Every time I see stuff about age verification (which I do admit is likely just a justification for control and surveillance over the internet) I can't help but wonder if there's some way to coordinate a large enough number of internet users to adopt a parallel internet that inherently cannot be regulated, or at least one in which no law can be reasonably enforced. For instance a fully encrypted p2p internet. I guess ultimately the problem is banks and other tie-ins to the real world like businesses with public reputations. And so I guess since endless content streams (including porn and other child-unfriendly media) follow the money primarily, any non-monetized / volunteer parallel internet would likely contain mostly unmonetized content like information (eg: wikipedia, Q&A sites, etc) and slow, un-gameable social media
In a perfect world, I'd prefer law and regulation minimization, but obviously that's just not reasonable in our actual world. As much as I have libertarian tendencies, I just can't argue that regulation is necessary. The really interesting part is which regulations are the ones you actually need, which do more harm than good, and which should be refactored -- all as measured (probably) by something like counterfactual real world preference (in the best case, at least). My sense (which isn't worth much; only should act on empirical evidence and falsification-resistant modelling) is such a parallel internet, plus an analogous parallel economy (like bitcoin), would be a net positive
In most of the developed world, you need to register with a government to operate a communications device, whether it's radio, land line, mobile phone, whatever. If you're theorizing some kind of peer-to-peer system, where you let someone use your service to bypass mandatory registration, you're going to be liable. There will be very limited takers.
Semi-related: I always wished there was something like the unholy combination of a spreadsheet and notebook rolled into one. I picture it notebook-like at the top level, then each cell is a widget that the host language can reference parts of in other cells (probably with a variable (eg: something like mathematicas `Out[_]`) or a built in construct (like the `$ABC123` forms in spreadsheet formulas)). A notebook interface would also be good (I think) as a straight up terminal as well, as you (I) typically want to run commands in an order like in a notebook
Some time ago, I remember Microsoft having made a video for a "courier tablet" that was essentially an electronic notebook. Either side of the spine was, by default, just plain "paper" that could be drawn or written on. It had some kind of intelligence to recognize stuff, so if you started drawing out a grid it had basic capabilities that could be attached to that grid, like spreadsheets.
At least, these are things I think I remember. It's not quite what you're imagining, but it was cool and along the same lines.
The thing that gets me is these large companies obsess over their UIs, so don't they consult with UI experts? Yet why do their UIs become predictably worse over time? Perhaps a certain subset of people actually really like featureless, pseudo-minimalist, vague, vacant, and contrary UIs??
bean counter excel model allocates jr salary to UI UX person (seen as “soft” work, “not real engineering”) and no feedback loop to realign model to reality, i.e. frontend as of yet has no clear KPI the way backend infrastructure does (raise adtech to next scale magnitude). Resulting in salary structures that bias towards what the bean counters understand and amplifying their biases, the excel model becomes reality, tail wagging dog
Bad UIs hurt users, but users do not usually make the choice of which software to buy or use. Therefore, bad UIs do not hurt sales or user engagement. Bad UIs can even boost engagement, and ad views.
The problem is that they prioritise looking elegant over being good usable.
Buying decisions are made on looks, not analysis of UI. People will buy pretty, and most people will never be aware of bad UI - they just adjust to it.
Possibly a result of labor division? The more a business grows the more there are parasitic positions opening (see Parkison's law). Thus the selection of people whose work matches the intellectual mediocrity of their superiors (graphic designers in lieu of competent programmers)
Believe it or not, the problem is likely that they are consulting UI "experts". Many designers responsible for this stuff (at least the ones I've worked with, and I can extrapolate based on what other companies have released) haven't been in the industry for very long and they don't really have the practical experience in using computers and applications to recognize the harm they are inflicting. Combine this with the fact that the one of the main ways for designers to get pay increases is to pad their portfolio with dribbble-worthy form-over-function designs and you start to get things like the OP is lamenting. And the Slack redesign.
