God, I had that entire Dress To Kill show loaded up on my old timey mp3-player along with Definite Article, Glorious and Sexie. Barely any room for music, but I was giggling my way through every day trying not to look too insane in public.
Izzard probably rewired my brain more than any other single comedian.
I am convinced the people who swear by them either have very different work tasks from me, or they have very different ideas about what a job well done looks like.
I feel like everything I apply these things to sends me up a much messier and long winded route to a useable result, when compared to just doing it myself from the jump. Even the things they're ostensibly good at like sorting data comes out so messy it's practically net zero by the time you're done with quality control.
I tend to do the main structural parts myself and tell it to fill in the gaps and add tests, which sort of works 70% of the time. It may not be worth what my company is being charged.
MyHouse.WAD is a genuine work of art. Anybody who is even tangentially interested in video games as an artistic medium should look into it, because it really is astounding.
I'm guessing you need permission to go deploy a bunch of buoys off the coast of Oregon, and that permission may be difficult to obtain for foreign research projects in the current US political climate.
I think you may have a hard time monitoring the Atlantic current if your sensors are all deployed off the coast of Oregon so it seems to me that this administration would jump at the opportunity to deploy those sensors off of the Oregon coast. Then they could tell the people that they are carefully monitoring the situation and can't find a problem. Nothing to see here, literally.
There is a similar app called ScreenZen that can be set up with a timer like this, or small math problems. It's exceedingly effective at breaking the loop by forcing you to do a tiny task first - you're not impeded from doing anything important, but the mindless loops get broken up.
Young Amish typically venture out into wider society for a while to try it out for a while before returning to their community and settling into adulthood. Presumably the Amish returning now will have encountered LLMs or their output in one form or another during their journey. They're supposed to satisfy their curiosity and try a bunch of stuff, so they can make an informed choice about letting it go.
This is a flattening of Herbert's angle - it is explicitly stated in the quoted section in the article that part of the reason for the ban is that the people who control thinking machines would exert outsized control on those who depend on them. This is a recurring theme in Dune, as we see with anxieties about dependency on mentats and Bene Gesserit truthsayers (the latter of which are in fact exerting hidden influence from their positions of trust).
Suk doctors are theoretically safer because of their imperial conditioning, but even that can be tampered with, as we see with Dr Yueh. This is a central problem in Dune: Whatever you depend on will gain power over you (or whoever controls the thing you depend on). Dependency on spice, on truthsayers, on mentats, or on thinking machines - even specific relationships. All of these are systemic vulnerabilities and therefore potential attack vectors in Dune.
(Edit: Suk Doctors get imperial conditioning, not mentats)
> The mentats are theoretically safer because of their imperial conditioning, but even that can be tampered with, as we see with Dr Yueh
Dr Yueh was not a mentat, but a suk doctor who was subject to conditioning. (Which was broken by the Piter de Vries, via the pain amplifiers applied to his wife, Wanna.)
Paul himself was being trained to be a mentat, and there were no hints of conditioning there, neither with Paul, Hawat, or de Vries (albeit he was described as a "twisted mentat", whatever that means).
de Vries was a "twisted mentat" because he was designed by the tleilaxu to be so. I think there were suggestions that Yueh was, too.
That doesn't necessarily mean they were grown in tanks, though, they could just have been "groomed for purpose" in the same way the Tleilaxu's matriarchal counterpart the Bene Gesserit did.
(The Tleilaxu are to me a very obvious stand-in for "patriarchy": there are a few men ruling over a genderless, fluid workforce, and women are literally just birth machines.)
The other day I had to read a C-suite guy share how he had an epiphany that spending more tokens did not linearly align with more useful features being output by the teams. He was describing it as this breakthrough moment for him, as if it wasn't glaringly obvious that making the KPI "spend more tokens" would result in inefficient token spending, not massive value for the customer.
It's baffling how these people have entirely shut their ears to all the obvious warnings about this, and are now congratulating themselves for their slightly less psychotic outlook and pivoting to blaming the workers for inefficient usage, after specifically forcing them to tokenmaxx.
>It's baffling how these people have entirely shut their ears to all the obvious warnings about this, and are now congratulating themselves for their slightly less psychotic outlook and pivoting to blaming the workers for inefficient usage, after specifically forcing them to tokenmaxx.
It's not baffling. They are a caste, wholly insulated from the consequences of their own actions.
Almost every company is run in a basic dictatorial way. We almost never discuss it, when there is a wide corpus of political Science analysing the pros and cons of governance models that certainly puts it at the bottom.
(Meaning that it's not just business school indoctrination, but a dynamic they've been raised to expect and uphold. Fixing it isn't simply about convincing them of the folly of their approach, because you're attacking their personal sense of self in doing so. Which, I'm to understand, is a no-no, professionally.)
