Code samples. This is what’s missing most of the time. Even if you encounter esoteric jargon, if they give a few examples, it’s pretty easy to decipher. Even big companies like Google give code examples in multiple languages.
Readit Newsjrue commented on How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me anniemueller.com/posts/ho... · Posted by u/wonger_
jrue commented on Help, Bing Won’t Stop Declaring Its Love for Me nytimes.com/2023/02/16/te... · Posted by u/hnuser0000
I mean, I understand where the author is coming from. But I cannot help but just read those particular responses by Bing as an amalgam of cliche-ridden texts secrets and love, of which there would be plenty in the training data. I genuinely feel a little bit alienated by text these days because of all the articles that HN is throwing around...
On the other hand, it is a little bit unsettling how much the author reads into this. Maybe it is just human nature to read something and emotionally engage? And this AI just falls into the same unsettling gap as too humanoid robots which trigger the uncanny valley effect?
Reading the whole article, the author clearly states he knows there is no sentience or anything mysterious going on, and acknowledges this is simply mimicking endless volumes of human dreck. What worries him, and I agree, is that if this were to go public as-is, the common populace wouldn’t understand that. This AI would con people into relationships, and maybe even instigate dangerous behavior. Such an AI would seem magical to the layperson.
When I think of future AI assistants, I’ve always pictured something akin to the Star Trek computer. A cold dispassionate voice that responds to what you need, and maybe only a hint of personality for color. Sydney feels like a full blown teenager going through some kind of emotional crisis.
Douglas Adams, [how to learn to love the internet]:
1. everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
2. anything that gets invented between then and before you turn 30 is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
3. anything that gets invented after you’re 30 is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.
(I too miss RSS)
[1] https://internet.psych.wisc.edu/wp-content/uploads/532-Maste...
jrue commented on Is there life after death? John Cleese discusses with panel of scientists openculture.com/2021/12/i... · Posted by u/miles
What are those alternatives?
I believe the common scientific consensus is that of classic materialism: mind is a process supported by the body's matter.
There are probably alternative theories indeed but they are at the fringes. For example, what are the repeatable experiments that would prove that the mind exists outside the body?
They've been billions of experiments now were people body disappear and the mind never came back. Unless you believe in spiritism which is far from being an accepted scientific theory.
I like to keep an open mind about these things. But they tend to be metaphysical arguments based on asking lots of questions and just pondering the issue, rather than on testable empiricism. If there is no physical test to prove the point, then it would equally valid for me to say we’re all video game characters, or living in a dream, or conjure up innumerable scenarios, no matter how ridiculous they could all be equally valid. It’s not scientific if it can’t be tested at some level through reproducible experiment. The point Carroll is making is that the atoms in our brain don’t magically float away after we die, and there is no scientific model that would allow that to happen, even through currently unexplained phenomena (like dark matter or weakly interacting particles).
It’s an argumentative fallacy to simply say we don’t know what we don’t know, therefore anything is possible. Rather than on what we currently do know.
jrue commented on Is there life after death? John Cleese discusses with panel of scientists openculture.com/2021/12/i... · Posted by u/miles
Physicist Sean Carroll’s take, based empirical understanding, and what would be necessary for some essence of a person’s conscious to remain after death.
jrue commented on A Handy Little System for Animated Entrances in CSS css-tricks.com/a-handy-li... · Posted by u/chmaynard
Animations can be a great way to create a sense of dynamism to a website. But it has to be very subtle, and done right. I sense most people’s knee-jerk reaction is to hate these, and I can understand why. I think the trick is to not break any expected UI conventions. So many flashy web experiences hijack the scroll, or create mystery buttons that aren’t clearly clickable. Harking back to Steve Krug’s mantra, “don’t make me think.” The best web design is so clear and intuitive, it rarely draws attention to itself. It’s like iOS animations, when closing an app, and seeing the app get sucked into it’s icon. It’s so quick and subtle, you barely notice it.
Kudos to the reduced motion advice at the end of the article, for better accessibility. I didn’t know this.
Dead Comment
Not directly mentioned in the article, but relevant: Richard Dawkins, in at least one of his books, discusses why dads don't put in as much child-rearing (in many mammals, for example). The evolutionary incentives for fathers and mothers are the same (eg they have equal stakes in the genes being propagated). 2 categories of reasons. (there may be more)
- Fathers (depending on species) can't be confident a given child is theirs. Mothers can be confident due to giving live birth. Fathers have a lower incentive to care for a given child, since expending effort on offspring that's not yours is evolutionary detrimental; everything has an opportunity cost.
- Mothers have a much higher investment in the child from the moment of conception: Due to the extra food they must consume to nourish the embryo, the effects of pregnancy etc. By comparison, sperm is cheap. Neither parent wants to let the child die due to lack of care, but the fathers are in a better position to call the mothers' bluff than vice versa due to the sunk cost.
This is fascinating, but also worrying how people might extrapolate too much from innate evolutionary upbringing. We’re social beings and there are so many examples of social constructs that benefit humans as a species but run against the grain of our more primal tendencies. It’s still important to study, and interesting nonetheless. But too often I see it used as a justification for people to express certain types of behavior (e.g. physical altercations, etc)
jrue commented on Can a Supernova Cause Mass Extinction? daily.jstor.org/can-a-sup... · Posted by u/toufiqbarhamov
All the ways extinction is possible helps to answer Fermi’s paradox. Asteroids, nuclear war, disease, supernova, etc. I was just reading that NASA is getting closer to its [asteroid defense system](https://www.nasa.gov/planetarydefense/dart). It’s like civilizations are in a race to get technologically advanced enough to protect against all the ways they can be extinguished. I imagine we would one day catalog all of the potential supernovas near us to a high degree of certainty. Hopefully, if we found an imminent one, we would be advanced enough to take mitigating steps or just leave the planet.
jrue commented on Marriott hack hits 500M Starwood guests bbc.co.uk/news/technology... · Posted by u/tooba
Is it time for us to simply accept that it's inevitable that, at some point, everything will be hacked, and hacked often?
Should we be focusing our efforts more on how to make "identity theft" (i.e. fraud) more difficult, even when someone knows all your data?
Something more tied to your physical self, whether 2FA or something else?
> Is it time for us to simply accept that it's inevitable that, at some point, everything will be hacked, and hacked often?
I disagree. I’d take the Economists route, which is looking for the incentives that drive motivation. If companies were held to a higher standard of accountability, imagine how many would beef up their security. For decades, security researchers have been poking fun at how ridiculous some of these sites are at handling security, and nothing ever happens.
Now, imagine if there was severe economic accountability to a company that was hacked. Perhaps payouts to each person affected (in this case, to all 150m). I imagine you’d see security become a top priority very quickly at most companies.