But I have one big question -- why aren't the "middle" keys replicated on both sides of the keyboard? That is, for example, why not have two 'g' and 'h' keys? There are always times when you have to adapt; when you're holding down a tricky combination of alt-ctrl-shift keys or something where on a flat keyboard one would just reach with the "wrong" hand to hit a middle key; why not just replicate them?
It's pretty common for Alice-style keyboards to have two Bs (the one in the pic in the article does) as on a normally-staggered keyboard the B key is basically equidistant from the home keys so it's common to use either.
But it would be a bit of a problem for keycap sets, some come with extra Bs to accomodate Alice keyboards, but none that I'm aware of have extra G/H/T/Y. That would mean you'd be into buying two sets or using weird keys, so it's probably unlikely to be a popular choice.
That said, there's so many custom keyboards out there, and it's easier than you think to design and build your own - if you feel strongly about it go for it.
I did have that problem a little when learning to type on a split, but I very quickly corrected after hitting the table a few times haha. I actually think it's arguably easier to learn to type on a split as it'll quickly force you to break some bad habits.
If you want to do that, you can set many keyboards up to do exactly that. They just need to run the standard software - QMK, ZMK or Vial. You'll need to pick a keyboard with enough keys, of course, but there is plenty of choice. However there are other ways of solving the problem, e.g. a single key that is mapped to produce that combination. It's a matter of taste and experiment, and there is no reason for you to do it the same way as anyone else.
I have also switched to nvim, but every release I consider moving back.
Honestly a lot of this is that I hate Lua. With so much of the infrastructure moving in that direction it's basically unavoidable. XDG support was honestly one of the things holding me back; I'm glad that this is finally fixed.
XDG was added somewhat quietly almost two years ago now. It was announced on www.vim.org but that was it as far as I know. They don't keep news that far back but here's the commit: https://github.com/vim/vim/commit/c9df1fb35
Lua is one of those languages, where the more I code in it, the more I dislike it. It always trips me up. Just too used to modern type safety, ergonomics and zero-indexing.
The article is paywalled but it seems the gist is that by restricting immigration and escalating deportation, we risk population decrease.
What I find amusing about this is that it is roughly equivalent to saying that the United States needs to conquer new territory to survive. Need to bring more people under our thumb.
This is definitely "dying empire" thinking.
Worth saying that I do not agree with this. I think in many ways our cardinal sin is that in the interest of legibility (especially for tax purposes) we've regulated our ability to employee people and to get work to an absolutely insane degree. To such a degree in fact, that much of our economy relies on having a source of "black market" labor and indentured servitude in the guise of immigration.
Where we flirt with danger is that we look at one side of this equation, the immigration side, but not the other, the labor side.
The recent episode of The Daily gives a prime example of this,
I was seeing people getting hired and getting paid a lot less than me. And when I inquired about it, my boss would say, well, they’re less expensive. I don’t have to pay workman’s comp on them. I don’t have to pay general liability insurance on them. If they get hurt, they’ll go to the emergency room. No sweat off my back. And I was getting paid less and less, because I was competing against people who were hired because it cost less to hire them or employ them... It’s illegal, by the way. But people are getting away with it and I’m competing against them.
Wanting them gone isn't the same as putting the blame on them. It isn't a personality conflict or a troubled relationship; immigrants shouldn't feel guilty for wanting to stay and the people competing with them should feel guilty for wanting them to go. Or rather, who cares? Shouldn't people be allowed to have their inner states to themselves? Can't we own anything? How did a discussion about labor exploitation turn into a discussion about feelings?
And why is it a discussion about some workers' feelings vs. other workers' feelings? How did the boss manage to completely recuse himself?
I don't think he blames the immigrants specifically, so much as illegal immigration as an institution. The only "punishment" that most people want for illegal immigrants who have committed no crimes other than the immigration violation itself is for them to be deported, which really does not seem like a punishment at all -- it's just undoing the criminal act. Like if you stole some money from a bank and then had to give it back, but otherwise did not have to face prosecution.
Because what can an illegal immigrant do? They could in theory just rely on social services and entitlements, but I don't think anyone (including the immigrants themselves, for the most part) really wants that. They want to work, and to make money, and the law makes it very hard to do so legally, so they work illegally.
All the barriers you mention are things that we put in place to "protect" workers, but at the same time create a black market that undercuts those very workers.
As for the employers, sure, they are culprits here, but would you rather have them let the immigrants starve? That also does not seem to serve any social good. As for not paying workman's comp, for example, there is already enough paperwork and bureaucracy involved in hiring a legal worker where there are systems that support and administer those programs. If you wanted to offer a workman's comp lookalike for illegal labor as a social service, then that would multiply the effort and cost by a huge factor.
