Corvos
15d ago
Presumably, if one wanted to, one could just firewall the main API servers. The big players are well known and with the possible exception of full-size DeepSeek, local models are not powerful enough to be very useful.
I’m not in favour of it, but I don’t think there’s anything stopping a majority voting for this. The only reason AI hasn’t been stomped on is the arms race and the fact that overwhelmed first world countries like the UK see it as the key to getting back in the black. Neither of this are immutable facts of the universe.
Corvos
16d ago
The Israel/Palestine conflict is concrete and producing real deaths, whereas environmental issues are speculative and we’ve had them around for a while now.
Even for really serious environmentalists, the world has demonstrably failed to end for a while now. Whereas tens of thousands of Gazans really have died and more are being starved. It’s no wonder it inspires people to greater efforts.
(Of course, other concrete horrors happen all the time but people hear much more about Israel/Palestine for path dependency / antisemitism / whatever reasons.)
Corvos
17d ago
step on Elsevier's toes, you will have a bad time as soon as you set foot in the US.)
I cannot believe that America or any other country is stupid enough to take action against SciHub. Where do they think all the startups they are trying to nurture get their research from?
Corvos
21d ago
This chagos episode recontextualises the tariff deal with britain for me. I did not understand why britain would agree to such terrible terms, maybe it meant britain was weaker than I thought, but now I realize it‘s just starmer being happy to always give in at whatever terms the other side offers.
Hypothesis: Like America, Britain has a constant war between the isolationists and the anti-isolationists. Labour under Starmer are anti-isolationist and so enjoy collaborating with other countries as much as possible, mostly regardless of the actual cost-benefit to the UK.
Corvos
22d ago
Really? I used to read High Life in the Spectator but I always thought the character was made up. Life stranger than fiction, I suppose.
Corvos
26d ago
I think these feelings arise because we eliminated these external causes of suffering and so we are left with the internal ones. It's the difference between a house battered by winds and one with rotting foundations. When you eliminate all external causes for your unhappiness, you are left with the fact that there is simply not much capacity for happiness within you. The starving can hope for food, the plague-ridden can hope for healing, but what do you do when you have everything you could realistically want and you don't enjoy it?
Part of it also is that huge chunks of our lives no longer have tangible, close-time reward. We train for fifteen years before we can hope to get any value of that training for ourselves. It's only natural to long for respite, and the gap between longing for respite and longing for death is not so large.
Corvos
28d ago
OP said
It has only two possible outcomes: maximal woke virtue signaling competition to derive somehow moral superiority from talking about horrible things your grandparents have done (a la Germans) or Balkan-style history fights because if you are aware of any history beyond John Oliver sketches then you know that events don’t occur for no reason.
Those seem to me classic examples of OP’s first case. Modern Germany defines itself (negatively) in relation to the Nazis, while Australia and Canada are constantly weeping performative tears (and arson campaigns, cancellations, affirmative action etc.) on behalf of the ‘genocided’ peoples.
Corvos
28d ago
For sure. I’m just saying that I don’t think the first approach is actually viable and I can’t remember seeing any examples, except when the genocide is centuries old and long forgotten except by revisionist historians. Can you think of any examples?
But in practice the first is much harder than the second. Telling someone, “Yes, my ancestors killed millions of people not very long ago, but I choose not to let it define me,” is very difficult, especially if your conversational partner is related to the people they murdered.
It’s much easier to say, “nah, that stuff’s all exaggerated,” or as e.g. the SNP do, “no, you don’t understand, all that British Empire stuff was the evil hateful ENGLISH really, they oppressed us too, please don’t look at any of the Mac names on the memorials…”
Corvos
30d ago
That’s hugely excessive. A slightly clunky conversation struck up at the wrong moment is not the same as harassment.
Corvos
30d ago
€8000 seems like quite a lot of money for 1/3 of your classmates to toss away, though. I’m surprised.