I use Alacritty and really like it :). I use it primarily for scripts and other cases where I want a terminal to open extremely fast. Some day I'll get around to finding a way to easily use tabs in it and I can replace Terminator (which I also really like and use, of course; but its a lot slower to open)
Yes! Finally something relevant I can post to hacker news
I use this little script https://github.com/jmacc93/paste-to-tmux-script daily. Its for pasting your current clipboard item to a target tmux session, along with very simple dsl for controlling which tmux target to send to, opening the tmux target, killing tmux sessions, etc. It makes a vastly, vastly better and more productive repl for me. The workflow for using it looks like typically is like: use `@sw name_of_target`, `@open`, `name_of_executable`, then move my cursor to something I want to evaluate, use ctrl-c to copy the line, and ctrl-. to send it to tmux
I think I've changed stuff around since I last updated that repo, though, but the general idea and skeleton is there, if anyone wants to use it / hack on it. And I'm gonna do a rewrite of it soon, I think, so that instead of using a dsl (the `@...` forms above) it uses `!...` or some similar form to execute arbitrary shell commands
I've long thought a good challenge to aim development toward in machine learning is to make an agent that can finish Skyrim zero-shot, unassisted, in real-time. I'm just a hobbyist but I thought I'd try to see if I could figure out what this would look like
I'm very interested in this topic and if anyone is interested in talking about it, please let me know. You can also email me at joe_miller_93@protonmail.com
I'm thinking about trying to write and train a superagent (an agent composed of agents) for my next project. If anyone is interested in talking about that, again: let me know :)
This is a demonstration prototype I made of a transpiler to Javascript from a variant of Javascript extended with type conjunctions and tag types (I describe both on the page) for a form of dynamic dispatching via implicit guard clauses. It is very rough behind the scenes and is really likely to break if too much is done with it haha. But its really just to demonstrate and illustrate type conjunctions and tag types. The explanation on the page is hopefully worth more than the demonstration, anyway
I hope you all like it :)
P.S. the demonstration requires javascript but the other stuff on the page I wrote in markdown then used pandoc to turn that into html and manually spliced that into the page's index.html. It pulls CodeMirror from the web, and I think that's it iirc
When I want to use behavioral directives, I've been putting the directives for ChatGPT in a parenthetical reminder header at the top of all of my messages to it
For example, you would say "Don't apologize", and then after that you would start every message with "(Remember to not apologize)"
I've also learned from using local LLMs that if you force the LM to start its response with something (via the 'start response with' field in text generation webui), then it will just go with that thing. This can be used to prevent RLHF-trained models from not responding because they think the question is unethical or illegal, and from giving the typical "I am a language model bla bla bla" responses. To be clear, if you put in the start response with field "Sure, I can answer that!", the LM will just go with it and not respond with "that's unethical" or "you're a horrible person for even conceiving of such a thing. they should lock you up for life!!", etc etc. It seems there is a similar effect when you edit the LM's past responses in some way, the LM's new responses will mimic that way of responding
Carrying that over to ChatGPT, it seems that if you request ChatGPT always starts its replies (via parenthetical reminder as well) with "Sure, I can answer that!", or with "I apologize", that that does seem to affect how it starts its replies. There appears to be some cases where it will say, for example "Sure, I can answer that! As an AI language model, ...", but it seems that forcing it to start its response a particular way helps prevent it from apologizing
But generally, for the apologizing thing, I just downvote it when the apology doesn't make any sense, and otherwise ignore the apologies, as others are doing. This indicates a potentially hazardous 2nd order effect where people are trained to ignore ChatGPT's apologies. eg: Boy who cried wolf, etc
In a perfect world, I'd prefer law and regulation minimization, but obviously that's just not reasonable in our actual world. As much as I have libertarian tendencies, I just can't argue that regulation is necessary. The really interesting part is which regulations are the ones you actually need, which do more harm than good, and which should be refactored -- all as measured (probably) by something like counterfactual real world preference (in the best case, at least). My sense (which isn't worth much; only should act on empirical evidence and falsification-resistant modelling) is such a parallel internet, plus an analogous parallel economy (like bitcoin), would be a net positive