The thing is that the mainstream aspect will burn out, like most fads do, but the people who really love it will keep loving it, and some (usually small) amount of the new influx will also stick around permanently and enrich the community. It’s just about surviving through the fad part that is hard.

that’s disturbing, I’m very sorry you had to deal with that, having someone you were supposed to trust with your health, who suddenly pulled back the curtain and revealed themselves as an utter moron.

Same with leaded gas: it is a wonderful fuel additive; very effective and engines ran so well as they covered the world with lead microparticles. And CFCs: a really great refrigerant but it just also loves reacting with stratospheric ozone! Oddly enough, both commercialized by the same dude https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.

I feel conflicted about the whole thing. Technically it’s a model. I don’t feel that people should be able to sue me as a scientist for making a model based on publicly available data. I myself am merely trying to use the model itself to explain stuff about the world. But OpenAI are also selling access to the outputs of the model, that can very closely approximate the intellectual property of people. Also, most of the training data was accessed via scraping and other gray market methods that were often explicitly violating the TOU of the various places they scraped from. So it all is very difficult to sort through ethically.

The backstory is that he wrote it in a letter to Charles Lyell, and also used the opportunity to rant about how much he hated orchids

(During grad school, I had this quote printed on my office wall because I identified with it)

“We cracked the case open when we discovered their chats in ‘troubleshooting_not_secret_comms.xls’. They tried to cover their tracks through regular deletion, and they would have gotten away with it if not for one neglected PC in a disused office running an unsupervised copy of Norton Backup 1990.”

Yes, the metaphor has fallen out of fashion for a lot of reasons, including that the guy who coined the expression turned out to be a real piece of shit, but the core concept is still a valid one.

I have a Volt, and I resent how few compact hybrid options there will be when I get a replacement. When I drive around, I literally struggle to see around the giant land boats cruising around. They hold up parking lots trying to stuff themselves into spaces, and if I get hit by one I’m much more likely to be injured. Average car size is kind of a tragedy of the commons. Everyone suffers when the cars get bigger, but the individuals with the dumb land boats suffer little of the cost.