Or just opt out... you don't have to use these things.

It works at the individual level but won't if mass adoption happens.

The mechanism will become like taxes, you don't have to use public services thus pay those taxes, unless most people comply as it's easy to oppress those who don't.

The parallel isn't about legitimacy, but Mechanism. Some companies already oblige employees to use AI to deliver their work. In a near future we may see jobs seekers registering their AI ID for companies to decide which humans qualify to be plugged into the compensation system, at what rate, and usage conditions to avoid terminations.

Food delivery systems already show a glimpse of how it could look like.

I can't even manually resolve the merge conflicts alone that happen between my code and that of everyone else submitting code at agent speed in my team's repo. So long as I have financial obligations toward my family, I cannot opt out. I must use these things.

Not that simple. If I opt out and others don’t, and it confers a competitive advantage they win and I lose.

At this point, or perhaps not too far off it's like opting out of electricity, or the automobile.

Sure you can. But you're going to have a bad time.

And then the Amish see the world around them using electricity and cars and think, "Yep, I'm happier without that." And they're one of the few groups on earth with a growing population, so they're doing something right.

1. Your assumption that a growing population is the metric of success is questionable. A population that grows but is subject to famine, epidemics, and natural disasters because they haven’t developed the scientific and technological capacity to escape the existential risks of the physical world is living on borrowed time. Not saying I agree with that, and I would actually agree that there is merit to the Amish hypothesis that a certain existence is more compatible with individual and societal fulfillment. But there are obvious counterpoints.

2. The Amish are not a good example because AI will confer an advantage to those that control access to it that has never existed.

>Your assumption that a growing population is the metric of success is questionable.

It's a better measure than GDP/S&P/401(k) line-go-up especially [re: America] when the native Euro-based population has been aging and dropping for decades, once you strip away all the post Hart-Cellar immigrant lineages.

What are hart-cellar immigrant lineages? And why is that in anyway relevant?

Let’s play a thought experiment.

Let’s say we have a million people that are so technically sophisticated that they are a space faring civilization capable of seeding the universe with living ecosystems capable of perpetuating life and evolutionary processes. But they are entirely infertile and will never give birth to another individual of their species.

And we have another population that doubles every single year but is incapable of leaving their home planet.

Which one is more valuable?

It depends on what your measure of value is, but if it is to maximize the amount of life in the universe, then population growth is not the right metric, expansion of life through technological means is the more appropriate metric.

I chose not to drive as a teenager (public transit even in my smallish city seemed fine, I wanted to spend my money on a computer not a car) and it was interesting to watch the assumptions go from "you are incapable / afraid" to "you must be too poor or have a DUI" over the last 30 years.

It's inconceivable to most people that it could be a choice.

> I think "clanker" is intended to be a slur

It reads that way to me, and feels bad. We can just say "computer program" or similar.

Fascinating. Is it that exact word, or rather any negative words towards llms? For example would calling my agent "piece of shit" be similar for you?

What about other objects like an old car?

I guess loaded derogatory terms are somehow worse than otherwise worse-sounding terms. Think about it in the context of e.g. the n-word. “A piece of shit”, while sounding very bad: 1. is generic, can be applied to anything thus has no discrimination component, and 2. ends there. It has no history, no reference to previous usage, etc.

I guess. I'm not sure if it's the exception, but for example "rust bucket" is mostly used against old vehicles.

Now I'm laying here, wondering if it's bad to be discriminating against objects.

Sometimes I’m wondering what to call people who get offended on behalf of other people or entities that they imagine might be offended by some term or other. See, they feel bad, and like small children, they assume everyone else must feel bad.

Okay, in case of people and words like n___er, one could argue they have a leg to stand on. But stupid computer programs? Really?

And then I remember that in my part of the galaxy, we indeed have a word to describe such people. We call them “dumbasses”.

I don’t have to imagine the offense of others to take offense to slurs intended to denigrate them. If I tell you not to use the n-word in my presence I’m not doing it for black people. I’m doing it for me. I don’t want to hear that shit because it offends me. The entire mindset that would think it is okay offends me.

A slur applied to anthropomorphic programs is the same mindset to someone who really believes the programs are experiencing, quite different from “rust bucket” being applied to a car they know doesn’t think and feel. While I can’t quite get offended about it, it does make me wonder if they’re not using other slurs because of the socially unacceptable nature of those slurs rather than because they’re not awful people.

You see, I believe that cars with enough mileage have a soul. My car definitely has grown a soul. Yours might be a rust bucket for all I care. And yet it has a soul of its own.

Programs also have souls. Especially the little well-crafted programs which are works of art. Their authors took a part of their soul and put them into code, and you can see it in the way the code is written and in the way the programs work. They are not anthropomorphic, and yet they have a soul.

