This fast run to use LLMs in everything can be undone by one court decision - and the sensible thing is to isolate as much as you can.

Really interesting insight

That's funny because they have been releasing a ton of named hero characters lately.

A (I'm unsure how large) portion of the community hates this style of game design and call it "Herohammer"

I play the space bugs because I like huge swarms of things, so thematically I agree with them.

right... there has been ample code and visual art around to copy for decades, and people have, and they get away with it, and nothing bad happens, and where are the "millions of coming copyright claims" now?

i don't think what you are talking about has anything to do with killing openai, there's no one court decision that has to do with any of this stuff.

Some genres of music make heavy use of 'samples' - tiny snippets of other recordings, often sub-5-seconds. Always a tiny fraction of the original piece, always chopped up, distorted and rearranged.

And yet sampling isn't fair use - the artists have to license every single sample individually. People who release successful records with unlicensed samples can get sued, and end up having to pay out for the samples that contributed to their successful record.

On the other hand, if an artist likes a drum break but instead of sampling it they pay another drummer to re-create it as closely as possible - that's 100% legal, no more copyright issue.

Hypothetically, one could imagine a world where the same logic applies to generative AI - that art generated by an AI trained on Studio Ghibli art is a derivative work the same way a song with unlicensed drum samples is.

I think it's extremely unlikely the US will go in that direction, simply because the likes of nvidia have so much money. But I can see why a cautious organisation might want to wait and see.

If you don’t know what good people look like you can’t win.

People want to work hard and they want to do good - but they're scared. They're scared that working hard will only be to their detriment and, well, can you blame them? When managers create an almost adversarial relationship, it can feel like doing your best is setting yourself up for failure.

That since for 100,000 years humans were roaming the landscape gathering or hunting, and for 10,000 years engaged in heavy agricultural work, is the modern day rise in depression not just correlated but caused by the modern day reduction in daily heavy exercise?

It’s such an obvious idea I am wondering if folks know of any research / studies on it?

I think physical activity, even just going on walks makes one feel change is possible. If something sucks and I sit home all day on YouTube, then it continues to suck. If I can change my environment, do things outside, see new people and find myself if different situations, then the thing that sucks starts feeling like maybe it also could change.

For example I doubt exercising in a basement just by yourself on 1 machine is likely to materially help with depression. At least not as much as going out doing a variety of things, or playing a game of basketball at the local gym/community center.

I think it was quite hard to get an appointment for a depression diagnosis 100,000 years ago.

To me it seems to be a combination of

- wealth inequality (eg 20/30 trillion dollars was printed and furloughed out in Covid, which funnels its way up to the holders of the most assets, seeing asset price inflation but no attempt to tax back the money printed). Repeat on different scales for unfair tax systems and poor infrastructure and and and

- urban planning (we think the ideal city is dense using seven storey or so apartment buildings and fairly aggressive anti-car (ie far less parking than seems possible) with better public transport and lots of pedestrian access. This describes almost no cities

- mortgages and other pro house incentives. You want house price inflation for decade after decade, just allow people to borrow a greater ratio against their salary — and allow married women into the workplace. Suddenly turning a mortgage limit of 2.5 x a man’s salary into 5x a dual couples salary. People bid up prices, forcing more couples to have two salaries to compete. And companies don’t have to increase salary to compensate … people combine salaries and go deeper into debt. Hell if you only had one policy weapon, forcing 2.5 borrowing against one highest paid persons salary is not a bad one. You won’t get re-elected however.

To some extent seems like it would also provide a margin of safety given homogeneity effects eg https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/working-pa...

They offer low rents and therefore a large part of tenants dont compete on the private market, therefore pulling overall rents lower.

“”” This compares with London around 20%, paris 24% and NYC 9%

So yeah that makes a huge difference…

The doctor said, “don’t do that”.

Edit: so yeah a rather snarky reply. Sorry. But it’s worth asking why we want to use classes and objects everywhere. Alan Kay is well known for saying object orientated is about message passing (mostly by Erlang people).

A list of lists (where each list is four different types repeated) seems a fine data structure, which can be operated on by external functions, and serialised pretty easily. Turning it into classes and objects might not be a useful refactoring, I would certainly want to learn more before giving the go ahead.

When you’re in a project with a few million lines of code and 10 years of history it can get confusing.

Your data will have been handled by many different functions before it gets to you. If you do this with raw lists then the code gets very confusing. In one data structure customer name might be [4] and another structure might have it in [9]. Worse someone adds a new field in [5] then when two lists get concatenated name moves to [10] in downstream code which consumes the concatenated lists.

customers[3][4]

is a lot less readable than

customers[3].balance

But hidden in this is the failing of every sql-bridge ever - it’s definitely easier for a programmer to read customers(3).balance but the trade off now is I have to provide class based semantics for all operations - and that tends to hide (oh you know, impedance mismatch).

I would far prefer “store the records as plain as we can” and add on functions to operate over it (think pandas stores basically just ints floats and strings as it is numpy underneath)

(Yes you can store pyobjects somehow but the performance drops off a cliff.)

Anyway - keep the storage and data structure as raw and simple as possible and write functions to run over it. And move to pandas or SQLite pretty quickly :-)

You can write the type heavy language with the nullable-type and the carefully thought through logic. Or you can use the dynamic language with the likelihood that it will crash. The issue is not “you are a bad coder, and should be guilty” but that there is a cost to a crash and a cost to moving wholesale to Haskell or perhaps more realistically to typed python, and those costs are quantifiable- and perhaps sometimes the throwaway code that has made it to production is on the right side of the cost curve.

And it is always a choice - we choose platforms and regulations and spending priorities. If “we” choose a different set of tech regulations the K shaped economy can be put back in its box.

For me the problem was most clearly outlined by Cory Doctorow “developers did not unionise or rebel in time because they thought of themselves as temporarily embarrassed entrepreneurs”.

(I also just realised that the world become more complex than I could understand when some guy mixed two ochres together and finger painted a Woolly Mammoth.)

Our brains are far more impressive than what amounts to fairly trivial signal processing done on digital images.