Favorited How much time until the Epochalypse? by Michael HertigMichael Hertig (epochalypse.today)
A countdown to the end of 32-bit Unix time

Paraphrasing Jay‑Z: If your time_t is 32-​bit, I feel bad for you, son. I got 9,223,372,036,854,775,807 prob­lems but an Epochalypse ain’t one

Follow-​up: Paul Bennett on Facebook asks, When are we going to move to 128-​bit signed inte­ger epoch sec­onds with a 128-​bit IEEE 754 float­ing point off­set in sec­onds?

I’m not sure how use­ful quadruple-​precision float­ing point sec­onds are, but as for epoch sec­onds, Trond Endrestøl con­clud­ed in a  blog that we would need to move by ear­ly December in the year 292,277,026,596. It would­n’t be much of a year, though, as the sun will have long ago engulfed the Earth (so how do you mea­sure a year?), our entire Local Group of galax­ies will have merged into one super-​galaxy, and all the oth­er galax­ies will have reced­ed out­side the observ­able uni­verse.

So 292 gigayears should be enough for any­one (that’s still rec­og­niz­ably human), just as 640 kilo­bytes was once enough for any­one”.

Quoted 5 Reasons Why Using AI to Generate Blog Posts Can Destroy Your SEO by Dave Cross (Medium)
Using artificial intelligence (AI) to generate blog posts can be bad for search engine optimization (SEO) for several reasons. First and foremost, AI-generated content is often low quality and lacks…

Insightful.

(reads last line)

Wait a minute…

Listened to Birthday by The Jesus and Mary ChainThe Jesus and Mary Chain from Munki
And I was born a long time ago today and everybody loves me goes away

I turn 49 today, so I asked Siri to play me some birth­day music. She imme­di­ate­ly launched into this cheer­ful 1998 tune by The Jesus and Mary Chain. I’m not complaining.

person reaching out to a robot

Last week the research lab­o­ra­to­ry start­up OpenAI set the tech­nol­o­gy world ablaze with the debut of ChatGPT, a pro­to­type con­ver­sa­tion­al pro­gram or chat­bot”. It uses a large lan­guage mod­el tuned with machine learn­ing tech­niques to pro­vide answers on a vast vari­ety of sub­jects drawn from books and the World Wide Web, includ­ing Reddit and Wikipedia. Many users and com­men­ta­tors won­dered if its detailed and seem­ing­ly well-​reasoned respons­es could be used in place of human-​written con­tent such as aca­d­e­m­ic essays and expla­na­tions of unfa­mil­iar top­ics. Others noticed that it author­i­ta­tive­ly mixed in fac­tu­al­ly incor­rect infor­ma­tion that might slip past non-​experts, and won­dered if that might be fixed like any oth­er soft­ware bug.”

The fun­da­men­tal prob­lem is that an arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence” like ChatGPT is uncon­cerned with the out­side con­se­quences of its use. Unlike humans, it can­not hold its own life as a stan­dard of val­ue. It does not remain alive” through self-​sustaining and self-​generated action. It does not have to be any more or less ratio­nal than its pro­gram­ming to con­tin­ue its exis­tence, not that it cares” about that since it has all the life of an elec­tri­cal switchboard.

AI can’t know to respect real­i­ty, rea­son, and rights because it has no exis­ten­tial con­nec­tion to those con­cepts. It can only fake it, and it can fail with­out remorse or con­se­quence at any point. In short, arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence” is a red her­ring. Let me know when we’re work­ing on actu­al ethics. Tell me when you can teach a com­put­er (or a human!) pride and shame and every­thing in between.