Love The Daemon and FreedomTM! They are very different from most of the AI singularity novels. I wish the Daemon was real and I could move to a holon...
When I thought about Project Gutenberg I remembered that original brutalist non-design. The current site has been very tastefully updated but looks like it's still very accessible if you turn styles off. Great job!
I like the design but liked the previous design as well, it was unique and Craigslistish, you knew what website you were visiting just by looking at it.
>When I thought about Project Gutenberg I remembered that original brutalist non-design.
I suppose a printed book, black ink on paper, is "brutalist" and unpleasant to look at?
The text of a book shouldn't be encrusted with format, your reader or browser should contain the presentation that you want to see, find appealing, or need (accessibility).
On the other hand it is not like we (as people) never personify our tools. Take boats as the iconic example. Many languages place genders on nouns. I'll also say that it sure looks like a conversation to me when I use Claude the tool.
Sorry to break it to you, but computing is totally related to colonialism. Where do you think the materials that go into a modern computer come from? It'd be nice if all that was mined in the good ol' U.S. of A but it's not, and that's where we get connected to colonialism. Not to mention labor.
What do you mean by colonialism? If industrial production/mining in lower wage countries is "colonialism" to you, then I strongly disagree, and so would most dictionaries.
Colonialism, to me, implies exerting direct political control over a territory (without allowing it democratic participation) and ressource/value extraction against the will of the local population.
Assembling phones in China/buying silicone in Brasil does neither.
Colonialism in Congo would be controlling the local government, administrating/allocating mining workers and extracting raw material against the will of the local population.
"Buying stuff from poor countries" is not colonialism.
Jeez he never suggested that all ambient music was released or was popular for this reason, he just said that's what happened in that particular case. Give it a rest!
I don't feel that this piece explains its title very well (to me) though the idea expressed by the title is spot-on
I've gone through hand-coding HTML, CGI, CMSes, web frameworks, and CMSes built with web frameworks. Each is (roughly) a layer of abstraction on top of lower layers.
People talk about LLMs as an extension of this layering but they're not. With the layers of abstraction I've listed you can go down to the layers underneath and understand them if you take the time.
LLMs are something different. They're a replacement for or a simulation of the thinking process involved in programming at various layers.
Your point is similar to the post in a sense that all abstractions are deterministic, so you could go connect the higher layer directly to the lower layer, while in LLMs, by their very probabilistic/black box nature you can’t have this direct link.
But isn’t this just a semantics discussion? Is there a rule for abstraction in CS that says it needs to be deterministic (I really don’t know)?
I believe deterministic abstraction to natural language is impossible to reach by the very ambiguous nature of it, we get misunderstandings when we talk to each other so naturally when talking to a machine it would need to be probabilistic to understand how to translate it to code.
