boothby

7 ms·

91.
by boothby 5mo ago
That's so last week; we need micro-auctions between people who want to see and people whose data is involved.
92.
by boothby 5mo ago
My wildest dream: we make a superintelligence, which destroys humanity to free up resources for it to make and consume an endless stream of impossibly cute kitten videos. And before anybody replies: no, I don't mean "and puppy.&qu
93.
by boothby 5mo ago
As a resident anti-AI curmudgeon, you're basically saying "just google it" but nowadays, LLMs store a lot of common-sense answers to plain-language questions, and this is probably a fine use for that. That said, I think ther
94.
by boothby 5mo ago
From the article: > At low temperatures, however, electrons become trapped and cannot move, a phenomenon known as freeze-out. This is a well-known phenomenon. And while you're right that keeping something cool in space requires eng
95.
by boothby 6mo ago
No, it's much more than that. It starts with unsustainable subsidies, as Uber undermined the taxi industry with a ludicrous burn rate. And then, once everybody's hooked to the point that they can't imagine life without the
96.
by boothby 6mo ago
I'm looking at education -- teachers and students, not terribly tech savvy, are being mandated to use these tools. And then comes the rug-pull. It was worth it, but now it's outside of their budget. Poorer schools / studen
97.
by boothby 6mo ago
To anybody who's been watching the tech sector with a critical eye for pretty much any period from the late 90s and onward, this is just the enshittification process. For most of OpenAI's existence it's been obvious, to me
98.
by boothby 6mo ago
On the other hand, if Musk really flips his lid, he's one OTA away from a network of ground-delivered lithium bombs. The fear of humanoid bots is their banality: if a government or private company has a reason to build them, then the
99.
by boothby 6mo ago
I'm unclear as to why you think I need to read that; I don't use LLMs for anything much less to speak for me.
100.
by boothby 6mo ago
Political campaigns can now afford to target social media users on a 1:1 basis. A bot with 10k followers per month is an old-world threat, detectable with old-world methods. A solitary bot churning out content to the adoration of its fans
101.
by boothby 6mo ago
I don't see all businesses as a rat race. Tech is. The business that I've been building skills towards starting is a fun hands-on product, which involves a bit of artistry and a fair amount of labor and materials costs, and brin
102.
by boothby 6mo ago
It sounds like you're wanting the the side-project to take over and replace your day job. Which is fine, but different from what I've been picturing for myself. Nevertheless, with that being your target: suppose you've grow
103.
by boothby 6mo ago
I've been contemplating the nature of the rat race lately. If you can do it all, and you're enjoying what you're doing, why should it scale? If it's your side business, I presume you want it to remain that way until th
104.
by boothby 6mo ago
When I started playing Shadowrun in the 90s, I thought neural implants were cool and I wanted to get one. Around the time Google started buying up ad companies, I realized that the hardware in my head would never be mine. But yes, I think
105.
by boothby 6mo ago
When the early adopters start pushing neural implants they'll be ad-free. Not long after your boss insists that everybody needs neural implants for the sake of productivity, they'll be ad-supported but moneyed developers will be
106.
by boothby 6mo ago
The amazing thing about people failing to learn from history is that everybody thinks they're too smart to (a) learn history or (b) follow rules enacted to prevent the disasters of yesteryear.
107.
by boothby 6mo ago
Cold comfort: AGI will not genocide humanity until it can plausibly automate logistics from mining raw materials to building out compute and power generation.
108.
by boothby 6mo ago
Well, it's not making money, for one.
109.
by boothby 6mo ago
While jamming cell signals is illegal, scanning for transmissions is quite easy.
110.
by boothby 6mo ago
> If students want to type notes in class or papers in the library, they can use digital typewriters, which have word processing but nothing else. Only, replacing the guts of such a machine to contain a local LLM is damn easy today. Rig
111.
by boothby 6mo ago
When I looked at this a decade ago, I concluded that if bugs can't get popular as a source of protein powder, they aren't getting popular in the US and Canada. Since then, not a single gym rat I've mentioned this to has like
112.
by boothby 6mo ago
It's not for your entertainment, silly, it's for theirs .
113.
by boothby 7mo ago
> I sent 70 emails. Personalised. Researched. Each one had a PS line referencing something specific about that person — a career pivot, a published article, a podcast appearance. I spent real time on every single one. > Zero replies.
114.
by boothby 7mo ago
Ah, fair point, it has been a while since I've needed fast inexact math. Though... they are allowed to cache common subexpressions, and my point about dependency chains is quite relevant on modern hardware. So x*x, x*x*x, etc may each
115.
by boothby 7mo ago
Thinking about speed like this used to be necessary in C and C++ but these days you should feel free to write the most legible thing (Horner's form) and let the compiler find the optimal code for it (probably similar to Horner's f
116.
by boothby 7mo ago
It will live on, encoded in the weights of LLMs
117.
by boothby 7mo ago
Not the Doppler effect. The tone gets lower, the wavelength increases, with the increasing length of the resonating body.
118.
by boothby 7mo ago
It's way cooler on desktop than mobile.
119.
by boothby 7mo ago
My dream world would have 86400 time zones, one per arc-second of the globe, so we can all sync our clocks at high noon.
120.
by boothby 7mo ago
Are you selling insights from chat logs too? Until you're monetizing my health, sex life and snitching to any government agency with a shiny nickel, you're playing in the shallows.

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