Look up the English Enclosure acts. They brought about a large-scale robbery of peasants by landowners in the 17th and 18th centuries, and created a proletarian class that needed factory work to survive. Things got a little better in the 19th and especially 20th centuries.
Curious to hear if anyone has tried running the 2-bit or 3-bit quantization of this. With a bit of investment I may just be able to swing it locally. I already have 96GB VRAM, so with 192GB RAM, which seems to be the most one can find these days with a 4-slot motherboard, I may be in with a shot. Yes, it'd be slow, but I could give it overnight jobs. But I don't know if running at such a low quantization would make it hallucinate with only a small context.
Qwen and Gemma are great, but they need babysitting every 30 mins, which is quite a cognitive load.
How far would you take this? Let's grant that the difference between murder and a just killing is what someone (maybe the guy in power) says it is, nothing more. Would you say the same about robbery? Is it only robbery to point a gun at someone and take his money if someone says it is? If yes, at what point does the distinction between one thing and another thing become real, and not just based on what some guy says?
Yes. A full-recourse loan and a non-recourse loan are different: in the way a cat and a dog are different, not in the way a small dog and a big dog are different. It's most unfortunate (and probably deliberate) that they both go by the word 'loan'. Aquinas explains this very clearly in his discussion of usury in the Summa.
Anyone failing to distinguish between the two has no business talking about the ethics of usury, or the history of late-medieval Catholic teaching on the same.
Making a profit on a full-recourse loan, regardless of whether the lender or borrower are Christian or not, is a sin, and a pretty serious one at that. Usury is to fraud what robbery is to larceny. Many people try to claim that the Church has 'changed its teaching' on this, but they can never point to a source that shows this.
For those of us who have read Paul Graham's submarine essay, should the last paragraph be a giveaway? The "AI theoretician's" quote seems to have nothing to do with the rest of the article.
It's astonishing to me that advertising and marketing is accepted as normal. The majority of B2C marketing is designed to manipulate people's emotions so that they act against their interests, in order to make you money. It's really disgusting.
> During the Middle Ages, Western civilization described humans as composed of two distinct entities: body and soul.
This is absolutely, completely, demonstrably false. Soul-body dualism was largely a 17th-century innovation, although Plato somewhat anticipated it. Most medieval Catholic thought rejected it (and continues to do so), being quite clear that the soul/mind and the body are one entity. How can people in good conscience write about things they're so ignorant of?
Gell-Mann suggests I don't read the rest of the article. A brief scan reveals a rehash of the common assertions with no serious attempt to reply to counterarguments.
I was seriously considering investing in an RTX 6000 rig, and I think this is just enough to tip me over the edge. I know it's not as good as CC, but at least I know it'll be there tomorrow.
I am interested in hearing how to get hard drives to last longer. Should you keep them locked away in the closet? Spin them up occasionally but not too much? Keep them always-on? I understand the less reading and writing, the better.
How does external compare to internal, if at all? Is 3.5" going to last longer than something smaller?
Yes, I'm grateful I run Linux. You can get quite a bit done with 4GB RAM and a 6th generation (or even earlier) CPU. All 64-bit. I don't think such ancient hardware will be affected by AI demand to the same degree (though I think we'll still see some prices rise if people stop buying new stuff).
The worry is that at some point the older hardware will stop working.
Search the site for other examples of the fun he had with it.
I'd choose Wikipedia over AI, of course, so I'm ultimately grateful it's there. But better than both would be a well-edited traditional encyclopedia, written by experts in a single voice, and possibly peer-reviewed.
Potentially-ignoramus comment here, apologies in advance, but amazon.com itself appears to be fine right now. Perhaps slower to load pages, by about half a second. Are they not eating (much of) their own dog food?
Worth remembering that the Venerable Bede was writing The Ecclesiastical History of the English People two centuries before Athelstan, so clearly there was some notion of unity as early as that.
I recommend "The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science" by E.A. Burtt if you're interested in that period. It discusses both the science, and the different philosophies of physics that were informing and perhaps influencing them. The book is a hundred years old but very readable.