ben_w

26 ms·

631.
by ben_w 3mo ago
Streaming probably dented it, but likely so did satellite and cable. For much of my childhood there were only four (and briefly before the boom, five) TV channels. Major events like football would have a significant proportion of UK househo
632.
by ben_w 3mo ago
A large part of that goes via arguing about consciousness. Starts of with a quite defensible: First: super-intelligent AI is unlikely because, if you pursue Vernor's program, you get there incrementally by way of human-equivalent A
633.
by ben_w 3mo ago
> There was a guy on here the other day trying to argue that Brave New World wasn't a dystopian novel. There are some absolutely wiiild world views out there. I think that's likely to be all the sex and drugs? Though I'm b
634.
by ben_w 3mo ago
It could be either or both. He comments here sometimes, perhaps he will say. Or not, there's likely too many AI-bros in this particular thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=cstross
635.
by ben_w 3mo ago
I'd quite like a tool (running entirely locally on my own hardware, with no cloud service and no copyright-thieving grifters making bank on it via subscription fees) that digests a manuscript and derives a scene-by-scene timeline,
636.
by ben_w 3mo ago
> That is going from 1.5% of global electricity use to 3%. > It is less than I expected. I suspect this is because of the word "global". Are not most of these currently planned specifically for the USA? Sure, the USA has a d
637.
by ben_w 3mo ago
> Our biology is an innate part of us - to improve, to fix, sure, but not to cast off. Right now, necessarily so. The more mysteries that science solves, the more we unweave the rainbow*, the worse the tension between rationality and our
638.
by ben_w 3mo ago
> but Western culture has lost the vocabulary to express their true sentiment. They are grasping for words but can't reach for "soul" and other religious terms because that would sound ridiculous in a secular modern world
639.
by ben_w 3mo ago
Yes, but also for humans who learn of distant lands by reading (books or news, just so long as it's reading). And also these models have been associating with real-world phenomena from the first moment their training data did, and also
640.
by ben_w 3mo ago
> You are taking 'ancestor' in a strict technical sense, which was clearly not my intention. Blutly, this was not obvious, and what you suggested would have been equally true if you'd said: Learn Lithuanian. You were w
641.
by ben_w 3mo ago
> What is stopping us from creating an operating system that has programming as a first class citizen? Isn't that just any computer booting into a terminal?
642.
by ben_w 3mo ago
> I feel like I'm not doing this enough yet, it hasn't fully sunk in, and I'm going to be building a lot more stuff when it does sink in. I haven't yet gotten to the point of writing my own note-taking application (st
643.
by ben_w 3mo ago
(If you will permit the fanfic): Carter: I've finished comparing Goa'uld control crystals, all that glow is completely unnecessary. O'Neill: So they added lights inside closed boxes because…? Teal'c: The Goa'uld hav
644.
by ben_w 3mo ago
As is so often the case SMBC has already got a comic for this. I sincerely regard Zach Weinersmith (and also separately Randall Munroe) as two of the most pertinent voices in modern philosophy. https://www.smbc-comics.com/co
645.
by ben_w 3mo ago
> The generalization and summary of this rant is: slack is good. Happiness lives in slack. There is such thing as optimizing too much. Also the small, isolated systems under optimization, are in reality neither small nor isolated. Indeed
646.
by ben_w 3mo ago
Before reading, know that I am uncertain in either direction. > a hidden representation of self that is continually tended to This sounds like a personality? They act like they have one of those. It may be an illusion, and even if it isn
647.
by ben_w 3mo ago
> A slightly smarter highschooler could write these. I could write these. It's clear as day that the LLM, not the human, did the heavy lift. It'd be ridiculous to give full credit to whoever wrote the prompt. I think you'r
648.
by ben_w 3mo ago
> Do you attribute the build to the tool? The "system's contribution" is helped by many other things all the way down to chips, datacenters and power generation. If the authorship requires attributing to a tool, then it sh
649.
by ben_w 3mo ago
> Which is precisely the reason to attack now before this problem becomes much worse and then Iran adds in nuclear weapons too. Perhaps. However, there are many alternatives to "attack" besides "do nothing". > Even
650.
by ben_w 3mo ago
> Specifically in the case of economic warfare, Iran is losing badly. The worst outcome is some MAGA coal rollers have to pay more for gas. Iran's economy literally doesn't function due to our blockade (which means we also cont
651.
by ben_w 3mo ago
My imagination is indeed very capable of magical thinking. However, if this was something that worked in the real world, we wouldn't be having this conversation because e.g. DOGE would have been successful.
652.
by ben_w 3mo ago
Plants need a lot of things, not just CO2; what they are limited by varies from case to case, and conversion to farmland can cause permanent damage which may indeed turn it into a desert. Fortunately, careful manipulation can reverse desert
653.
by ben_w 3mo ago
Quick search says that list is a mix of misleading and untrue. That said, 1.5 million on goats, 1 on cows, 1.7 million on fish, these are all perfectly reasonable research costs compared to the potential benefit to agriculture on the scale
654.
by ben_w 3mo ago
Mm, however the more I experience of the world, the more I find this matches the description up-thread: > Google acting like a normal but competent company Is it messed up and weird? Yup. Still normal though. Worse, this is matching the
655.
by ben_w 3mo ago
> 100% of the time or at That you're still asking "100% of the time", shows me you're missing the entire point that has been said repeatedly.
656.
by ben_w 3mo ago
> How do you transmit the power? The usual way. > Do the countries on the Atlantic even want wind power, set up the transmission lines, and pay for it? They can sell the power, you know. This already happens. > That reduces the sto
657.
by ben_w 3mo ago
> Can you give a few specific examples? Early AI, the "Symbolic AI/Expert systems" era: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendral Evolutionary computation era: https://en.wikipedia.org/wik
658.
by ben_w 3mo ago
We have proven solutions. We're building the factories to make them as fast as we can find investors with money to spend on them, because they're already cheaper than fossil fuels which are themselves cheaper than nuclear.
659.
by ben_w 3mo ago
Why do you think that's a criticism? The following table shows that in total 2264 installations have been identified in the EU ETS to be power plants, which have reported emissions in at least one year since 2005. The fuel of 1440
660.
by ben_w 3mo ago
> Now, let’s assume that there’s something that it truly doesn’t know anything about. I can’t think of an example right now but let’s say we go back two centuries when airplanes weren’t a thing. All it’s given is the raw data like 1) Bir

More ›