justinjlynn | 2 years ago | on: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI
Because capitalism is a bad thing for rich people when poor people also get to do it like they do.
justinjlynn's comments
justinjlynn | 2 years ago | on: Microsoft was blindsided by OpenAI's ouster of CEO Sam Altman
Maybe shouldn't have been given advanced notice at all, since it was during trading hours.
justinjlynn | 2 years ago | on: Laid-off masses have a message for Zuckerberg, Benioff: We'll never come back
There are a lot more sheep than farmers...
justinjlynn | 2 years ago | on: CVS ditches common cold meds after FDA advisers say they're useless
If I recall correctly, it was the resulting cash flow that needed to be laundered, and the potential of those operations to eventually result in the funding of terrorism, that was the alleged concern.
justinjlynn | 2 years ago | on: TimeGPT-1
Oh, just the death of the planet through waste heat buildup. That's all. Just a small matter of code should fix that.
justinjlynn | 2 years ago | on: Patience for after-hours work socializing is wearing thin
If people phrased it as what it was "doing psychoactive drugs with co-workers/competitors in a non-work setting" ... the activity would seem as dangerous as it always was. It's just that now people, rightfully, have higher expectations of each other's behaviour because work forces otherwise incompatible people together due to economic pressures and those relationships must remain collegial. Those pressures have always been there, but as time has gone on - and especially since the 1970s with the rise telecommunications and database technologies - that social pressure has only increased due to the growth of more tightly knit but wider scoped social networks (among essentially all employers in a field, esp.). This has grown to global social networks and databases essentially creating a permanent reputation in all aspects of life. Job mobility has likewise decreased. Given that psychoactive drugs alter a persons mind and cause a person to do things they most likely would never do when they were sober, and esp. at work - the changing culture seems a natural outcome of all of those pressures as a rational way to decrease the risk of disaster.
justinjlynn | 2 years ago | on: John McCarthy’s collection of numerical facts for use in elisp programs
Is there any better embodiment of entrepreneurial capitalism than stealthily appropriating an entire planet, privatising it, and then naming it after one's self? ... I'd be hard pressed to think of one.
justinjlynn | 2 years ago | on: Aardvark'd: The Fog Creek documentary, 18 years later
Huge respect for making that work in the first place! Would love to hear some kind of retrospective about what wa involved in that - I'm super curious.
justinjlynn | 2 years ago | on: I only lost 10 minutes of data, thanks to ZFS
In short, backups aren't actually taken until they have been verifiably restored.
justinjlynn | 2 years ago | on: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License
> most large Tech companies have a blanket ban on AGPL
sounds like it's doing its intended job well then?
justinjlynn | 2 years ago | on: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor
> anime profile pictures
Either that or furry ones. Amusing apparent correlation.
justinjlynn | 2 years ago | on: Striking SAG actors in disbelief over studios’ dystopian AI proposal
Precisely this.
justinjlynn | 2 years ago | on: Striking SAG actors in disbelief over studios’ dystopian AI proposal
Well, they're not buying the 'likeness' in most cases as much as they're buying the actor's 'star power' - i.e. their ability to trade on their own name and performance independently of any one media product. That is, simply having their name attached to something makes that thing more likely to do well financially. This is what they're buying - and why casting "unknowns" in a "big budget" production is rather unusual. It's more risky than simply paying, say, Chris Pratt or Scarlett Johansson to perform. As you might imagine, investors don't like risk except the kind that guarantees them returns.
justinjlynn | 2 years ago | on: Striking SAG actors in disbelief over studios’ dystopian AI proposal
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History
justinjlynn | 2 years ago | on: Striking SAG actors in disbelief over studios’ dystopian AI proposal
Oh, I agree. The concept of being capable of being coerced into signing away your likeness in perpetuity is absolutely vile. In a real sense it's the only thing you own that can't be separated from you. These contracts should be illegal just in the way signing a contract to endenture yourself is illegal.
justinjlynn | 2 years ago | on: Striking SAG actors in disbelief over studios’ dystopian AI proposal
Perhaps the problem is people needing to be employed to justify their existence or as a proxy measure to their ongoing contribution to society and its degree?
justinjlynn | 2 years ago | on: AI weights are not open “source”
Simply because I didn't state "for all and every" doesn't invalidate my point, nor does it support yours as true - further, "heavily favored" suffers from the same problem. The point is, there's a system which takes as input formatted in a specification (a program) and some transformed output (a set of actions to be taken or another program input for another compiler). So, there you go. If a hot dog on a bun could be considered a sandwich, then a CPU could be considered to be a compiler. shrug disagree all you like.
justinjlynn | 2 years ago | on: AI weights are not open “source”
Words have meanings, and the instruction pipeline consists of electrical signals - and those early CPUs were almost all microcoded or had multiphase clocks or some other implementation abstraction which they did not expose to their architectural state... so yes, they were in a very real sense compilers.
justinjlynn | 2 years ago | on: AI weights are not open “source”
The CPU is a compiler for programs written in the machine instruction set architecture the CPU claims to implement which happens to output real world effects just as a compiler outputs program code. So, no, you can't.
justinjlynn | 2 years ago | on: Tech debt metaphor maximalism
Technical uncovered short position. Nothing wrong with taking a short position on a technical aspect of the project/product and taking the premium right now - so long as you hedge your bets. Otherwise you might have the contract assigned and go bankrupt, or fail to deliver the asset promised and lose everything. There's a reason purposefully taking uncovered short positions is illegal in most developed markets...