As an official greybeard who has written much in C, C++, Perl, Python, and now Rust, I can say Rust is a wonderful systems programming language. Nothing at all like Perl, and as others have mentioned, a great relief from C++ while providing all the power and low-level bits and bobs important for systems programming.
It looks nice. The movement is smooth and elegant. However, I really don't understand what the essential play loop is supposed to be. Is this about graphs? Calculus? Physics? Am I solving puzzles? Taking quizzes?
The challenge with long form texts is that they are so often picked apart, each piece quoted and analyzed on its own, without regard for how that small piece fits into the whole, often veering from a far more nuanced argument or portrait of life.
Something I very much like about poetry, is that so much wisdom can be condensed into such succinct language. We fill the gaps with our own experiences, not relying on the author to lead us step by step. And I see poetry proliferating in modern times in song. (How else is a poet to earn a living?)
There frequently are reminders of who we are, where we come from, and whence we always return. Life is a wheel. From Black Sabbath:
They say that life's a carousel
Spinning fast, you gotta ride it well
The world is full of Kings and Queens
Who blind your eyes and steal your dreams
It's Heaven and Hell, oh well
And they'll tell you black is really white
The moon is just the sun at night
And when you walk in golden halls
You get to keep the gold that falls
It's Heaven and Hell
well i just asked it the same thing and it gave me a 1MB 1024x1024 png with fringed edges & sensor noise that measures out to a 17x21 pixel image. https://files.catbox.moe/1q4jtp.png
In the time it would take to keep retrying until it makes one that fits, then reshaping it to fit into 16x16 nicely I could have just drawn one myself.
Has the XDG Base Directory Specification been adopted by an official standards committee? In my previous life, calling something a standard carried a great deal of weight. For example, contracts could mandate compliance with standards.
Having built apps and CLI tools for macOS, the author's post certainly makes sense to me. Calling something a standard without backing from a standards committee seems odd, however.
At the risk of sounding dismissive -- this is all drama that amounts to nothing more than Internet entertainment. Legitimate claims of harm should be heard in court. Legitimate scientific debate should be hashed out at conferences or in peer-reviewed journals. Drama posted to an audience of 8 billion people, hosted in personal blogs and on YouTube videos, seems like soap opera entertainment at best and childish behavior at worst.
In this blog post:
podcast: 22 times
video: 13 times
blog: 6 times
rogan: 5 times
youtube: 4 times
clubhouse: 4 times
paper: 14 times
conference: 0 times
journal: 0 times
This is another great example of how LLMs are not really any sort of AI, or even proper knowledge representation. Not saying they don't have their uses (like souped up search and permutation generators), but definitely not something that resembles intelligence.
While I agree, it's still shocking how far next token prediction gets us to looking like intelligence. It's amazing we need examples such as this to demonstrate it.
Another way to think about it is how interesting it is that humans can be so easily influenced by strings of words. (Or images, or sounds.) I suppose I would characterize it as so many people being earnestly vulnerable. It all makes me think of Kahneman's [0] System 1 (fast) and System 2 (slow) thinking.
In the old days, code reuse was an aspirational goal. We had collections of functions, libraries, etc., but the overhead of reusing specific lines of code, or patterns of lines of code, was too burdensome to be practical. Many tutorials have been published on how to create a tower defense game, meaning there are tons of sample code out there for this domain.
I would ask that given the amount of source material available, when when ask an LLM to generate code, is this really "AI" of any sort, or is it really a new kind of search?
