That is the same categorical argument as what the story is about: scanned brains are not perceived as people so can be “tasked” without affording moral consideration. You are saying because we have LLMs, categorically not people, we would never enter the moral quandaries of using uploaded humans in that way since we can just use LLMs instead.
But… why are LLMs not worthy of any moral consideration? That question is a bit of a rabbit hole with a lot of motivated reasoning on either side of the argument, but the outcome is definitely not settled.
For me this story became even more relevant since the LLM revolution, because we could be making the exact mistake humanity made in the story.
And beyond the ethical points it makes (which I agree may or may not be relevant for LLMs - nobody can know for sure at this point), I find some of the details about how brain images are used in the story to have been very prescient of LLMs' uses and limitations.
E.g. it is mentioned that MMAcevedo performs better when told certain lies, predicting the "please help me write this, I have no fingers and can't do it myself" kinda system prompts people sometimes used in the GPT-4 days to squeeze a bit more performance out of the LLM.
The point about MMAcevedo's performance degrading the longer it has been booted up (due to exhaustion), mirroring LLMs getting "stupider" and making more mistakes the closer one gets to their context window limit.
And of course MMAcevedo's "base" model becoming less and less useful as the years go by and the world around it changes while it remains static, exactly analogous to LLMs being much worse at writing code that involves libraries which didn't yet exist when they were trained.
On mastodon, with the non-algorithmic feed, following mostly accounts that aren’t particularly political, those things are still at the top of the feed. If you’re not seeing those topics at the top of your feed you’re probably being misled by your algorithm.
Another reason why feed ranking algorithms should be published. If we can see the algorithm we can stop playing these yes/no games. The real enemies are social media companies, not the other side of politics.
Realistically to maintain a modern web framework to even a minimal standard you need a few people working fulltime on it, and more than a few if you want to take it places. There needs to be some kind of long term sustainable vehicle for funding those developers, either a corporate sponsor or a foundation.
So all those frameworks have to end up somewhere, and I’d rather it be somewhere else than vercel, as they already own way too much of the web frontend space.
You have to use third party software to configure them properly, then they work fine. I used logitech’s drivers for a while but they’ve become the biggest pile of garbage I have ever seen call itself a driver. I now use BetterMouse instead.
I have to disagree on trackpads sucking less. This year I walked into a big box electronics store and tried the screen, keyboard and trackpad on every laptop they had on display.
Trackpads were universally abysmal, with the sole exception of the macbooks. They all had the frustrating diveboard design, every single one at every price point from every manufacturer. I’m sure you can buy laptops with decent trackpads online, but they had none in the store, macbooks excepted.
Keyboards were all over the place, but I notice that even some premium models are now carrying generic low end keyboard parts with weak travel, lack of key separation, num lock mashed into the backspace, and awkward arrow key layout. If anything I think keyboards are getting worse.
Screens are the one place where I’ll say things have improved noticeably, especially colors and black levels, although getting over 200 ppi and 500 nits is still a rare treat, and that is my bar for a compromiseless display.
You're comparing Apple to unnamed computers brands you touched at a random place, I'm not sure what to make of it.
For instance how does the Macbook Air compare to the current 13" Surface Laptop ? Is that what you call diveboard design and awkward arrow key layout ?
Given the primary selling point of laptops is their portability (often at the cost of other things), they should be optimized to be highly usable wherever they might end up getting used.
I don’t feel confident there is a way to use npm safely. The basic problem is that of curation, and there not being any except for what you do yourself. Every day brings new surprises, and osv.dev’s npm feed is a continuous horror show.
I would love to see the equivalent of a linux distro, a curated set of packages and package versions that are known to be compatible and safe. If someone offered this as a paid product businesses would pay for it.
I mitigate by shooting JPG most of the time, only going to RAW for shots I think will need the sort of editing RAW enables. So, maybe 10-20% of my shots are RAW, at most.
And for most of those, after edits, I'll export back into Photos as a new file, and remove the original RAW. Obviously, this is destructive, so it might not appeal to you, but it does side-step the RAW storage conundrum.
That 15mb still needs to be parsed on every page load, even if it runs in interpreted mode. And on low end devices there’s very little cache, so the working set is likely to be far bigger than available cache, which causes performance to crater.
Ah, that's the thing: "on page load". A one-time expense! If you're using modern page routing, "loading a new URL" isn't actually loading a new page... The client is just simulating it via your router/framework by updating the page URL and adding an entry to the history.
Also, 15MB of JS is nothing on modern "low end devices". Even an old, $5 Raspberry Pi 2 won't flinch at that and anything slower than that... isn't my problem! Haha =)
There comes a point where supporting 10yo devices isn't worth it when what you're offering/"selling" is the latest & greatest technology.
It shouldn't be, "this is why we can't have nice things!" It should be, "this is why YOU can't have nice things!"
When you write code with this mentality it makes my modern CPU with 16 cores at 4HGz and 64GB of RAM feel like a Pentium 3 running at 900MHz with 512MB of RAM.
This really is a very wrong take. My iPhone 11 isn't that old but it struggles to render some websites that are Chrome-optimised. Heck, even my M1 Air has a hard time sometimes. It's almost 2026, we can certainly stop blaming the client for our shitty webdevelopment practices.
>There comes a point where supporting 10yo devices isn't worth it
Ten years isn't what it used to be in terms of hardware performance. Hell, even back in 2015 you could probably still make do with a computer from 2005 (although it might have been on its last legs). If your software doesn't run properly (or at all) on ten-year-old hardware, it's likely people on five-year-old hardware, or with a lower budget, are getting a pretty shitty experience.
I'll agree that resources are finite and there's a point beyond which further optimizations are not worthwhile from a business sense, but where that point lies should be considered carefully, not picked arbitrarily and the consequences casually handwaved with an "eh, not my problem".
But… why are LLMs not worthy of any moral consideration? That question is a bit of a rabbit hole with a lot of motivated reasoning on either side of the argument, but the outcome is definitely not settled.
For me this story became even more relevant since the LLM revolution, because we could be making the exact mistake humanity made in the story.
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