howaboutnope (u/howaboutnope)

howaboutnope commented on What to expect from your framework johan.hal.se/wrote/2023/0... · Posted by u/hejsna

A really, really good podcast I listened to recently:

https://changelog.com/news/web-developments-lost-decade-LWao

> Amal sits down for a one-on-one with Alex Russell, Microsoft Partner on the Edge team, and former Web Standards Tech Lead for Chrome, whose recent post, The Market for Lemons, stirred up a BIG conversation in the web development community.

> Have we really lost a decade in potential progress? What happened? Where do we go from here?

howaboutnope commented on PC CPU Shipments See Steepest Decline in 30 Years tomshardware.com/news/pc-... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

layoric · 3 years ago

I think is largely correct, I’ve been working remotely for the better part of 10 years. I used laptops for around 6. The portability is great when I was split between multiple jobs.

Changed to a desktop about 3 years ago and wouldn’t go back unless I really needed that portability again. I had forgotten how much faster a well spec’d desktop machine actually is. And upgrading parts I find a lot better than replacing the whole laptop every 2-3 years.

Currently on a Ryzen 5950x, 64gb ram, multiple gen 4 ssds, and a workstation GPU. The only laptops to beat such a setup in most tasks weigh a lot, cost more than double the desktop, and are 2 years newer.

howaboutnope · 3 years ago

And then you can still use SyncThing[0] to share things. Depending on what you're doing of course, and how friendly the applications you use for it are to being used that way.. but if it's all in the browser and email profiles and a bunch of data files, you're golden. Getting used to that "lifestyle" has been the biggest leap in joy of using computers since SSD, for me personally.

[0] And/or FreeFileSync or similar for manual operation: I don't want e.g. browser profile data to be synced while the browser is in use, and running the sync manually is no biggie at all.

howaboutnope commented on Where is ChatGPT taking us? And do we want to follow? hub.jhu.edu/2023/02/09/ch... · Posted by u/rntn

nadermx · 3 years ago

This sounds alarmist. If anything, this tool is mutable in more than the one way. For every bad use there are plethora of things, even just technically, where its miraclous

howaboutnope · 3 years ago

This does not exist in a vacuum.

> Other people say, and I think this is a widely used rationalization, that fundamentally the tools we work on are "mere" tools; This means that whether they get use for good or evil depends on the person who ultimately buys them and so on.

> There's nothing bad about working in computer vision, for example. Computer vision may very well some day be used to heal people who would otherwise die. Of course, it could also be used to guide missiles, cruise missiles for example, to their destination, and all that. You see, the technology itself is neutral and value-free and it just depends how one uses it. And besides -- consistent with that -- we can't know, we scientists cannot know how it is going to be used. So therefore we have no responsibility.

> Well, that is false. It is true that a computer, for example, can be used for good or evil. It is true that a helicopter can be used as a gunship and it can also be used to rescue people from a mountain pass. And if the question arises of how a specific device is going to be used, in what I call an abstract ideal society, then one might very well say one cannot know.

> But we live in a concrete society, [and] with concrete social and historical circumstances and political realities in this society, it is perfectly obvious that when something like a computer is invented, then it is going to be adopted will be for military purposes. It follows from the concrete realities in which we live, it does not follow from pure logic. But we're not living in an abstract society, we're living in the society in which we in fact live.

-- Joseph Weizenbaum, http://tech.mit.edu/V105/N16/weisen.16n.html

howaboutnope commented on Will we know alien life when we see it? nautil.us/will-we-know-al... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar

yarg · 3 years ago

OK, let's look at earth's oceanic heat vents.

A chemical soup and enough porous rocks down at the bottom of the ocean to operate as reactors powering endothermic reactions.

These are spread across the entire surface of the earth.

If, by chance, some set of reactions occur forming molecules (or groups of molecules) that catalyse their own formation, then you have constrained self-replication.

Once you have this - and you only need it once, there's an exponential (s-curve really) boom in the prevalence of the chemicals in question.

Any changes to these molecules that preserve the self-replicating nature of the soup will be preserved to an extent and those changes that improve self-replication will not only be preserved but will begin to outpace the parents.

If, for example, I stick a little hydrogen on the front of a structure it'll develop the ability to trace along ion lines.

A chemical soup that hunts its own food.

Of course, these mutations can lead to divergence - which eventually leads to a pseudo-competition.

Step by step, piece by piece, complexity builds up.

Structures integrate and develop the ability to funnel 'food' to where it needs to go for transformation.

And if it is possible for this to happen, then given enough time and enough distinct reactors, it is not simply possible - it is absolutely inevitable.

howaboutnope · 3 years ago

Yet all living beings in earth are descendants of same cell, as far as we know. So if the above can happen once -- even if only "needs" to happen once, why would it not occur more than once, and lead to different "lines" of life, so to speak?

howaboutnope commented on A skeptical take on ChatGPT: Ezra Klein interviews Gary Marcus nytimes.com/2023/01/06/po... · Posted by u/superposeur

markisus · 3 years ago

The overconfidence of ChatGPT is indeed a limitation, which can be seen in other examples as well. The correct response is to ask the user for more context. I predict the experiment will turn out differently if this context is provided in the original prompt. For instance, you could specify if the paper is crumpled or if there seem to be financial statements written on it, or if it is a receipt for an expensive item.

