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Markdown is so much easier to read and maintain in its raw form. I can't imagine trying to take meeting notes in html.

``` - [ ] Item 1 - [ ] Item 2 ```

``` <ul> <li><checkbox> <label>Item 1</label></li> <li><checkbox> <label>Item 2</label></li> </ul> ```


Most mortgagers require home insurance as part of the loan terms. They will increase your monthly payment due to offset the risk of their stake in your property. It's like paying for insurance, without any of the benefits.


* Copilot is great

* Great for sanity checking your plans or designs (ex: "What are the best ways of securing a multi-tenant application?")

* Great for bootstrapping a presentation or pitch (ex: "Please create a presentation outline about Istio, intended for an audience unfamiliar with Service Meshes"

* Simple questions/reminders (ex: "How can I make it so a bash script exits on error?")

edit: formatting


When you say Copilot, is that the one by Microsoft or something else? And where can we get access to it.


Why not? It's a great mix of productivity and power and the Microsoft/Azure ecosystem works really well together.

You can go with dynamic languages if you're flying fast and loose, or native languages like Go/Rust if you are worried about performance but you miss out on the "enterprise" integrations of something like Java or .Net.

Speaking of Java, it's great too but the ecosystem is a jungle. It's more flexible, but that flexibility has a cost too and you'll spend a lot of time frustrated trying to figure out the right combination of configs in xml, toml, yaml, json, env, properties, etc files.


I really like skaffold for stuff like this, and it's a single binary.


A single bin? Doesn't that spoil the fun of this random amalgam of langs, packages and CVEs? It's like a lucky dip :)


Maven Enforcer does have a rule for duplicate class _names_ (which includes the entire namespace), but I think the author was more talking about it's enforcement of duplicate dependencies. For example, it will detect when you have different (transitive) versions of the same library referenced by your code or dependencies.


Side note: Statements like that paragraph drive me absolutely batty. There have been tons of novels, novellas, movies, comics, YouTube videos, poems (yep) imagining all sorts of aspects of the singularity.

How fast it comes on How this was no warning How there was lots of warning How we shoulda known How nobody coulda known How it completely takes over society immediately About the long drawn out wars fought for it to take over society How society splits between those under it's affects, and those not How prevalent the effects are How exclusive the effects are How big, how small etc, etc, etc

There are billions of humans out there right now, imagining all manner of things, and it's irritating to me to see all the hand wringing over the "Nobody stopped to think if they should". Lots of people did, and are, asking that question.


I think it's wrong for a much more profound reason: what Knuth describes as an aberration is, like, 90% of all AI in science fiction, ever. They are almost all human or sub-human, with only the occasional god-like AI (carefully rendered irrelevant). Singularity-style SF is rare, in part because authors really want to write human-centric stories, and because a true Singularity SF story is quite difficult to write. (As Vinge was so memorably told when he tried some of the first: "you aren't smart enough to write this story. No one is.") So, you can fit pretty much the entire corpus on a screen or two: some Vinge, some Stross, some Rajaniemi, some Brin, maybe some Stanislaw Lem or Olaf Stapledon if you're feeling historical/generous... As opposed to 'mundane' AI which is probably the last SF fiction you read and then the dozen before that too.


Some stories that come to mind...

Accelerando Charles Stross https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler...

Stress again has Singularity Sky which has a minor character as a weakly godlike AI (which is explored much more as a character in the sequel Iron Sunrise (the third book in the series is not to be written - http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/09/books-i-... ))

Implied Spaces by Walter Jon Williams (aside: it has a mention of the Vingean Singularity):

> “I and my confederates,” Aristide said, “did our best to prevent that degree of autonomy among artificial intelligences. We made the decision to turn away from the Vingean Singularity before most people even knew what it was. But—” He made a gesture with his hands as if dropping a ball. “—I claim no more than the average share of wisdom. We could have made mistakes.”

There's the classic Asimov - The Last Answer

There's a nacesant one in True Names by Vinge (the post singularity in Marooned in Realtime doesn't have any AIs) https://ia801004.us.archive.org/0/items/truenamesvingevernor...

And digging fairly deep into my library, I'll also make mention of The Risen Empire by Scott Westerfeld.

There's a lot of smart AI in sci-fi - but things that that gets close to flirting with the singularity are indeed a rarity.


