Simone Sturniolo

So some time ago @timcolbourn asked whether anyone supporting more COVID prevention measures - ventilation especially - had run the numbers on the supposed benefits of this. Here I try to provide some back-of-the-envelope estimates: a 🧵 .

@JamesWHankins1 Consider also how "mature" in these contexts meant 50 years old, not 70 going for 80. Those ages would be rarer to reach (especially with a semblance of lucidity) back in classical times.

Interesting how the modern perception differs from the premodern. Roman and European republican theory is unanimous in wanting to keep political power in the hands of mature citizens and out of the hands of the hot-headed young. Wealth was supposed to stay in families, under the control of the patriarch. Maybe the difference is that modern gerontocrats in the West show no more practical wisdom than the young. Numerous examples spring to mind.

@Denny_Zmeen @HistoricHub Florence, Italy.

@SturnioloSimone @HistoricHub Looks like Spain. Girona?

This is one of the worst downgrades of all time Old London Bridge was a medieval stone structure that stood for over 600 years and was once considered a wonder of the world. It was 926 feet long and filled with houses and shops, making it the longest inhabited bridge in Europe

@excesstential @PAHoyeck And I can't really understand the desire for that to change? It's like complaining that people like pizza because you, personally, don't like pizza. Pizza is cheap and easy to make and lots of people find pleasure in it, but we just ASK that they stop and only strive for lobster.

@excesstential @PAHoyeck And also, the fact that again and again "bad prose" authors keep being successful kind of gives you a natural experiment of how many people actually are that particular. Clearly not enough to stop these books from being successful!

People have always said this kind of sort of thing about hard science fiction. But now that it's an established genre with a century-old history, you'd think those people would have learned to pivot from "This isn't real literature" to "This isn't literature I like."

@Denny_Zmeen @HistoricHub Ironically, with modern materials and techniques, we probably would be better at doing that safely than anyone else before us. That said, some bridges with houses still survive and do well:

@HistoricHub It also burned and got destroyed by floods quite often.🤷🏻‍♂️ I mean, the modern version is an eyesore, but we don't build houses on bridges anymore for a reason.

@excesstential @PAHoyeck This doesn't mean that this is better or superior to great prose. Great prose is fantastic! It's just a different skillset. Very few artists could possibly excel on ALL dimensions simultaneously. Strikers and goalkeepers.

@excesstential @PAHoyeck As a lover of science fiction I know full well that I can't usually expect great prose out of it. The prose is serviceable to deliver something else - cool ideas and scenarios. It's like a newspaper article. I read it to know what happened, not to be wowed by the turns of phrase.

@lisavsworld Also, Andy Weir's books are barely 10% math equations. Greg Egan's books are 70% math equations. And that's awesome! You can absolutely write great stories that revolve around maths. Of course, unsurprisingly, they'll be most appreciated by people who like maths.

Someone's jealous. We can argue about cringe prose all day. Did people enjoy the story or not? Being the exception to the rule of not liking the book or the story doesn't make someone special nor does it give them a better eye for literature. Someone wrote a book. Many people read it. Those people loved it. And you think you can do better. But you didn’t.

@chriskilroy @HiddenYorkshire I mean, the protagonist of PHM is a teacher and his motivating love is for the children he teaches. Seems in the same ballpark.

@HiddenYorkshire I agree wit most of what you said except the comparison to Interstellar and the themes that movie explored A huge theme in interstellar is parenthood and how one character is motivated by the (complicated) love for his children. It is not an abstract ‘save the world’ motivation

To elaborate: Project Hail Mary is an incredibly earnest film. It's about a guy who needs to save the world meeting an alien who also needs to save it's world. Because it has themes of friendship and self-sacrifice to save others, those with a reflexive jerk against anything sincere in sci-fi - everything must be couched in millennial irony and self-aware postmodernism - see it as gauche and "heartwarming", and because it has humour it's seen as 2013 Reddit. But it's really a fun, powerful film, great for adults and young people alike. The writing is very good, the cinematography a d effects are excellent, and it provides a more satisfying approach to themes which Interstellar tried to explore but struggled to. It's a very well-made film about the power of love and friendship. If that makes you want to hurl, so be it. It's probably not for you!

