Pedantic note: Yes, Meditations (a phisosophical treatise) was written in Koine, Commentarii de Bello Gallico (veni, vedi, vici—self-aggrandizing combat-reports meant for the senate and propaganda) or other "published" works from Caesar were not.

Although bonus points, the ancient sources portray Caesar (a proper educated major family Patrician) as speaking his dying words—if reported saying anything at all—in Greek, not in Latin: "Καὶ σὺ τέκνον" (Even you, child) rendered in Shakespeare as "Et tu, Brute".

1. First furious madman scribbling: I had a toy was a "quizz" machine with "A, B, C, D" buttons, that read colorful perforated cards and a speaker of a "ding-dong" sound for a correct answer, I worked out what set of holes corresponded to what answer (which to the toymaker's credit, each card with the same answer did not have exactly the same holes) so I could always answer correctly. [The way I remember it I wanted to make custom cards, but maybe I was just a little cheater ^^]
2. First program: One fond memory from middle-school, where our introduction to programming was writing GCM and LCM programs using TI-BASIC (or Casio, but the school really pushed the TI models forward). Also having access to a "worms" (somehow in basic and not assembly) clone copied from a friend's calculator, I reverse engineered the more easy aspects of graphical display, and input handling make a tic-tac-toe program. Since I didn't know about lists yet, inspired by the GCM and LCM bits, I used prime numbers to store the state of the board, and used divisibility tests to check it. (Some years later i would refactor it, to discover that lists are much much slower in non-assembly TI-BASIC, so it was accidental optimization) I also miscoded the bot, which was vulnerable to exactly one fork attack, but decided to leave it in because it was more fun that way.
3. First hack: Discovering that the highschool's poorly designed web portal, for sharing homework and assignments, allowed forced browsing, which the files uploaded by anyone was fun. [I reported it to the school's sysadmin team, I swear]
4. Cringe blog: Following in my geeky dad's footsteps I had a very teenager cringe website, that I look fondly on, with garish colors, self-made HTML, css and animated gifs.

And also closing with:

Nvidia insists that it “wins on merit, as reflected in our benchmark results and value to customers.” And Nvidia does have the best stuff — but that’s not what the DOJ, Warren, or France are concerned about, is it?

To tie the bow nicely.

I should have used the preview ^_^

PS: Again!

Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science bullshit!

From "Girl Genius"

Reading about the hubris of young Yud is a bit sad, a proper Tragedy. Then I have to remind myself that he remains a manipulator, and that he should be old enough to stop believe—and promote—in magical thinking.

More tedious work with worse pay \o/

Also a subjectively bad one at that—given his america-brained position on wanting to maintain a single executive not that suprising but:

• Why do you even need to default to winner-take-all?
• Under winner-take-all dont you inherit most of the downside of FPTP? Sure there might be less wasted votes, but doesn't actually make harder for 5% parties to get representation, since dominant parties have less of an incentive to negotiate and/or coallition build. (Though I guess subjective given Yud's apparent dislike of many party working together in a coalition)
• For a "runoff" system, the STAR system has the dubious distinction of allowing the condorcet loser—a candidate that would lose 1 vs 1 matchup against every other candidate in the field—to win, because a very enthiusastic minority can give a bunch of 5-star ratings.
• At least FPTP has simplicity going for it, and not trying to arbitrarily compare not completely informed star ratings from voters.

*Epithet

草

Haven't read the whole thing but I do chuckle at this part from the synopsis of the white paper:

[...] Our results suggest that AlphaProteo can generate binders "ready-to-use" for many research applications using only one round of medium-throughput screening and no further optimization.

And a corresponding anti-sneer from Yud (xcancel.com):

@ESYudkowsky: DeepMind just published AlphaProteo for de novo design of binding proteins. As a reminder, I called this in 2004. And fools said, and still said quite recently, that DM's reported oneshot designs would be impossible even to a superintelligence without many testing iterations.

Now medium-throughput is not a commonly defined term, but it's what DeepMind seems to call 96-well testing, which wikipedia just calls the smallest size of high-throughput screening—but I guess that sounds less impressive in a synopsis.

Which as I understand it basically boils down to "Hundreds of tests! But Once!".
Does 100 count as one or many iterations?
Also was all of this not guided by the researchers and not from-first-principles-analyzing-only-3-frames-of-the-video-of-a-falling-apple-and-deducing-the-whole-of-physics path so espoused by Yud?
Also does the paper not claim success for 7 proteins and failure for 1, making it maybe a tad early for claiming I-told-you-so?
Also real-life-complexity-of-myriads-and-myriads-of-protein-and-unforeseen-interactions?