There are such deep contradictions in these thoughts. You think that the illegal immigrant is going to starve without the criminal employer? When just a second ago you were saying they should be deported, and that "most" people think that's OK?
We all lose when these immigrants are deported, and every mass deportation means simultaneously a mass deprivation of rights and a mess of big mistakes that ruin people's families and lives.
I think that yes, they should be deported. This is not a punishment.
If your solution is that they should not be deported, but employers should be prosecuted, then you're saying that you want the immigrants to starve.
If your solution is that they should not be deported, but we should extend labor protections to them and force employers to hire them legally, then I think there is some merit to this. This is closer to the libertarian open borders argument, and I once found it very appealing. Entitlement abuse is the main argument against here in my mind.
My thoughts on this have always been a blend of your two 'they should not be deported' scenarios, with a slow, measured rollout.
Sudden changes cause too much chaos, and you don't always know what works until you try it. Avoiding entitlement abuse is always going to be part of the conversation, and it seems to me the fix for this (and nearly any other issue) needs to be approached carefully from both the supply and demand sides until what's effective is more clear.
I guess where we differ is that I believe that we've tried the other side and found it wanting. You can say that the Biden asylum catch-and-release policies did not include entitlement reform or worker protections so they don't count, but what it shows me is that too many moving parts mean that only the worst aspects of the worst solution are what get implemented. The simplest solution is securing the border and deporting illegal immigrants.
>I think he unfairly places the blame on the immigrants themselves, when the true culprits are the employers and system of black market employment.
The same thought formed in my head listening to that the other day. He even talked about how, as an independent contractor with his own business, he couldn't hire help. He refuses to pay undocumented immigrants under the table (kudos to him), and recognizes that hiring people legitimately would raise his costs too high above the competition. But then he latches onto the idea of deporting the immigrants instead of punishing businesses violating labor laws.
It's not that he apologized for the shady business owners. He didn't seem to ever consider it an option.
It really seems like there is no downside to this, other than the minuscule risk of a low-altitude puncture + spark causing a fire, and even there the exposure is small because the amount of hydrogen gas is so much small.
Not to mention that hydrogen is free for anyone who has water and a power source.
But every airfoil has an equilibrium angle of attack (not always stable with velocity) where it generates zero lift. The chordal angle of attack is for convenience because it depends only on airfoil geometry and not ambient velocity, but it isn't a fundamental physical property of the airfoil.
If we treat the angle where zero lift is generated as the base angle for an airfoil, then all airfoils generate lift depending on their angle relative to that, including a flat plane. As the GP says, other properties are the dominant factor in airfoil geometry.
When introducing airfoils I think it is more useful to start from a plane than a traditional airfoil shape; the math and intuitions are much clearer from there.
And with steady level flight symmetrical airfoils are flown at an angle, a cambered airfoil shape being flown at 0 degrees angle of attack vs its chord line would be an unusual coincidence. Wings are mounted at a small angle relative to the direction of thrust and what one would define as a flat line on the fuselage.
If I had a nickel for every time a company that sends out optical disks bought Warner Brothers, I'd have $0.10, which is not a lot, but strange that it happened twice.
If I had a nickel for every time a company that sends out optical disks bought Warner Brothers, I'd have $0.10, which is not a lot, but strange that it happened twice.
I'm not convinced that this added latency will help, especially if everyone uses it. It may protect you as long as nobody else uses a cooldown period, but once everyone uses one then the window between the vulnerability being introduced and it being detected will expand by a similar amount, because without exposure it is less likely to be found.
Opinions vary, but I posted a link to a web page that he co-authored, which I would argue stands as a very significant and deep dismissal of his views on AI. If, after reading that essay, a person still feels that Scott Alexander has something interesting to say about AI, then I challenge them to defend that thesis.
Probably better for me to have remained silent out of politeness, but if anyone follows that link to the https://ai-2027.com/ page then I feel I have done my part to help inform that person of the lack of rigor in Scott Alexander's thinking around AI.
Ok! I take your point that your comment was more related to the topic of this thread than I assumed it was.
Probably if you had phrased it in a slightly more informative way, that pattern-matched slightly less to internet-dismissal-trope, I'd have understood that better the first time.
(By internet-dismissal-trope in this case I mean something of the form "After X, I am no longer interested in person Y".)
It is an attempt to predict a possible future in the context of AI. Basically a doomer fairy tale.
