They’re talking about the visions of sci-fi authors, filmmakers, and artists. The tech Bros are the ones being drawn towards those artists’ visions.

IMO if we ever get to a point that pulling information from the Internet is as simple as “remembering” it the same way we remember any other information, that could have both significant advantages over having to first read the data visually to ingest it, and terrifying potential to implant “facts” into someones mind.

Why shouldn’t we, as engineers, be entitled to a small percentage of the profits that are generated by our code? Why are the shareholders entitled to it instead?

I worked in Hollywood before becoming a programmer, and even as a low level worker, IATSE still got residuals from union shows that went to our healthcare and pension funds. My healthcare was 100% covered by that fund for a top-of-the-line plan, and I got contributions to both a pension AND a 401K that were ON TOP of my base pay rather than deducted from it.

Lastly, we were paid hourly, which means overtime, but also had a weekly minimum. Mine was 50 hours. So if I was asked to work at all during a week I was entitled to 50 hours of pay unless I chose to take days off myself.

Unions fucking rock and software engineers work in a field that is making historic profits off of our labor. We deserve a piece of that.

Self driving cars could actually be kind of a good stepping stone to better public transit while making more efficient use of existing roadways. You hit a button to request a car, it drives you to wherever, you need to go, and then gets tasked to pick up the next person. Where you used to need 10 cars for 10 people, you now need one.

In many cases it should be fine to point them all at the same server. You’ll just need to make sure there aren’t any collisions between schema/table names.

I’m not saying there aren’t downsides, just that it isn’t a totally crazy strategy.

You’re being sarcastic but even small fees immediately weed out a ton of cruft.

While that’s true, we have to allow for the fact that our own intelligence, at some point, is an encoded model of the world around us. Probably not through something as rigid as precise statistics, but our consciousness is somehow an emergent phenomenon of the chemical reactions in our brains that on their own have no real understanding of the world either.

I do have to wonder if at some point, consciousness will spontaneously emerge as we make these models bigger and more complex and – maybe more importantly – start layering specialized models on top of each other that handle specific tasks then hand the result back to another model, creating feedback loops. I’m imagining a nueral network that is trained on something extremely abstract like figuring out, from the raw input data, what specialist model would be best suited to process that data, then based on the result, what model would be best suited to refine that data. Something we train to basically be an executive function with a bunch of sub models available to it.

Could something like that become conscious without realizing it’s “communicating” with us? The program executing the LLM might reflexively process data without any concept that it’s text, but still be emergently complex enough when reflecting its own processes to the point of self awareness. It wouldn’t realize the data represents a link to other conscious beings.

As a metaphor, you could teach a very smart dog how to respond to certain, basic arithmetic problems. They would get stuff wrong the moment you prompted them to do something out of their training, and they wouldn’t understand they were doing math even when they got it “right”, but they would still be sentient, if not sapient, despite that.

It’s the opposite side of the philosophical zombie. A philosophical zombie behaves exactly as a human would, but is a surface-level automaton with no inner life.

But I propose that we also consider the inverse-philosophical zombie, an entity that behaves like an automation, but has an inner life that has not recognized its input data for evidence of an external world outside it’s own bounds. Something that might not even recognize it’s executing a program the same way we aren’t consciously aware of the chemical reactions our brain is executing to make us think.

I don’t believe current LLMs are anywhere near complex enough to give rise to that sort of thing, but they are also still pretty early in their development and haven’t started to be heavily layered and interconnected the way I think they’ll end up.

At the very least it makes for a fun Sci-fi premise.

We really need to start redistributing how we spend money on health care. Public option, lower executive pay. More non-emergency long term facilities for patients with psych issues or rehabilitation, and chronic illness care. Better pay and shorter shifts for doctors and nurses. Subsidies for medical tech companies to offset end-user price. More government-funded research into medical tech.

Health care should realistically be our biggest industry akin to a military with the social status of being a soldier and the compensation of being a software developer. We have the wealth and technology to help most people live healthy lives. We need the government to incentivize allocating it correctly.

Yeah. Part of me has to wonder what – if any – backchanneled agreements there are between Glynn Shotwell and the DoD for if/when Musk does something truly compromising.

I just want you to know that I hate your username.

I actually don’t think that’s the case for languages. Most languages start out from a desire to do some specific thing better than other languages rather than do everything.

I can’t tell if it’s just cognitive bias on my part but I feel like the content and discussion has gotten even worse on Reddit since the protests.

Compiled Rust is fast.

Compiling Rust is slow.

Also my understanding is that RustAnalyzer has to compile all Rust macros so it can check them properly. That’s not something that a lot of static analysis tools do for things like C++ templates

That’s not the actual reason. Hexbear was openly advocating for their “army” to brigade other instances once it was federating. It just so happens that the basis of that brigading was going to be political.

Lemmy.world pre-emptivly decided it wasn’t worth the hassle of having to deal with that.