What? 100% disagree! Do you actually mean this? What do you think is important?

"explore the world without desire"

I don't know how I feel about this. I know when I can manage to accept things I feel better overall, but there is real joy in getting what you wanted - in doing something you enjoy, and realising that you're enjoying it while you're doing it, and rejoicing in that

Detachment is all very well, but attachment brings higher highs as well as lower lows

From my own experience, it is about lowering expectations, not detachement. World is full of things and processes I can't control, experiencing them without expectations gives me peace and joy, and I attach to them then in such blissful state.

Impressed by what utter shit this is. Music video creators are safe for a while yet

> having humans watch every citizen on camera instead of just using computers which even Asimov in the 1980s could see was laughably inefficient

1984 was published in 1949. It's a bit harsh to expect him to have anticipated computers

In addition, he was riffing on Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, a hub-and-spoke style prison design with a single guard at the hub observing the prisoners in each spoke.

1984 imagines a telecom-enabled nationwide panopticon, which made for good speculative fiction in the 50’s (and also does now). Asimov wishes he had been that prescient.

Read what Asimov says in his review, the whole idea is fundamentally absurd when you think about it for even a second.

Asimov seems to have missed that the book does not claim that everyone is being watched at all times, but that everyone could be watched at any time, in any place, and that they have no way to know for sure if they are at any given moment. Therefore, they have to behave as if they are under surveillance at all times, just in case. It’s a very effective and practical means of control. See the famous panopticon concept. You don’t even need a guard in the tower, just the threat of one most of the time, and occasional random, unpredictable enforcement just often enough that the surveilled cannot relax. The cost of doing so is not impractical at all.

Asimov is missing an important point that is pretty clearly spelled out in the novel, and this severely weakens his critique. I find this pretty funny because he starts off the essay insinuating that others who claim to love the book haven’t read it. Same to you for hating it without having understood it, Asimov!

That review is hilarious.

"To summarise, then: George Orwell in 1984 was, in my opinion, engaging in a private feud with Stalinism, rather that attempting to forecast the future."

He really got it!

And shows how fundamentally Asimov misunderstands how totalitarian societies work. "Furthermore, he has a system of volunteer spies in which children report on their parents, and neighbours on each other. This cannot possibly work well since eventually everyone reports everyone else and it all has to be abandoned"

Have you been neglecting to pay your child support?

This sounds awesome ... is there a way to enter text rather than talking? I'm guessing yes, but I can't see where

Yes there is, in settings, switch to text mode!

It's necessary for devs right now, no matter how good they are, and it's those devs' code the models are trained on

Even worse, the training set probably includes a lot of code that needed review but didn't get it...

If we know the outcome of that code, such as whether it caused bugs or data corruption or a crappy UX or tech debt -- which is potentially available in subsequent PR commit messages -- it's still valuable training data.

Probably even more valuable than code that just worked, because evidently we have enough of that and AI code still has issues.

You're missing a zero. It was EIGHTY thousand, not 8000.

I thought so too, but wikipedia says 8k

Ah weird - the text of the page says Atahualpa had 80k troops, but then the infobox describes the Inca forces as 3-8k in size. I guess not all the 80k were involved in the battle

Cats are native to the UK, and less damaging to biodiversity than they are in the US because local wildlife has co-evolved with cats

I get a lot of content about "how to promote your band"* and it's almost ALL about finding "superfans" you can sell merch to - so the actual art is reduced to ads for t-shirts

* I've been in the same (unsuccessful) band since 1987 - obvs I have a day job too