Corvos
3d ago
I think crypto isn't such a good analogy. I never saw anyone get value out of crypto qua crypto. As an asset and an investment, yes, and occasionally as a way of paying for mildly shady or super-techy things, but in general the value proposition just never seems to have manifested to me.
Whereas I get massive value out of AI. For writing, for my hobby projects. My startup would be facing much larger headwinds without AI for coding and research. I think the hype is still kind of overdone, but only because the hype is so strong that only the immanent eschaton could live up to it and because it's not clear how much of a directly-related ecosystem there will be for third parties.
With respect, I think that you are veering close to the "if you didn't buy so much avocado toast, you could afford a home" meme, both by overestimating other people's frivolous spending and by underestimating the amount it costs to get ahead.
The vast majority of people are not ordering doordash McDonalds for breakfast. For the few who are, it doesn't cost $30. It costs $10 max including coffee, and maybe another $5 for delivery. The people I know who travel regularly and aren't rich and established do so as cheaply as possible - they're staying in fleabag hostels in grubby parts of town, taking budget redeye flights, etc. My acquaintances who live like your paralegal are rich as hell.
Then on the other side. I've had a big and maybe temporary salary boost lately, but before I was on a pretty decent above-median income. I could probably have bought a house by being very thrifty over ten, twelve years. That's with a PhD and a good upper-middle-class job, and for a very mid-tier house in a very mid area.
I don't think that the ordinary middle class, let alone the working class, can aspire to own a nice place with a picket fence just from cutting down on restaurants and vacations. Especially if they're not DINKs. If anything, the shift towards 'buying experiences' stems from assuming that our standard of life as children was normal rather than a freak bubble, and a deep skepticism that scrimping and saving will result in achieving goals that seem to accelerate away faster than one approaches them (b/c a lot of them are limited and competitive goods).
Corvos
3d ago
There was a funny bit in the first episode of new Doctor Who along those lines.
DOCTOR: How can you hide something that big in a city this small?
ROSE: Hold on. Hide what?
DOCTOR: The transmitter. The Consciousness is controlling every single piece of plastic, so it needs a transmitter to boost the signal.
ROSE: What's it look like?
DOCTOR: Like a transmitter. Round and massive, slap bang in the middle of London. A huge circular metal structure like a dish, like a wheel. Radial. Close to where we're standing. Must be completely invisible.
(Rose stares over his shoulder pointedly.)
DOCTOR: What? What?
(The Doctor turns and looks at what Rose is staring at on the south bank but the penny doesn't drop.)
DOCTOR: What? What is it? What?
(He finally catches on to what Rose is looking at. It's called the London Eye, it's on the south bank of the Thames, it's lit up like a Christmas tree, and it was the biggest Wheel in the world when it opened in 2000.)
DOCTOR: Oh, fantastic!
Corvos
3d ago
Now, as a gentleman enthusiast of the literary arts, how to find these people...
Corvos
3d ago
Isn't a huge chunk of increased prices for premium grocery products (meat, cocoa) competition with huge new markets in China? As you say, the market is global.
Corvos
4d ago
Yes, later self-play could be used to learn different games (and the original DRL was applied to many Atari games) but AFAIK nobody successfully made one of these agents learn chess and Go.
You know, I never thought about heroin/cocaine/fentanyl saving alcohol’s reputation but when you say it I can see what you mean. That’s a very interesting perspective.
Corvos
5d ago
Yes, I think the ‘bitter lesson’ is the other thing that came out of this, but AlphaGo’s intelligence didn’t generalise to simultaneously learning even a single other game.
Finding that sufficient data could lead to expertise in massively distributed domains came as a huge shock to me, professionally, and completely destroyed my notion of how intelligence could work.
You might have lost a lot of that money. Almost none of the tech used in AlphaGo lead to LLMs and it produced a frenzy of research and startups that mostly looked in the wrong direction. I guess RL for behaviour tuning made it in.
Corvos
5d ago
Shepherd Book works, although he’s a little harsh.
“Father, don’t the bible have something to say about killin’”?
“It does. It is however a mite fuzzier on the topic of kneecaps.”
