It’s more than that - he failed to create PayPal so his group bought a competitor, he didn’t found Tesla or spaceX - he claimed he did, then reached settlements with the actual founders to not contest his claims. He did start the boring company. It didn’t get off the ground because he can’t build a team

NASA doesn’t have effective control of their budget anymore. Congress holds the purse strings and uses them like a harness

NASA gets funding to do something - like go to the moon, or track CO2 emissions. But it comes with strings - sometimes you have to build a certain component in a certain congressional district, sometimes Congress chooses the design you have to use

It’s a problem of politics and corruption. When the public supports NASA, they have more autonomy. When NASA gets a blank check, they do more with it - reusable rockets aren’t a new idea, and when they cancelled the shuttle program NASA had brain drain. Some of those people founded spaceX - Elon didn’t start it, he came in when they were getting off the ground, just like with Tesla

That’s not what arbitration is. This doesn’t stop valve from reaching a settlement, it stops them from using fake privately funded bench trials

Binding arbitration means the results are legally binding, non-binding arbitration means a judge needs to approve the arbitration results before it’s final. Sometimes it’s with an off duty judge, sometimes anyone can be the arbiter

Regardless, on one side you have a repeat customer, on the other you have someone who will probably never be back - there’s a built in conflict of interest

I really don’t get how people so easily accept this. This is an engineering problem, not a law of the universe… How would someone possibly prove something is impossible, particularly while the entire branch of technology is rapidly changing?

I don’t agree with that at all - that’s how art works. You take ideas and techniques and copy them, adding your own twist in the process. Art is about more than the aesthetic - the backstory is what gives it value. Stealing that is plagiarism, everything else is artistic inspiration… If you add nothing new you’ve made a cheap knockoff, which is very different from plagiarism

Palworld has its own lore, its own type system, its own battle mechanics, and as far as gameplay it’s nothing like Pokemon. All it has in common is many creatures you capture in a ball, with designs largely based on IRL animals and Japanese folklore. They’ve made something new no matter how you slice it

…are you implying that mass gas chambers aren’t an effective way to kill people?

The way I see it, it’s just a form of therapy. People don’t walk in and sit silently, they talk about their problems and get vague reassurance that everything is going to be alright - or occasional advice when they’re way out of bounds

I don’t think it’s unethical to do that, so long as you operate in good faith with good intentions

Oh, I said that as a programmer all right. And that’s how I’ve approached AI - I ran it locally, and kept poking it until I began to get a feel for it. Until I could see patterns. Until I could put together a methodology

They exist. Word choice matters greatly. Shorter is better. Varied word choice is better. Less “orders” is better. Strange combinations of tokens can convey something in non-obvious ways. They all seem to have a very strong attachment to the name “Luna”

They’re as deterministic as any software is, if you run it in the same state with the same input you’ll get the same result, sometimes with minor wording changes

And software isn’t as deterministic as we pretend it is. Programming doesn’t require it either, luckily. Every program you’ll ever write is interacting with complex systems no one fully understands, and it will sometimes act unpredictably

Programming is about finding patterns in the chaos, then using them to get the result you want. You need consistency - not deterministic outcomes. You can program with anything you can find the patterns in - even human behavior or the physical world. You can program yourself.

You can treat AI like something unknowable, or you can find the patterns and put them in your toolbox

That’s how I look at AI. It will never (in it’s current forms) replace people, but it can turn a passionate creator into a one person army

Using AI is a form of programming - you turn the right words into action. Programming is magic, an AI user is a warlock

Not really… This isn’t people being empowered, this is people being chewed up and spit out

Ok, let’s be real here. A charger can last a decade even if the charging speed slows…a cord will not outlast a phone. If it does, there’s a serious issue

Sure, you can do that. It’s obviously on you to figure out how you want to do it, but that’s exactly what no DRM means

And I don’t mean it’s technically possible, you can backup the game files through steam and put them on a flash drive, and there you go

Morality is definitely relative, there’s just some common overlaps

Sometimes the answer is just the same no matter what (coherent) moral framework you examine it through… Sometimes it’s just that simple

For all we know, they’re literally just passing massive checks in a circle to one another to say “yes, it says right here in our bank records that we spent a combined $100,000,000”, meanwhile only 25% actually goes into the production, and they pocket the rest.

That would be illegal and easily discovered

But you could pay $10M to hire another company to do the sound mixing. They might spend $500k to do the work. You might also be the owner of that company, and the money ends up back in your pocket…And that’s not embezzlement or a kickback, because that’s what it’s called when poor people do it

That’s the thing - AI isn’t about size, it’s about categorizing the state of the world. If you can understand an action in context and possible responses, a Markov chain can learn and respond appropriately with the processing of a calculator - it really doesn’t take much

But it’ll probably show 3 orders of meatballs, and she saw him get 3 meatballs. He just has to keep her from looking too closely

I find it’s about size. A small organization can be good or bad, depending on the members. At some point, you reach a size where the orgs focus shifts to perpetuating itself

Oh, it works… It turns the group against the kid. They may or may not attempt to police the behavior, but they won’t do it effectively. They will resent the kid though

And isolated kids are famous for being obedient

Wait, our hat has oil? Eagle screech intensifies

Damn straight. I don’t fear AI, I fear an even more uneven playing field