Whew, for a second there I thought I missed some big announcement from Proxmox proclaiming that they would follow the path of Silicon Valley enshittification.
At its core, arithmetic is a deterministic set of rules that can be implemented with logic gates. Computing is just taking that and scaling it up a billion times. What is intelligence? How do you implement intelligence if nobody can provide a consistent, clear definition of what it is?
Same thing: we create models about how to solve the problem, not biomimicry models about how natural entities solve the problem - these are not necessary. They are on a lower layer in the stack.
Except that doesn't make sense if you can't articulate what the problem space is. We know arithmetic inside and out, and we've understood how to make mechanical calculators centuries before the dawn of electronics. "Intelligence" on the other hand is a nebulously defined philosophical concept.
What I see with these attempts at AGI is VC-funded circuses throwing shit at the wall, hardly checking to see if it sticks, and then heaping more on top. Nobody can explain how exactly transformer models are the building blocks of intelligence or how building on top of it will lead to real intelligence.
The unclear sides of the implementation are just the usual normal hurdles on the path. There are no impacting doubts about the goal.
The point was, let me remind you, that we do not see any need for biomimicry: we did not need to simulate any brain to implement counting. Similarly, there is no need to simulate a brain to implement a reasoner (and the problem is well defined).
> these attempts at AGI
They are just occasional events in the whole history of the endeavour.
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Edit:
> normal hurdles
...or, in other words: "yes, if we had the recipe, it would be trivial". Yet we normally manage without.
Adobe can say whatever they want in their EULA; whether it's legally enforceable in court is another matter.
Imagine how these you-own-a-license-not-the-thing-itself shenanigans would play out for any other product we purchase. "No, you didn't buy that $40k car in cash upfront! You only bought Toyota's permission to operate the car, and we reserve the right to repossess it at any time."
> Tesla used to sell Model S vehicles with software-locked battery packs. This was a way to offer different range options without having to make production more complicated with different battery pack sizes.
> Later, Tesla started to offer owners of those software-locked vehicles the option to unlock the capacity for an additional cost. Tesla phased out the practice over the years, but the company still used software-locked battery packs when doing warranty replacements of battery packs of certain capacities that it doesn’t produce anymore.
Upgrading the head unit for a 2013 Model S triggered an error and reverted this old generation battery to software lock.
This clearly was a software bug and Tesla reverted it for all customers using these older batteries.
This has literally nothing to do with subscriptions (the word subscribe isn’t even in the article once). I don’t even think you read the article.
> Car is sold twice since, and now has a new owner (my customer). It says 90, badged 90, has 90-type range.
> He has the car for a few months, goes in and does a paid MCU2 upgrade at Tesla after the 3G shutdown.
> ...
> Tesla told him that he had to pay $4,500 to unlock the capability:
It's all in the article.
You can get all stuck-up about the word "subscription" but guy goes into Tesla for a non-battery related service and loses 2/3 thirds of the range the car claimed it had unless he forks over 5k.
I fear what a lot of what outspoken "progressive" types (and yes, before anyone asks, also the MAGA crowd) want is a CCP-style political system as long as they're the ones in control. Concepts like separation of powers and rule of law are merely obstacles to smash through on their road to utopia.
Correct. Which is why both of those groups you listed along with many others need to continue to lose elections and fail to attain power because the endgame for them is eliminating the possibility that they ever lose an election again. Like the CCP has.
Few progressives want sprawling bureaucracy. Rather, that’s typically what we get out of social safety nets due to conservative sabotaging of the process and text.
Sprawling bureaucracy is a byproduct of what you get from investing the government with additional functions. Every office you open whether Civil Rights or Agriculture or Patent Office needs staff. If we had a single payer system, there would necessarily be an enormous bureaucracy attached to it, most likely an expansion of the existing Medicare/Medicaid bureaucracy.
You just don’t get one without the other, even if you cut the staff down to the bare minimum that can still efficiently manage government programs you still end up with a sprawling bureaucracy.
There’s a difference between sprawling bureaucracy and necessary bureaucracy. Are you really suggesting that all bureaucracy is inherently bad and defaults to wasteful sprawl?
Are you saying a “necessary” bureaucracy is necessarily not a sprawling bureaucracy?
In any case, if the function invested in the government is a misapplication of public money then the bureaucracy servicing it would also necessarily be unnecessary. If the function is necessary, that does not mean the bureaucracy servicing it isn’t sprawling. The military has what could be termed sprawl, but that’s a function of the broad scope of its missions and global reach.
Correction: it would replace multiple competing staffs (“bureaucracies”) of private insurers with the ability to take losses and go out of business with one bureaucracy with a chain of command spearheaded by the POTUS backed by the full faith and credit of the United States. My example was not an invitation to discuss the merits and demerits of single payer healthcare in a different topic, but to point out that for every function you invest the Federal government with, you get a corresponding bureaucracy ultimately subordinate to basically one guy. Doesn’t matter what the function is, you’re expanding his staff.
