We are reliving 1998 with a twist

Thomas Jefferson Approved

You wouldn’t believe it, but some people still think the solution is to install windows

Cause, sure, you can poke around with pointers and references in C++ but it can also be used just like any other OOP language

Fair. It is harder to break things in C++ than C. Although I’ve definitely created a few memory leaks.

I’ll admit I haven’t actively fucked with C++ in over a decade, but in my experience you’re not going to find the kind of native integration with - say - Azure or SQL that’s baked into more modern languages. You can work around this with libraries. But eventually you’re just emulating a higher level language.

Learn assembly and you can DIY your gender.

Feels a bit like being told to do brain surgery and getting handed a hatchet, especially in the modern era.

Like, its a great learning language precisely because it does force you to think about what’s actually under the hood of your objects and attributes. You actually have to learn what a pointer is. You actually have to think about memory usage and system states. Its like Bio 1 when they have you dissect a rat.

But without a ton of library support, you’re doing so much heavy lifting. And with a bunch of library support… why not just use C#?

you are actively defending North Korea

If this was any other county, you wouldn’t consider it an insult.

Why do you feel the need to hate a foreign people this much? They have no impact on you whatsoever.

It’s up to the authors how they want to license it.

Plus or minus some amount of piracy, sure

I mean, look what happened with TCP/IP.

A fucking disaster for humanity on a global scale

you think I’m defending the genocidal losers

If the shoe fits

15% of russian GDP has already been seized

Do you know what GDP is?

one side sucks so clearly that means the other side is absolutely perfect

It’s funny to hear liberals defend the genocidal members of the Democratic Party by insisting “we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good”.

But when you’re a guerrilla resistance fighting of the Japanese at their most bloodthirsty, or a country that’s painstakingly recovering after suffering more bombings in a year than all of Europe suffered in four, the bar gets raised through the roof.

You idealize tyranny and oppression

You are living under a totalitarian regime right now, you big dummy. You don’t seem to mind.

LeCun says current AI models are a dead end for progress.

Sure. That’s easily proven, as the Pacific Rim tech companies are all running laps around the American models in terms of efficiency and output.

It looks like two guys arguing about which dead end to pursue

They’re both Snipe Hunting for the mythological AGI, because they’re each invested in the idea of a Singularity solving all their problems.

LLMs have a set of niche useful applications, but these dudes are chucking that advancement aside in pursuit of Digital God.

With Roko’s Basilisk bumping around in their heads, I can’t help but detect a certain religious fervor, either. We really might have folks who believe they’ll be tortured for eternity if they don’t build AI Hellraiser first.

It’s jibberish. Might as well be calling Trump a TERF or complaining that Andrew Cuomo isn’t Italian.

American Isekai Rides Again

totally-not-zionist “lefty” Mandani

What?

Obviously, the solution is US slavery

US prison workers produce $11bn worth of goods and services a year for pittance

Sounds reasonable.

Does it, though? Feels like we’re just rewriting the sales manual without thinking about what “learning from video” would actually entail.

Doesn’t make sense to build a lot of compute capacity, then spend fifteen years banging on research before you have something to utilize that capacity.

There’s an old book from back in 2008 - Killing Sacred Cows: Overcoming the Financial Myths That Are Destroying Your Prosperity - that a lot of the modern Techbros took perhaps too closely to heart. It posited that chasing the next generation of technological advancement was more important than keeping your existing revenue streams functional. And you really should kill the golden goose if it means you’ve got a shot at new one in the near future.

What these Tech Companies are chasing is the Next Big Thing, even when they don’t really understand what that is. And they’re so blindly devoted to advancing the technological curve that they really will blow a trillion dollars (mostly of other people’s money) on whatever it is they think that might be.

The real problem is that these guys are, largely, uncreative and incurious and not particularly intelligent. So they leap on fads rather than pursuing meaningful Blue Sky Research. And that gives us this endless recycling of Sci-Fi tropes as a stand in for material investments in productive next generation infrastructure.

Well, he’s got a bowtie and Zuck wears an oversized t-shirt with Bugs Bunny dressed as a 90s rapper.

They certainly can’t both be wrong, can they?

You: I consent

Host: I consent

Cloudflare: Isn’t there someone you forgot to ask?