It is just phenomenally dumb.
Way worse than the worst bad scifi about the subject. It is presented as a cautionary tale and purports to be somewhat rationally thought out. But it is just so bad. It tries to delve into foreign policy and international politics but does so in such a naive way that it is painful to read.
It is not distasteful to participate in it -- it is embarrassing and, from my perspective, disqualifying for a commentator on AI.
I reject the premise that https://ai-2027.com/ needs "refutation". It is a story, nothing more. It does not purport to tell the future, but to enumerate a specific "plausible" future. The "refutation" in a sense will be easy -- none of its concrete predictions will come to pass. But that doesn't refute its value as a possible future or a cautionary tale.
That the story it tells is completely absurd is what makes it uninteresting and disqualifying for all participants in terms of their ability to comment on the future of AI.
Here is the prediction about "China Steals Agent-2".
> The changes come too late. CCP leadership recognizes the importance of Agent-2 and tells their spies and cyberforce to steal the weights. Early one morning, an Agent-1 traffic monitoring agent detects an anomalous transfer. It alerts company leaders, who tell the White House. The signs of a nation-state-level operation are unmistakable, and the theft heightens the sense of an ongoing arms race.
Ah, so CCP leadership tells their spies and cyberforce to steal the weights so they do. Makes sense. Totally reasonable thing to predict. This is predicting the actions of hypothetical people doing hypothetical things with hypothetical capabilities to engage in the theft of hypothetical weights.
Even the description of Agent-2 is stupid. Trying to make concrete predictions about what Agent-1 (an agent trained to make better agents) will do to produce Agent-2 is just absurd. Like Yudkowsky (who is far from clear-headed on this topic but at least has not made a complete fool of himself) has often pointed out, if we could predict what a recursively self-improving system could do then why do we need the system.
All of these chains of events are incredibly fragile and they all build on each other as linear consequences, which is just a naive and foolish way to look at how events occur in the real world -- things are overdetermined, things are multi-causal; narratives are ways for us to help understand things but they aren't reality.
Sure, in the space of 100 ways for the next few years in AI to unfold, it is their opinion of one of the 100 most likely, to paint a picture for the general population about what approximately is unfolding. The future will not go exactly as that. But their predictive power is better than almost anyone else. Scott has been talking about these things for a decade, before everyone on this forum thought of OpenAI as a complete joke.
Do you have any precedent from yourself or anyone else about correctly predicting the present from 2021? If not, maybe Scott and Daniel just might have a better world model than you or your preferred sources.
>The job market for junior software engineers is in turmoil: the AIs can do everything taught by a CS degree, but people who know how to manage and quality-control teams of AIs are making a killing.
AI doesn't look like a competition for a junior engineer and many of the people using not "managing" AI are going to be juniors in fact increasing what a junior can do and learn more quickly looks like one of the biggest potentials if they don't use it entirely as a crunch.
Meanwhile, it suggests leading-edge research into AI itself will proceed fully 50% faster than research not without AI but those using 6 months behind cutting edge. This appears hopelessly optimistic as does the idea that it will grow the US economy 30% in 2026 whereas a crash seems more likely.
Also it assumes that more compute will continue to be wildly more effective in short order assuming its possible to spend the money for magnitudes more compute. Either or both could easily fail to work out to plan.
I'm not sure why it's so distasteful, but they basically fear monger that AI will usurp control over all governments and kill us all in the next two years
Yes -- the closing of mental hospitals was very much in response to a moral panic (possibly justified) against the unreasonable use of involuntary indefinite confinement. That combined with the inhumane conditions in the facilities themselves, which was itself worsened by the difficulty in obtaining funding and overcrowding.
In the US this is very much an unsolved problem -- chronic homelessness is probably a problem better served by indefinite involuntary confinement, but the moral cost of this is very high and there's a lot of reluctance to go back to that. In Europe this is less the case -- if you look closely into any country that has made big strides fighting chronic homelessness (I'm looking at you, Finland [1]) underneath it you'll see a huge rise in the involuntary confinement numbers that are the quiet solution.
Not just the moral cost. The monetary cost is quite high too. Easy decision to save money by cutting something that most see as immoral, consequences be damned.
But I have one big question -- why aren't the "middle" keys replicated on both sides of the keyboard? That is, for example, why not have two 'g' and 'h' keys? There are always times when you have to adapt; when you're holding down a tricky combination of alt-ctrl-shift keys or something where on a flat keyboard one would just reach with the "wrong" hand to hit a middle key; why not just replicate them?
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