queerlilhayseed

Oh my god yes. It's amazing to me how much art we produce where the artist is adamant that no one ever see it. Like, Kafka wanted all of his works destroyed on his death, and his art is so weird and different that it got it's own word to describe it, because there's nothing quite like it. Makes me wonder about how much of that art happens every day, and we'll never know because, for whatever reason, we can't bring ourselves to share it.

I mean look at them. To quote Raymond Gillette, nobody's that gay.

That is mesmerizing. Is some of the particulate in the video eggs (or hatchlings) that are becoming dislodged? Or is that all other debris in the water?

I don't share your concerns about the profession. Even supposing for a moment that LLMs did deliver on the promise of making 1 human as productive as 5 humans were previously, that isn't how for-profit industry has traditionally incorporated productivity gains. Instead, you'll just have 5 humans producing 25x output. If code generation becomes less of a bottleneck (which it has been doing for decades as frameworks and tooling have matured) there will simply be more code in the world that the code wranglers will have to wrangle. Maybe if LLMs get good enough at generating usable code (still a big if for most non-trivial jobs), some people who previously focused on low-level coding concerns will be able to specialize in higher-level concerns like directing an LLM, while some people will still be writing the low-level inputs for the LLMs, sort of like how you can write applications today without needing to know the specific ins and outs of the instruction set for your CPU. I'm doubtful that that's around the corner, but who knows. But whatever the tools we have are capable of, the output will be bounded by the abilities of the people who operate the tools, and if you have good tools that are easily replicated, as software tools are, there's no reason not to try and maximize your output by having as many people as you can afford and cranking out as much product as you can.

What amuses me about this take is that the jokes about the song being played all the time fall prey to the exact same overexposure mechanism that made people dislike the song in the first place. As the song gets more commonly perceived as being overexposed, the idea of its overexposure itself becomes more and more popular until it is itself perceived as overexposed. Like a memetic echo.

I'm just making stuff up, but your comment made me look it up and of course it's also the name of a controversial youtuber who blew up, coincidentally, around the same time the trebuchet did. Learning all kinds of internet history today.

The CPU malloceth, and the CPU freeeth, according to the divine Program. And lo, the virtuous array shall enter into the ofstream and be saved, while the wicked shall be dereferenced for ever.

I'd expand on your last thought to say that all art is a compression tool for meaning. Got an idea in your head you want to communicate? You've got your body and your environment to work with, good luck. Words, images, dance, sculpture, they're all noisy channels we use to try and get information from one brain to another.

I think if we're ever going to find an answer to "Why does the universe exist?" I think one of the steps along the way will be providing a concrete answer to the simulation hypothesis. Obviously if the answer is "yes, it's a simulation and we can demonstrate as much" then the next question becomes "OK so who or what is running the simulation and why does that exist?" which, great, now we know a little bit more about the multiverse and can keep on learning new stuff about it.

Alternatively, if the answer is "no, this universe and the rules that govern it are the foundational elements of reality" then... well, why this? why did the big bang happen? why does it keep expanding like that? Maybe we will find explanations for all of that that preclude a higher-level simulation, and if we do, great, now we know a little bit more about the universe and can keep on learning new stuff about it.

Yes, kind of, but I don't think that's necessarily a point against it. "Why are we here? / Why is the universe here?" is one of the big interesting questions that still doesn't have a good answer, and I think thinking about possible answers to the big questions is one of the ways we push the envelope of what we do know. This particular paper seems like a not-that-interesting result using our current known-to-be-incomplete understanding of quantum gravity, and the claim that it somehow "disproves" the simulation hypothesis is some rank unscientific nonsense that IMO really shouldn't have been accepted by a scientific journal, but I think the question it poorly attempts to answer is an interesting one.

the realpolitik is in Corrections

IME: