The joke

Your head

You

I didn’t like it at all. And nobody I know has liked it.

I was mindblown when I heard it was on the Oscars. It’s just a random film, worse than average I’d say.

Point, purpose, whatever. They are synonyms.

Look, you said you didn’t understand insurance. I tried to explain to you that the reason you don’t understand insurance is because you are wrong about your definition of insurance. If you fixed how you define “insurance” to make sense with how the rest of the world uses it, then you would have a much easier time understanding insurance.

But you refuse to change your definition of insurance. That to me signals that you’re not trying to learn, you just want to argue.

If that’s the case. Fine, let’s argue. But it is hard to argue about something if each of us have a different definition of what that something is.

Yes, you could see insurance as a bet. When giving insurance, you are betting that the insurer will be lucky. But since you have to make a profit, you have to obtain more than the expected value. It is not much different than a casino.

If you bet on a coin toss at a casino and win, you wouldn’t get 2x your offer, you might only get 1.9x. That 0.1x is the casino’s profit.

If your house has a 50% chance to lose all value in the next year, your insurance payment must be higher than 50% of your houses value. If it is 55%, then that 5% is the insurance companies’ profit margin.

If there is no data because nobody has ever been insured, then you just make an educated guess with a low confidence score.

So the last example has a high confidence that it’s a 50% chance results in 55%. Let’s say you eeucately guess that the chance is 20-80%. The middle point of your guess is still 50%, but due to the low confidence, your margin would need to be higher. In this case, they payment might be 70% instead of 55%.

Now you see why insurance companies need all that data. Higher confidence means lower prices without risk increase, or the same prices with a lower risk. Lower prices allow more market share, which results in more money.

If it were as you said, why would they even need to make predictions? Just adjust the rate according to the pool size. “Oh no, last month was really unlucky and the money pool shrank, we’ll increase prices this month”, “nice! Last month was lucky and the pool increased, we can lower the price”.

As I said, there are many ways to implement insurance.

Again. You are confusing purpose with implementation.

The purpose is what I stated. The implementation is irrelevant. You claim that insurance is insurance only if it is implemented the way you explain. However, as I tried to explain, you can provide insurance without having a large pool of insurers.

Look at this example:

Alice has a tomato farm and wants to buy a goat from Bob. They reach a price of 20 tomatoes for a goat.

However, they live in different villages. Alice pays 2 tomatoes to Charlie to pay for transport. But Alice is worried that bandits will steal the tomatoes or goat from charlie while the transportation is happening.

So Charlie offers Alice this deal: “give me 4 tomatoes instead of 2, and you will receive a goat, even if the goods get stolen in transport”.

That is insurance.

Why can Charlie offer such a thing? That’s just the implementation, it doesn’t matter. But here are a few possibilities:

• Charlie calculated the chances of getting robbed, and calculated that after many insured transports, the value of the insurance payment will be greater than the value of the insured goods.
• Charlie is very confident in himself and has never been robbed. He accepts the risks, and if he does get robbed, he’ll make sacrifices to get another goat.
• Charlie paid a cheaper insurance, easy low-risk profit.
• Charlie has plenty of goats, and is willing to lose one of them to strengthen his ties with Alice.
• Charlie does plenty of safe transports with a higher-than-normal insurance price, so even if he is robbed this time, he has enough of apples stored to pay for another goat. (This is the one you are saying)

About your last claim:

Nobody “knows” how much insurance is worth. Insurance companies pay lots of money to obtain data and make calculations about predictions. But it’s all statistics. The more data there is, the more accurate the price can be. Companies that make good predictions stay afloat, while bad predictions makes them lose money.

But that goes for absolutely every product. There is no global entity that dictates the prices of products as an absolute fact.

You cannot have an insurance company with a single regular customer the same way you cannot have an iphone shop with a single regular customer.

But the concept of insurance is not only for insurance companies.

You can sell a single instance of insurance to a single customer like you can sell a single instance of an iphone to a single customer.

You can see at what price others are selling similar insurance policies and set your price like that. Or you can set the price with a big benefit margin to compensate for the higher risk you are incurring when selling insurance while having little data.

