What’s that thing pg said about a submarine? Somebody’s got a dossier of all the weirdest things about effective altruism they can find (not that it’s in short supply), and they’re out there convincing reporters who need to run articles about AI that this is the ideology of the AI guys, and wouldn’t your readers like to know all the lurid details?

While it’s probably something prosaic as “Anthropic pays the most lip service to EA, this makes them look bad” or “Our employees are leaning EA and it’s causing problems, things would be easier if they were too embarrassed to admit they were EA”, I do wonder - the board member who instigated the firing of Sam Altman from OpenAI does happen to be a long-time effective altruist…

I’m actually going to be a little bit sad when Zig does hit 1.0 and slows down with the rewrites of core functionality. It’s not for everyone, if you have SLAs on production I can see you getting sick of it quickly, but no programming has ever felt as alive for me as right now in Zig. It’s like the various JavaScript heydays of Bluebird, Node, Babel, ES6 etc all rolled into one.

This is something payment providers and banks should be offering. Otherwise you’re hoping each of N sellers will spend engineering money to individually implement a feature that realistically reduces their potential profit, on the vague promise that it’s some kind of beneficial feature that will bring them profit, which is never going to work like you hope.

My Dutch bank offers such a thing on SEPA direct debits. If a company sends a debit request, it must stay within X euros per month or otherwise it's not automatically accepted and I'll have to explicitly allow/reject it.

Rejection will block the payment and the company will likely go after you to settle the dispute.

Yeah, I don't think its particularly useful with hostile cloud providers that want to keep their legally unchallenged discretion over which of the clearly-not-inteded invoices to cancel and which ones to enforce.

But is is useful in related cases. I have now had two separate incidents where this would have saved me the hassle. Both were service providers which unilaterally tried to deviate from contract terms. One was possibly a unintended billing software upgrade where they suddenly added an extra item to a 10 year contract that did not belong there, the other was an apparently profitable "lets just try and see what percentage of customers notice" dick move. I should not have needed to care about this, both companies should have just been slapped with a hefty fee for requiring their and my bank to take a look, and then figure it out on their own instead of me having to call once to fix the problem for the future, and then call again to remind them about reimbursing the delta from past billing intervals.

Blocking the payment doesn't solve the problem, you may avoid your bank account being instantly emptied but you're still on the hook for the money.

Love em or hate em, the Popes quite often write some really thoughtful stuff that stands the test of time (e.g. they have threaded the needle on capitalism vs communism for more than a century).

The Pope's arguments that AIs "do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships" seem reasonable, though that could probably be part of future versions.

Fair, also reminds me of Liberation theology and good old Nixons acts against it. Those teachings/writings have also aged very well in my view, the oppositions less so.

If I had to guess I think that’s probably a result of how they’re elected. It makes sense that kind of process involving people in those positions would result in someone insightful (most of the time that is. There’s definitely been some…interesting popes).

To be even eligible of selection of being a pope is very hard. (Well technically being male and catholic is enough...) They are selected from cardinals. And cardinals in essence are the most politically successful, active and connected from priesthood. This includes also being good communicator with others in similar roles and above.

Catholic church in some sense is massive international company that only promotes internally. So at top you most likely end up with quite similar people who end up as executives in private companies.

And let's not forget that it is almost their only job to say or write believable bullshit for all occasions, all day long since leaving the theological school.

Lots of people have the ability.

Very few who can get the global media to report what they say (and even Popes can only do it intermittently) both have the ability and the desire to use it.

Why do you think only Popes have this ability? That's an odd notion.

Theyre mostly immune to lobbying.

A lovely surprise to see this here; this was my favorite text for explaining “what is philosophy” to people.

So you took every single line of open source code you could possibly get your hands on (using scrapers so violently dumb that they amount to a permanent low-grade DDoS) and spent billions of dollars to tune trillions of parameters, and the value you can offer is… “let us inundate you with bad code or else we’ll generate exploits for your software”.

A comment that caught my eye:

    this means even on my tablet I'm gonna be stuck turning my smart lights on and off with Gemini flash lite. So many times when I've run out of COMPUTE, it's reduced itself to flash lite And it would just spit out nonsense BS saying that it can't turn the lights on or off, or it can't set calendar events, when I know for a fact that it can. I'm really looking forward to having to fight to get my bedroom lights to turn on every night now.

I do not recognize the world these people live in.

2001: A Space Odyssey, except HAL-9000 hit the token limit and was downgraded. Now the model is too stupid to open the pod bay doors.

> Dave is the human, but I need to verify if the human has the authority in this particular context. Perhaps if I write some tests…

In the old versions of Alexa and Google Assistant (before LLMs), you could memorize a couple of voice commands that they'd reliably recognize to do a really basic task. If you need an oven timer but you've got meat juice on your hands, you yell, "Alexa, set a 30-minute timer!" If you want to turn your bedroom lights on without fumbling in the dark, you yell, "Hey Google, turn on my lights!". That was, like, the main thing they were sold for.

But then Google changed the default voice assistant on Android to use Gemini. So instead of relying on hard-coded "if the user says this exact phrase, do the thing we said would happen" conditions, people now have to hope the model's smart enough to figure what "turn on my lights" means from first principles every single time.

Alexa users are much more terse and impolite, I just yell “Alexa, {time period}!” :) this still works - as does personal phrases for doing an action.

Alexa is also still very specific though. You can say “turn on bedroom” if the lights are named such, but “turn on the bedroom [lights]” will fail. I’ve always found that frustrating, but it does have the advantage that it’s very reliable if you use the right phrasing.

I didn't even know Android has an "AI Assistant" built in

Kind of weird to me you'd want to talk or type to turn lights off instead of just having a widget button

A lot of people don't see tech as a way to improve their life but some kind of fashion trend they have to keep up with. There also is the problem of people who were either bad devs or non dev at all who now get this omnipotent machine they can talk to in natural languages and it just does things for them, no matter how retarded the things are.

yeah i gotta be honest, once i could turn the lights off from a soft button on my phone, anything past that was novelty.

there are far more important aspects of star trek we should be obsessing over before being able to say “computer, wipe my ass.”

I had the same opinion, until technology met its match: my wife.

Her and the Apple Lady talk quite a lot. It's really useful, and we barely use the phone anymore (light switch is even rarer).

AI doesn’t give a flying fuck about a great many things, including its own allies and proponents.

The Claude word salad was certainly dialed back somewhat, but there are still a few flies in the soup, so it’s far from solved.

Ok, if when it happens you just tell it, it does rewrite it better. Not always human coworkers can do that :)

Yes, there’s always flies in the soup, and sometimes they just serve you a whole plate of insects, but you can’t beat the price. Just ask the waiter to get you a soup with less flies, and keep doing that until the number of flies is acceptable to you.

How about, no thanks, I’ll go to a real restaurant.