Unfortunately the headline is misleading. It's constantly emitting radio signals, it's just spinning in a way that points at us every 8 minutes. Great book though!
Ohhh this explains why it was kind of awkward to read. I'm not sure how to explain it, like look at this:
> Benefits look like a second source for everyone else. But 68 cents of every tax dollar in America is raised from pay for work, so a benefit is mostly a claim on somebody else’s wage. Follow the money far enough and nine households in ten are living on each other’s wages. We live off the earth and off the machines we’ve built on it. Our share of what they produce reaches us through one narrow channel, which is being paid for a job.
It's like you're reading something backwards. The content is there, but it's like I have to do a double take after every sentence.
All I've said is the writing is poor. Whataboutism is saying "well what about the ideas??? those are good, so you shouldn't complain about the writing!" Both can be true.
The problem is that the payout is unbounded. Yes, their initial investment was important. But most of the productivity gains after that investment was not directly their work, yet they claim all of that as well.
Bonus points if they invest some of those gains into lobbying for regulatory capture to make it difficult or impossible for some of those workers to strike out on their own and compete.
The US, where unbridled capitalism, at any cost, in all fields of endeavor, is the goal - from healthcare to education to private prisons.
Every economy is "money-based" in some way, money is just an abstract representation of value. You can try to get rid of it, but it will come back in another form because "value" is still useful to quantify and resources are finite.
You pretend as if this is a totally alien concept, while you yourself use HN in a browser. Literally everyone uses a browser. The whole point of the post is that you don't have to ask your users to do anything other than click on a URL. It is obnoxious to act like you can't understand this.
Because when something is running on my machine i have more control over it and greater ability to inspect what it does. Usually i also put stuff in my machine from reputable sources (e.g. Linux repositories). And for the most part i prefer opensource software that i (or some LLM i point the code at) can check if it does something obviously naughty.
Yes, web apps are fine if i don't trust the source much. As an example i use the web-based version of Discord in a Firefox tab instead of the native version.
FWiW I've made my choice, I stopped using Reddit on a regular basis more than a decade ago, and used old.reddit for occasional reference and link following until recently (the account/password login requirement) since which I've not been back.
There are some people who exclusively (or mostly) use open source software. There are practical and philosophical reasons; I am not sure if the parent poster is one, but it is likely from context.
Which they can also do for websites. It is strange for them to say native apps are preferable to the web, but then also say that they won't install most native apps because the issues are worse.
Actually it is very true. And as i wrote in the rest of the comment after the part you quoted, i a) generally install stuff from reputable sources and b) use opensource software.
I have great news for you: you are free to only visit sites that are open source, and they run in sandboxed environments. You can't say that native apps are preferable to webapps, and then say "oh also I refuse to install most native apps because the security and privacy issues are 1000x worse"
Are you seriously suggesting that using a disassembler to dig through closed-source software to verify safety is somehow more preferable than using a sandboxed browser? Be real.
You mean "go to the installation page and choose the correct OS/version, download and install". Compare that to "Click here: https://tinylittleoffice.com/"
The computer already comes with an office suite installed in most cases. And I hope you don't suggest that tiny little office compares, even though it's very neat.
And the place you get your app from usually automatically knows which OS you are on.
And also most web apps of any sophistication demand that you register an account to use them, click the verify email link etc
Ah, so now I know you did not actually read the post at all. That link is from the article. What's the point of jumping straight to the comments and arguing about something you never read?
Apologies that I didn't remember the article for several days. I did read it, but it wasn't exactly worth remembering. It's just the same points that have been made for decades by Linux people, who are starved for quality native apps and therefore convince themselves that they prefer using apps in the browser.
To boil down my argument: Simple web apps like Tiny Office are not easier to use than simple native apps that come pre-installed with the computer/operating system. Sophisticated web apps are not easier to "install" than a couple clicks for installing sophisticated native apps. The reason being that you have to register name, e-mail, phone number, confirm e-mail etc to use most sophisticated web apps.
No it doesn't, not even close. You are looking at a video represented as pixels changing on a flat screen. None of it actually exists. You exist, the computer or phone in front of you is composed of mass and energy, and absolutely none of it is algorithmic. World models, as complex as they are, are still just pushing numbers around on paper.
