'In accepting an honorary degree from the University of Notre Dame a few years ago, General David Sarnoff made this statement: "We are too prone to make technological instruments the scapegoats for the sins of those who wield them. The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value."

That is the voice of the current somnambulism.

Suppose we were to say, "Apple pie is in itself neither good nor bad; it is the way it is used that determines its value." Or, "The smallpox virus is in itself neither good nor bad; it is the way it is used that determines its value." Again, "Firearms are in themselves neither good nor bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value." That is, if the slugs reach the right people firearms are good. If the TV tube fires the right ammunition at the right people it is good.

I am not being perverse. There is simply nothing in the Sarnoff statement that will bear scrutiny, for it ignores the nature of the medium.'

Since you didn't provide the author, it's Marshall McLuhan, from Understanding Media. Here's a link: http://topologicalmedialab.net/xinwei/classes/readings/McLuh...

For the record, I disagree with McLuhan, but perhaps I don't fully understand his argument.

If you disagree with the statement, "guns don't kill people, people do," then you agree with McLuhan's maxim of the medium being the message and that there is no such thing as an unbiased tool.

You can use a hammer to screw and a screw to hammer, but the biases for their respective uses are embedded in their affordances. McLuhan argues that the same can be said for any tool, whether it's a binky or a bomb.

> is the grass greener on the other side of the fence?

Was it?

Not OP but:

The grass is greener where you water it.

Also it's greener over the septic tank.

tulips grow well there too

For about 6 months out of the year!

The insidiousness of notebooks is in their uncanny resemblance to proper code. To take writing for example, a handwritten draft scrawled on coffee-stained yellow paper is more obviously a work-in-progress than a typed manuscript. But the maturity of code is not so immediately apparent.

I agree. TFA calls out the “fundamental weakness” of the theory as a lack of specificity in definition and measurement, then goes on to make further opinionated statements as far as a proclaimed definition without referencing the much deeper history of the uncanny in literature (e.g. The Sandman, Frankenstein) and philosophy (Jentsch and Freud).

"The tie between information and action has been severed. Information is now a commodity that can be bought and sold, or used as a form of entertainment, or worn like a garment to enhance one's status. It comes indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, disconnected from usefulness; we are glutted with information, drowning in information, have no control over it, don't know what to do with it."

The uncanny valley of generated software: utility is inversely proportional to distance from the correct answer, with a huge drop into the dangerously believable.

I find this comment a bit myopic.

First is the belief that the essence of a person can be reduced to quantified metrics as inherited and objective as height or, in this case, the shape of one's vocal cords and the resultant pitch of their voice. Second is using a glorified function approximator as an arbiter. The positive outcome for OpenAI would be a classifier able to achieve high accuracy in distinguishing between the original and impersonated voice as evidence that the voices are sufficiently distinct.

In the event of an underperforming classifier, what is preventing OpenAI from claiming that the current technology is simply not adequate? Under what grounds could one refute the claim that a future, more advanced system, very probably trained with more appropriated data, would be a better classifier and favor OpenAI?

Thank you for caring about the craft.

> I would also add that they often don't use version control.

Working for corporate R&D, I once received a repo on a flash drive. The team would merge changes manually by copy-pasting.

I should've just turned around and left.

Same. I'm completely anhedonic by Friday when I box myself into a schedule like this, which makes enjoying the weekend feel like a chore.