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adonovan

1033

Karma

2015-07-10

Created

Recent Activity

  • One annoying trope I keep seeing in Gemini output is the punchy invented concept name in a tripartite list:

    - “The Pledge”:…

    - “The Turn”:…

    - “The Prestige”:…

    (For this particular example I used real terms from the stage magic world, at least according to Christopher Nolan’s film, as it captures the same meaningless-to-the-uninitiated quality.)

  • Likewise! I often marvel at the patience of readers of earlier times. Of course, they had more time and fewer distractions, and I suspect that there was a dynamic at work in which both the writer and reader derived a certain satisfaction from long meandering sentences, the writer proving their skill, and the reader proving (to themselves) their stamina.

    Nowadays we tend to write in a plainer style demanding a smaller “parser stack”. Some style manuals have excellent examples of sentences of equal length but very different “stack depth” and thus ease of comprehension.

  • Good question. We don't know the true figure, but we extrapolate the denominator from estimates of the total number of Go users and the fraction of Go users that run gopls.

  • Good point: I-cache is memory too. (Indeed it is SRAM, so its bits might be even more fragile than DRAM!)

  • > "what is the role of humans in a scenario where work is no longer necessary?"

    People have been fantasizing about this scenario throughout the industrial era--read William Morris' News from Nowhere (1890) for example--but it has failed to come to pass so many times, and the reasons are pretty obvious. The benefits of technology are spread unequally, and increasingly so over time, so only a wealthy few get the option of a post-labor existence. Also, our demands for the products of labor change as labor productivity increases; we prefer (or have been persuaded to act as if we prefer) material riches over lives with less stuff and more time.

    We still haven't seen that AI actually replaces labor, as opposed to amplifying it, like a power saw or CNC mill used by a carpenter, so all these discussions about the end of labor seem like unwitting sales pitches for AI.

    > “what would be the role of humans in an AI-first society”

    The real question is why would anyone want, or want to help build, such an obscenity.

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