The idea that you can just build a thing and send out a swarm and (slow) boom - you've colonised the galaxy, and all the adjacent galaxies - is hopelessly naive. To the point I'd call it stupid and silly.

Let's say you have a replicator thing that works. You send them out in swarms.

And then what? Some die, some miss, some are destroyed by accidents.

Some work.

But "a replicator landed and made some more" is not colonisation. Colonisation implies there's some kind of to-and-fro traffic, maybe trade, some kind of information exchange at a minimum.

And that implies the source civilisation has political, technological, and cultural stability, which can survive an incredibly slow diaspora.

Colonisation worked on Earth because it didn't take long to cross the Atlantic by sailing ship. Successful colonisers landed where humans already existed and trade was easy.

It doesn't work on interstellar, never mind intergalactic time scales, because nothing stays stable for that long. Not hardware, software, politics, or culture.

Nor, on slightly longer periods, biology. On much longer periods, geology, and eventually astrophysics, because stars change, and planetary systems aren't unconditionally stable.

So a colonising wave from a unified culture is an incredibly unlikely thing, not at all an obvious necessity.

The FT piece is paywalled. But two prominent members of Reform are currently in jail - one for domestic abuse, and one for treason (!) - so the party is not famous for a steely dedication to the moral high ground.

I am very curious about what they're seeing, and how well the get-it-over-with solution worked.

It was a bold move and the results will be fascinating.

What was the real reason? Tradition? Lack of imagination? Photo opportunities?

The rest was great tho.

Office tools and web browsing are less demanding.

Personal murder is tightly controlled now. But this is a fairly recent development. In many periods it was tolerated under various forms, including slavery, blood feud, honour killings, and state-sanctioned murder as punishment, or political process.

It's only in the last few centuries that it's been prohibited, and the prohibition in practice is still partial in many countries. (See also, gun control.)

Tribal murder has been the norm for most of recorded history. There are very, very few periods in very, very few cultures where there was no tribal/factional murder in living memory, and far more where it was an expected occurrence.

And technology has always been close by. Throughout history, most tech has either been invented for military ends or significantly developed and refined for them.

If it ever becomes possible to say "build me a unicorn" you're going to get millions of people trying to do the same thing, and you no longer have the same economy.

Because the features that generate unicorns stop being unusual.

Startup slop instead of art slop.

Which is the real problem with AI. Work gets cheap, original value stays expensive no matter how much compute you throw at it.

Because if it gets cheap too, it gets commoditised and stops being valuable.

And globally that applies to everything.

AI will either have to be tightly rationed, or it will murder the competitive economy.

> "Heaven is exactly like where you are right now, but much, much better."

If a million Claudes of compute were accessible, people would not be doing the same things they are now, but more so. They'd be doing very different things we likely can't imagine - in the same way that Alan Turing imagined machines learning from experience, but didn't imagine downstream products like Sora, ad tech, or social media, or their cultural and economic effects.

I wasn't unhappy with some of the results, but it was an interesting and frustrating struggle.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/32832718@N00/17951484570/in/ph... https://www.flickr.com/photos/32832718@N00/19868350512/in/ph... https://www.flickr.com/photos/32832718@N00/17952106385/in/ph...

You can push AI in the same way and end up in some unusual spaces, but the quality often degrades when you get there.

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fr...

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fo...

But it's still useful to have some of those effects catalogued and easily accessible as presets. Photoshop doesn't quite do that, which on the one hand makes it hard for beginners to get a good look, but also leaves some space for those who want to go deeper to get more creative.

I deleted a ton of useless emails anyway, but that didn't fix the problem. Somehow I had more than 25 gigs of space being used on a cloud system I'd never used, tied to an email account which supposedly needed less than 500 Mb of storage.

Eventually after a lot of searching I discovered the magic page that gave me direct access to OneDrive's actual storage - which was not, somehow, the page that gave access to the files.

OneDrive was storing a lot of attachments, and deleting emails and clearing the trash didn't delete them.

Or something like that. Whatever the magic words were, I did eventually find them and fix the problem.

But it took a while, I had to resubscribe for free for a month to make it happen, there was a lot of confusing side information online suggesting I should open a ticket (good luck with that on a consumer account) and generally it Just Didn't Work.

I can imagine people resubscribing for another year just to make it all go away.

This has been my lifelong experience of Microsoft - shockingly poor, contemptuous, or downright stupid interface design, Kafka-esque indifference to the user experience, and constant unwanted friction and complication, around a suite of core consumer products that are mediocre to start with.

So even though they're a small minority they infest politics, business, and the media, and create a culture in their own image.

Most proposed solutions end up in superficial tribal arguments about standard economic and political positions. Not about the underlying issue, which cuts right across the usual battle lines.

DSP uses a lot of actual math for processing and synthesis. But trad music's chords, rhythms, melodies, and forms are linguistic grammars that can be annotated mathematically after they're defined.

The creation process isn't mathematical. Composers are always making choices from possibilities, and the choices rely on subjective taste.

With Coltrane there a lot of similar structures he could have used, and likely experimented with.

But he picked this particular one for subjective creative reasons.

I'm also wondering how performance would be tested, and how much results would depend on specific surrounding contexts (law, regulations, and so on) and what happens legally if a model breaks applicable laws.

I mean actual going-concern businesses with customers, marketing, deliverables of some kind, and support. Not toy activities like share trading.

And when you're dealing with a potential existential threat, this is an existential problem.

The gold bugs are almost entirely on the right. The left are far more likely to be MMTers.

https://wid.world/country/usa/

There's really no such animal in practice. Over time Christian values have included charity for the poor, rapacious capitalism, slavery, the abolition of slavery, anti-science, science, war, peace, and the rest.