If it was so clearly ineffective, why does it get challenged more often and replaced? Existing corporations aren't likely to change, but new startups and work owned coops exist, so why don't they compete?
Maybe ranking it on a scale of best to worse is too simplistic a view, and there are reasons this develops. Maybe it is the best option when there is a good leader, thus such structures dominate, much as a government ran by philosopher kings are better. But this only lasts as long as a wise rule is in charge, and it reverts back to a norm, and eventually, due to pure time and chance, enough bad leaders come on board that slowly dismantle the giants, but this happens at a time scale we don't particularly notice due to how much inertia large corporations can have (before we even get into the less pleasant issues like regulatory capture).
>If it was so clearly ineffective, why does it get challenged more often and replaced?
I supposed you meant "why doesn't it get challenged"?
Well, look at how long it took for a democratic/Republican system to appear and survive. The French 1st Republic was immediately at war with all of Europe (I am not talking of Napoleon at all here, it was before that, when the French King was executed).
Nowadays, good luck getting any kind of financing with an "alternative" governance model. The banks and investors will either refuse or edge by pushing higher return rates on you. The whole system is conservative.
The adage "democracy is the worst system, apart from all others" only becomes true long-term. There are plenty of short-lived democracies back to antiquity, in the middle of the middle ages, during the Renaissance, the XIXth century... All stamped down by "more efficient" dictatorial empires... That aren't here anymore. You can expect the same in the even more cutthroat corporate environment, where fitting the system buys you leverage.
And don't get me stated on startups: most of them seek only an exist strategy. Very few challenge any existing behemoth. They are basically externalized R&D.
One other question I had but wasn't sure if it would leave my previous post too unfocused is "aren't we a bit too early to determine in our current government systems are really the most effective?" This is something that will be decided by political scientists far removed from the current societies who can see how our current societies evolve.
After ejecting anyone who spoke out or were even publicly hesistant against the hard swerve into "just do maximal amounts of AI stuff above all else", they're now surprised to find that everyone that remains is dutifully excited about the emperor's new clothes, and yet he remains mysteriously exposed to the breeze.
> Almost every company is run in a basic dictatorial way. We almost never discuss it, when there is a wide corpus of political Science analysing the pros and cons of governance models that certainly puts it at the bottom.
Is it not wild that in the Freedom Loving West, we all spend the vast majority of our time as adults living inside tiny totalitarian states?
I think this persists largely because the people atop those tiny states are also the ones behind most of our media apparatus, so they can make it look and feel pretty normal. But that may be a little tinfoil hat of me.
FWIW I don't think it's tinfoil hat at all but when you say things like that on here you get a lot of late-stage-McCarthyists screaming about you being a Communist.
This entire narrative is just made up. Managers know not to reward spending. At best you had some tracking to see who was using it and encouragement for those that aren't to start.
The person I am referring to is the CEO of Uber. He called this realization that higher token usage did not proportionally increase useful consumer features a "head-exploding moment". That's in his own words.
If you're thinking "that's bad management" then we are in complete agreement. He should have been able to predict this in advance, but evidently he either did not, or is pretending he did not.
I think this is the part that kills me. This is what many grunts, including myself said from the start. More PRs and more code does not equal value for the customer.
Yes, I think in that way it is dumb. But in another way I think it could be justified as a way to try and blaze some new trails and see what's possible by having users not worry about cost in the beginning.
Sure most token burning ends up being a waste but some ideas pan out?
Not disagreeing but it's another way of looking at it IMO
It's never been a good way to get things done, but when you block off every other venue for change people will be much more willing to take a chance on a high risk option. Violent revolutions aren't usually the first thing people try.
Democracies that arise by nonviolent revolution, do so in part due to the threat of what comes next if the nonviolent revolution is crushed. Because if you make sure placards and petitions don't work, it eventually won't be placards and petitions anymore.
'Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, will make violent revolution inevitable', and all that.
Yeah, I get that it's a useful threat to back up the nonviolent options. I just don't think Americans have tried the nonviolent options wrt economics with any amount of real effort yet, and it's worrying/annoying to see people jumping to the nuclear option as soon as they personally hit a rough patch or start getting scared of one.
When I've gone to local government meetings, I've generally been one of only a few without gray hair. The vast majority of working-age people seemingly can't be bothered to learn the basics about who's running in a non-presidential election, let alone go argue for the boring but extremely impactful things that would actually help people out.
People need to put down the phones and put in some actual effort on fixing things before even jokingly advocating for something that would almost certainly be a mass casualty event. It's shameful.
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