Seriously, if just a fraction of "intellectuals" in other fields took some time to read the past 50-odd years worth of Supreme Court rulings, there wouldn't be all this pointless bickering over basic facts. If anything, the Warren/Burger courts were egregious in making up constitutional rights out of thin air based on their moral beliefs, and not the letter of the law. It's a shame that it takes a far-right Supreme Court for people to finally understand that it's Congress's job to pass new laws, not the judiciary branch.
Please tell me you did not just travel to a tier-1 city like Beijing or Shanghai, and extrapolated what you saw in the CBD to all of China. There is a reason that they're still desperately clinging to zero-COVID policies when the rest of the world has moved on, against seemingly all common sense.
It became against common sense when Omicron became a thing, and if you understand what the average Chinese person has to go through now to visit relatives in a neighboring city, shop for groceries, or really just to go anywhere... I hope you get the idea. It relies on totalitarian levels of AI + big data surveillance, internal passports, lockdown measures, and completely untenable long term.
If I wasn't being clear, there are 2 major reasons why China refuses to open up: ineffective domestic vaccines and few hospital beds per capita. The CCP fears a total healthcare system collapse and subsequent discontent from its citizens.
Have you considered it's because you've grown up in a middle class suburb, isolated from all the depravity and violence that goes on in these inner city neighborhoods, that you can afford to daydream about "power structures" and dismiss these losses as mere property damage? Do you know how many of these businesses are owned by poor minority and/or immigrant families, who have taken out loans and spent every last penny they had to open up shop?
The enshrinement and protection of private property rights is one of the core principles that separate developed nations from third-world banana republics. If property is worth that little to you, perhaps you should start by offering up your own, and move to one of these places.
This is a wild overreach. It seems to presume that because I grew up there that I was middle class. I am now but believe me I was not always. I still do now own where I live and it’ll take me to the end of my thirties before I can, reasonably.
If you consider analysis of power structures “daydreaming” I’m not sure what to say. There is a manifest difference between two random people slapping each other in an argument and a cop slapping a civilian.
Every single interaction which has ever occurred between humans has a power dynamic. It’s the furthest thing from “academic” “philosophical” or “theoretical.”
This is a pretty big overreaction to a statement no-one should have any issue with accepting. It's manifestly obvious that property damage is not the same as violence against humans. It's something which is reflected in our laws. You can believe that property damage is bad and still accept this as clearly true.
Yes, they're clearly not the same thing, which is why we have different words for them. I would however disagree that any violence is worse than all property damage, which is what seems to be implied. Would you rather be slapped in the face or have your house burnt down?
The more I read about VSCode and Electron apps in general, the more I'm convinced that all this effort is akin to putting lipstick on a pig. Modern CPU designs have all converged on multi-core as the solution to increasing performance, and yet on the software side of things... we've turned all of our desktop applications into Chrome instances running single-threaded event loops. That these extensions are even more poorly optimized is more icing on the cake.
I have to say, I find it sad how even the most trivial apps, like some basic bug trackers, are built on top of electron and manage to be extremely slow even with the latest 4500€ hardware. And I have to use a bunch of different slow-as-hell apps like this in work. It is just embarassing.
Funnily enough the quote on textmate grammars in the article feels quite relevant:
>The fact that we now have these complex grammars that end up producing beautiful tokens is more of a testament to the amazing computing power available to us than to the design of the [TextMate] grammar semantics.
It looks like VSCode is running many threads (some as separate processes) on my machine. Is what you're saying that it does not provide an API for extensions to schedule work on other threads?
Single threading is not the issue. Just 5% of single modern core should be plenty fast enough to run a text editor. You still want multiple threads of course, to avoid blocking the UI for background work, but computers are so fast nowadays that it should still be fast enough even if all threads were run on the same core.
VS Code team member here. The diagram in the article is a little wrong, but the basics of it are:
- The "main process" which manages the windows (renderer processes)
- The renderer process" contains the UI thread for each window, the renderer process can have its own worker threads
- The extension host loads extensions in proc, extensions are free to create their own threads/processes. The separate process for extensions protects extensions from freezing the renderer
- Various other processes that live off either the main process or the "shared process", such as the pty host for terminals which enables the terminal reconnection feature when reloading a window (also file watcher, search process)
We've been shuffling where processes are launched from recently but the actual processes and their purpose probably won't change. You can view a process tree via Help > Open Process Explorer to help understand this better.
Off topic: Is there a document/blog/article somewhere about the plugin architecture of VS Code? I'm less interested in developing a plugin (which google results usually yield) and more interested in, say, how VS Code determines the order in which plugins are called.
