I don't know about good vs evil. That seems impossible. But I'd be interested in a license that prevented use by any company owned by one of the top 1% most valuable companies in the world. I have no idea if that's enforceable or not. Basically a license that restricts use for companies that are just trying to be acquired.
Readit NewstheSherwood commented on Stopping bad guys from using my open source project (feedback wanted) evanhahn.com/stopping-bad... · Posted by u/emschwartz
theSherwood commented on How can England possibly be running out of water? theguardian.com/news/ng-i... · Posted by u/xrayarx
I'm really skeptical of the idea that the blame for the lack of water infrastructure ought to be put at the feet of the water companies. The UK's planning system has strangled just about every infrastructure project in every domain. There is a general trend of local residents preventing infrastructure being built in the area, whether it be for water, energy, rail, or roads.
This site is an absolute gem. Thank you.
theSherwood commented on Breaking the WASM/JS communication performance barrier github.com/ealmloff/sledg... · Posted by u/weinzierl
The extra DOM complexity that would entail seems like a loss for the existing web.
The current situation is that we have limited uptake of WASM. This is due, in part, to lack of DOM access. We could solve that but we would have to complicate WASM or complicate the DOM. Complicating WASM would seem to undermine its purpose, burdening it forever with the complexity of the browser. The DOM, on the other hand, is already quite complex. But providing a fresh interface to the DOM would make it possible to bypass some of the accretions of time and complexity. The majority of the cost would be to browser implementors as opposed to web developers.
theSherwood commented on Breaking the WASM/JS communication performance barrier github.com/ealmloff/sledg... · Posted by u/weinzierl
The whole UTF-8 vs UTF-16 thing makes this way more messy than it should be.
I'd love for some native way of handling UTF-8 in JavaScript and the DOM (no, TextEncoder/TextDecoder do not count). Even a kind of "mode" you could choose for the whole page would be a huge step forward for the "compile native language to WASM + web" thing.
100%. If we could get a DomString8 (8-bit encoded) interface in addition to the existing DomString (16-bit encoded) and a way to wrap a buffer in a DomString8, we could have convenient and reasonably performant interfaces between WASM and the DOM.
theSherwood commented on When Is WebAssembly Going to Get DOM Support? queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?... · Posted by u/jazzypants
I want DOM access from WASM, but I don't want WASM to have to rely on UTF-16 to do it (DOMString is a 16-bit encoding). We already have the js-string-builtins proposal which ties WASM a little closer to 16-bit string encodings and I'd rather not see any more moves in that direction. So I'd prefer to see an additional DOM interface of DOMString8 (8-bit encoding) before providing WASM access to DOM apis. But I suspect the interest in that development is low.
theSherwood commented on CSS's problems are Tailwind's problems colton.dev/blog/tailwind-... · Posted by u/coltonv
The advantages of Tailwind are:
- the styling is colocated with the markup - sensible defaults - avoids rule hierarchy/inheritance - minimal JS at runtime
Disadvantages:
- build step and configuration - dynamic styling complexity
I don't think that's a bad tradeoff. And we're talking about styling on the web, here. So there are no good solutions. But there is a bad solution and it's CSS-in-JS.
theSherwood commented on LLM Inevitabilism tomrenner.com/posts/llm-i... · Posted by u/SwoopsFromAbove
It is not a "specific theological claim" either, rather a school of theological discourse. You're literally doing free-form association now and pretending to have novel insights into centuries of work on the issue.
I'm not pretending to any novel insights. Most of us who don't have much use for theology are generally unimpressed by its discourse. Not novel at all. And the "centuries of work" without concrete developments that exist outside of the minds of those invested in the discourse is one reason why many of us are unimpressed. In contrast, AI development is resulting in concrete changes that are easily verified by anyone and on much shorter time scales.
theSherwood commented on LLM Inevitabilism tomrenner.com/posts/llm-i... · Posted by u/SwoopsFromAbove
Nobody serious is claiming theological predesination is based on "nothing", either. Talk about poor pattern matching.
You are, of course, entitled to your religious convictions. But to most people outside of your religious community, the evidence for some specific theological claim (such as predestination) looks an awful lot like "nothing". In contrast, claims about the trajectory of AI (whether you agree with the claims or not) are based on easily-verifiable, public knowledge about the recent history of AI development.
theSherwood commented on LLM Inevitabilism tomrenner.com/posts/llm-i... · Posted by u/SwoopsFromAbove
I think you’re missing the point of the blog post and the point of my grandparent comment, which is that there is a pervasive attitude amongst technologists that “it’s just gonna happen anyway and therefore whether I work on something negative for the world or not makes no difference, and therefore I have no role as an ethical agent.” It’s a way to avoid responsibility and freedom.
We are not discussing the likelihood of some particular scenario based on models and numbers and statistics and predictions by Very Smart Important People.
I agree that "very likely" is not "inevitable". It is possible for the advance of AI to stop, but difficult. I agree that doesn't absolve people of responsibility for what they do. But I disagree with the comparison to religious predestination.