I've only got some superficial acquaintance with Thiel's ideas, but he's been objectively correct on enough contrarian stuff (Thiel fellowships) that I'd like to at least have some rough, non-distorted understanding of what the anti-christ stuff is about even if it sounds a bit crazy.

https://inquisitivebird.xyz/p/the-myth-of-the-nordic-rehabil...

> they are better for most use cases of string templating where what you really want, is just a string.

I think use cases where you want to unconditionally bash a string together are rare. I'd bet that in > 80% of cases the "just a string" really is just a terrible representation for what really is either some tree (html, sql, python, ...) structure or at least requires lazy processing (logging, where you only want to pay for the expensive string formatting and generation if you run at the log level or higher that the relevant logging line is meant to operate).

I do this myself. I basically always use the subtl wrong log.warning(f"Unexpected {response=} encountered") and not the correct, and depending on the loglevel cheaper log.warning("Unexpected respone=%s encountered", repsonse). The extra visual noise is typically not worth the extra correctness and performance (I'd obviously not do this in some publically exposed service receiving untrusted inputs).

I'd argue these use cases are in fact more prevalent then the bashing unstructured text use case.

Encouraging people to write injection vulnerabilities or performance and correcness bugs isn't great language design.

Here are some interesting things about it:

1. It has an simple but nice trick for avoiding ugly_underscores: a-b is a single symbol, a - b is subtraction.

2. IIRC it was the first non-sexp language with a sophisticated macro system.

3. Like Common Lisp it has multi-methods and resumable exceptions (but unlikely Common Lisp all exceptions are resumable). If you want to play around with either multi methods and resumable exceptions, Common Lisp or Dylan are probably your best bets and Dylan has the advantage of being probably simpler to pick up.

Exactly, it's not all that subtle, so I find it hard to even come up with an alternative interpretation.

Among knowledgeable people who have concerns in the first place, I'd say giving the probability of a very bad outcome of cumulative advances as "very low" is a fringe position. It seems to vary more between "significant" and "close to unity".

There are some knowledgeable people like Yann LeCun who have no concerns whatsoever but they seem singularly bad at communicating why this would be a rational position to take.

Given the amount of work and confusion entailed this is a completely unreasonable expectation.

Purely out of curiosity, what do

     ps -A -osize,cmd | awk '/[g]nome/{t+=$1}END{print t/1024^2 "GiB"}'

print on your machine?

In particular:

> If a language model spits something out it was already available and indexable on the internet,

Is patently false.