"So that is my call to arms. If we want the full power of AI scientists, then we should share the goals with them so they can create, evaluate, discover, and in these ways fully participate in achieving the goals. Let’s be bold! Let’s fully automate Creativity and Discovery!"
Should we automate exercise and play as well? How about learning?
The machine didn't have a soul, so we donated ours.
I understand the skepticism. I am worried about the implications of AI as well. The deeper issue at stake is that the depth of scientific knowledge has been increasing for a very long time. Now you get to have a PhD in esoteric subproblems and that slows down research especially if the discoveries require depth in multiple subdomains. Socially and economically training people in every combinatorial combination of subfields at the required depth may not be possible. I am especially interested in two problems to be resolved and do not care if an AI scientist performed the discovery. It will be humbling, but totally worth it:
- Fusion (a clean sustainable form): Without this I think we are heading in a very wrong direction, whether it is conflict or climate change does not matter. Everyone is aware of this and instinctively afraid of the implied loss of quality+quantity of life.
- Cure for Cancer: It is a world wonder even in Civ. I and for good reason. As a father of a teenager, every time I hear a story of someone losing a parent/child I cringe. We have to accept this as a reality of life until a proper/generic cure is found that eliminates the most common offenders.
I am skeptical that we will have AGI anytime soon and I think the social aspects will help balance the technical developments even it becomes a reality (Three laws, A Butlerian uprising, you name it).
Chess bots can beat grandmasters, but I have a friend who takes his son to tournaments. Humans are still playing chess, kids in the same tournament with grand masters. We have to have faith in the humanity, or all else will not matter.
And I will definitely keep playing Factorio even if AGI comes to pass ;-)
Commercial fusion energy is almost certainly a pipe dream. We already have good alternatives. Short of some unpredictable major breakthrough in physics on the level of something like cold fusion, the current activity in the fusion space will basically just serve to demonstrate definitively that it's not viable.
We also have competitive energy wasting (bitcoin), that will translate into competitive water deleting which will greatly accelerate how quickly we burn through all of it.
Eh, it seems increasingly clear that no matter the fusion breakthroughs to come, it's going to be complicated and big and therefore expensive compared to renewables. By the time we figure it out it'll be a nice breakthrough but will end up on the shelf.
They do say "live a little", and it strikes me now that perhaps I've completely misinterpreted that phrase. For some reason I've always thought it to be a call to live a lot, or at least more.
But now I see that my interpretation is almost opposite of what the words mean... Huh...
Most discovery takes a ton of iteration and repetition. That's a lot less fun than the hedonism of sitting on a beach drinking a mahi thai.
Same with learning, humans historically where generalists without that deep of knowledge when compared to one another. Now we study a quarter of our short lives just to get to the point where we can specialize for the rest of our lives. This situation doesn't seem exactly tenable as complexity increases in the future.
I don't know what the future looks like, but I can tell you that entropy and complexity will only increase.
I'm slightly baffled it existed in the first place, considering they also used the small s, and it looks almost exactly like the f. To be fair, I am equally confused that so many modern typefaces don't distinguish I and l.
Many SSNs have been compromised already. The jig is up. It was never supposed to be an identity system but organisations keep insisting on using it as one. Even if they aren’t literally publicly available and easily obtainable, they should be treated as such.
Unless you’ve been a hermit or homeless for the entirety of your life, just about anyone can get your SSN from Accurint or TLO for a few bucks.
Sure, in theory Accurint and TLO do KYC. In practice you can find tons of people on various crime forums offering those lookups for a few dollars a pop.
I don’t really think chat is a step back (discord may be a step back vs irc or I am just graying). Learning newish tech in chat has always been way more engaging for me than wiki or forum style communication.
IME chat attracts people who devote a lot of energy to the topic, including top contributors and power users. If you have questions about the latest features or obscure use cases there isn’t a better place to go.
Forum and wiki are great formats too, with different strengths. But if you are frustrated because you can’t seem to find help in those formats, head for the chat.
