And it's a pity that this highly prevalent phenomenon (to exaggerate a bit, probably the way tech in general will become the most influential in the next couple years) is barely mentioned on HN.
- a large number of incredibly fragile users
- extremely "protective" mods
- a regular stream of drive-by posts that regulars there see as derogatory or insulting
- a fair amount of internal diversity and disagreement
I think discussion on forums larger than it, like HN or popular subreddits, is likely to drive traffic that will ultimately fuel a backfiring effect for the members. It's inevitable, and it's already happening, but I'm not sure it needs to increase.
I do think the phenomenon is a matter of legitimate public concern, but idk how that can best be addressed. Maybe high-quality, long form journalism? But probably not just cross-posting the sub in larger fora.
Part of me thinks maybe I erred bringing this up, but there's discussions worth having in terms of continued access to software that's working for people regardless of what it is, and on if this is healthy. I'm probably on a live and let live on this but there's been cases of suicide and murder where chatbots were involved, and these people are potentially vulnerable to manipulation from the company.
The percentage I mentioned was an example of how a very small prevalence can result in a reasonable number of people, like enough to fill a subreddit, because ChatGPT has a user count that exceeds all but 3 countries of the world.
Again, do you have anything behind this "highly prevalent phenomenon" claim?
Probably a relationship between what's the default and what model is being used the most. It is more about what OAI sets than what users care about. Flip side is "good enough is good enough" for most users.
But how do we know that you did not hallucinate the claim that ChatGPT does not hallucinate its version number?
We could try to exfiltrate the system prompt which probably contains the model name, but all extraction attempts could of course be hallucinations as well.
(I think there was an interview where Sam Altman or someone else at OpenAI where it was mentioned that they hardcoded the model name in the prompt because people did not understand that models don't work like that, so they made it work. I might be hallucinating though.)
I have a simpler problem - I want a yearly calendar app (for Android) that just shows the yearly calendar (for any year), nothing else (no events, no reminders, no anything).
Any app I find seems to disappear from the Play Store after a couple years.
Haha, I talked about my bullet journal approach, but there is one time I always use cal... When I've resigned from a job, I'll always the output from cal, format it to full page in word in Courier, and grey out all the non-working days, and days before now and days after my last day in the job. And then print it out and cross off each day until I leave like an advent calendar! I've had this ritual for the last 6 jobs, going back to the early 2000s when I quit a job I really hated and literally looking forward to crossing off every single day was what kept me sane in the (3 month) notice period.
Source: bsdmainutils
Maintainer: Debian Bsdmainutils Team
[...]
Description-en: display a calendar and the date of Easter
[...] This utility displays a
simple calendar in a traditional or an alternative and more advanced layout,
and the date of Easter.
And here is a Bash script that runs ncal to show weeks vertically.
Within each month the weeks should be shown vertically (this was common when I was a kid, now even a google image search for yearly calendar shows only horizontal weeks).
Probably, the reason they disappear is that this is the sort of "finished software" that Google makes it very infuriating to keep on the store. On Android you can build an APK like this and it will literally work unmodified for a decade. Google can't stand that and makes you make changes to keep up with shifting policies.
I remember being confused as a kid by "Yes/No/Cancel" when the computer asked "Do you want to save the changes...?" because I couldn't figure out whether "Cancel" meant "Yes" or "No" and why on earth would one have a third option. I then realized it meant to "cancel" my intention to close the file. I had been confused because I thought it meant to "cancel" the computer's intention to ask me.
Also, I was that obnoxious kid who, after asking someone a yes/no question, used to add "Yes/No/Cancel" (probably to highlight my perceived absurdity of that button).
I've slowly become more and more inclined to "Theory 5: Purity of vision" over the past six years.
When I was younger, I valued movies more than books. I know that people usually replied that books make you exercise your imagination more, but to me that felt like a disadvantage of books, they seem to rely on a crutch (the imagination), whereas movies (in my child's mind) stood alone, proudly. I tended to see a book as infirm, incomplete until it got an adaptation, and even then, a bad adaptation seemed to me to somehow devalue the book itself, like an infection from a prosthesis. I literally couldn't sleep at night because of errors in book adaptations, it was like a hole in the universe itself.
Then I reread Harry Potter, especially the last book, and I came to love the descriptions of nature and feelings in the tenting chapters, and I suddenly realized how much I value how the book makes feel, and how irrelevant the quality of its adaptation is.
This theory got put to the test when the Foundation TV show came up, which I found awful, and for the first time I didn't care. The book was just as brilliant as before, and no bad adaptation could make me lose nights anymore.
Recently, this disappointment with adaptations together with the appreciation of literature itself made me more disappointed with movies in general, even original ones. I realized how many compromises have to be made to make a movie which simply don't exist in books.
Somehow I managed to make it to just last year with only seeing the first Harry Potter movie. I decided this would be a good opportunity to read the books, then watch the movie… something I had never done before. I’m currently part way into the 4th book.
While watching The Prisoner of Azkaban, I finally understood by book readers hated movie adaptations so much. Massive, meaningful, plot lines were completely missing from the movie. Places where the movie deviates from book create issues of believability that didn’t exist in the book.
I’m now excited to read the rest of the books, but less excited for the movies, lol. And here I thought the carrot of the movie at the end would help drive me to finish the books.
> You cannot escape the details. You must engage with them and solve them directly, meticulously. It's messy, it's extremely complicated and it's just plain hard.
Of course you can. The way the manager ignores the details when they ask the developer to do something, the same way they can when they ask the machine to do it.
> who ultimately buys the goods and services that companies produce?