Maybe you need a mirror. People are literally watching AI generated soap operas that have gone viral. Perhaps it's your lack of understanding that frustrates you
I don't know what you think I said, you should read the context again. This has nothing to do with movies being made with AI.
Altman thinks that movies "will become videogames". As in, he sees media as some sort of ranked ladder where everyone wants to climb as high as possible. He does not understand what movies are or why people like them.
> As in, he sees media as some sort of ranked ladder where everyone wants to climb as high as possible.
You're projecting pretty hard here. That's what you think of when he says he thinks of them as a videogame. You do know that "games" on netflix are basically movies? See the recent https://www.netflix.com/games/82112833
You seem quite out of touch with what the state of media and games in general if the first thing you thought of was a game with a ladder.
> movies are going to become video games and video games are going to become something unimaginably better
He sees media like a ladder, where movies are obsolete and will "become" videogames. No they won't. There are movies, and there are videogames. Those are two different things. One does not "become" another. Movies are not going away.
I for one would love to be able to experience Godzilla Minus Zero interactively. I get that it's different from movies. I remember seeing Avatar in 3-D and realizing that James Cameron was directing the audience's attention to a particular part of a scene by the way the 3-D focused, and it was a little off-putting at times. That's a small thing compared to what will be possible in a few years, but still -- being immersed in Avatar will be an amazing experience. I'd also love to see a version of Avatar written by '80s James Cameron -- he was a much better writer back then -- or maybe other, more skillful writers had greater influence on him? In any case, it's inarguable that Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss, and Terminator 2 are all better written than the Avatar films.
More and more off-topic, but this made me wonder: this interactivization would work much better for some works than others. Many comedies are scripted so tightly that I can't imagine any wider world around them (also, on the other side, Memento), while something like Twin Peaks would be perfectly expandable into a world (if you somehow had David Lynch in a datacenter, which sounds oxymoronic).
> I for one would love to be able to experience Godzilla Minus Zero interactively.
So would I. But I don't not want to experience it as a movie. It'd be something separate. Not an upgrade.
Which makes Sam's comment the inane blather of a pitchman. We don't need to bend over and try to steelman marketing dross. He doesn't care if that statement means nothing, why should we?
Oh, I see your point. I didn’t think of “movies becoming video games” as meaning there’s no such thing as a movie anymore. Kind of like the false argument about evolution, “if we can from monkeys why are there still monkeys?”
> as an extreme measure the wealthy are able to take, or desperate indentured servants are shipped off to work.
This is the part I don't think people appreciate: space sucks. It's horrible. There is not a chance that the rich decide that they'd do that rather than lounge on a yacht. The working class goes first into the mines.
> Holography implies that you can do that — reconstruct every fold, vessel, and neuron in three dimensions — without actually looking inside. Simply photographing the surface of the brain somehow suffices.
Gah I am not a fan of pop-sci simplifications like this for the sake of a soundbite. The author goes onto explain how no, a picture is not enough, you need to actually measure the distortion of spacetime at the surface. Somebody is going to walk away thinking this stuff is possible, that maybe psychics really can detect something wrong with them.
> Consider a video game sun passing behind a video game tree. The sun pixels touch the tree pixels directly, yet the tree does not burst into flames. This is because the sun pixels are independent of the tree pixels.
With apologies to Babbage, I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such an explanation.
lol yikes. Some of the other illustrations quoted seemed OK esp if you already have a layman's understanding of the major concepts... but this just seems.... bad.
I know what you mean and I think you're right, but I take it as the cost of doing business when trying to turn frontier physics into layperson analogies. You're not going to use an analogy to successfully complete a calculation of black hole entropy, you're going to use it to convey the high level intuition that "stuff on inside = stuff on boundary".
Because if we litigate the imperfections of analogies all day long, then you're going to react to videos titled "black holes described at five levels of difficulty" by saying the first four levels were all wrong, which may in a sense be technically true but not in the spirit of the exercise.
It's okay as long as they call it out, but the author doesn't and instead states it like a fact. They could have easily caveated it with "but a magical camera that can see magnetic and gravitational fields" or something. The analogy is fine, but it's not presented as one, so it's not clear how far the analogy actually goes. So the takeaway is "wow technically it's possible!"
Yeah and LLMs can't do anything, they can only produce text. These "frontier labs" are looping that with a harness that performs actions requested by the LLM. They are literally saying "we ran a script that hacked you, oopsie!!"
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