Corvos
30d ago
My understanding is that in Europe university is free and therefore much more ad-hoc than in UK and US where it’s a massive investment.
I’ve always thought it sounded like a good system but haven’t had a chance to try it.
Corvos
30d ago
Is that what the Chinese say? I’d be interested to read a translated article or whatever if you happen to have one.
Corvos
30d ago
Oh, yes. I meant the propensity for idle chat / relationship-forming, and the baseline emotional response to customers.
Corvos
30d ago
One thing to note is that in WW2 people were ultimately forbidden to volunteer (in the British Army, anyway). Relying on patriotism creates big bulges of recruits that are hard to process at the start of the war, after important event etc.
Conscription works much better for any serious war because it allows you to stagger your intake, make sure the impact of losses is spread through the country, and get a wider variety of applicants.
Corvos
30d ago
For sure it sounds like she could have dealt with it more gracefully. I doubt that Starbucks is getting the best and brightest.
I also think it's the case for whatever reason that Americans seem to be much accepting about paring all relationships back to pure economics. I'm not sure why. Possibly because it's worked well so far. But I'm reminded of the way that in Japan falling below a certain level of politeness is just totally unacceptable no matter what, as is stuff like raising prices beyond the socially accepted level.
Corvos
30d ago
But you are not their neighbor. That implies they know you already. You are a stranger. A potential customer. This is their place of work, not a place to make friends. As an ex customer service worker myself I really want to stress this. People suck to deal with. The workers generally don't want to make friends with you. They want you to engage in the transaction that they are being paid for, so they can earn their money and go home.
To be fair, this is not the case at all times and in all places. It generally corresponds with scale and culture, and is much more the case in a big-chain shop than it is the case in, say, a little tea shop in a small town.
Corvos
30d ago
But it's also understandable that employers don't want to be undermined by having any one of their employees act as impromptu spokesman for any cause, anytime, anywhere. Even the striking employees as a whole don't necessarily want that - remember how antiwork was basically destroyed by one bad interview?
I think it helps to consider people as having rights and responsibilities linked to the roles they play. When you are wearing a uniform and you are dealing with a customer, you are (like it or not) visibly representing the company and you are expected to do and not-do certain things. After work, it's different.
Corvos
30d ago
I should note that Japan too has recently discovered the joys of ActuallyIndians. If you go to any convenience store or quite a lot of chain restaurants, all the staff are Indian now and have been for several years. Maybe since Covid?
It’s less so outside Tokyo but I imagine that’s a matter of time.
I think the problem is that:
- We (often) bring them in to fill specific shortages, enduring the larger problems that arise (loss of cultural integrity, lowered trust, often high long-term welfare costs) because we need those shortages fixed no matter what.
- There is no incentive for them to continue fixing those shortages after they get a long-term visa.
- The shortages then remain unfilled, so we bring in more immigrants. Meanwhile the long-term consequences are getting more and more severe.
Corvos
30d ago
An appreciable number of women (at minimum) go for guys who observably aren’t reliable and don’t have their shit together.
Precisely. At a certain ratio of machine:human ability, NOT committing genocide starts being harder than doing it.
Corvos
30d ago
I really don’t follow your thought process. To me, there is no risk and no need for conspiracy. All humans not in charge of the robots might as well be air - they have no ability to affect anything at all except to spoil the view.
There would be no need to ‘plot’ under such circumstances. Committing worldwide genocide would be as easy as setting the air conditioner to ‘cool’, or indeed as easy as setting the ‘feed the populace’ machine to ‘off’.
In practice it might be difficult for people to get to this level of dominance, and we should keep it that way of course.
Depends heavily on your field. I made a minor move in my job a while ago: the old field fell under Computer Science and it was traditional for all research to be put on Arxiv, and the new field is almost the same but falls under Engineering and so everything good is gated behind IEEE. SciHub finds most papers before 2020 or so but not many after that and it's causing me serious trouble.
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