Pretty much what this blog post says: https://hermit-tech.com/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global...

It seems pretty bad, no doubt about it

Oh it's not just the author's opinions. They're the opinions of a bunch of LLMs he checked, too. Much better.

Southern europeans tip, there wouldn't be much difference there

Northern ones it depends, they don't tip at home but they usually do on vacations to southern europe (where tipping culture very much exists). Though some of that also has to do with currency conversions, at least historically, even if the tradition has stuck past the euro being introduced. So maybe that's why they don't tip when it comes to dollars?

And the result isn't even very angry at all. It's like mildly peeved internal company communication (also in direct violation of "don't send this to your manager")

It also doesn't quite come around to the idea of something you might call "convenient" obsolescence. Not planned, not actively colluded to happen (the Phoebus cartel did do this, but are one of few examples), but very convenient for the manufacturer when optimizing for other factors (mostly cost) instead of lifespan.

It is illegal.

> To comply with the regulations governing cookies under the GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive you must:

> [...]

> - Allow users to access your service even if they refuse to allow the use of certain cookies

> - Make it as easy for users to withdraw their consent as it was for them to give their consent in the first place.

7 clicks is not as easy as one "accept all", violating the last point. Not allowing you to dismiss the banner and access the site violates the other point.

The real problem is enforcement, unfortunately.

...do they though?

The "proper" terminology says all main sequence stars are dwarves, but nobody calls them all that in practice. Some astronomers insist on saying "yellow dwarf", but some don't really bother. In general having the only two kinds of star be "giant" or "dwarf" is contentious, but it's also contentious that there isn't a name for whatever is in the "middle". "Main-sequence star" is a broader category and doesn't apply. They're all "stars", obviously, so that isn't specific enough.

The only decent terminology is for the spectral classes, but those only work as long as you look at spectra. The moment you try to figure out what the theory says those stars would look like as proper 3D objects, things get very messy. You also immediately get the issue that star size and brightness goes O>B>A>F>G>K>M. So... it's alphabetic except it isn't. And C is something completely different and doesn't fit the brightness classification at all.

All that debacle around dwarf planets to prepare for future observations, and yet the distinction ceases to apply the moment you go outside the Oort cloud...

But really, that's just the naming systems being bad, obviously common people don't think asteroids around other stars are "exoplanets" or should be called that way

You're going to have to go all in on learning the game, putting in massive effort into every game just to keep up, and will still probably lose most games. I just don't have it in me to play that kind of competitive RTS game like you're trying to climb the SC2 ladder to the top during peak Heart of the Swarm playercounts or whatever, so FAF multiplayer was a no-go.

They have also been explicitly told by the department of education to NOT do this, but it hasn't stopped lazy teachers all over. Apparently not doing your job, in direct contradiction to your given rules, is ok because "it's the future".

The article also makes a big deal out of country-level factors like the system of autonomous communities, governance, in-house expertise etc.

But all of those should apply to Malaga as well, which also built a metro in the 2000s. But that one became a city-wide joke for always being supposed to open "this year" and that continued for at least 5 years...

There was definitively none of the cheap or fast involved in that project, a relatively limited line to make travel to the airport more convenient which still couldn't deliver. Today it actually operates, but I think the rest of the network (it was supposed to be a "proper" metro system and not just isolated lines) is still vaporware. Haven't lived in Malaga in many years, though.

Manufacturers need to pick a lane - either fully open, and then people who need it can harden their own stuff (and at least be aware of the tradeoff), or fully closed and secure.

This in-between where cars are invasive privacy nightmares that spy on you at all driving hours, and are insecure nightmares that will give up that data to anyone remotely invested, is the worst case scenario, obviously.

> I also object to making myself and my work depend on paying a subscription fee to anyone. I don't want an outage at Anthropic to affect my ability to do my work. I think it is a grave mistake to build anything on such shaky foundations as the sustainability and profit margins of the AI industry.

Someone actually sensible, excellent.

One of the worst things about LLM writing is how it makes big promises of what it can prove in some piece of writing, and then never really follows up on that, or has specifics that go all the way towards the original, grandiose statement.

And frankly, Zitron is guilty of that pattern of writing too, or of relying on some unstated "baseline" knowledge which is clear from his other writing but not in the specific piece.

So, basically yeah, agreeing about the ad absurdum thing.

(I will note, the tone, the swearing, etc. really doesn't matter nearly as much as these problems, and everyone instead obsessing about the swearing and personality is really boring)

Is reading comprehension really this bad nowadays?

> Why must this always be the argument? It was the same with cryptocurrencies and NFTs, there is a specific type of proponent who always accuses critics of secretly being pro the technology but publicly against it due to some ulterior motive. Most people aren’t selfish lying rat bastards who think like that.

Meanwhile, the prestige to be gained/lost from supporting/doubting the big mainstream thing is immense, and the incentives are actually in completely the opposite direction...

Anyway, on that topic The Line Goes Up video covers the arguments about prestige far more extensively and far more elaborately than I ever could: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g

But it's very much not the doubters who are worrying about prestige in crypto and NFTs, and probably not with AI either.

The fact that he isn't a deeply involved technical developer who knows the ins and outs and nuances of using LLM tools is the point, because the stated capabilities of LLMs are that they are trivial to use, extremely powerful, and getting so much better every month that you personally can replace developers without even trying as a completely non-technical person with basic writing skills.

Given the hype and extreme claims being made, the fact that he remains ignorant and gets practically no use out of LLMs immediately disproves those statements. The counterargument boiling down to "you're using it wrong" is actually just a further indictment of Sam Altman and his like, because it shouldn't be possible to use LLMs wrong!

The rest, well, the hype needs to die before anyone can make sane estimates of what LLM tech can do for us in various fields. Right now it's all a complete mess.

Then Sparta started believing their propaganda and setting up a huge warrior caste, which sucked up resources for decades without ever really accomplishing anything. Then Philip rocked up and annihilated the whole place, their much-vaunted warrior caste had no chance against the Macedonians.

And fittingly enough, a good description of what Sparta was actually like and the myth of their warrior prowess is the same blog series as the original post: https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p...

All the options are extremely depressing