What about the Texas state legislature? Were those part of this election?

AI is not smarter than the best scientist. It’s just smarter than Sam Altman. But that’s partially because Sam Altman is regressing due to his over reliance on AI.

AI was cool 5 years ago. It’s not anymore.

My ad blocker still skips them.

What it doesn’t block is shorts. I need something to block those too.

No, you were the first person to start about “wild” animals. The person you responded to never mentioned wild animals and was talking about feral cats. You’re the one who equated that with wild cats. They also never said feral cats weren’t a problem; quite the opposite: that those were the cats that ate birds, and not the domestic cats that came outside. I don’t know whether that’s true, but that’s the argument they were making, and not the strawman you’re making out of it.

That feral cats are not necessarily escaped domestic cats like you claim. Many are the distant descendants of domestic cats, born from a long line of feral cats. Like the person you responded to claims, and like you seem to want to deny. Those cats are not immediately wild cats like you suggest; they’re feral. You and the person you reply to focus on only part of the feral population.

Andy Yen sounds like an asshole.

I still need to move away from Gmail, but it’s probably not going to be to Proton.

That doesn’t mean they’re all escaped or abandoned pets. Maybe their ancestors were, but cats breed, and some places have significant populations of breeding feral cats that have never been inside a home.

I once took over my neighbour’s cat. He was very scared and timid. Stayed behind the fridge for the first weekend. Took half a year before he was comfortable enough to be petted. Never wanted to go outside. Didn’t even want to go into the stairwell of our building. Until some day it did. I was really proud of his newfound courage. But it was very eager, so I followed it. It went upstairs to the common attic, where I saw a very scared looking pigeon sitting on a box surrounded by way too many feathers.

From that moment on I kept him inside again. Apparently even that super timid scared cat will kill breeding pigeons.

There’s that time of the year when birds land, make nests, lay eggs and have to hang around to feed their young. That’s a very vulnerable time for them. Make sure your bird house and bird feeder are cat proof.

Also note how low wind turbines actually are on that list. The oil industry lives to harp on the number of birds killed by wind turbines, but you never hear them about the much larger number of birds killed by vehicles.

Still worth reducing every number on that list of course, but keep some perspective.

Exactly. Look at pictures of the ISS: it has radiators. It has to get rid of its heat, and it works. And those radiators aren’t even as big as the solar panels. The radiators really aren’t the problem.

The problem is scale. The ISS has about enough power for a single server rack. If you want entire datacenters in space, you’re going to need thousands of times the scale of the ISS.

They’re really rushing to leave the bleakest cyberpunk distopia in the dust.

When is a human ever culpable for the actions of a company?

See it as a quaint historical drama.

Yeah, they clearly don’t. At the moment the downsides by far outweigh the upsides, but I keep hoping that eventually people will come to their senses.

I think so. I’ve worked at bad, average and good places, but the bad places tend to be larger and far less efficient, so they have to hire more engineers to make up for the inefficiency.

And they don’t necessarily pay well either. They see engineers as powerless cogs who have to do what they’re told, so they get paid like that too. And then they complain they can’t find seniors.

Yet even for those Joe Normals, I kinda like the democratising effect that they’re now able to produce software, or modify existing software for their own use. Just don’t fool yourself into thinking it’s enterprise grade. Understand your limitations. And don’t spam open source projects with slop PRs because you think the AI makes you a software wizard.

But sometimes worth repeating.

Whether it has any sort of real understanding or not, it does summarise. It produces summaries as well as many other things. It’s just very unreliable, due to a number of shortcomings that might just be fundamental: no real world model, no ability to distinguish between truth and lies, fact and fiction, except statistically, which sometimes results in nonsense. It can misrepresent, leave things out, and sometimes just make stuff up.

It does summarise, but it does it poorly and unreliably.