No. Pooling the resources of all to spend it on the benefit of society (including helping the less-fortunate) is the purpose of taxes.

The purpose of insurance is to trade low chance big impact risks for 100% chance small costs.

As I said, you can have insurance with just one insurer and one insuree. You cannot have taxes with 1 taxpayer and 1 tax collector, that would be called an asset manager or something, where you pay someone to decide for you what to spend that money on.

Merriam-Webster:

1 a : coverage by contract whereby one party undertakes to indemnify or guarantee another against loss by a specified contingency or peril b : the business of insuring persons or property c : the sum for which something is insured 2 : a means of guaranteeing protection or safety The contract is your insurance against price changes. Frequent hand washing is good insurance against the common cold. 3 gambling : a side bet that a player in blackjack may place when the dealer’s first faceup card is an ace

Note: An insurance bet can be up to half of a player’s original bet. It wins at 2 to 1 odds if the dealer’s cards add up to 21.

First of all, I’m going to replace AI with LLM, since that’s probably what you meant.

There are 2 distinct questions asked in this post:

1. Why not use LLMs to provide different levels of automation? (Like, manual, medium, auto)

Answer: you don’t need LLMs for that. You can just code it in like any other feature. It’s not particularly hard, game developers know how to do it since they are used to programming automation for NPCs.

2. Why not use LLMs to procedurally generate NPC dialogue?

Answer: games are primarily a form of art. NPC dialogues are written with a purpose. Different characters have different personalities. Some dialogues are meant to drive the plot. Other dialogues are meant to teach the player how to play. Others are meant to show the player things that they may have missed, or things that are interesting.

Procedural dialogues removes all the control from artists. They would all be generic npc n#473, with the “personality” of the LLM, maybe slightly varied if the developer writes a different prompt for each character.

Procedural dialogues would have the same issues as procedural world generation or photorealistic graphics, it would just not be interesting.

There is a practically infinite amount of Minecraft worlds, yet they all feel the same way. The thing that differentiates a Minecraft world from another is that which the player has built. The only part of the world that wasn’t procedurally generated.

There is a great amount of photorealistic games. And they all look very similar. You may only distinguish one from another by looking at their handcrafted worlds or their handcrafted characters. But not by staring at a wall. You can stare at a wall in non-photoreslistic games and know what game it is.

So if you put procedurally generated dialogues, no one will read them, since you’ll be bored by the time you read the same thing being said by 5 different NPCs from 5 different games.

That’s because you misunderstand the purpose of insurance.

The purpose of insurance is to provide stability.

That is, instead of paying a lot of money with a low frequency, you pay a small amount of money with high frequency.

Of course, as the provider of that “stability service”, you pay the insurance company.

Note that at no point in this definition is more than one customer necessary.

Each customer has a different definition for “a lot of money” (X), “small amount of money” (Y), “high frequency” (Z). “Low frequency” is usually a month or a year though.

Customers “control” variables X and Z. Insurance companies control Y. For simplicity let’s say A = X*Z.

In an ideal market, each customer would accept the policy where Y is highest.

In your view, insurance policies should have constant Y.

If you make an insurance company based on that, you have 2 options:

1. Set a low Y, you’ll go bankrupt.
2. Set a high Y, you’ll go bankrupt.

In scenario 1. You’ll go bankrupt because your customers will be the ones with the highest A in the market. Since low A customers will go to another company that sets Y as a function of A.

In scenario 2. You’ll go bankrupt because you’ll have no customers. Setting a Y high enough so scenario 1. Doesn’t happen means that not even the highest A will be willing to pay your high Y.

If you see it from the PoV of the customer:

Why would I pay the same as my neighbour that drives drunk every day when I only use my car once a years on a small trip while following every traffic law and regulation? I’ll just go to that other insurance company that costs only a small fraction of my neighbour’s.

Because the British empire was absolutely huge. Which lead to many countries having English as an official language. Which means those countries would conduct trade in English. Followed by American dominance, which also has English as its main language.