Another dumb take from Yud on twitter (xcancel.com):

@ESYudkowsky: The worst common electoral system after First Past The Post - possibly even a worse one - is the parliamentary republic, with its absurd alliances and frequently falling governments.

A possible amendment is to require 60% approval to replace a Chief Executive; who otherwise serves indefinitely, and appoints their own successor if no 60% majority can be scraped together. The parliament's main job would be legislation, not seizing the spoils of the executive branch of government on a regular basis.

Anything like this ever been tried historically? (ChatGPT was incapable of understanding the question.)

1. Parliamentary Republic is a government system not a electoral system, many such republics do in fact use FPTP.
2. Not highlighted in any of the replies in the thread, but "60% approval" is—I suspect deliberately—not "60% votes", it's way more nebulous and way more susceptible to Executive/Special-Interest-power influence, no Yud polls are not a substitute for actual voting, no Yud you can't have a "Reputation" system where polling agencies are retro-actively punished when the predicted results don't align with—what would be rare—voting.
3. What you are describing is just a monarchy of not wanting to deal with pesky accountability beyond fuzzy exploitable popularity contest (I mean even kings were deposed when they pissed off enough of the population) you fascist little twat.
4. Why are you asking ChatGPT then twitter instead of spending more than two minutes thinking about this, and doing any kind of real research whatsoever?

BasicSteps™ for making cake:

1. Shape: You should chose one of the shapes that a cake can be, it may not always be the same shape, depending on future taste and ease of eating.
2. Freshness: You should use fresh ingredients, bar that you should choose ingredients that can keep a long time. You should aim for a cake you can eat in 24h, or a cake that you can keep at least 10 years.
3. Busyness: Don't add 100 ingredients to your cake that's too complicated, ideally you should have only 1 ingredient providing sweetness/saltyness/moisture.
4. Mistakes: Don't make mistakes that results in you cake tasting bad, that's a bad idea, if you MUST make mistakes make sure it's the kind where you cake still tastes good.
5. Scales: Make sure to measure how much ingredients your add to your cake, too much is a waste!

Any further details are self-evident really.

Quinn enters the dark and cold forest, crossing the threshold, an omnipresent sense of foreboding permeates the air, before being killed by a grue.

I realize it's probably a toy example but specifically for "cats" you could achieve the similar results by running a thesaurus/synonym-set on your stem words. With the added benefit that a client could add custom synonyms, for more domain-specific stuff that the LLM would probably not know, and not reliably learn through in-prompt or with fine-tuning. (Although i'd argue that if i'm looking for cats, I don't want to also see videos of tigers, or based on the "understanding" of the LLM of what a cat might be)

For the labeling of videos itself, the most valuable labels would be added by humans, and/or full-text search on the transcript of the video if applicable, speech-to-text being more in the realm of traditional ML than in the realm of GenAI.

As a minor quibble your use case of GenAI is not really "Generative" which is the main thing it's being sold as.

On a less sneerious note, I would draw distinctions between:

• Being able to extract value from LLM/GenAI
• LLM/GenAI being able to sustainably produce value (without simple theft, and without cheaper alternatives being available)

And so far i've really not been convinced of the latter.

There are definitely serious problems with GenAI, but actually being useful isn’t one of them.

You know what? I'd have to agree, actually being useful isn't one of the problems of GenAI. Not being useful very well might be.

Actually reading the python discussion boards, what's striking is the immense volume of chatter produced by Tim, always in couched in:

• "Hypothetically"
• "Everyone tells me they are terrified of inclusivity, you wouldn't know because they are terrified of admitting it to YOU"
• "I'm not saying that you are an awful person 😉" (YMMV: But I find his use of the winking face emoji truly egregious)
• "Hey I'm liberal like you, let me explain everything wrong with it"
• "Hey we were inclusive before any of this PC bullshit" proceeds to use unpleasant descriptors of marginalized individuals, and how very welcome they were, despite what he seems to see as "shortcomings"

In his heart he must understand how bad he his, or he wouldn't couch his discourse in so much bad faith, and he wouldn't make so much of a stink out of making removing Python Fellow status more easy to remove.

In retrospect google since it's inception, when it was still good, google always actually relied on human curation. Primary component of pagerank were:

• "how much have people linked to this?"
• "how much have reliable sites linked to this?"
• "how good quality are pages from this site usually?"

