Isn’t it a reference to the trick that mentalists have been doing for decades? My mind immediately went to Uri Gellar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_bending

I built an RS232 cable from parts from RadioShack 25 years ago, with no soldering, just electrical tape. It’s surprisingly easy if you don’t need speed. Mine capped out at 1200 or 2400 baud. Was it good? No. Did it work? Absolutely.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peano_axioms

In this case, they’re talking about being in the natural numbers club, and applying the “successor” (or “succ”) function.

Exactly.

Most of the comments in this thread are accusing him of trying to take credit for the work of a machine that’s just imitating other work. It’s the FuckAI echo chamber and people who didn’t actually read the article.

In this case, it’s more like he’s claiming to have created a genuinely creative being that deserves rights previously reserved for humans (like copyrights and patents).

It’s a completely different (and IMO, much weirder) story than people are assuming.

Yeah… Checking his website at https://imagination-engines.com/founder.htm, he certainly seems like an “interesting” character.

My understanding is that he did do the work of creating the AI. This isn’t just someone using ChatGPT.

In this case, it’s not that he’s trying to claim copyright for himself based on coming up with a prompt. He’s spent years applying for patents and copyrights with the AI listed as the creator.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DABUS

Speaking as a green card holder (who, by definition, went through the immigration process), I’m wondering if they’re alleging that he lied on his application.

It was a long time ago when I filled it out, but I do remember that there were a lot of questions about whether you’ve ever been convicted of or even charged with a crime.

Ooh! There was an episode of the Past, Present, Future podcast a couple of months ago that touched on this very subject. Tariff policy was set by congress up until the Smoot-Hawley act, which was considered such garbage that they decided that it should be left to the executive.

Back when it was a congressional power, it was also the source of some of the worst horse-trading, as representatives from rural areas would seek protection on agricultural imports (with low tariffs on imported machinery), while representatives from manufacturing areas would seek to lower food prices and increase the cost of imported manufactured goods.

Edit: Not saying that handing it to the executive is the best plan, as we can see by what’s going on now, but letting congress do it was also problematic. It’s funny how a lot of us grew up with the idea that no/low tariffs are the natural order, when it’s actually been a fairly short-lived anomaly in historical terms.

Oh, maybe! I didn’t understand how it chose the points, but it does look like the random convergence approach.

Nice, thanks!

I’m disappointed that none of them seem to have gone with the random convergence approach.

Set the three corners of an equilateral triangle. Pick a random starting point on the canvas. Every iteration, pick a random corner from the triangle and your next point is the midpoint between the current point and that corner. While the original point is almost guaranteed not to be a point in Sierpinski’s triangle, each iteration cuts the distance between the new point and the nearest Sierpinski point in half.

If you start plotting points starting with (say) the 50th one, every pixel is “close enough” to a Sierpinski point that you see the triangle materialize out of nothing. The whole thing could be programmed in about 20 lines of QBasic on DOS 30 years ago.

So when you zip some files and then unzip them, some of the bytes are missing? Really?!

Wait… Is that community run by Gerald Holmes?

http://www.l8r.net/geraldholmes.freeyellow.com/ (a 25 year-old, very likely satire site)

As a maintainer on an open source project, I assume the sticks are PRs coming in right before code freeze, right? Right?!

While kids are now more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD due to increased awareness and better diagnostic methods, this can also lead to an interesting “reverse echo” effect where their parents have a sudden realization that they’re ADHD too.

Hearing about the symptoms from a doctor talking about your child can be an eye-opener that stuff we called “laziness” and “being too sensitive” back in the 80s might have a better name.

Trump’s second impeachment came after he lost his second election.