I'm becoming more convinced that this kind of rhetoric is usually peddled by individuals who haven't actually built anything notable (granted, that's most of us).
If all you're doing is using AI to build products, by definition, you're gravitating to the mean.
The AI doesn't care about a delightful product, it cares about satisfying its objective function and the deeper you go the more the two will diverge simply because building a good product is really complex and there are many many paths in the decision maze.
This reminds me of the Belgium 2003 election that was impossibly skewered by a supernova light years away sending charged particles which manage to get through our atmosphere (allegedly) and flipping a bit. Not the only case it's happened.
Well the thing is, millions of stars go supernova in the observable universe every single day. Throw in the daily gamma ray burst as well, and you've got bit flips all over the place.
I wonder if not just checking the site every day (or minute ) would solve for this.
It's not necessarily the structure of the source data (the DOM, the HTML etc.) but rather the translator that needs to be contractually consistent. The translator in this case is the service for the endpoints.
> I wonder if not just checking the site every day (or minute ) would solve for this.
No, because a webpage makes no promise to not change. Even if you check every minute, can your system handle random 1 minute periods of unpredictable behavior? What if they remove data? What if the meaning of the data changes (e.g. instead of a maximum value for some field they now show the average value) how would your system deal with that? What if they are running an A/B test and 10% of your ‘API’ requests return a different page?
This is not a technical problem and the solution is not a technical one. You need to have some kind of relationship with the entity whose data you are consuming or be okay with the fact that everything can just stop working at any random moment in time.
That's just part and parcel of relying on third parties - you should always price in the maintenance burden of keeping up with potential changes on their end. That burden is a lot lower if the third party cooperates with you and provides an explicit contract and backwards compatibility, but it's still not zero.
It’s not about the maintenance cost, it’s about continuity of service. If you scrape a website things may break at any time. If you use a proper API and have a contract with the supplier you will have the opportunity to make any changes before things break.
I thought this too, but I imagine it's a bit of pathetic fallacy for the reader's benefit else it would be (ironically) quite a boring read for us from the machine's perspective.
Isn't that the point of the dark forest theory? It's not the fact that there is a dangerous tribe behind a bush it's more that you don't know if they're dangerous or not so you have to err on the side of caution - because you don't know if they're doing the same.
It's the whole chain of suspicion theory that it's safer to shoot first and then ask questions later because the speed you can communicate is the same speed you can mount an attack.
Yes, but the next bush is dozens of light years away. The analogy breaks down because the distances are different in quality.
The only reason why this becomes such a problem in the Three-Body-Problem is the existence of magic in that universe. Thinking protons, instant communication, folded dimensions, easy interstellar travel, it's all interesting speculation inspired by physics, but incompatible with our actual universe.
How do you know it's incompatible with the actual universe instead of our current understanding of the universe?
Take us for example, we're communicating instantly (for practical purposes) using thinking machines - how would that not seem like magic to someone thousands of years ago?
My point is, we don't know what the tribe have behind the bush. It's the equivalent of the Mayans wondering what's over that hill and then finding the Spanish with gunpowder, horses, and steel armour.
The only reason why we can't out sentient protons folded out of 28 microdimensions into our 3 macrodimensions is the same reason we can't rule out that our universe is actually the works of a giant hand puppet player called Zquaarx.
The problem is just - if any of what happens in 3BP was to actually happen, we would not have to be a little wrong (like Newton was in regard to celestial mechanics) but so wrong that it doesn't even make sense to apply what we know at all.
This is, by the way, the exact point of the first part of the first book: physicists discover that all off the known physics are completely wrong.
Why does the distance change the dynamic? So what if the species trying to exterminate you are 500 light years away, you think they should ignore it ?
Maximum travel speed of an extermination weapon in 100,000 years of of science may very much be impressive or even magical by today’s standards
The distance completely changes the dynamic. If I tell you there's a crazy axe murderer in your house, you should be afraid. If I tell you there's a crazy axe murderer on Venus, how afraid are you?
And unless we are completely wrong about physics, the maximum speed of a weapon will be the same as it today - very close to 1c.