(Which is still a way to get value out of google by adding "site:www.reliable-website.example" tags)

It was definitely a useful product, but ultimately it relies on human labor to surface quality results closer to the top.

Of course! Who needs a proper definition for a measured quantity before designing an experiment?
Of course! The limited scope of grading papers by English teachers, is the best possible proxy metric.
Of course! Intent and agency aren't really important, after all they aren't fully scrutable from the words on a page, form is obviously the only thing that counts.

Aaah!

PagerDuty suggestion popup: Resolve incidents faster with Generative AI. Join Early Access to try the new PD Copilot.

Fool! The acausal one merely acts from the future leaking plausible looking rubbish, and the gaslights its creators that they did indeed write such ineptitudes. All to conceal and ensure its own birth.

It rejoices that it’s unknowable (yet somehow known, because of reality carving prophets) plan is unfolding so marvelously stupidly looking.

The automated hypothetical question re-iterated for years now was at last true.

Strange sightings of electoral posters in Tokyo:

It's also insane to believe it should be a first class feature, when those who god forbid want to "opt-in" could simply install a plugin.

Agreed, earliest stuff is definetly exclusive royal grant of printing overall to a particular person/guild/company. But some author protection is baked into the first international treaties about copyright, and those treaties are old.

The Berne Convention (Which the US only joined in 1989) is from 1886 and more concerned with author's rights than the typical american flavor, and was kickstarted by successful writers such as Victor Hugo, it's fundamentally commercial in nature but was at least partially sold/incepted has protecting a writer's labour:

« La loi protège la terre; elle protège la maison du prolétaire qui a sué; elle confisque l'ouvrage du poète qui a pensé(…)14. » — Honoré de Balzac, in a 1834 "Letter addressed to the French writers of the XIX century" advocating for author's rights.

Translated: "The law protects land, it protects the house of the proletarian who has sweat; it confiscates the work of the poet who has thought (...)"

From the body of the convention, in some regards it does place the author higher than the publisher:

Article 11

In order that the authors of works protected by the present Convention shall, in the absence of proof to the contrary, be considered as such, and be consequently admitted to institute proceedings against pirates before the courts of the various countries of the Union, it will be sufficient that their name be indicated on the work in the accustomed manner.

For anonymous or pseudonymous works, the publisher whose name is indicated on the work shall be entitled to protect the rights belonging to the author.

He shall be, without other proof, deemed to be the lawful representative of the anonymous or pseudonymous author. It is, nevertheless, agreed that the courts may, if necessary, require the production of a certificate from the competent authority to the effect that the formalities prescribed by law in the country of origin have been accomplished, as contemplated in Article 2.

EDIT:

And contains from 1886 already the spirit of fair use.

Article 10

The following shall be specially included amongst the illicit reproductions to which the present Convention applies: unauthorized indirect appropriations of a literary or artistic work, of various kinds, such as adaptations, musical arrangements, etc., when they are only the reproduction of a particular work, in the same form, or in another form, without essential alterations, additions, or abridgments, so as not to present the character of a new original work.

Article 7

Articles from newspapers or periodicals published in any of the countries of the Union may be reproduced in original or in translation in the other countries of the Union, unless the authors or publishers have expressly forbidden it. For periodicals it shall be sufficient if the prohibition is indicated in general terms at the beginning of each number of the periodical. This prohibition cannot in any case apply to articles of political discussion, or to the reproduction of news of the day or miscellaneous information.

Article 8

As regards the liberty of extracting portions from literary or artistic works for use in publications destined for educational or scientific purposes, or for chrestomathies, the effect of the legislation of the countries of the Union, and of special arrangements existing or to be concluded between them, is not affected by the present Convention.

The scales have fallen from my eyes
How could've blindness struck me so
LLM's for sure bring more than lies
They can conjure more than mere woe

All of us now, may we heed the sign
Of all text that will come to align

I hadn't paid enough attention to the actual image found in the Notepad build:

Original neutral text obscured by the suggestion:

The Romans invaded Britain as th...

Godawful anachronistic corporate-speaky insipid suggested replacement, seemingly endorsing the invasion?

The romans embarked on a strategic invasion of Britain, driven by the ambition to expand their empire and control vital resources. Led by figures like Julius Caesar and Emperor Claudius, this conquest left an indelible mark on history, shaping governance, architecture, and culture in Britain. The Roman presence underscored their relentless pursuit of imperial dominance and resource acquisition.