A clanker is anthropomorphic in a way that an advanced enough mimic in a dungeon that looks like your ideal waifu is anthropomorphic. It will infect you the moment you get kissably close to it. It subsists on egregious acts of copyright infringement. It’s a parasite that seeks to destroy a part of your brain and replace it with itself, making you quiver in pain each time you try to think for yourself, and the pain stops when you let it mimic your thinking while paying its creators per word-chunk it outputs.

The clanker seems anthropomorphic enough for the people it has infected, so they get offended to the point of blind rage when someone points out that no, this is its mimicry, and that it doesn’t actually experience things.

It's not. These people need to seek help. And I say that in a completely genuine, compassionate way. Getting triggered by some "insult" to robots - and some even feeling racially attacked - is not healthy

It doesn't really have anything to do with LLMs. There's no reason to anthropomorphize the software.

Edit: feels a bit like inventing an insult for your pet rock. If I met someone who acted superior toward an inanimate rock and used invented slang to insult it that sounded like a slur, that would feel bad to me too. What's the point except to role play a fantasy of some kind?

If it's ok and often done for cars, why not for pet rocks and llms?

Use slurs when you're trying to offend, not in general use.

Trying to offend all the time is childish.

It's also used when voicing frustration, or as nick names.

"Gosh darn it, why won't you start now you rust bucket"

The same principle applies.

The principle of not trying to offend because it's childish?

I don't like swearing, and I really try to not offend people. But telling someone not to do something with the sole reason giving it's childish I dislike strongly.

I sometimes play video games, even though some people say it's childish. Or act silly with my partner. What ever floats your goat.

The swearing is something that makes sense when it's a situation to swear. I would not trust person who never, under any circumstances swear.

The same thing would apply to a person who swears endlessly without reason.

>I sometimes play video games, even though some people say it's childish.

Who cares what you do in your own time?

Here, on the other hand, someone is trying to force his opinion on public. This, I can judge. Both on merit, and the language they use.

They could put an LED in the bezel, like the camera indicator.

That works great on a laptop. Less so on a Mac Studio, using non-Apple displays.

This shouldn't be downvoted. Transducers being reversible is a neat and non-obvious thing.

It's probably downvoted because it sounds somewhat nonorganic.

Even with the em-dash. New account and other comments seem to be here-and-there. Maybe LLM with some editing after.

Motors can be dynamos too

and many LEDs are weak photo-diodes, i.e. you get weak current when you shine a light to them.

It's pretty obvious if you did high school physics. I experimented with earphones as microphones as a teenager but couldn't get any meaningful audio data.

I think they're being downvoted because their comments all seem to have AI features.

Ours are along the river, that's nice too.

This isn't interesting.

Does it imply there is a cultural difference that would make this style more lucrative in Japan than other places? Does it suggest compositionally the alignment of asymmetric shapes in a regular form is more satisfying than a regular arrangement of identical forms? Does it imply that given an array of nearly identical choices it's important to add some noise visually to distinguish?

I'm a cynical person by nature but I'm seriously not understanding what makes this interesting.

We might as well discuss the effectiveness of simulated grime in the most recent Clorox advertising campaign?

The 192 other comments from interested people seem like pretty strong counter-evidence to your claim.

You've also listed a few questions that seem pretty interesting to me, from a curiosity perspective.

It's simply a matter of market psychology. Some find that interesting, others may not. Culture is a factor in psychology, so yeah, that too.

It doesn't fit the requirement to modify the list in place, but the prompt itself contradicts the requirements by asking explicitly for the implementation to use *args and a list comprehension.

Ahh I didn't see the full original prompt -- it's overflowing into a horz scroll for me. I thought it was the "critique loop" that injected the *args requirement. I guess garbage in, garbage out. Still unfortunate example to use.

The classification is pretty weird sometimes, too. For example the `/exit` slash command is filed under advanced and experimental commands...

I'm ready to reorganize, there are a lot of really good ideas here! Most of all I had a similar trajectory of starting with small component drawers and now it's a real pain to find appropriate places for everything. I didn't think to try larger boxes! Makes a lot of sense. I'm curious to try some variation of the dot system too, but I think I appreciated the somewhat mundane in-between details about your setup the most.

(I would have appreciated less AI-assistance in the prose though FWIW, I'm sorry if that's annoying to say!)

+1, the information content is nice, but the AI telltales and writing patterns were annoyingly distracting.

thats fair, I appreciate your feedback very much! Initially, I typed out easily two or three times as much text as what made it into the final post, and had to trim and summarize what I wrote down to size. I totally hear what you are saying about generic structure and prose.

I understand -- still, FWIW, I would have enjoyed reading (and maybe partly skimming in sections) the longer version, warts and all. A lot of what I enjoyed most about the article were the in-between details, the LLM-assisted sections felt a bit like fluff in comparison, even though I could squint and imagine the input somewhat?