The most famous "weakly godlike" AI entities are probably the Culture Minds (RIP I.M. Banks). Or ar least they’re supposed to be weakly godlike. In practice they never seem to do anything that a bunch of particularly smart humans couldn’t do, besides being exceedingly parallel, being able to, say, carry a conversation with a hundred million people at the same time. Indeed, they weren’t even able to predict that a certain agent of theirs, a highly effective warrior, would go and win a war that he was (unknowingly) supposed to lose. Never mind being able to figure out his true identity, or at least entertain the possibility given what they knew about him.


Maybe I have weird taste but I seem to read a lot of sci-fi where superhuman superintelligence is central to the plot. In addition to the great examples you gave in Vinge and Stross, Banks and Watts come to mind.


Almost all of this is just brand engagement with tech company marketing.


More detail. They have positioned themselves as being too powerful. Think about how ridiculous that is, and at odds with everything else we know about the industry. They love it. They want YouTubers warning about how cool their tech is. They want the CEOs to philosophize about whether self driving is ethical with their friends.


It’s the plastic bag wrapped around the drain cleaner - making you think it’s so acidic and powerful it has to be carefully controlled.

But it’s all just marketing and completely unnecessary and to plumber would even bother.


There have been many but none I know of have predicted what we are experiencing now.


Is it working? Give "Amish abuse" a search in google, limiting people's access to communication can also make it hard for them to get help or to realize that they have access to other options a few miles up the road.


You're not too far off from the arguments people made about the internet not too long ago. It's too easy to access information that could easily be incorrect...even maliciously so!

You're better off sticking to published books and journals from respectable organizations that vet their authors and review their publications!

Then again, who's in control of those printing presses? How can you trust the publishers to not push their own politics and agendas? You're probably better off finding a religious organization you can trust to help filter out the bad stuff. Help you see things through the proper perspective.


The problem is people weren't wrong about the internet. In fact, they couldn't grasp the magnitude of the problem it would create, and the complete transformation it would have on media, politics, and culture.


As someone who vaguely remembers the 90s I can tell you that there is no transformation in media, politics or culture. Well, there is.

But the difference people describe, that politics used to be based on sound science and now, with the internet/facebook/fake news/tiktok changed to be based on total bullshit. Not true.

Not because media and politics aren't currently almost exclusively bullshit. But because that wasn't any different in the 90s. Back then media was full of bullshit, and politics reacted 100 times to media bullshit for every time it reacted to actual science. Hell, there's positive evolution too, I think the BBC has actually improved their fact checking since back then, for example. And I actually know what is trustworthy. I didn't know in the 90s.


But... With books you know who is publishing them. You might know who is in charge of a website. At least with Wikipedia sources are cited. With gpt, nothing.


Just had a dinner conversation where ChatGPT was characterized as automated plagiarism, and then I thought wouldn’t it be cool to get like a set of BibTex entries for all the sources whose content were combined to synthesize an output.

Not sure that’s possible, and even if so, that it would be any kind of reasonable or manageable size whatsoever.


You'd see hallucination in the citations too. Ultimately, you can't get away from having to manually verify everything that an LLM outputs.


I run the cheaper self hostable OpenAI alternative https://text-generator.io I've been working on automating this manual verification of everything, with a few components we already have like a search engine and an edit API we can both detect and correct most of these errors to at least be reflective of what a reliable source says like Wikipedia, still a lot of reasoning, logic and math issues will remain, but there's a big step up coming soon in factual generation


| what a reliable source says like Wikipedia

oh dear me


perplexity.ai does this


Just search for "overdrive pedal" on Sweetwater and you'll see a lot of pedals that have been around for decades. Read up on the newer ones and you'll see they generally just add novelty options and variations to classic designs. You can easily find comparisons of schematics by googling, though it's not as simple as "Tubescreamer 85 vs Tuberscreamer 2023" because of various small evolutions and models. Try "tubescreamer circuit comparison" to get a good start.

Delays are another story, search Sweetwater and you'll see it's dominated by digital options that bundle things modulation, stereo effects, and loopers. You won't see the same analog options as the 80's, or many analog options at all comparatively.


A lot of the analog options are still around because bucket brigade devices are still manufactured. So you can get a Boss CH-1, a Memory Man, or something like that, new from the manufacturer.


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