Compiling isn’t sufficient because it doesn’t tell you if the program matches the specification. A program that always says the temperature is 80 F will compile but is a terrible solution to what is the temperature outside at this location right now.

That's funny, I know someone that's fairly famous in the product development world that claimed to be the inventor of the gas pump arrow. Weird thing to lie about.

a very slow one.

IMHO the smart people saw the "Ghibli scandal" and thought "omg this is the feature of IP".

You don't like the last Star Wars trilogy? Pay us a few hundred dollars and you can rewrite your own story, thank you very much this is where you put the credit card number.

It was INEVITABLE.

I’m pretty sure people don’t want that for the same reason people buy books instead of writing things they want to read. It’s not just to save the effort— stories are good because they surprise, challenge, and inspire us. I think the idea of the “everyone can make the exact movies they want to see” thing conceptually makes sense at first blush, but I just don’t think people want something that matches their assumptions entirely.

Not only that, they’re materially worse than real movies. Designer t-shirts still sell despite people being able to buy blank t-shirts and color them in with laundry markers.

If it's smart it won't be what you planned, but it'll almost always be what you like. If you thought the Vader scene at the end of Rogue One was stupid fanservice, it leans one way; if you went "FINALLY! YES!" it leans another. Lather rinse repeat across many potential inputs.

With the right sensors, your sentiment will be apparent to the system and it will be able to tune on the fly.

I think curated interactive environments like games are a much more realistic application of those distant technologies than automatically modified Hollywood movies on the fly.

And personally, I have absolutely no desire to modify movies that bothered me, story-wise, artistically, or editorially, with my own ideas. Likewise, I also don’t want to modify classic paintings to make the people fit my preferences for attractiveness. And I sure don’t want it done automatically.

Art is interesting because it comes from other people’s brains.

Art doesn’t smoothly fit in, it imposes.

Clearly there’s a market for Netflix background noise, but no one’s going to theme parks for that.

I’m not sure what you’re trying to say here.

> It’s not just to save the effort— stories are good because they surprise, challenge, and inspire us.

Maybe, but that's the minority of demand. Most book sales are to people looking for something comfortable - think the near-infinite supply of practically interchangeable romance novels or detective stories.

Comfortable is different than known. How often do people use LLMs to generate fiction for them to read?

I hear a lot of people already roleplay with LLMs which is pretty much that.

No, it’s not the same as generating yourself a static piece of literature to read. It’s the difference between having an hours-long conversation and listening to an hours-long monologue. They are neither conceptually nor practically the same activity. It’s much closer to playing a video game.

Some people are really going to hate this.

Sounds like you work with inexperienced PMs that are not doing their job, did you try having a serious conversation about this pattern with them? I'm pretty sure some communication would go a long way towards getting you on a better collaboration groove.

I've been doing API development for over ten years and worked at different companies. Most PMs are not technical and it's the development team's job figure out the technical specifications for APIs we build. If you press the PMs, they will ask the engineering/development manager for the written technical requirements, and if the manager is not technical, they will assign it to the developers/engineers. Technical requirements for an API are really a system design question.

The technical design is definitely the job of the technical team for the most part, but the business requirements should be squarely on the pm. The list of use cases, how the API feels, the performance etc... All of that the business owner should be able to describe to you to ensure it does the job it needs and is fit for the market.

That would be the biggest mistake anyone could do. I hope nobody goes down this route. AI "wanting" things are an enormous risk to alignment.

At some point I think we'll have to face the idea that any AI more intelligent than ourselves will by definition be able to evade our alignment tricks.

equating more intelligent to "wanting things" is a fallacy. You can have a hyper intelligent computer that simply waits for you to ask it to do a job, or you can endow it with the digital equivalent of hunger and reproductive instincts and it will behave completely differently.

We would be INSANE to pursue giving that type of instincts to AIs.

For some senses of “wanting things”, I think it might be hard to make a powerful AI that couldn’t be easily modified to produce one that “wants things” in some sense.

So, if it would be bad thing for one to be made that “wants things” in any reasonable sense of the phrase, then it would probably be bad for J Random to be able to take a copy of a powerful AI and modify it in some way, because someone is likely to try doing that.

Of course, perhaps the best way to make sure that J Random doesn’t have the ability to do that, is to make sure no one does.

You are making a claim that "Intelligenece" is separable from other things found in humans and other animals. There is no proof or example supporting this.

I have come to beleive that we will only be able to truly replicate intelligence if the system was trying to preserve itself. Its the biggest incentive ever to do intelligent things.

I mean setting any neural net with a 'goal' is really just defining a want/need. You can't just encode the entire problemspace of reality, you have to give the application something to filter out.

I have been a lot less lucky

Genuinely interested: did the distro break "on its own", or was it due to something you did? Not trying to suggest you are incompetent: maybe "doing it right" is not intuitive, and that's an issue. But I wonder which distro publishes changes that they call "stable" and just break things. Or worse get to the point where it requires a complete reinstall every year...

For instance, by installing stuff on the system with "sudo make install" that breaks the expectations of the system package manager, or by modifying config files and then not handling the merge conflict during the update, or stuff like this?

Very, very long ago I remember having to reinstall some nvidia drivers once in a while (but while annoying it took minutes), and I haven't used nvidia since then.

I don't know about that. I had plenty of stuff break randomly when updating Ubuntu so I can see the appeal.

Don’t worry. These immutable distros break in completely new and unexpected ways, especially since a lot of programs don’t quite gel with it or with the flatpak stuff (e.g. mdns still not really supported)

I ran Silverblue for a while, but you can still have your mutable distributions on top through toolbox or distrobox.

Which bring their own issues. The compromises may or may not be worth it.

correction to the title: the plane crashed because the owner is a moron, not because he bought a 3d printed part but because he failed to ensure his provider is trustworthy and instead used a fly-by-night nobody to fit a machine that can kill him at any moment.

Absurd what people will do to save a buck.