simonh

61 ms·

931.
by simonh 3y ago
Alignment with any philosophy. Alignment itself is easy to define. An AI system is considered aligned if it advances the intended objectives. Firstly we don’t know how to concretely and completely define any philosophical system of values (
932.
by simonh 3y ago
The problem isn’t sentience, it’s alignment. AIs can be as sentient as we like without being any threat at all, as long as their goals are aligned with our actual best interests. The problem is we have as yet struggled to clearly articulate
933.
by simonh 3y ago
Since it genuinely seems to have generalised those logical principles and can apply them to novel questions, I’d say it’s more than just marketing.
934.
by simonh 3y ago
There's definitely some people out there that think LLMs reason the same way we do and understand things the same way, and 'know' what paint is and what a wall is. That's clearly not true. However it does understand the
935.
by simonh 3y ago
It sounds like you’re saying it’s only reasoning in that way because we taught it to. Er, yep. How great this is becomes apparent when you think how virtually impossible it has been to teach this sort of reasoning using symbolic logic. We’v
936.
by simonh 3y ago
You can tell it that you can buy white paint any yellow paint, but the white paint is more expensive. After 6 months the yellow paint will fade to white. If I want to paint my walls so that they will be white in 2 years, what is the cheapes
937.
by simonh 3y ago
Yep, they haven’t 100% every time got it right, but for Apple in the Jobs era form and function were the same thing, and for the most part they’ve kept to that vision. Just look at AirPods or the watch. Obviously we’ll never know, but I don
938.
by simonh 3y ago
Japan generally. They tried to pull a great leap forward move with AI a few decades ago, but just ended up wasting billions on dead end approaches right on the cusp of the AI winter. My personal opinion is that really top notch breakthrough
939.
by simonh 3y ago
I think that's a little hyperbolic, but the Japanese are way behind. There was a decent analysis (as always) in the Economist recently. https://www.economist.com/asia/2023/04/16/how-japan-is-losin...
940.
by simonh 3y ago
To be fair until the iPod the Apple base had a decent proportion of committed Cupertino cultists. At this stage that's an ancient historical anomaly. They still exist as a tiny fraction of the actual customer base nowadays, but the ext
941.
by simonh 3y ago
I agree the dock as the only way to charge seems daft, but I suppose they expect everyone to have a USB-C charging cable for their phone already, and use that on the go. Most Android phone owners will, and I suppose this is aimed at them.
942.
by simonh 3y ago
My eldest daughter has gone plant positive. She’s mostly vegetarian, but doesn’t go way out of her way to avoid meats. She eats veggies and tofu from the communal hotpot (were a half Chinese family) even though meat cooks in it as well, She
943.
by simonh 3y ago
Cost control is largely about correctly predicting costs. So teams that correctly predict costs will select lower performing but affordable instruments. Teams that fail at that may well under predict costs, over engineer their systems and e
944.
by simonh 3y ago
Go into settings and switch to Flat Earth mode.
945.
by simonh 3y ago
For much of human history 50 years is probably a lot closer. Anyway… https://xkcd.com/2608
946.
by simonh 3y ago
> The ones who write the code make the rules… Any code I didn’t write myself, from the ground up using no third party components, in a language I developed, ‘could’ possibly be abused in this way. Even then, do I have to also write the m
947.
by simonh 3y ago
The key term there is “essential liberty”, by which he meant political rights. Choosing to delegate management of a computer’s firmware to a third party firstly isn’t giving away any political rights, and is a rational choice in some circum
948.
by simonh 3y ago
In which case you’re just hosed anyway. A jumper won’t change that.
949.
by simonh 3y ago
The stock exchange was about spreading risk too. You could raise equity from many small investors that individually are assuming a relatively low risk. So arguably this was the foundation of modern capitalism too, just in time for the devel
950.
by simonh 3y ago
That's true, but what matter for technology development is who is specifying the design criteria. For most of the history of US rocket development it's been NASA. They designed the Saturn V, the Shuttle, SLS, and sub-contracted ou
951.
by simonh 3y ago
The problem is they are constrained by the needs of the one customer they definitely have, the US Navy. It's their need for reactor power plants for their nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers that is funding the development of thes
952.
by simonh 3y ago
The more they tighten their grip, the more equity investors will slip through their fingers.
953.
by simonh 3y ago
It varies a lot by country. France is unbelievably bad.
954.
by simonh 3y ago
I'm not trash talking Englebart, in any way, I'm just saying the minimalist web approach was not at all obvious. To many, many pioneers there were a lot of sophisticated features they though would be absolutely essential to any pe
955.
by simonh 3y ago
There have been programming environments on iOS since 2011 with Codea. I started programming on my iPad using Pythonista in 2012.
956.
by simonh 3y ago
The thing is nobody was even trying to create a smartphone platform remotely like the iPhone. The standard approach was crippled cut-down mobile OSes with shared memory architectures and proprietary tooling stacks. There's no way to ge
957.
by simonh 3y ago
So why didn't Engelbart invent HTML and HTTP in the 60s? At it's core it's a very simple protocol and minimal document format comparable in complexity to systems that existed at the time. Computers back then were perfectly ca
958.
by simonh 3y ago
You don't have to use all of that though, it's optional. A fairly basic but serviceable HTML document that looks decent is still pretty easy.
959.
by simonh 3y ago
Right, the dynamic is that high prices are due largely to shortages. Increasing supply requires investment, so yes price controls would reduce profits, but at the cost of curtailing investment which will sustain shortages and high prices fo
960.
by simonh 3y ago
The point is everybody is spying on everybody else. Every nation has spy agencies, and what they do is spying, it’s right there in the name. It’s just that the US operation is bigger and better funded, and has the biggest network of allies.

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