a realist view - there's a real object there. Although some physicists disagree, QM slants very anti-realist. There are no objects anywhere, no particles, no waves, only probabilistic interactions, some of which can be snaps
80.
by TheOtherHobbes 2mo ago
The next wave is already in view and it's going to surprise and horrify the survivors in equal amounts. Some people will be delighted. Most are going to have a very hard time adjusting. YC and adjacent isn't it.
81.
by TheOtherHobbes 2mo ago
The more relevant term is Modernism, which was a wave of anti-realist abstraction in the arts and sciences. It's more than a century old now. "Modern art" in the 1950s/60s post-war sense means extreme abstraction with no
82.
by TheOtherHobbes 2mo ago
Most engineering classes include projects, but they're presented as homework and/or "something you can show an employer." And "building things" isn't enough. Many projects have zero commercial potential. I
83.
by TheOtherHobbes 2mo ago
I think he does, but it seems he still considers himself a remote SV native rather than someone working in the UK's economy. Worst of both worlds - no casual gossip feed in the Bay Area, no big dog meetings in the UK. (Which mostly has
84.
by TheOtherHobbes 2mo ago
"We have the smartest model in the world but our company consistently does stupid things" is not a sustainable business model. Maybe Anthropic's enterprise sales are going brilliantly, and the rest of us are just pixel dust t
85.
by TheOtherHobbes 2mo ago
Any art needs theory, practice, and study of the greats. Unless you're some kind of exceptional genius talent out of the gate - and no one is, really - you need inspiration from other work, imitation, understanding, and practice of you
86.
by TheOtherHobbes 2mo ago
His stories are beautiful. The language is very ordinary. (Not a criticism.) I would absolutely call him a landmark writer, but I wouldn't call him lit fic in the publishing sense.
87.
by TheOtherHobbes 2mo ago
John Updike. Better than average prose in all of his books, but his debut The Poorhouse Fair is outstanding. It may be too much for modern readers - not many explosions or super heroics - but even if you only get a chapter in, it shows what
88.
by TheOtherHobbes 2mo ago
Programming is the mathematical equivalent of brick layers looking at architects and saying "I could do that."
89.
by TheOtherHobbes 2mo ago
Because the same techniques are used in the media and politics to get believe and vote for things that aren't true, by people who will not just scam money from the victims in many different ways, but do far worse things to other innoce
90.
by TheOtherHobbes 2mo ago
I think Blade Runner and Alien helped destroy mainstream science fiction. Before Blade Runner almost anything could be science fiction. After Blade Runner science fiction meant detective noir with #tech_upgrade - clones, memory implants, dy

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