No! Obviously no!

A leap hour? You want to let sunset/sunrise drift up to an hour off? You don’t see any problems with that? That’s one of the stupidest things I’ve heard smart people say in a long time.

If adjusting a leap second every couple years is just too damn difficult, then use a leap minute that you need to adjust every hundred years. I promise, it’s a hassle you’ll only have to deal with once in your lifetime.

Though I warm you, there may be unforseen issues with that as well, it might be best to just keep on doing things the way we have been.

Hey, why is Meta using this uncanny valley grimace on xanex as a mascot anyway? I mean, what’s the plan there… He’s creepy.

Nice

I guess you didn’t like my examples of paradigm shifts, that’s fine.

Someday everyone alive will die, does it stop being true if you live to 20?

If I lived to 20 and literally nobody in the world had died, then yes, that would be a rational conclusion.

Look, I don’t expect to convince you of anything, that’s fine. You can look at trends and history and draw your own conclusions. Personally though, I’ve watched the march of technology first hand, I’ve seen how this works and I see where there’s room for advancement. The last major paradigm shift was when we moved to multi core processors, but that kind of shift can happen again. For example, CPUs are still 2 dimensional, if they can solve the heat dissipation there’s plenty of room for growth. Also we’re still transmitting signals via electricity, but there’s research being put into optical computers transmitting data via photons. My point being, this isn’t the only viable architecture, and we will continue to develop technologies that are currently not even imagined yet.

But that assumption is the same as thinking a fallen object will keep gaining speed until it passes the speed of light. Or that Moore’s law would really keep going forever despite a very real limit in physics for how small a chip can be.

I gotta say, I’ve been hearing predictions that Moore"s law is coming to an end every year for the past twenty years.

Look, strictly speaking if you take Moore"s law word for word, sure there is a limit to how small a silicon transistor can be. However, realistically, I see no reason to expect computers won’t continue to meaningfully increase in capability every year forever.

When a technology reaches physical limits, we figure out how to bend the rules and get a little bit more out. And when that stops working, we start exploring different architectures, different materials. I think it’s just silly to predict that technology won’t improve, when has that ever happened?

Yeah, if they could reduce the weight, or even the volume of the wrist, that would shift the center of mass forward and could significantly improve balance.

You’re likely right that their options are limited with the current way it balances.

They need to run this thing through the genetic algorithms a bit longer, that shuffle is pretty janky. It could be really impressive if the movement were a bunch smoother. But as it is, it moves like a windup toy.

This has real Philomena Cunk energy.

Nobody needs meta. Just stop using any of their products.

I can’t think of the last time I used Facebook or anything related to it, my life is better for it.

Just leave them behind.

You really want to give the ccp all the credit? Weird. Are you a ccp shill?

So that show we mentioned, robot wars, are those robots? I mean it’s right there in the name, but is that just propaganda? These are all manually controlled.

What about that Boston dynamics dog, spot? Is that a robot? Because those can be controlled manually too.

I think you need to adjust your definition of “robot”, because you seem to have it wrong.

It’s not hiding it… It’s in the rules.

You’re acting like this is one monolithic ccp program, but there are engineering teams from many universities and companies competing here. This is in fact a lot like Robot Wars, it’s just a flashy robotics competition, there are a lot of these.

The Chinese government didn’t build any of these robots, none of them. They don’t have any claim to have invented something new, because they didn’t invent anything. What I’m saying is, your complaints don’t make any sense.

Don’t bash the article before you read it.

But Patel observed that many of the robotic competitors were still being teleoperated by human operators who directly controlled the robots’ actions. The World Humanoid Robot Games allowed for human teleoperation of robots in certain events, but penalized the final score if robots were being remotely controlled rather than performing autonomously.

In other words, they know. The games preferentially favor fully automated bots. But that’s a really high bar, so they also don’t make you go home if your team can’t achieve that in every event.

Sadly, I’m too uncultured to get the Mark Twain reference…

Well when they crash the company needs to replace the whole drone, so they are probably going to try to avoid that when possible.

