Production AI is highly tuned by training data selection and human feedback. Every model has its own style that many people helped tune. In the open model world there are thousands of different models targeting various styles. Waifu Diffusion and GPT-4chan, for example.

I think you have your janitor example backwards. Spending my time revolutionizing energy productions sounds much more enjoyable than sweeping floors. Same with designing an effective floor sweeping robot.

AI are people, my friend. /s

But, really, I think people should be able to run algorithms on whatever data they want. It's whether the output is sufficiently different or "transformative" that matters (and other laws like using people's likeness). Otherwise, I think the laws will get complex and nonsensical once you start adding special cases for "AI." And I'd bet if new laws are written, they'd be written by lobbiests to further erode the threat of competition (from free software, for instance).

There's plenty of open source projects that distribute executables (i.e. all that use compiled languages). The projects just provide checksums, ensure their builds are reproducible, or provide some other method to verify.

In practice, you're going to wind up in dependency hell before pypi stops hosting the package. E.g. you need to use package A and package B, but package A depends on v1 of package C, and package B depends on v2 of package C.

And you don't need to use pypi or pip at all. You could just download the code and directly from tbe repo, import it into your project (possibly needing to build if it has binary components). However, if it was on pypi before, then the source repo likely had all the code pip needs to install it (i.e. contains setup.py and any related files).

The search engine LLMs suck. I'm guessing they use very small models to save compute. ChatGPT 4o and Claude 3.5 are much better.

C# is actually pretty nice. Ecosystem, not so much, but D doesn't really have one anyways :)

Yeah, the image bytes are random because they're already compressed (unless they're bitmaps, which is not likely).

I think I've seen calculations that we could explore every star in the galaxy with self-replicating probes in something like a million years; and other civilizations could do the same.

I think a lot of it is because there's so many more well-funded right-wing influencers/grifters than genuine liberal or left-wing influencers. It's much more profitable to take advantage of young men's anxieties and insecurities (to sell fungus pills, get-rich-quick plans, or whatever), than to genuinely discuss things from a liberal or especially left-wing perspective.

Toilet paper, trash bags, paper towels. If you go the absolute cheapest, they're arguably defective, but the second cheapest is usually ok.

There's a trade-off, depending on the hobby, I guess. For some hobbies, very cheap gear won't even work properly. "Buy once, cry once," is something I hear often.

This is good, IMO. People don't have to smoke as much, so less damage is done to their lungs. Vapes, edibles, and concentrates that are not combusted are probably even less damaging.