gerikson

current difficulties

1. Day 21 - Keypad Conundrum: 01h01m23s
2. Day 17 - Chronospatial Computer: 44m39s
3. Day 15 - Warehouse Woes: 30m00s
4. Day 12 - Garden Groups: 17m42s
5. Day 20 - Race Condition: 15m58s
6. Day 14 - Restroom Redoubt: 15m48s
7. Day 09 - Disk Fragmenter: 14m05s
8. Day 16 - Reindeer Maze: 13m47s
9. Day 22 - Monkey Market: 12m15s
10. Day 13 - Claw Contraption: 11m04s
11. Day 06 - Guard Gallivant: 08m53s
12. Day 08 - Resonant Collinearity: 07m12s
13. Day 11 - Plutonian Pebbles: 06m24s
14. Day 18 - RAM Run: 05m55s
15. Day 04 - Ceres Search: 05m41s
16. Day 23 - LAN Party: 05m07s
17. Day 02 - Red Nosed Reports: 04m42s
18. Day 10 - Hoof It: 04m14s
19. Day 07 - Bridge Repair: 03m47s
20. Day 05 - Print Queue: 03m43s
21. Day 03 - Mull It Over: 03m22s
22. Day 19 - Linen Layout: 03m16s
23. Day 01 - Historian Hysteria: 02m31s

Problem difficulty so far (up to day 16)

1. Day 15 - Warehouse Woes: 30m00s
2. Day 12 - Garden Groups: 17m42s
3. Day 14 - Restroom Redoubt: 15m48s
4. Day 09 - Disk Fragmenter: 14m05s
5. Day 16 - Reindeer Maze: 13m47s
6. Day 13 - Claw Contraption: 11m04s
7. Day 06 - Guard Gallivant: 08m53s
8. Day 08 - Resonant Collinearity: 07m12s
9. Day 11 - Plutonian Pebbles: 06m24s
10. Day 04 - Ceres Search: 05m41s
11. Day 02 - Red Nosed Reports: 04m42s
12. Day 10 - Hoof It: 04m14s
13. Day 07 - Bridge Repair: 03m47s
14. Day 05 - Print Queue: 03m43s
15. Day 03 - Mull It Over: 03m22s
16. Day 01 - Historian Hysteria: 02m31s

The previous thread has fallen off the front page, feel free to use this for discussions on current problems

Rules: no spoilers, use the handy dandy spoiler preset to mark discussions as spoilers

“It is soulless. There is no personality to it. There is no voice. Read a bunch of dialogue in an AI generated story and all the dialogue reads the same. No character personality comes through,” she said. Generated text also tends to lack a strong sense of place, she’s observed; the settings of the stories are either overly-detailed for popular locations, or too vague, because large language models can’t imagine new worlds and can only draw from existing works that have been scraped into its training data.

The grifters in question:

Jeremie and Edouard Harris, the CEO and CTO of Gladstone respectively, have been briefing the U.S. government on the risks of AI since 2021. The duo, who are brothers [...]

Edouard's website: https://www.eharr.is/, and on LessWrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/users/edouard-harris

Jeremie's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremieharris/

The company website: https://www.gladstone.ai/

HN reacts to a New Yorker piece on the "obscene energy demands of AI" with exactly the same arguments coiners use when confronted with the energy cost of blockchain - the product is valuable in of itself, demands for more energy will spur investment in energy generation, and what about the energy costs of painting oil on canvas, hmmmmmm??????

Maybe it's just my newness antennae needing calibrating, but I do feel the extreme energy requirements for what's arguably just a frivolous toy is gonna cause AI boosters big problems, especially as energy demands ramp up in the US in the warmer months. Expect the narrative to adjust to counter it.

Yes, I know it's a Verge link, but I found the explanation of the legal failings quite funny, and I think it's "important" we keep track of which obscenely rich people are mad at each other so we can choose which of their kingdoms to be serfs in.

Apologies for the link to The Register...

Dean Phillips is your classic ratfucking candidate, attempting to siphon off support from the incumbent to help their opponent. After a brief flare of hype before the (unofficial) NH primary, he seems to have flamed out by revealing his master plan too early.

Anyway, apparently some outfit called "Delphi" tried to create an AI version of him via a SuperPAC and got their OpenAI API access banned for their pains.

Quoth ElReg:

Not even the presence of Matt Krisiloff, a founding member of OpenAI, at the head of the PAC made a difference.

The pair have reportedly raised millions for We Deserve Better, driven in part by a $1 million donation from hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, who described his funding of the super PAC as "the largest investment I have ever made in someone running for office."

So the same asshole who is combating "woke" and DEI is bankrolling Phillips, supposed to be the new Bernie. Got it.

Years ago (we're talking decades) I ran into a small program that randomly generated raytraced images (think transparent orbs, lens flares, reflection etc), suitable for saving as wallpapers. It was a C/C++ program that ran on Linux. I've long since lost the name and the source code, and I wonder if there's anything like that out there now?

Rules: no spoilers.

The other rules are made up as we go along.

Share code by link to a forge, home page, pastebin (Eric Wastl has one here) or code section in a comment.