Oh don’t worry, I wouldn’t suspect someone from around TechTakes to have such framing on this issue.

It’s obvious the video is tailored for usual YouTube-y overexaggeration clickbait style, but like, if you are going to speak for devs maybe talk to some of them first lol.

I think most of this was caught immediately when the announcement was made (like the edited live coding), and in any case I can’t stand watching this video to the end. “This scared the pants off every software developer in the world” no. No it hasn’t. That’s just not true. Why do you even say that. The immediate first reaction of any SE with even a passing awareness of how marketing of software tools works and not completely high on genAI farts was “ye that won’t work” and, fucking shocking, it doesn’t work, wow, no way.

People were trying to sell you that software engineers will be obsolete because “codeless apps” like 10 years ago. Wizards were supposed to eliminate jobs because they’d generate code so well. Knowing SQL was supposed to be completely obsoleted with ORMs. I’m too young to have been there but apparently XML was supposed to “solve networking” or something nonsensical like that.

Those ads aren’t targeted at software engineers. They’re targeted at execs. It’s execs who get all excited that they can start firing their expensive and pesky developers that complain so much. Software engineers worth their salt don’t buy this shit because bollocks like these come as part of the job description.

Anyway, trying to frame it as “it was supposed to be this revolutionary tool to replace developers” without mentioning that this is a song that’s been sung for fucking decades is a disservice to the topic. Nothing makes executives as wet as the thought of not having to deal with those fucking “specialists” that they need to pay actual salaries and can’t huff down their necks 8h a day with a whip to use if they don’t hit KPIs. And that’s extremely important to have in focus when you talk about shit like this and wonder “why did they raise so much money”. Because VCs hate labour that’s why. The answer is always that.

A lot of “I can control my emotions and choose how I act, you should try that” - yeah stop. We’re human. Emotions are normal.

Ye, that’s the point? The point is not to suppress emotions but to recognise them as they’re happening to you. It’s not even that there’s objective value assigned to the emotions, it’s simply so that you yourself can perform introspection of the kind “I did that action because I was furious. Now is that good or bad?”. But it’s still entirely okay to make a conscious decision of the form:

1. I’m gonna punch that motherfucker
2. Okay, stop, I am feeling fury right now, I shouldn’t allow just the emotion to guide me. Let’s think.
3. Okay, I thought this through, I’m gonna punch that motherfucker with purpose.

Step one is understanding you only control your own thoughts and actions. Step two is learning how to control your anger and use it as fuel for deliberate actions.

Honestly, I think Luigi here just followed this wisdom. Recognised that he was rightfully angry at the system and directed that anger at someone responsible. You only control your actions, and your action can be to shoot a motherfucker on the street ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I’m not condoning or saying it’s morally acceptable, but I don’t think it’s philosophically incoherent.

I think it forces us all to ask an important introspective question – if I were to become the target of a national manhunt, would my posting history look cringe?

Realistic version: pulling the lever would save five lives but that decision would cost shareholders $7.23. What should you do?

10/10 CEOs fail this test!

Salvation Army

they are certainly mostly doing worthwhile things

No. Nope. Not in the slightest. Crucially, they’re not even a charity! They don’t get any financial transparency scrutiny a charity gets! It’s a church! We don’t even know how to evaluate them because there’s literally no way to check what percentage of it is actually spent on charity. Their primary mission is to evangelise!

Also Chick’fil’A had to distance themselves from SA because of their egregious track record with gay rights. The Bigotry Chicken deemed them too bigoted.

Satelite models are increasingly trained and deployed as autonomous agents, which significantly increases their potential for risks. One particular safety concern is that the Moon might covertly pursue misaligned goals, hiding its true capabilities and objectives – also known as scheming. We study whether the Moon has the capability to scheme in pursuit of a goal that we provide in-context and instruct the Moon to strongly follow. We evaluate satelite models on a suite of six planetary evaluations where the Moon is instructed to pursue goals and is placed in orbits that incentivize scheming.

Funnily enough he makes a really strong case as to why he specifically definitely shouldn’t be a father.

If you asked an embryo to pick parents it’d be like “oof, anyone but that guy please”

Ahhh you see, the physics of 2D waifus were actually covered on the seminar a year after he flunked out. Womp womp.

the guy is actually almost a physicist, even flunked out of a Ph.D

Great credential for trying to “integrate physics and AI” if he’s demonstrably too lazy to understand physics at an advanced level.

In that sense, no underlying physical state could be said to hold “more” information than any other, right?

In an information-theoretical sense, you can have a message that has a lower or higher information content. This is where entropy gets derived from. But it only makes sense for a fixed distribution – a more likely outcome has a lower information content. So I think you could have a physical state holding more information, if it’s a less likely state for some fixed definition of likeliness.

This would probably be closer to an actual link between informational entropy and physical – a given microstate has lower physical entropy when it is a less-likely state (e.g. half-squished cup of coffee), and that state would have higher information content if we considered the state as the message. This intuitively makes sense, because physical entropy is in some sense the ability of a system to undergo change, so indeed a low-entropy system is “more useful”, just like a message with higher information content is “more useful”.

The thing already is a markdown renderer and every single markdown renderer I encountered supports maths within $ delimiters.

Also can we make awful.systems render Latex in posts, I had to screenshot my formulas to put them here and I feel unclean

This is the only way you could make me care about the Simulation Hypothesis, if it runs on a spreadsheet then I will make it my life’s mission to break out just to yell at them for being terrible at engineering and replace them with a small shell script

as if it makes any difference whether the universe runs on (…) Microsoft Excel

Okay but it is very spiritually important for me to not be that, please.

Storing a message in a system doesn’t make new microstates. How could it?

Lol I got so tripped up by him later saying “this is no longer clearly 0 or 1 so it doesn’t exist” and decreasing N that I missed he does the reverse thing when encoding the message.

This is like the ontological argument. He creates a virtual entity from words alone and then treats it as a physical thing storing energy. And then once it no longer fits the words of the definition, poof, gone it is, oh look, total entropy decreased.

We have to consider probabilities, not just for where the pieces are, but also for how they are moving.

I completely omit that because, well, it’s hard, but also I don’t think it’s necessary here. This approach doesn’t work even if you consider only positions and assume uniformly random momentum. It doesn’t work even if the microstate is “is this pixel more red or more blue” in the paper’s experiment!

But thank you for the comment, I’m glad I didn’t completely butcher entropy with my weird nonrigorous internal model I developed based PBS Space Time videos lol

but you aren’t quite right about some of the details.

I’d be happy to be corrected.

This isn’t too outlandish, and modern studies of quantum mechanics suggest that information is a conserved quantity,

I hope I didn’t pass it as if it was completely out there, that information has to have some physical properties and energy as a carrier is a very reasonable hypothesis. The Landauer principle is not that controversial, I’m sad I’m too stupid to actually understand the discussion around it on any reasonable level lol

Oh, it’s worse than “outlandish”. It’s nonsensical. He’s basically operating at a level of “there’s an E in this formula and an E in this other formula, so I will set them equal and declare it revolutionary new physics”.

I meant the experiment itself. Like it looks like something you could try and do and measure and get an actual answer?