Microsoft has been placing Bedrock before Java ever since they named it Java Edition, but Java has survived. I’m sure Bedrock is much more popular now, but I would be worried about Microsoft enshittifying Java further to push players to Bedrock, and any new microtransactions they figure out.

Basically. 99 Percent Invisible did a podcast on this very topic: Episode 468 Alphabetical Order

As a fellow pedant, I have to point out that even a simple tic-tac-toe algorithm is “AI”.

The term AI was coined at the Dartmouth College Summer Workshop in 1956. Early AI focused on developing expert systems and things like heuristics.

Most people conflate AI, the technical term for computerized decision making in general with the SciFi concept of super intelligent computers, and there has been a revolution since about 2010, in that computationally intensive neutral networks that were theoretical became more conceivable and practical. But LLMs are just a single family of AI techniques.

This, even bad 90’s game computer AI is just as valid to call AI as the latest OpenAI model. It’s just more primitive. Orders of magnitude more primitive, and no neural networks or LLM.

The mad “gold rush” mentality towards AGI is nerve-racking. I’m reminded of Protogen’s attitude towards the Protomolecule in The Expanse.

I figured we still had 5-ish years to figure it out, but the rapid progress against HLE (Humanity’s Last Exam) makes me nervous.

But sure, let’s just rush headlong towards the precipice, how hard can alignment be really? My anxiety about the future and the importance of getting this right are not eased by people scoffing because “just count the fingers!” When the field is changing so fast, looking at what was going on a few years ago isn’t helpful.

Well, past my pay grade.

It’s like the classic essay, “Why Jonny Can’t Code”.

I remember entering program listings from computer magazines into the Vic 20 as a kid, then modding them to make new things. But still, it was a minority of kids who had a computer back then, and even most of them (and myself most of the time) would just play games rather than write games.

The difference now is that everyone has a cell phone, but it’s still only a small minority that care.

That’s kind of what I was thinking.

I used to run Folding@Home, as well as others, as a screensaver. It’s been a while, but I think you had some control of how hard to work the computer. As someone who regularly works with 30 year old computers that run 24/7, it seems weird to kill a GPU by running it,but if it runs cooler maybe it will last longer? Although that defeats the purpose kind of.

Now you need to use the money you saved and the $15 in crypto to buy two identical computers, then run one flat out and the other at around 50% and see how long they last. Report back every couple of years.

Excuse me while I look at extreme uptime posts.

It’s diplomacy though. Some things are better said behind closed doors as it were.

Going back to Cold War brinksmanship, the point of NATO was to loudly say that you were ride-or-die, go-to-the-wall with all your NATO homies. It made the risk of messing with NATO countries too high, likewise with the Warsaw Pact.

Now would all NATO allies go all in? 100%, all the way? Who can say with certainty. Still, so far there’s only been one US president who has said… it depends. For the record, Trump walked that back, but it certainly got a lot of NATO countries closer to Russia to quickly point out that they were over the NATO 2% GDP commitment.

Still, Article 5 has been invoked once in NATO’s history, and it was by the US. It’s why Canada was in Kandahar, Netherlands in Helmand, etc. Too my recollection, every single NATO country participated in Afghanistan at the US’s request.

Also, every NATO country on the frontier (as it were) is well over the NATO 2% GDP minimum. The three Baltic countries, Poland, the UK and the US have been over the 2% GDP minimum for a while. Finland is already well past that before joining, and I believe several more countries will hit the goal in 2023.

Trump just wanted everyone to spend more on the military. He wasn’t a threat to nato.

Not US-ian, so I’m going to have to disagree hard. Back in 2016 and 2017 he called NATO “obsolete”, although he later changed his mind and said it was “no longer obsolete”, as well as taking a while to affirm US support for Article 5, and even saying “If they fulfill their obligations to us, the answer is yes,” when asked if the US would defend the Baltic NATO countries.

Now you could argue that he was using this to push the NATO defence spending requirements, which is a fair critique, but it sent a pretty clear message that under his presidency, the US honouring article 5 was conditional. This wasn’t just a message to the other NATO members; it was a message to Putin as well whether intentional or not.

I believe that the silver lining of Trump’s presidency is now being felt as Europe is seriously taking it’s ability to autonomously defend itself seriously. This is probably why Petr Pavl is musing that it may be necessary to go beyond NATO’s 2% spending targets, because Trump could get elected again, or someone like Trump, and there could always be more conditions added to US NATO commitments.