Man that got famous by confidently making claims on stuff he has zero idea about (religion and philosophy) is still making claims on stuff he has zero idea about.
Dawkins should stick to pop-biology, and we should be more demanding before granting someone a title of public intellectual.
I never particularly revered Dawkins, but he always ranked reasonably high in educated circles, and his books were very popular.
But my goodness, the buckets of crap that get poured on him nowadays, in stark contrast with even 10 years ago. Parent comment is an exhibit.
I am 99% convinced that it's because Dawkins ended up on some "anti hate" group target list, after he said things in 2021 that the trans movement found offensive.
> he always ranked reasonably high in educated circles
Unless someone was educated in philosophy of religion, for example.
> and his books were very popular.
Hard to deny. I have a beef with pop-science in general, but nothing particularly bad about his books on evolution.
> But my goodness, the buckets of crap that get poured on him nowadays, in stark contrast with even 10 years ago. Parent comment is an exhibit.
My comment is not exhibit - I poured crap on him more than even 10 years ago, when he was one of the Four Horsemen (and I poured crap on other three as well), and generally celebrated.
I was there before it was fashionable.
> I am 99% convinced that it's because Dawkins ended up on some "anti hate" group target list, after he said things in 2021 that the trans movement found offensive.
Couldn't care less about trans movement or Dawkins opinion on gender issues.
You don't have to be expert in all subjects to be respected for one you do know, evolution in Dawkins case. The fact he considers religion to be nonsense and hence has limited knowledge of it doesn't change that.
I've got one. I'm working on a cryptographic identity system in rust. One of the stricter iterations of it demanded creating a public version and private version of each type. The best way to accomplish this is a procedural macro. I don't know if you've written proc macros by hand in rust. I have, years ago, and it was somewhat torturous. I didn't want to relearn to do it all over again and spend what would have taken weeks (this is a side project) to gain a skill I will easily forget in a month or so. So I had an LLM code it for me. This is a really great use for it: it's not building any strong logic or doing any IO, it's simply writing code that generates other code, and is entirely verifiable and testable. It built it for me so I could spend those weeks working on higher level logic and p2p syncing protocol stuff that actually matters for the project.
I want to make it clear that I'm an LLM luddite. I mostly find the things distasteful and obnoxious. But there are definitely use-cases where they can do what's essentially bitch work and save a lot of time that would otherwise be a waste. It's a tool that can be used for specific things. I don't use them for everything.
Did it became noticeably better because you used LLM to make a proc macro, therefore freed up you creative and cognitive powers to deliver something much better than you would by writing this macro yourself?
I spend a week hand-generating charts and graphs detailing my caloric intake vs creative output in case I needed to convince someone online that my side quest was a success. Are you stupid?
I measured it in time and personal energy. I spend time working on something creative as opposed to working on something procedural. If I'd had to write the macros by hand, it would have sucked a lot of joy out of the project and would have delayed me probably much longer than it would have just to write the macros.
Your line of questioning is obnoxious and indicative that your original suspicions are false, yet you're too pigheaded to just let it go and admit that you are wrong.
I'll bite. I've been writing music for decades but I can't sing. With ai I can write lyrics and generate ai vocals, then separate the stems and extract the vocals throwing away the rest.
Add the vocals to my daw and create the rest the way I want.
Saying its a great work of art is subjective, but for me I can make music I couldn't before now.
Parent suggests the perspective where using AI allows to free up the "brain juice", and utilize it elsewhere. What you describe is AI allowing you to mitigate some limitations that prevented you trying something. So not the same.
Sidebar: learn to sing. Singing well and “finding your voice” are in my mind equivalent. Every time I become a more confident person I get better at singing. Every time my singing gets better through practice I feel more confident. “Speak with your chest” didn’t make sense until a few years ago. Now it’s obvious to me when someone is incapable of it.
On my side, I can give many examples of random software that became significantly worse since the AI trend started.
Trainline is practically unusable for purchasing itineraries that go accross multiple european countries. GitHub Actions now contains a bunch of extremely frustrating random bugs. Grammarly somehow gives worse copy recommendations.
So this is the classic tension between the "coding for the love of code" vs the "coding to solve problems" mindset. This cultural concept has been around since before AI was on the scene, heck well before software existed (craftsman vs builder).
I'm curious why this is a vs and you have to pick both? I've found coding for the love of code always helped me accelerate my speed and ability so that I could also deliver solidly on time and solve the problems too.
I tried Twow, and the experience blew me away. Awesome community, TONS of new content that not only expanded the endgame, but the leveling experience as well (I don't have time for raiding, so I really appreciated what they did with new quests, new zones etc.) True Classic+ experience that Blizzard will never match, because if they could, they would already.
> What will change, however, is no country will build anything new that is entirely dependent on a U.S. entity, and every country will now try to find alternatives to existing dependencies.
> It will be a slow, multi-decade process, but it’s probably irreversible at this point.
I think it is important to distinguish talk intended to appease the public, that currently is very anti-US, from real policies. For example there is lot of talk about sovereignty in the EU, you can even see lot of that here, but so far no real steps were taken. Globalism cannot be reversed, not without some external factor like global cataclysm. And the public opinion on anything, in the age of Twitter et al, change as often as Trump's proclaimed policies.
Truth is, EU countries have not other potential ally that could replace US, especially among themselves. In Poland some groups dream about European army and French nuclear sharing, when first is pure fantasy, and second is even less reliable that the US one.
You can balance however much you want between US and China, but there may be time when you need to choose. As bad as current state of US is, China is an antithesis to everything EU and its democracies say they stand for.
> I think it is important to distinguish talk intended to appease the public, that currently is very anti-US, from real policies.
It's pretty clear that governments engage in such two-sided talk at their peril going forward. This is exactly how you get populism - usually of the far-right variety, with its specific blend of parochialism, jingoism and nihilism.
There is no other word that reeks more of ideology than entrepreneur. It is a name of the fake promise fed to masses by people having wealth and power, and not willing to share it.
It is good to encourage people to save money and invest them, but 8 out of 10 people out there don't earn enough to gather so much capital to live off it.
In general, you are right, but many people on this site do earn enough. Engineers have some of the highest paying "normal person" jobs out there. If we can't save and invest for the future, who can?
Agreed. And if more high income professionals pursued this path, it would tip the balance of power in the workforce away from employers. That's a win for all except those at the top.
> It for sure is but it's being ised to refute an affirmative assertion, not make it's own assertion.
To refute assertion you need to claim negation of that assertion, which is assertion in itself, as every negation can be rewritten to become affirmation, and vice versa.
This is not true. Producing a counter example to an assertion refutes the assertion.
While you can certainly argue that such a counter example entails the negation of the original assertion, that is not the same thing as claiming the negation of the assertion.
Putting forth an argument or demonstrating a counterexample is not the same as asserting all of the logical consequences of that argument.
The second statement doesn't actually imply that all cats are black but it does refute that all cats are white. It doesn't make it's own claim about all cats, it just adds an anecdote that doesn't conform to the first statement.
This fantasy of AI replacing C-suites, CEOs or whatever is very symptomatic of naive tech-folk outlook, completely blind towards sociological and political reality.
Dawkins should stick to pop-biology, and we should be more demanding before granting someone a title of public intellectual.
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