Some communities archive their chat. This seems like a great source of data to bootstrap a wiki or faq.
> forum is awash with questions from beginners like “How do you make for loop in reverse? or “What allocator to use in WASM?” Most get answered within minutes.
You wouldn't get a chat awash with these questions if they could be easily searched for.
1. Not as much because people can actually find the answers to their questions before locking to the chat
2. On top of that you can make info on and solutions to other issues/problems actually available and accessible. Like the one the author describes later in the same text
Instead all this info is locked behind a proprietary chat platform
My favorite Firefox plugin is NoScript. There is often an incredible amount of third-party JavaScript running on commercial web sites. NoScript turns all the JavaScript off by default, and then you can whitelist it temporarily (or permanently, your choice) at the per domain level. (I will never whitelist google tag manager, how is it present on every freaking website?)
So I visit thing-i-want.com and it doesn’t load because NoScript is currently disabling JS for that domain. No problem, I temporarily enable JS for thing-i-want.com
The page refreshes and suddenly NoScript is disabling JS for 10 more domains!
That seems excessive, maybe the page doesn’t need ALL of those scripts to function.
I will enable that cloudfront domain and that one that has “static content” in the name.
Page refreshes.
Okay it mostly works now but also NoScript is showing disabled JavaScript from 5 more domains!
..Anyways
Sometimes sites are running scripts from 15 or more domains and sometimes they are nested 4 domains deep.
It’s absurd and OF COURSE it overwhelms older devices.
If you want to use a modern browser on an older device, use a browser with a script blocking plugin
NoScript as a antipattern, because it disincentivises browsing new websites. As you observed, for every new website you need to reload the page quite a few times to get it functional.
I don’t ever install NoScript on family/friend devices. It just breaks their experience. I have knowledgeable coworkers that won’t use it because it’s not worth the hassle for them.
So I agree it is an anti-pattern for typical use cases.
But if you’re trying to get the most out of old hardware, it will make some websites more usable.
GTM is just another JS CDN, like unpkg and jsDelivr and others I forget. What amuses me is sometimes a site will use all three. Often, none are necessary for the core site to work; having had to help add support for GTM once to a site builder product, I think the target demographic is PMs who want to add random marketing/ad/analytics/audience-segmented scripts to a site.
Very rarely it'll happen that I'll care enough to go through the list of possible domains to temporarily whitelist before finally giving GTM a shot, then immediately remove the whitelist. Usually I don't get that far, especially because if it hasn't worked by then, enabling GTM doesn't tend to work either, it's just a bad site that isn't actually providing what it claimed to provide. NoScript has never disincentivized me from visiting a new site, but it has made me give up on some or look for alternatives. My daily experience is pretty minimally impacted by it. (Still, I don't usually bother installing it on work machines or my travel laptop (which is remoting to my home PC most of the time anyway), and sometimes I'll just load the page up in a chromium tab (incognito or not) rather than play the game of five refreshes from whitelisting JS.)
The performance impact is quite minimal I think, especially if you compare the difference between Firefox with NoScript and Chromium without, the latter is just faster because it's not Firefox. The oldest machines I still use sometimes are from 2009 (with an i7 920, pretty good for the time) which as my old daily-driver I used NoScript, and 2017 (my travel laptop with an i7 7820HQ) where I don't bother. Neither is all that slower for web stuff than my current daily driver with a Ryzen 9 5900X. The web is just slow even with newer hardware. (In contrast to others here though, I immediately notice the difference of better hardware with local applications, especially content authoring ones like gimp or krita.)
Please, the exceedingly wealthy don’t muck out their own barn.
Where I live a piece of equipment like an excavator is a great investment. It’s a tax write off and it frees up time for you to do other more valuable tasks instead of breaking your back with a shovel for far too long.
Many (most) people will take out a loan to purchase a piece of equipment with the expectation that it will “pay for itself” over it’s service life.
Should we automate exercise and play as well? How about learning?
The machine didn't have a soul, so we donated ours.
Eureka! My AI found it!