thom

32 ms·

511.
by thom 2y ago
Perhaps we can disagree on the shape of the curve, but it seems likely that ever more capable AI will enable ever more serious harms. Absolutely true that we should counter those harms in the present and not fixate on a theoretical future,
512.
by thom 2y ago
Up until about GPT 2, EURISKO was arguably the most interesting achievement in AI. Back in the day on the SL4 and singularitarian mailing lists, it was spoken of in reverent tones, and I’m sure I remember a much younger Eliezer Yudkowsky ca
513.
by thom 3y ago
I'm not sure that follows. If most programming is thinking, then it makes sense to minimise the amount of thinking that is wasted when circumstances later change.
514.
by thom 3y ago
There were occasionally multiple-choice adventures using the colour buttons. I must say as much as the slowness is annoying in hindsight, I still have memories of how exciting it was waiting for your team's football score to page back
515.
by thom 3y ago
I’ve been delighted with this approach and have never had a single glitch. Highly recommended, although I think I’ve heard from some denizens of HN that they’ve got even faster performance by manually copying data files instead of using tem
516.
by thom 3y ago
Just yesterday I literally spent 20 seconds staring at the Word print dialog not sure how to actually make it print. There’s a flat image of a printer with ‘Print’ under it with a box around it but it’s at the top so I guess my brain wrote
517.
by thom 3y ago
It’s worth having a mental model of _why_ OR can be suboptimal. Often it’s because you’re only hitting an index on half the conditional, or forcing PG into a bitmap scan, or worse turning and index lookup into a sequential scan. Not to bang
518.
by thom 3y ago
After the network didn't really work out, you could pick up the base stations and phones pretty cheaply so my family had these as our home phones for a while. They were very chunky and tough, with an aggressive beep when you pressed th
519.
by thom 3y ago
I think you’re arguing for the abolition of stalemate (and certain kinds of pins), and that’s totally reasonable. This doesn’t solve drawisness in general though.
520.
by thom 3y ago
I love that this account survives, not least because the embassy to Attila was made to argue about some missing bowls.
521.
by thom 3y ago
What do you consider “invoking a brutalist experience” to mean?
522.
by thom 3y ago
Ever started your car engine in a parking space but not been able to immediately pull out? Airports are extremely dynamic and complex and do not run like clockwork - they are pushing big hunks of metal through the air and across concrete wi
523.
by thom 3y ago
Same company as my answer to the useless question tbh so just goes to show…
524.
by thom 3y ago
Worked with a PhD student who had an algorithm to tell airline pilots exactly when to turn their engines on. Probably saves more pollution than I or my descendants will generate in all of our lives so I feel I’m comfortably in the black the
525.
by thom 3y ago
It probably would still be useful - even quite recently a UK politician got into hot water running up a large bill on his work iPad, I’ll admit I’ve not followed the industry for the last decade as anything but a consumer, You also see the
526.
by thom 3y ago
Corporate users of 3G dongles used to rack up enormous charges while roaming. They’d get hit with five-figure bills and complain to their carrier that they didn’t warn them, and often the carrier would end up swallowing the charge, even tho
527.
by thom 3y ago
The moment AI can fully replace programmers, the world is going to change so much that it’s probably not worth thinking about. Gather ye rosebuds until we unleash the rosebud optimising bot army.
528.
by thom 3y ago
Paradigms aren’t just technical capabilities within a language, they’re also modelling approaches for real world problems. Imperative programming lets you think about a series of steps. Structured programming lets you split and name series
529.
by thom 3y ago
There’s something about this that reminds me of the “you’re just a kid” scene in Good Will Hunting.
530.
by thom 3y ago
I've not noticed that, if anything I'm always delighted to find a 3-minute song these days, it feels like a bit of a lost art.
531.
by thom 3y ago
Not sure you have to be tall, you can do this flat on a bed just by shaking from the bottom instead.
532.
by thom 3y ago
Even so, is it really a big deal? There is more - and more varied and complex - music now, than there has ever been at any point in history. And you can find and access almost all of it instantly! Who cares or even knows what's in the
533.
by thom 3y ago
Imagine how unhappy we’d be if we had nothing to grumble about.
534.
by thom 3y ago
Every web framework has error handling features. These are HTMX’s. It’s two HTML attributes and you’re done, if you don’t want any of the additional functionality.
535.
by thom 3y ago
It depends on your options for managing state. If you can build a largely stateless UI, that can update from the server via a form submission or query parameters, then it’s a big win, both in terms of your code complexity and the complexity
536.
by thom 3y ago
This is all handled in an extension: https://htmx.org/extensions/response-targets I don’t know what kludge you’re referring to, it requires you to add basically two attributes to your HTML, it’s really no hardship at a
537.
by thom 3y ago
I'm baffled by your responses unless you're just on here to try and score points, which ironically you could do better by actually engaging with people instead of changing the terms of debate and then enigmatically exiting every t
538.
by thom 3y ago
We do invest quite a lot of money building things with earthquakes in mind, and have extensive early warning systems around the world. You were arguing that AI won't be dangerous, are you now arguing that it will be but we can't d
539.
by thom 3y ago
Nuclear reactors aren’t expressing their primal urges when they melt down and kill people, they’re just powerful machines doing something unexpected.
540.
by thom 3y ago
There are extremely high capability entities (people, companies, governments) that aren’t comically evil on the surface but nevertheless immiserate large groups of humans. Not all of them, not all of the time, but not none of them. What is

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