Which is a way to earn responses from people who are experts in reading
Russell wrote it around 1945. I used his version because Hobbes' writing from 1651 uses pretty archaic phrasing. Hobbes was actually taking a materialist point of view that if a machine flails its arms, it's alive, so I guess he'd probably have sided with the AI guy. The Bible isn't huge on summoning spirits. And...
FWIW, I reworked my article on consciousness, in part to find an excuse to include this quote.
This is probably the dumbest realization of all the dumb realizations I had since I started blogging: https://blog.coredump.cx/p/stop-ontology-time/comment/371265164
The reporting about the 25% thing at Microsoft is odd. I doubt they're aiming to shed 25%.
They likely want a 5-8% cut, pretty "standard" for big tech when the quarterly numbers don't look great. You offer buy-outs to 25%, hope that one in five take it, and you avoid layoffs.
The peril of this approach is that if the offer is good enough, your top talent may take it too. But if you do layoffs, many of them will start looking around anyway.
Yes, the cycles of hiring and firing in tech suck. And yep, if AI investments go sideways, it could get worse.
You kids think you're cool, but you don't know what cool looked like
Further bombshells from the Anthropic IPO filing: as it turns out, Claude is named after Claude "Screwy" Maddox (1901-1958), a notorious prohibition-era mobster who operated out of Chicago
Latest acquisition. Arrived dead and sat in the workshop for a couple of weeks, but it's back in business now. It's an exceptionally well-preserved one, and yes, it's wood.
My cat caught a wild fish from a creek, I'm kinda impressed
Stop! Ontology time! https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/blog/ontology/
US patent 118,435
To me, the most disheartening thing about AI is how quickly we're sliding into the slop culture. It's insidious: no one wants AI to ruin their hobby, but most folks see it as a cool superpower that the tech lets them imitate other people's skills - "see, I couldn't draw and now I can".
The net effect is that everything is getting ensloppified, even in the absence of economic incentives. Yeah, that includes Mastodon: I see AI-generated memes and blog posts every day. And the usual reaction is "what does it matter, it's a funny meme", but maybe it kinda does?
"The Secret Life of Circuits" is now in stock everywhere (+ a small plea): https://blog.coredump.cx/p/the-secret-life-of-circuits-is-now
IT DOES NOT COMPUTE
Dead German guys: https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/blog/dead/
My middle kid's woodworking project (it works, it has a wooden three-digit combo mechanism inside!)
Just once, I'd like to see a company come forward and say "we got badly breached, and we analyzed the evidence, and you know what, we don't think the adversary was extremely sophisticated at all"
Hey, so this might be the only article on epistemology you'll read today that talks about a "Cronenberg-type cat-sofa entity":
Most people don't understand just how different computing used to be in the early 2000s. This is Commodore PET 2001, one of the popular computers of the era.
A portion of the Minuteman guidance computer (cleaned up reupload)