The only goods that will be produced will be the one that machines will need for their survival or for whatever unfathomable goals they will have. Human goods will only be produced as long as human labour still has some value.
Good point. During that era, a lot of the legacy devices like the famous Nokia brick, the dev work on those was done with actual physical devices.
The smartphone stuff, a lot of that development was running in emulators, which likely reduced the time-to-market.
I distinctly remember seeing devs working on future phones in emulators, but most of the devices we sold were just upgrades to existing devices.
That was probably the moment when Nokia and Ericsson and RIM should have been paying attention to what was happening just south of Microsoft in Bellevue. But none of those three companies had a significant presence in the area at the time, AFAIK. The Silicon Valley folks were flying in every single day. I'd argue that this is what killed Sprint too; they were five hours from anyone. The predecessor of AT&T Wireless was so close to T-Mobile, you could drive from one HQ to the other in under fifteen minutes and you could stop off at Microsoft on the way over.
Definitely an example of the synergies that are possible when you have a couple of tech titans who are less than 90 minutes away from each other via Southwest Airlines.
That's both a very good description of Tolkien's struggles with orcs, and a writing style that feels out of place in an encyclopedia. The Halls of Mandos are described as a halfway house.
> J. R. R. Tolkien, a devout Roman Catholic, created what he came to feel was a moral dilemma for himself with his supposedly evil Middle-earth peoples like Orcs [...] so killing them would be wrong without very good reason. Orcs serve as the principal forces of the enemy in The Lord of the Rings, where they are slaughtered in large numbers in the battles of [...]
Admitting that there's a very wide diversity of beliefs under the "Roman Catholic" banner - historic Roman Catholic armies have been eager participants in well-documented battles for the past 1,500 or so years. I'd assume that Tolkien would have had a wide variety of perfectly historic Roman Catholic arguments to chose from, to justify his fictional slaughter.
(If I recall, the orcs slaughtered in LoTR are pretty much all soldier or near-soldiers. Do orc women, children, or other non-combatants ever appear in the story?)
In many ways, that Wikipedia article feels like a Hays Code-era whitewashing of Roman Catholicism.
Your criticism of Catholicism is valid, but regardless: this dilemma of Tolkien is real, and well-documented (e.g. in his letters, etc).
He really did struggle with this, re: the origin of the Orcs, whether they had souls, whether it was ok to default to massacring them without second thought, etc. He never really resolved it.
Most Tolkien fan communities are aware of this dilemma, it's one of those well-known things, along with "did Balrogs have wings?", "couldn't they just fly to Mount Doom and drop the ring?" and "why did Sauron need to put his power within a ring, anyway?".
> "couldn't they just fly to Mount Doom and drop the ring?"
If the allies were counterfactually sensible enough to fly the ring to Mordor, Sauron could have been counterfactually sensible enough to station an Orc/Troll Battlegroup at the Sammath Naur, with a Nazgul combat air patrol.
If trying to rationalize things - I'd say Sauron knows that giant eagles are a thing, and able to serve as mounts. So to prevent Western aerial reconnaissance and insertion/extraction of observers/spies/special forces in Mordor, he's got to have some sort of aerial observer / aerial denial systems going. Which systems would make a "fly the Ring to the fire" gambit too risky.
(Vs. voice-of-canon Gandalf makes it clear that anyone seeking to destroy his Preciousss is simply beyond Sauron's Vile McEvil worldview.)
In fact, when Gandalf catches up with Aragorn/Legolas/Gimli in 'The White Rider' chapter, he explicitly tells them that Sauron has committed a major strategic blunder: attacking too early, as soon as he thought the Ring was in play. If he'd kept some forces back to guard Mt Doom, he'd have been alright. Especially because, as later becomes clear, Mt Doom isn't a normal volcano where you could just lob the Ring in from your low-flying eagle. The Cracks of Doom are in a chamber deep inside the mountain.
Speaking of things needing rationalization: Smelting iron, which the dwarves are supposedly past masters of, requires furnaces which routinely exceed 1,500 °C. Vs. even exceptionally hot lavas are considerably colder. So why bother forming a Fellowship of the Ring, or embarking on a long & dangerous journey to Mt. Doom, when it'd be vastly quicker & easier to smelt local?
Mount Doom is magical/mythic in nature, the birthplace of the One Ring, while the Dwarven forges aren't.
Quoting Elrond during the Council at Rivendell:
> “It has been said that Dragon-fire might melt and consume the Rings of Power, but there is not now any dragon left on earth in which the old fire is hot enough; nor was there ever any fire, save the fire of Orodruin, that could melt the One Ring.”
Also, the Dwarves that took the One Ring for melting would have likely fallen under its influence, postponing the destruction and ultimately keeping the ring as a keepsake, tool or weapon, like most living creatures would... except for some brave Hobbits, which took a longer time to be corrupted.
More fundamentally, this is not the kind of mindset with which Tolkien wanted us to read LotR. It can be done for fun, but if done seriously, it'd be missing the point.
Note I wasn't really trying to go into the argument, just pointing out these are well-known and very debated topics in Tolkien fandom.
My own opinion is that debating this is missing the point. Tolkien was about the hero's journey, which necessitates the hard path to victory. It's not at all about flying a modern superweapon into Mount Doom; that's too literal a reading.
Yes - I am not saying that JRRT himself was anything less than saintly, or did not struggle with the issue.
My issue is with the Wikipedia article's heavy identification of JRRT's personal dilemma with the Roman Church and its doctrines. Historically, for that Church - one could just assume that the orcs were Protestants, so slaughtering them was perfectly okay. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Wars_of_Religion
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