And that American dominance includes dominance in media, especially films because of hollywood. Technical documents, research and especially computer-related technical documents are mainly in English for the same reason.

Sure, English is not that hard of a language. But it’s not the easiest either.

It didn’t make me repeat the curriculum. The curriculum is the same for everyone.

I didn’t use basque outside school, but I barely used English. Inside school, it was ~7 hours every day of basque. And ~3h per week of english.

Not research, personal experience:

Even after many years of school/high-school in basque, I learnt it at a way slower rate than English, which was just 1 subject.

I didn’t speak neither basque nor English outside school. At most, the difference might be that I consumed a little bit of media in English while none in basque. But all subjects except spanish and English were in basque, so that should make up for the difference.

And I don’t think it’s just a me thing. Since the curriculum has mostly been the same for all those years of school:

Learn how to say a verb.

That’s it. Many years of school just to say verbs correctly.

The exams where mostly just fill in the blank exercises, where the blank was a verb.

I still don’t know how to say verbs that aren’t the simplest ones.

So to your question I’d say yes. Even though neither are my native tongue, I learnt both since I entered school, but learned them at wildly different rates.

They didn’t when 8GB was the norm. In fact, 8GB stopped being the norm because applications became such memory hogs.

From a non-technical user’s pov kinda true.

But not true at all when you enumerate the actual responsibilities of an OS.

The terminal

Not really. Today at work that error appeared to me. As a software developer of course I have access to terminal, I use it every day.

I just closed the message and opened the terminal again, and it worked.

This is Microsoft’s fault, not any other’s.

Same thing with git.

There is no shortage of git beginners that refuse to use a GUI.

They ask for help for something, I haven’t used git CLI in years, so I tell them “go to this place and click those button”, then they open the vscode terminal and ask “but can I do it from CLI?” Okay then I go to search the command. Meanwhile I tell them to checkout a branch or something as basic as that and watch them struggle for way longer than it took me to find the command I was looking for.

I get that thousands of elitists have convinced you that using git from a GUI is a sin. But it’s fine, I won’t tell no one. I use a GUI myself.

Artists are better than anyone else

• an artist.

Lmao

Who said it’s okay to invade Greenland? And of course it’s not ok to invade ukraine

The C example is the wonderful happy path scenario that only manifests in dreams.

Most projects don’t have a dependency list you can just install in a single apt command. Some of those dependencies might not be even available on your distro. Or there is only a non-compatible version available. Or you have to cast some incantation to make that dependency available.

Then you have to set some random environment variables. And do a bunch of things that the maintainers see as obvious since they do it every day, so it’s barely documented.

And once you have it installed, you go to run it but discover that the fantastic CLI arguments you found online that would do what you installed this program to do, are not available in your version since it’s too new and the entire CLI was reworked. And they removed the functionality you need since it was “bad practice and a messy way to do things”.

All of this assuming the installation process is documented at all and it’s not a “just compile it, duh, you should know how to do it”.

Is there anything in the LLMs code preventing it from emitting copyrighted code? Nobody outside LLM companies know, but I’m willing to bet there isn’t.

Therefore, LLMs DO emit copyrighted code. Due to them being trained on copyrighted code and the statistical nature of LLMs.

Does the LLM tell its users that the code it outputted has copyright? I’m not aware of any instance of that happening. In fact, LLMs are probably programmed to not put a copyright header at the start of files, even if the code it “learnt” from had them. So in the literal sense, it is stripping the code of copyright notices.

Does the justice system prosecute LLMs for outputting copyrighted code? No it doesn’t.

I don’t know what definition you use for “strip X of copyright” but I’d say if you can copy something openly and nobody does anything against it, you are stripping it’s copyright.

No you can’t. In the same way you can’t watch a Mickey mouse movie and then draw your own Mickey mouse from what you recall from the movie.

Copying can be done manually by memory, it doesn’t need to be a 1:1 match. Otherwise you could take a GPL licensed file, change the name of 1 variable, and make it proprietary code.

LLMs are just fancy lossy compression algorithms you can interact with. If I save a Netflix series in my hard drive, then re encode it, it is still protected by copyright, even if the bytes don’t match.