And the author spent a year hassling Mozilla about how killing XUL plugins would make his wildly popular plugin nearly impossible. Did they move one iota to help that? Nope. Did they adopt DTA functionality natively, like they’d absorbed Pocket? Did they fuck. Their mantra for two straight decades has been “just rewrite!” and they cannot imagine why they kept hemorrhaging devs and plugins and users once Chrome slimed its way into everyone’s options.

Never give Nintendo money.

There’s a dozen Firefox extensions that really matter, at any given time. Mozilla has never appeared to give a particular shit about any of them. Paying special attention based on popularity wouldn’t be ideal, but for fuck’s sake, their passive-aggressive treatment keeps burning out the developers who fuel their ecosystem, and it would take vanishingly little effort to shield their keystone plugins.

If their active neglect had ruined both uBlock and DownThemAll - I’m not sure I’d be using Firefox anymore, and I’ve been using Firefox since before it was called Firefox. Why the fuck would anyone normal even consider it?

Never give Nintendo money.

Frankie Boyle: “Humans actually make quite poor shields. That’s why we invented… the shield.”

I had hopes for recurrent systems becoming kinda… Dixie Flatline. Maybe not general enough to learn, but spooky enough to evaluate claims.

Well thank god that’s not what I wrote. What does run on corn flakes is natural GI… in several senses.

You do all this on three pounds of wet meat powered by cornflakes.

The idea we’ll never recreate it through deliberate effort is absurd.

What you mean is, LLMs probably aren’t how we get there. Which is fair. “Spicy autocorrect” is a limited approach with occasionally spooky results. It does a bunch of stuff people insisted would never happen without AGI - but that’s how this always goes. The products of human intelligence have always shown some hard-to-define qualities which humans can eventually distinguish from our efforts to make a machine produce anything similar.

Just remember the distinction got narrower.

“Why does YAML suck?” is a question. “Why YAML sucks” is an explanation.

wd40

We are all such dorks.

One of the worst words in the English language is “intermittent.”

C is dangerous like your uncle who drinks and smokes. Y’wanna make a weedwhacker-powered skateboard? Bitchin’! Nail that fucker on there good, she’ll be right. Get a bunch of C folks together and they’ll avoid all the stupid easy ways to kill somebody, in service to building something properly dangerous. They’ll raise the stakes from “accident” to “disaster.” Whether or not it works, it’s gonna blow people away.

C++ is dangerous like a quiet librarian who knows exactly which forbidden tomes you’re looking for. He and his… associates… will gladly share all the dark magic you know how to ask about. They’ll assure you, oh no no no, the power cosmic would never turn someone inside-out, without sufficient warning. They don’t question why a loving god would allow the powers you crave. They will show you which runes to carve, and then, they will hand you the knife.

As a userscript author, it is some bullshit.

Listening to your example, compare the Deftones’ “Knife Party.”

From the description - hypnogogic pop? Tame Impala, especially anything off Currents. An album that begins with “Let It Happen” and ends with “New Person, Same Old Mistakes.”

Kinda progressive rock, especially post-70s. Kingston Wall - “Could It Be So?”

Songs that make you lose yourself before the voice of the artist jolts you awake.

Oh, so more My Morning Jacket. “Touch Me I’m Going To Scream, Pt.1.” “Dondante.” Or arguably Mew’s “Comforting Sounds.”

I have to admit - my initial outrage over Copilot training on open-source code has vanished.

Now that these networks are trained on literally anything they can grab, including extremely copyrighted movies… we’ve seen that they’re either thoroughly transformative soup, or else the worst compression and search tools you’ve ever seen. There’s not really a middle ground. The image models where people have teased out lookalike frames for Dune or whatever aren’t good at much else. The language models that try to answer questions as more than dream-sequence autocomplete poetry will confidently regurgitate dangerous nonsense because they’re immune to sarcasm.

The comparisons to a human learning from code by reading it are half-right. There are systems that discern relevant information without copying specific examples. They’re just utterly terrible at applying that information. Frankly, so are the ones copying specific examples. Once again, we’ve advanced the state of “AI,” and the A went a lot further than the I.

And I cannot get offended on Warner Brothers’ behalf if a bunch of their DVDs were sluiced into a model that can draw Superman. I don’t even care when people copy their movies wholesale. Extracting the essence of an iconic character from those movies is obviously a transformative use. If some program will emit “slow motion zoom on Superman slapping Elon Musk,” just from typing that, that’s cool as hell and I refuse to pretend otherwise. It’s far more interesting than whatever legal fictions both criminalized 1700s bootlegging and encouraged Walt Disney’s corpse to keep drawing.

So consider the inverse:

Someone trains a Copilot clone on a dataset including the leaked Windows source code.

Do you expect these corporations to suddenly claim their thing is being infringed upon, in front of any judge with two working eyes?

More importantly - do you think that stupid robot would be any help what-so-ever to Wine developers? I don’t. These networks are good at patterns, not specifics. Good is being generous. If I wanted that illicit network to shamelessly clone Windows code, I expect the brace style would definitely match, the syntax might parse, and the actual program would do approximately dick.

Neural networks feel like magic when hideously complex inputs have sparse approximate outputs. A zillion images could satisfy the request, “draw a cube.” Deep networks given a thousand human examples will discern some abstract concept of cube-ness… and also the fact you handed those thousand humans a blue pen. It’s simply not a good match for coding. Software development is largely about hideously complex outputs that satisfy sparse inputs in a very specific way. One line, one character, can screw things up in ways that feel incomprehensible. People have sneered about automation taking over coding since the punched-tape era, and there’s damn good reasons it keeps taking their jobs instead of ours. We’re not doing it on purpose. We’re always trying to make our work take less work. We simply do not know how to tell the machine to do what we do with machines. And apparently - neither do the machines.

I assumed he was big on Macs for their own sake. It’s a thing, for music geeks - and obviously he’s a fan of iPods, specifically. Surprised to hear his objectively correct summary of Windows versions.

Hydlide, probably. A deeply mediocre action RPG that came out on NES waaay after everyone else had one-upped it, or ten-upped it.

And I played it circa 1997.

No, hang on - I at least progressed in Hydlide. To this day I have no goddamn idea how to get out of the first room in Batman Forever. I had the Game Boy version. I did not buy this game. Some kid just gave it to me, which should have been a warning. As I understand it, all versions of the game are quite similar, which would be admirable if they were not, to a one, total dogshit. I think it’s the Mortal Kombat engine used as a platformer… made by aliens.

You shouldn’t regret not gambling $2000 just because you saw it would’ve worked out.

… you should regret not gambling $200, “because fuck it.” If you’re really worried about any greedy investment, just lower the stakes.

The word you’re looking for is “wealthy.”

This is the lesson I learned watching Bitcoin: cash out half.