Please read through this incredible book review (book is All Things Are Full of Gods by David Bentley Hart). It is the kind of philosophy that everyone is looking past. Syntactic vs informational determinacy. LLMs is designed to create copy that is syntactically determinate (it is a complex set of statistics functions). Whereas the best human prose actually is the opposite--it does not converge on syntactic determinacy (see quote below) but instead converges on informational determinacy. The plot resolves as the reader's knowledge grows from abstraction and ignorance to empathy, insight and anticipation.

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/one-to-zero

  Semantic information, you see, obeys a contrary calculus to that of physical bits. As it increases in determinacy, so its syntactical form increases in indeterminacy; the more exact and intentionally informed semantic information is, the more aperiodic and syntactically random its physical transmission becomes, and the more it eludes compression. I mean, the text of Anna Karenina is, from a purely quantitative vantage of its alphabetic sequences, utterly random; no algorithm could possibly be generated — at least, none that’s conceivable — that could reproduce it. And yet, at the semantic level, the richness and determinacy of the content of the book increases with each aperiodic arrangement of letters and words into coherent meaning.

Edit: add-on

In other words, it is impossible for an LLM (or monkeys at keyboards [0]) to recreate Tolstoy because of the unique role our minds play in writing. The verb writing hardly appears to apply to an LLM when we consider the function it is actually doing.

[0] https://libraryofbabel.info

Go thee to the land of government contracting and see thou how well thine ideas hold up.

I actually have worked in this space and it, uh, has not shaken my belief that powerpoint talks are bad.

consider how the xz supply-chain attack occurred 2 years ago [0]. the malware isn't auditable with a `git clone` as easily as you might want.

[0] https://research.swtch.com/xz-timeline

key word "encourages"

when someone uses `npm install/add/whatever-verb` does it default to only using trusted publishing sources? and the dependency graph?

either 100% enforcement or it won't stick and these attack vulnerabilities are still there.

The DIY tuning fork clock is very cool. I am hard pressed to understand why accutron doesn't still make and sell tuning-fork watches. I really admire the creative use of resonance frequencies (not dissimilar to quartz watches but cool that you can really see the tuning fork for you watch as opposed to a diminutive quartz crystal).

They recently re-released the Accutron with actual tuning fork movements, but at $6k ofc you’re better off buying vintage:

https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/introducing-accutron-314

They have done a re-issue, which Dole has linked to (I'm not going to lie, they do look smashing)

I think the reason why it took so long is a combination of snobbishness (its not "mechanical" enough) and cost of manufacture. I assume that most of the tooling has been lost, and it required a lot of work to re-learn how to make from scratch.

But accutrons wern't that cheap when they launched, so I think they are within 50% of their original price, judging by my half arsed inflation calculations.

I would be very careful of transmitting on the same frequency as WWVB. It is very likely illegal.

That’s a very good point but the transmission power is extremely weak and won’t propagate more than 1m.

Quite possibly, however the range is stated in centimetres so practically it’s unlikely to be a concern.

Get out

Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman is the book that comes to mind with this article link. 2 years ago my wife and I took the TV off the wall. My kids don't have Bluey or the latest Disney cartoon to keep them company. I am not going back... It has been the most blissful time. Amazing that the TV is not required to lead a thriving life despite what the incessant sales-industrial-complex will tell you.

I tried to do this recently but discovered that the DRM algorithm changed and I couldn't use the standard de-DRM tools.

Thanks for the info!

are you using a relatively new kindle?

It is a Linux variant. Has been rootable in the past.

USB ethernet tether might be the “how” here. Or some sort of VPN (tailscale) to the home LAN that the phone is hooked up to. Not quite “off-grid”.