@benlandautaylor The radness was the point. Enemies would be befuddled and demoralised by sufficient displays of chariot drifting.

It's wild how we we know that chariots were THE dominant weapon in ancient warfare for many centuries but historians don’t agree on how you actually FOUGHT from a chariot, and there's no satisfying account of how it’s better than just riding a horse besides being rad as hell.

@SOPHONTSIMP But the fundamental point about AI is whether our ability to imbue them with that purpose is good enough. That's the alignment problem. Just because you *want* AI to do what you're building it for doesn't mean it will if you're not building it in the right way.

Nonhuman animals did not intentionally build humans to serve their purposes, so the analogy is a category error. It’s also worth mentioning that things like this happened several times before, great oxygenation, Ediacaran burrowing animals, and land plants all helped catalyze massive extinction events. This happens because there is no global selection pressure placed on each individual species to maintain the health of the broader ecosystem.

@CustomWetware @mgubrud @MaMoMVPY I do not retain all of the knowledge I've ever looked up and read in my brain. I do sometimes stuff like "write notes" and only remember a bit of info like "the notes are in that folder". This, apparently, disqualifies me as a general intelligence.

@mgubrud @MaMoMVPY They still can't acquire knowledge. They can pull info from web searches into their context window but as soon as their context window needs to be compacted they forget it. That's only one of their shortcomings but it's a serious one. We'll get there eventually but not yet.

A year ago Jensen was a completely reasonable sounding CEO. Now he and the rest of the AI CEOs are just making up obvious fantasies about the state of AI. We have not achieved AGI. He knows that we are nowhere near that.

@avrldotdev @thdxr The problem is that "winning" in this framework is transcending entirely the need for someone to purchase your shit. The aspiration is no joke to bring forth a physical God that essentially conjures utopia on Earth and then starts conquering space.

@thdxr What's even the point of winning if there's no one to purchase your shit? The prices are hiked, the jobs are being cut, QoL is taking a nosedive, Data centers are unsustainable, etc etc.

everyone's interpreting this as proof of a bubble but the only information here is these companies are saying they'd rather die than lose this race

@TheLincoln And the first steps - "leave the village and go see the King" - were all on her. It's not like she was collected by the King's emissaries. She had to travel at her own family's expenses to go try convince the King that yes, she was the prophesied hero sent by God to save France.

@TheLincoln Yes, but to get there she had to travel alone to the court and persuade the King and his advisors that she was the real deal. She was questioned by theologians, there was a whole thing.

May need to steal this for the next time I write about how SFF has way too much focus on "realistic worldbuilding" that is rarely interesting and often impossible if you try to get beyond broad brushstrokes

@robbensinger @psychiel John Searle: In my paper I created the Chinese Room as a tool to define understanding. Open AI: At long last we have created a Chinese Room that understands things from the seminal paper "the Chinese Room couldn't understand things".

@robbensinger @psychiel Well, the interesting thing about LLMs is that we have either created sentient life, or we have created P-zombies. It's unclear which is it but either way, seems like a tremendous achievement in applied philosophy!

One underdiscussed aspect of LLMs is how tremendously they've sped up philosophical progress. Concepts like consciousness, sentience, moral patiency—once thought to have deep, subtle answers that'd take generations to unravel—have been greatly constrained in just a few years!

@dennismhogan @LudditeHacker I think the problem is this may seem legitimate writing on its face. What gives it away isn't mistakes but style. "I didn't give up. I shifted." in particular is such an AI-ism. It's the kind of pattern you see a lot (I think in Claude, and I suspect maybe in Gemini too).

@LudditeHacker If indeed the essay is ai-written, and I'll concede it's at least bad prose, then the Times should not just retract but should probably launch an investigation. A piece would have had to make it past several editors to appear in print. Not impossible, certainly, but serious

I think accusing writers of AI use without evidence is a pretty bad road to go down all things considered.