TechTakes

Was reading some science fiction from the 90's and the AI/AGI said 'im an analog computer, just like you, im actually really bad at math.' And I wonder how much damage these one of these ideas (the other being there are computer types that can do more/different things. Not sure if analog turing machines provide any new capabilities that digital TMs do, but I leave that question for the smarter people in the subject of theorethical computer science) did.

The idea that a smart computer will be worse at math (which makes sense from a storytelling perspective as a writer, because smart AI who also can do math super well is gonna be hard to write), which now leads people who read enough science fiction to see the machine that can't count nor run doom and go 'this is what they predicted!'.

Not a sneer just a random thought.

A second trashfire has hit the Ruby language - RubyGems was hit with a hostile takeover from Ruby Central, seemingly to squash an attempt at putting together an official governance policy.

Between that and DHH's fascist screed, its not been a good week for Ruby.

Enjoy this Rat pitch for a "pastor" who shall spread the gospel of Bayes to the unwashed masses:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/crEduvg2DwHPP74cw/pastor-selfie-an-attempt-to-evangelize-lesswrong-concepts-on

There's an ACX guest post rehashing the history of Project Xanadu, an important example of historical vaporware that influenced computing primarily through opinions and memes. This particular take is focused on Great Men and isn't really up to the task of humanizing the participants, but they do put a good spotlight on the cults that affected some of those Great Men. They link to a 1995 article in Wired that tells the same story in a better way, including the "six months" joke. The orange site points out a key weakness that neither narrative quite gets around to admitting: Xanadu's micropayment-oriented transclusion-and-royalty system is impossible to correctly implement, due to a mismatch between information theory and copyright; given the ability to copy text, copyright is provably absurd. My choice sneer is to examine a comment from one of the ACX regulars:

The details lie in the devil, for sure...you'd want the price [of making a change to a document] low enough (zero?) not to incur Trivial Inconvenience penalties for prosocial things like building wikis, yet high enough to make the David Gerards of the world think twice.

Ah yes, low enough to allow our heroic wiki-builders, wiki-citers, and wiki-correctors; and high enough to forbid their brutish wiki-pedants, wiki-lawyers, and wiki-deleters.

Disclaimer: I know Miller and Tribble from the capability-theory community. My language Monte is literally a Python-flavored version of Miller's E (WP, esolangs), which is itself a Java-flavored version of Tribble's Joule. I'm in the minority of a community split over the concept of agoric programming, where a program can expand to use additional resources on demand. To me, an agoric program is flexible about the resources allocated to it and designed to dynamically reconfigure itself; to Miller and others, an agoric program is run on a blockchain and uses micropayments to expand. Maybe more pointedly, to me a smart contract is what a vending machine proffers (see How to interpret a vending machine: smart contracts and contract law for more words); to them, a smart contract is how a social network or augmented/virtual reality allows its inhabitants to construct non-primitive objects.

This one's been making the rounds, so people have probably already seen it. But just in case...

Meta did a live "demo" of their ~~recording~~ new AI.

hot off the heels of months of “agentic! it can do things for you!” llm hype, they have to make special APIs for the chatbots, I guess because otherwise they make too many whoopsies?

Accidentally posted in an old thread:

This bullshit again