Friday, July 31
Daily News Stuff 31 July 2020
Beyond The Shoe Event Horizon Edition
Beyond The Shoe Event Horizon Edition
Tech News
- I went out to the shops this evening for the first time in about three weeks.
The process was slightly complicated by the fact that I threw out my shoes last weekend. At the time this seemed like a reasoanable thing to do, as (a) the heels had pretty much disintegrated and (b) I had at least four unworn pairs of shoes in the Strategic Shoe Repository at the bottom of the closet.
I picked a pair of brown lace-ups, laced them up, and made it about two blocks before they fell apart.
Not good.
Trudged back home again and took a closer look at the remaining pairs. Turned out that I hadn't got a faulty pair; rather they'd been sitting there so long that the soles had denatured somehow and were only slightly stronger than damp cardboard. That's likely what did in the previous pair as well.
Fortunately the fourth and final pair were made of a different material and were in good shape, so I did eventually make it to my destination and restock on gluten-free chicken nuggets and mi goreng and other essentials. You know you're eating the fancy ramen when it comes with five little sachets of stuff.
Everything was open, including the RSL club, and pretty busy. Unlike Melbourne which right now is in total lockdown, again.
This second wave is no joke though; it's killed nearly as many people as the first wave and much more quickly. Interstate travel has been largely halted until Victoria can get things back under control. I give it thirty years.
- Philosphers discuss GPT-3. (Daily Nous)
- GPT-3 discusses philosphers. (Pastebin)
- Hacker News dicusses GPT-3 discussing philosophers discussing GPT-3. (Hacker News)
One consequence of GPT-3 is that I am now highly sceptical of the human provenance of any HN comment on an article about GPT-3. It has made my HN experience objectively less enjoyable, because I’m constantly expending effort to spot nonsense and avoid wasting time reading it.
Yeah, pretty much.
Perhaps most worrying is not how "human-like†GPT-3 can be, but how "GPT-3 like†humans can be. When I am in "nonsense-detection†mode, I drill down into paragraphs to spot non-sequiturs etc and I find plenty of HN comments are rambling, contradictory, or I just can’t ascertain the meaning of the text.
- GPT-3 channels Harlan Ellison by way of Fritz Leiber. (0bin)
The first paragraph was provided as a writing prompt. The rest is GPT-3.
- Looking at all this, you start to wonder how much of philosphy consists of deepities and the unvoidable conclusion is that it's deepities all the way down.
We are all trapped in a cycle of life and death. Death is merciful. It brings an end to the suffering. We should embrace it when it comes.
In other news, GPT-3 also seems to have a deep interest in art.
- Envoy is a proxy sort of thing. (EnvoyProxy)
It's what I'd call an application router. The idea is that you run an instance of Envoy alongside each of your applications. Your application listens and sends all its requests to localhost and doesn't need to know anything about where other services actually live.
It handles HTTP, of course, but also MongoDB and Redis and PostgreSQL and generic TCP sockets.
- Amazon has received the go-ahead to launch 3236 satellites. (The Verge)
I'm so old I remember when that was a lot.
- Sort by controversial. (Slate Star Codex)
Three thoughts:
1. This is a great idea for a new social network if you want to watch the world burn.
2. It's probably fiction.
3. It's probably not written by GPT-3.
- Thanks for nagging me, Font Awesome.
No, seriously. I've been so busy the past week that I forgot about the 50% off FA 6 offer for backers of the FA 5 Kickstarter. Grabbed it with 11 hours to go.
$49 per year (regularly $99) for all their icons for five seats. I'd forgotten that part; makes it a great deal for small companies with a few developers / designers.
Not At All Tech News
Disclaimer: Probably.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
10:48 PM
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All is proceeding as I have foreseen: PC genderologists now classify humanity by Preferred Cancer: Prostate or Cervix.
-j
-j
Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, August 01 2020 01:09 AM (ZlYZd)
2
Dang, if only some \persun\ with a bit of foresight had created short, effective words to describe individuals with cervixes and indiviuals with prostates at some point in the dim and distant past.
Posted by: normal at Saturday, August 01 2020 06:11 AM (obo9H)
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