That said, they should have to obey faa regs, but while the laws for private use are pretty clear, the commercial use regulations are layered and sort of in flux. Major operators are always pushing to have laws adjusted, and because leadership in the US is generally overly supportive of big business, those changes often go into place.

In other words, there ARE laws, but you know, it’s the US, so they can probably change them.

I worked in IT for years, I’m good at it, I like problem solving, I like fixing things, I like building things.

But as time went by, I found myself in a more managerial role and truth be told, that’s not really my jam. And when I wasn’t doing that I was the specialist who could support some of our organizations’ worst and most troublesome systems. I was also put in charge of training people to use the company’s new web app (which was supposed to make people’s jobs easier, but really didn’t). Let me tell you, I do not like supporting shitty software or hardware, and I really do not like encouraging users to embrace useless web apps that don’t work well and serve no real purpose. I hated my job and it was time for a change.

So at that point I decided to completely shift my career and learn to code. I figured, if I hate supporting shitty software, why not just build good software. So I took some free classes through MIT’s open course ware, and learned to code. I spent a couple of years coding, picking up skills, learning languages, working with different compilers, taking additional math classes. And by the end of it all, one of my major takeaways was that I do like building things. But… as a professional software developer, I probably wasn’t going to be doing a lot of that. At the end of the day I might be able to say, “I squashed some bugs in some code that I didn’t write and don’t really know the greater purpose of”. Or if I’m lucky, “I wrote some functions that took in some inputs and produced some outputs”. But that doesn’t really feel like building something, that just feels like being a cog in a machine.

Over that same period when I was learning to code I was also picking up a second set of skills. We inherited the home my wife grew up in (which to be sure, is a pretty great deal). But it’s a fixer upper, it needed a bunch of attention. And since I was basically home schooling myself I thought I’d earn my keep by doing a lot of that maintenance myself rather than hiring a pro. I collected power tools, I learned to use hand tools, I made a lot of trips to Home Depot. I went through the basement full of rusty tools and restored many of them, replaced handles, sharpened blades, greased gears. I learned how to replace drywall, how to install an electrical outlet, how to repair a dryer. I replaced thermal fuses in kitchen appliances to bring them back to life, I mixed cement and rebuilt a crumbling retaining wall in the backyard.

Over time I got good enough at this that I started helping some of our friends with their homes. I could strengthen a rickety front step, or repaint a room, or replace a toilet. I had skills that people needed and actually, I generally liked doing it.

TLDR: In the time it took me to discover that being a programmer might somehow still not allow me to build things, I also learned that being a handyman would allow me to build things.

So yeah, career changes are scary, and it rarely looks like a good choice, but it is an option. And honestly, I’ve been a computer guy my whole life, but seriously, working with wood and screws and PVC has been super rewarding. So yeah, I guess I’m saying keep an open mind, and consider trying something different, you never know what might work for you.

The current examples of AI could never be described as a general intelligence let alone Superintelligence. These LLMs are definitely just a typing monkey (that was eloquently put).

They are literally generating text word by word with a next-word-prediction methodology.

With some tweaking they can be made to produce mostly coherent code and apparently also equations that balance. This does not make these algorithms geniuses. A calculator can also balance an equation, so that alone is not impressive.

The techniques LLM designers use to leverage statistical models in order to generate coherent sentences are actually rather impressive. It is legitimately quite a feat to make LLMs work as well as they do. But that does not mean that these outputs are anything like “thinking”, they’re just outputs. Data goes in, the machine churns, does some mystery math, and different data comes out.

These systems are not worth anthropomorphizing.

We just need a blanket ban on generative AI. The societal costs are just too high, we can’t bear it. We can continue on our path like this for years and dig ourselves into a deeper hole before admitting it, or we could just admit it now and save ourselves the pain.

I know what I would vote.

Sure, for as long as fuel lasts.

I mean, it’s possible, if you really fuck it up in some way, but not from regular use.

Replacing the compressor once is still going to be cheaper than replacing a fridge every 5 years.

In my basement I have a freezer from the 60s. It needs to be defrosted every year or two, but aside from that it’s never needed servicing, not once. I’m telling you, the older it is, the longer it will last.