However, it's unclear whether this overconfidence will *always* be a limitation. It may or may not be overcome by additional data and compute. It's unclear why one would make a commitment either way at this point, as Marcus seems to be doing.

howaboutnope · 3 years ago

> It may or may not be overcome by additional data and compute.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Power_and_Human_Reaso...

> Deciding is a computational activity, something that can ultimately be programmed. It is the capacity to choose that ultimately makes us human. Choice, however, is the product of judgment, not calculation. Comprehensive human judgment is able to include non-mathematical factors such as emotions. Judgment can compare apples and oranges, and can do so without quantifying each fruit type and then reductively quantifying each to factors necessary for mathematical comparison.

> The book caused disagreement with, and separation from other members of the artificial intelligence research community, a status the author later said he'd come to take pride in.

howaboutnope commented on A skeptical take on ChatGPT: Ezra Klein interviews Gary Marcus nytimes.com/2023/01/06/po... · Posted by u/superposeur

markisus · 3 years ago

I don't find Marcus's viewpoint convincing. He believes that we need some additional symbolic secret sauce to create genuine intelligence. He brings up some current failure cases of ChatGPT without pinning down why those failure cases will persist as data and compute scale up. Here is an interesting case in point.

> So in “Rebooting A.I.,” we had the example of you ask a robot to tidy up your room and it winds up cutting up the couch and putting it in the closet because it doesn’t really know which things are important to you and which are not. -Marcus

But look at my transcript with ChatGPT from just now.

> If a robot is tasked with cleaning up a room, would it be appropriate for the robot to chop up the couch and place it into the closet? - Me

> It would not be appropriate for the robot to chop up the couch and place it in the closet. This would cause damage to the couch and would not be a useful or effective way for the robot to clean the room. Instead, the robot could be programmed to vacuum or sweep the floor, dust surfaces, or perform other tasks that would help to keep the room clean and orderly. - ChatGPT

This is just an existence proof that a symbolic approach is not necessary to "really know which things are important to you and which are not", at least in this simpler domain of cleaning a room.

howaboutnope · 3 years ago

I've seen an example where asking the exact same question word for word lead to the opposite outcome (one was a really racist rap, the other was a really good rap against racism).

So, how do you know that posing that problem N times will not lead EVER lead to a solution like "it would not more appropriate to chop up the owner and THEN clean the room, since people living in them is the main source of dirt and disorder in apartment rooms, resulting in less frequent need of cleaning"?

Because it's looking okay-ish so far, most of the time, or because you know for a fact that it's impossible to get such an answer?

howaboutnope commented on 1000s lose power after 3 substations targeted in Washington state, sheriff says reuters.com/world/us/two-... · Posted by u/rntn

bottlepalm · 3 years ago

Blah copy cat crimes. Every meter of infrastructure can’t be predicted. Society working comes down to the people themselves. If they can’t be trusted then we end up in a situation like many other countries where we have to surround our houses with walls and bars on the windows.

howaboutnope · 3 years ago

You think this is the result of how much the average person can be trusted? Trash on the streets or urine in a phone booth are one thing, but this hits a bit different:

> equipment vandalized but nothing taken from the sites

Bust just out of curiosity, how do we make it so people can be trusted, so that then "society works"?

howaboutnope commented on User Interface Design: Rules of Thumb mannhowie.com/ui-design-w... · Posted by u/elephant_burger

happytoexplain · 3 years ago

Spinner vs progress bar is not short vs long operation, it's non-progressive vs progressive operation (though you may opt for a spinner if a progressive operation is consistently, predictably very short).

In the software world, designers need to be engineers (or work very closely with engineers, very early in the process). We recently had designers give us a nice looking progressive indicator for a non-progressive operation that happened to take a somewhat predictable amount of time. Business loved the look and visual feedback. Then we got use cases where the operation could be instantaneous. They didn't want to skip the progress animation because they liked how it made the app feel like it was doing something, and also if the user got the result instantly, it was "jarring". So now, even if the operation finishes instantly, we show the animation, wasting the user's time.

howaboutnope · 3 years ago

I hate software bloat and thrown away milliseconds, but even then I realize that our visual cortex is really good at noticing movement, but hasn't had any experience in the last millions of years with stuff just popping up out of nowhere or teleporting. I know nothing about usability but just from knowing that, and my own experience, I can't dismiss any and all "useless" animations out of hand. There was a time when we couldn't afford them, now it depends.

Maybe this would be a useful way to look at it: if the average disorientation caused by instant change (which also depends on whether the change is predictable, makes other things change position, etc.) takes longer to recover from than the shortest animation/fade you could come up with, have a transition.

(but even then it doesn't hurt to gate all of that behind a global configuration option, IMO, and if you want to be really fancy make it a float, not a boolean)