Ultimately social sanctions are backed by something. Whether that’s losing your job as with Twitter mobs, or punishment from the state. In certain societies judging stares and shunning can work, but those kinds of places don’t legalise drugs and they still tend to be running on a legacy of extremely harsh legal enforcement. England’s Bloody Code, Japan’s 99% conviction rate, etc.
People do stuff that’s not cool all the time, especially if they’re stoned. And legalisation so far has AFAIK pushed up usage considerably.
To be perfectly honest, I suspect your suggestion results from a dislike of coercion more than genuinely feeling that your suggestion is the most effective way to limit antisocial weed usage.
It was a reductio ad absurdam of course, but my point is that prejudice along many axes is an inherent part of any interaction.
For a more realistic example, if someone asks me for directions, I’m going to decide whether I’m comfortable pulling out my phone based on a number of factors, one of which is race.
Then you get to the social level. In London, a black man is 8x more likely to kill than a white man. Should we be focusing police attention based on this fact? If you’re a policeman and find two parties are in a he-said she-said situation and one of them is black, or homeless, are you going to let that affect your judgement or are you going to wall off all knowledge about relative aggression knowing that it’s going to make your judgements less correct?
Unless you’re going to email the credentials to your bank account to every American, and see which ones are actually thieves, you are going to end up pre-judging them in one manner or another.
“Sometimes kindness comes from unexpected places and people aren’t what you expect” does not mean “and therefore you must turn your brain off and clap your hands over your eyes until you have enough information to judge people on an individual level, and statistics are the work of Satan”.
Do I feel genuine sympathy for someone who has a harder time because they belong to a group with a bad reputation? Yes, certainly. The tend to be fine once they demonstrate a good character but they still find it a lame harder than many others. I *don’t * feel so bad that I’m willing to ignore really obvious group differences.
Corvos
8d ago
On the second point, I used to think that (and my wife as well), but since legalization we changed our mind. Weed is an extremely pervasive, intruding smell and it's FUCKING EVERYWHERE NOW.
Agreed. If I have my window open I keep getting gusts of it wafting in. It's disgusting.
Damn right. No Asians could understand the red-blooded British man's desire for a meal so massively calorie-dense that one bowl can last a man through the winter, lol.
Though I bet they have something similar in Mongolia area, it's frigid up there.
Sadly central heating has mostly killed traditional British cooking.
Corvos
8d ago
Cultural question but what kind of knitwear does a Russian man wear? Jumpers?
Corvos
8d ago
Depends on what you mean by dumplings. British dumplings, which are no longer eaten much in the modern day, are essentially dough balls cooked from suet (a specific kind of beef fat) and flour. I very much doubt they come from China.
Corvos
9d ago
Funny, I liked the last third best. Read the book through in the middle of a screaming once-in-a-century hurricane, really kept the mood up.
Fair but that makes
At its core the company is an entity formed by shareholders in order to generate profit. This is intrinsic purpose of any company
an assertion and a tautology, not an argument or a rebuttal. I don't mean that in a rude way.
Corvos
9d ago
I wouldn’t call profit a necessary element. Lots of nonprofits were incorporated under Company House until we started creating special legal containers for them.
“A group of people who band together to do something with limited liability” seems to best cleave reality at the joints.
True, I just think that (dependent on circumstances) “it’s impossible, give up” can and should be countered with “it’s perfectly possible but you are sabotaging it”.
So eg inventing an EV battery with 6000 miles of energy is impossible in a different way than building a massive factory of them in Britain is impossible.
Now, this is dangerous because the response to genuine failure is often to blame saboteurs, as in the Soviet Union, but it’s true sometimes.
On the object point, the government in the UK has pretty much wiped out smoking now, for example. And I’m pretty sure cannabis is going to start slipping back towards illegality. It’s been behind some really nasty murders lately (schizoid breaks), even when legalised it’s heavily associated with crime, it stinks all the way down the road, and it turns people into boring vegetables when it’s not sending them crazy.
I think he means it in the sense that "a nice man on the phone told me he was from BitPanda and asked me to read my password to him so he could check if it was secure" or "SBF stole all my money" can't be detected by enforcing code correctness. All of the badness has happened outside the code, everything inside the code is a perfectly valid transaction.
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