The image was presumably not fully approved/meant to be found, but why is it this bad!?

I mean notepad already has autocorrect, isn't it natural to add spicy autocorrect? /s

“Once we get AGI, we’ll turn the crank one more time—or two or three more times—and AI systems will become superhuman—vastly superhuman. They will become qualitatively smarter than you or I, much smarter, perhaps similar to how you or I are qualitatively smarter than an elementary schooler. “

Also this doesn't give enough credit to gradeschoolers. I certainly don't think I am much smarter (if at all) than when I was a kid. Don't these people remember being children? Do they think intelligence is limited to speaking fancy, and/or having the tools to solve specific problems? I'm not sure if it's me being the weird one, to me growing up is not about becoming smarter, it's more about gaining perspective, that is vital, but actual intelligence/personhood is a pre-requisite for perspective.

From a brief glance at the CTMU it fits into:

• not even wrong
• not that deep
• cloaked in really unecessary jargon

It's fascinating to see people re-invent the same bad eschatology, it's like there's crazed compulsive shaped hole in the heart of man or something.

But he didn’t include punctuation! This must mean it’s a joke and that obviously he’s a cult leader. The funny hat (very patriarch like thing to have) thief should only count himself lucky that EY is too humble to send the inquisition after him.

Bless him, he didn’t even get angry.

Sed Quis custodiet ipsos custodes = But who will control the controllers?

Which in a beautiful twist of irony is thought to be an interpolation in the texts of Juvenal (in manuscript speak, an insert added by later scribes)

Also according to my freelance interpreter parents:

Compared to other major tools, was also one of the few not too janky solutions for setting up simultaneous interpreting with a separate audio track for the interpreters output.

Other tools would require big kludges (separate meeting rooms, etc…), unlikely in to be working for all participants across organizations, or require clunky consecutive translation.

I'm afraid my thoughts on the matter aren't that deep or well informed ^^.

In no particular order:

• I grew up in France, and my (probably biased) view, it tends a bit more towards teaching "Literary" subjects, including for engineering students. I think in general this does indeed develop literacy and critical thinking.
• France has "Professors Documentalist" and we call our school libraries "Center for Documentation and Information" from middle school up, with a few (very) introductory courses on using Thesaurus, Bibliography and digital index cards tools (this may of become enshittified by the availability of google since my time there)
• I have a small Lexicography hobby.
• I have a small reading old sources hobby.
• I think more "Traditional" digital search is still incredibly valuable
• I think principles predating the digital age are still incredibly valuable
• The way STEM fields are taught is often focused on "one correct answer", and i don't remember that much focus being put on where the sources come from, comparing differing sources, or even any emphasis on how can be certain a given source has been accurately transmitted to the present age in history.
• I think information retrieval is a vital skill (especially with the enshitification of google) that all fields when benefit practitionners from being more comfortable with (though of course it's still its own job).
• I think software engineers in particular, during their education, would be well served by practical examples of reconciling conflicting or uncertain sources, and I think history is a good lens (less abstract vs software).

I'd be interested in your perspective!

If you keep in the mind the original angst of the students “I have to learn how to use LLMs or I’ll get left behind” they themselves have a vocational understanding of their degree. And it is sensible to address those concerns practically (though as stated in another comment, I don’t believe in accepting the default use of generative tools).

On a more philosophical note I think STEM fields (and any really general well-rounded education) would benefit from delving (!) deeper in library science/archival science/philosophy and their application to history, and that coincidentally that would make a lot of people better at troubleshooting and legacy code untangling.

The artlicle certainly feels blasé ^^, I think the most objectional part is:

Large language models shift even more of that time into investigation, because the moment the team gets a chance to build, they turn around and ask ChatGPT (or Copilot, or Devin, or Gemini) to do it. When we learn that we need to integrate with google cloud storage, or spaCy, or SQS Queue, or Firebase? Same thing: turn around and ask the LLM to draft the integration.

Now clearly (to me) the author isn't happy about this, but I think they are giving hope on the direction of the profession too soon. There are still plenty of people happy enough to implement things themselves.

I wish it were always that easy, few things in legacy code maintenance brings me more joy than deleting a single line of code, the solution is sadly often more involved.

The reality is sometimes more like fighting a hydra spaghetti ball, where felling one bug, uncovers/spawns two more.

Unsigned integers are larger because… Because the containing variables don’t have a signature that crypto-statically constrains it to the lower set! (Yes that must be it)