You could look up activation events on the website, I don't think we guarantee anything relating to order other than that. Generally the order in which they're activated shouldn't matter in practice.
Multithreading isn't some magic thing you slap on to go faster. You'll find single-threaded event loops in all sorts of high-performance code, e.g game engines.
Neither vaccine was fully sterilising. In fact current US CDC advice if going to a country with a polio outbreak is to get a booster.
In both those cases the vaccines just blunted the transmission rate enough for r0 to drop below 1. We were also lucky that the responsible viruses had very stable mutation rates & no animal reservoirs unlike SARS-CoV-2. That meant they mostly died out over time once the transmission rate was reduced.
Even if the polio vaccine isn't fully sterilizing, would you put our current COVID vaccines in the same league? Imagine we're living in the 60s right now, and we have a polio or smallpox vaccine with 70%+ uptake in the adult population, but the infection rate remains virtually unchanged. Would you consider this good enough?
I mean, take this quote from Dr. Fauci himself:
> As a physician and as a scientist and a public-health person, I think it is not entirely correct to make this very strong dichotomy between waning protection against hospitalization and death and waning immunity against infection and mild-to-moderate disease. It is an assumption that it’s okay to get infected and to get mild-to-moderate disease as long as you don’t wind up in the hospital and die. And I have to be open and honest: I reject that. I think we should be preventing people from getting sick from COVID even if they don’t wind up in the hospital.
It's a different type of virus. We have never, ever, successfully achieved the level of immunity against a rapidly mutating airborne virus as we have with SARS-CoV-2. Our greatest successes, Polio and Smallpox, were both extremely stable and without animal reservoirs, making vaccination much more straightforward.
You're demanding perfection and insisting that anything that falls short is worthless. That makes no sense.
I'm not saying the vaccines are worthless, I'm saying there is a trend of public figures gaslighting and making excuses for their ineffectiveness against Omicron, by redefining commonly accepted notions of what a vaccine is intended to do and pretending our goal all along was to merely prevent severe disease. The goal, as we've seen with past mass vaccination campaigns that worked, should be to stop the spread. Period. We need new vaccines, not fourth or fifth shots of the same thing.
The first and primary public focus was always to prevent severe illness and death and alleviate the load on hospitals. Messaging on that has been fairly consistent.
Some countries pursued an eradication goal early on and some public health officials publicly spoke about their hope to achieve that, but while that was possible with the wild type it no longer is with the variants and animal reservoirs. It was a reasonable, rational strategy at the time, later undermined by the nature of new mutations.
You’re attempting to redefine the baseline of what’s considered acceptable for a vaccine, beyond what has ever been the case. In fact the vaccine most people would be aware of and have come into contact with, the flu vaccine, only partially protects against severe illness.
We have only been able to eradicate two viruses in human history through vaccination. In all other cases it’s a tool used to prevent worse outcomes and control the disease’s severity and spread.
Nonetheless, new vaccines that better target variants like Delta and Omicron, and hopefully any new ones that may emerge, are already in active development and trials. So we will see improvements in our ability to protect people against COVID-19.
By lowering its R0 below 1. Which doesn't not require "sterilizing" vaccines (which is good, since neither the smallpox nor polio vaccine eliminated infection or transmission with anything close to 100% effectiveness).
No, the data from the first clinical trials for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines showed 95% efficacy against symptomatic infection. You had Fauci, Birx and countless other talking heads in the media implying or stating outright that the vaccines conferred sterilizing immunity.
Of course, we know now that the variants have evolved some degree of immune escape, that the vaccines no longer prevent infection while still being effective against severe disease, but that's not what the "experts" originally claimed. It's disappointing to see the Hacker News crowd buying into the gaslighting that vaccines are only ever meant to prevent hospitalization. That was not the scientific consensus 2 years ago, and still isn't.
The scientific consensus, as summarised in this Nature article announcing the news, seems pretty clear on what was being looked at and that the trials focused on severe disease outcomes.
Nope. The Nature article was written well before the actual results and studies were released. The studies are unequivocally clear that the primary goal of the studies (at that time) were to measure prevention against symptomatic infection.
I don't understand what you're trying to claim, are you trying to say that the trial results were falsified? Because there's no other way your insistence on this makes sense. That journal article accurately reports on the findings of the Phase III trial, which did show spectacular success against the wild type.
In simple terms, had SARS-CoV-2 not mutated, and we were still dealing with the original wild type, then this pandemic would have been over months ago. They were that all-round effective.
The emergence of variants is what has caused the pandemic to continue, as many scientists warned. As I showed with the Nature article, general scientific consensus was optimistic but cautious and warned about waning immunity and variants.
You seem to think this is all some kind of gotcha, when it's really about adapting to a changing situation and an evasive virus.
