boothby

19 ms·

271.
by boothby 2y ago
Especially if you're writing a file, the creation time is a big hint! Even nanoseconds won't help if you're leaking that many bits from your seed.
272.
by boothby 2y ago
Monopolies have no incentive to lower prices.
273.
by boothby 2y ago
This "quit or risk getting fired" email was sent to federal employees on January 28, the day before the crash: https://www.opm.gov/fork and that includes air traffic controllers and their supervisors [1] If you do
274.
by boothby 2y ago
Agreed on all but one detail. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I do believe that the more emergent concern is AI controlled by a small number of humans, working against the benefit of the rest of humanity.
275.
by boothby 2y ago
I'm not fussy about who's in control. Be it global or national; corporate or governmental; communist or fascist. But technology progresses more or less uniformly across the globe and systems are increasingly interconnected. An
276.
by boothby 2y ago
I think that science fiction plays an important role in discourse. Science fiction authors dedicate years deeply contemplating potential future consequences of technology, and packaging such into compelling stories. This gives us a shorth
277.
by boothby 2y ago
To be clear, I'm much more concerned about the rise of techo-authoritarianism than employment. And further ahead, where I said your original take might not age well; I'm also not worried about AI making humanoid bodies. I'd
278.
by boothby 2y ago
Honestly, I wasn't even talking about jobs with that. I worry about an intelligent IOT controlled by authoritarian governments or corporate interests. Our phones have already turned society into a panopticon, and that will can get mu
279.
by boothby 2y ago
The emotional response is meaningful. A desire for simple truths is helpful in some areas of life. Handling ambiguity and complexity is helpful in others. Applying an engineering mindset to emotion is a sure route to madness. Perhaps
280.
by boothby 2y ago
> AI doesn't have needs any desires, humans do. I fear that this won't age well. But to shamelessly riff on Marx, those who control the means of computation will control society.
281.
by boothby 2y ago
I see "gripping his handout" as significantly more vivid than the uttered response -- which OP confirms to have eluded their memory. That's the story: the teller's reaction to the question was more visceral than verbal.
282.
by boothby 2y ago
That's the strawman he chose to flog. Indeed, why not hold in contempt people I have defined as contemptible? It's circular reasoning, at best.
283.
by boothby 2y ago
Sage is a Python (and the snippet you pasted works fine in Python). And I'm also curious what would qualify that code as "horrid." I'd make light suggestion to improve performance by making `seen` a set right off the b
284.
by boothby 2y ago
I find it quite interesting that pg's article is so extensively uncurious and disdainful. He openly sneers at the topic he intends to explain, and tirelessly lays into a straw man (the FoxNews definition of woke) rather than the stron
285.
by boothby 2y ago
Astrology and astronomy only split a few hundred years ago, and modern astrologers do in fact have decent models for the motion of the planets. This sort of alignment is precisely the kind of thing that astrologers use to provide a veneer
286.
by boothby 2y ago
Them potentially violating my copyrights is very much my business. But you're right, the difference is how much the respective parties have to spend on legal battles. Simply showing up to court wearing a tshirt that says "what
287.
by boothby 2y ago
LLMs are trained on works -- software, graphics and text -- covered by my copyright. What's the difference?
288.
by boothby 2y ago
If I understand the position of major players in this field, downloading models in bulk and training a ML model on that corpus shouldn't violate anybody's IP.
289.
by boothby 2y ago
That's an abuse of quantifiers, and an interesting one. You suggest that the judges become literal fashion police, each individual with the authority to remove a contestant whose clothes are not impressive in their personal opinion.
290.
by boothby 2y ago
The rules specifically said "dress to impress" and she wore thousand dollar shoes. Ridiculous. Good for Magnus, somebody needs to take a stand and he's got the clout to do so.
291.
by boothby 2y ago
We generally don't talk about downvotes... but I gotta say that it's sad that this comment was gray. Your approach to an uncomfortable feeling was to name it, and get curious. That's commendable, and you're brave to sh
292.
by boothby 2y ago
You eat bugs. Be they flour mites, dust mites, eyelash mites, fruit fly eggs, parasitic wasps... your home, body, and food all have a nonzero chance of hosting bugs small enough to escape your attention. They inevitably end up going down
293.
by boothby 2y ago
Nearest rounding does seem like a mistake here. Rounding down is quite safe: rather than lose it all, you end up with at least 2^26 pennies.
294.
by boothby 2y ago
If you start out with a $1e12 stake, you're able to avoid catastrophic rounding errors even in the worst case. There's probably a life lesson here.
295.
by boothby 2y ago
Multiple people raising objections at once, each at a reasonable volume to speak to a large seminar room, and other people speaking to their immediate neighbor. If there was angry muttering, I don't recall it. But yes, a crowd of mat
296.
by boothby 2y ago
I've got a brief bio in my profile. The major thrust of my role is to develop architectures of digital/analog circuits for quantum computers, and I've lately been getting into device design. That's miles away from supe
297.
by boothby 2y ago
> All of which effort and edifice would collapse into the dumpster if some snot-nosed little upstart like you, using crude computation, achieved overnight fame by finding a counter-example. Not at all . In fact, if I had found a counte
298.
by boothby 2y ago
Just a gentle reminder from somebody with a foot in each camp: computers were invented by mathematicians to accelerate computation. The field of Computer Science is a child of the field of Mathematics. Computer Engineering is its grandchi
299.
by boothby 2y ago
This reminds me of a fun experience I had in grad school. I was working on writing some fast code to compute something I can no longer explain, to help my advisor in his computational approach to the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture.
300.
by boothby 2y ago
> I'm not entirely sure what Character AI could have done differently here. You're taking it as a given that Character AI should exist. It is not a person, but an offering of a company made up of people. Its founders could ha

More ›