- retsibsiFor what it's worth, I found (the start of the first book of) the Expanse to be this in a bad way, but the Martian to be this in a good way. I can definitely see why some people would find The Martian annoying too, but it feels more like a passion project than a TV pitch.
- > the more votes and comments it has, the higher the score
Unless this has changed, I don't think comments contribute positively to the score. Apparently they (used to?) contribute negatively if there are more comments than upvotes and the number of comments exceeds some threshold. See e.g. this very old article: https://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-reall...
> In order to prevent flamewars on Hacker News, articles with "too many" comments will get heavily penalized as "controversial". In the published code, the contro-factor function kicks in for any post with more than 20 comments and more comments than upvotes. Such an article is scaled by (votes/comments)^2. However, the actual formula is different - it is active for any post with more comments than upvotes and at least 40 comments. Based on empirical data, I suspect the exponent is 3, rather than 2 but haven't proven this.
- I don't think I missed the point; my point is that LLMs do something more complex and far more effective than memorise->regurgitate, and so the original analogy doesn't shed any light. This actor has read billions of plays and learned many of the underlying patterns, which allows him to come up with novel and (often) sensible responses when he is forced to improvise.
- > Imagine an actor who is playing a character speaking a language that they actor does not speak. Due to a lack of time, the actor decides against actually learning the language and instead opts to just memorise and train how to speak their lines without actually understanding the content.
Now imagine that, during the interval, you approach the actor backstage and initiate a conversation in that language. His responses are always grammatical, always relevant to what you said modulo ambiguity, largely coherent, and accurate more often than not. You'll quickly realise that 'actor who merely memorized lines in a language he doesn't speak' does not describe this person.
- What's your specific concern here? I certainly wouldn't want to, e.g., give young kids unmonitored use of an LLM, or replace their books with AI-generated text, or stop directly engaging with their games and stories and outsource that to ChatGPT. But what part of "generate fun images for my kids - turn photos into a new style, create colouring pages from pictures, etc" is likely to be "unhealthy and bad for their development"?
- It's my impression that the shift from 'basically normal government' to 'authoritarian nightmare', when it happens, tends to happen quite abruptly rather than via the ratchet effect/frog-boiling. And there seem to be plenty of examples of democracies that have remained basically normal despite decades' worth of policies that libertarian-leaning observers would decry as the thin end of the wedge. I'm open to being convinced that the risk of a policy like this clearly outweighs its benefits, but I think I need a specific causal pathway and/or historical precedent rather than general arguments.
- Let's suppose the cause really is as simple as "parents can't be bothered to parent". By default, this will continue to be the case. And realistically we're not going to fix it by telling bad parents to please start being good parents. So what do you actually want to do? I'm not saying it's this or nothing, but if you don't have an alternative policy that might actually help, I don't take much comfort in the idea that the kids who are damaged will have _parents_ who totally deserved it.
- > And, from now on, if you ever criticize the government you will lose your bank account and your job.
We could have a real conversation about tradeoffs (and maybe this one isn't worth it!) but not if you just assume/pretend the worst-case scenario is real. I'm Australian and I'll happily bet that N years from now I'll still be able to criticize the government without being debanked or sacked.
If we do ever fall to authoritarianism, I doubt this will have been a crucial step; it's already easy for the government to deanonymize most posters if it wants to, and an evil future government that wanted to go further could probably just... do it, regardless of precedent.
- Does it happen much with non-Claude models? If someone genders ChatGPT, it makes me worry that they're taking the character it's playing too literally. But if someone genders Claude, that seems pretty normal, given that it has a man's name.
- > That model does not exist.
It does (unless the previous comment was edited? Currently it says Opus 4.1): https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-4-1. You can see it in the 'more models' list on the main Claude website, or in Claude Console.
- I love Warsow but am I right that it's very hard to find an opponent these days? I just checked https://arena.sh/wa/ and there are 4 non-empty servers, but most (maybe all) of the players seem to be bots.
- They are wrong, though. Locks also stop people who would happily commit an opportunistic theft but who lack the necessary tools or skills, people who would trespass if they could retain some plausible deniability ("oops, I didn't see the signs" vs. "oops, I didn't realise I wasn't supposed to cut that padlock"), and so on.
- Not a unicycist (or a physicist), but I wonder if it would throw off your balance by changing the centre of mass?
- In the end the analogy doesn't really work, because 'eternal September' referred to what used to be a regular, temporary thing (an influx of noobs disrupting the online culture, before eventually leaving or assimilating) becoming the new normal. 'Eternal {month associated with ChatGPT}' doesn't fit because LLM-generated content was never a periodic phenomenon.
- Not this time:
> The global leaderboard was one of the largest sources of stress for me, for the infrastructure, and for many users. People took things too seriously, going way outside the spirit of the contest; some people even resorted to things like DDoS attacks. Many people incorrectly concluded that they were somehow worse programmers because their own times didn't compare. What started as a fun feature in 2015 became an ever-growing problem, and so, after ten years of Advent of Code, I removed the global leaderboard.
- It's up for me (but the first puzzle won't be available until 15 hours from now).
- The important difference is not the price, but the extent of the corruption. A politician whose public persona is clean, law-abiding, respectful of norms and institutions, and generally benevolent will be limited in how far they will go to abuse their power and sell out their country -- even if they are secretly very cynical and amoral. A politician who is openly corrupt, above the law, norm breaking, and vindictive will be free to do much more damage.
- > I was surprised how hard many here fell for the NFT thing, too.
Did they? I'm not saying you're wrong but I'd like to see some evidence, because NFTs were always obvious nonsense. I'm sure there were some grifters posting here, and others playing devil's advocate or refuting anti-NFT arguments that somehow went too far, but I'd be genuinely surprised if the general sentiment was not overwhelmingly negative/dismissive.
- Agreed. I'm a regular user of the BoM website, and from my perspective the old version was absolutely fine. I wasn't one of the people instantly panning the redesign, but after using it for a while I haven't found positives to outweigh the minor annoyance of the change, let alone justify the expenditure. I can totally believe there were some accessibility issues that I was oblivious to, but it's hard to imagine they couldn't have been fixed in a much narrower, cheaper way.
(It was slightly weird that the old website didn't support https -- but on the other hand, I can't really think of a realistic case where that mattered. And I reckon they could have sorted it out for closer to $0m than $100m.)
- > eu newfascism
What do you mean by this, concretely? Or in other words, if we check back in 5 years, what would cause you to say 'yeah I was wrong, eu newfascism {doesn't exist || hasn't progressed as badly as I expected}'?
edit: to the downvoters, what do you object to here?? I'm trying to pin down the meaning of the parent comment, because without some kind of definition, a phrase like 'eu newfascism' is all heat and no light. My 'in other words...' framing was not based on the assumption that the parent commenter will be proven wrong; I'm just asking 'what would it take to falsify this?'