DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
Tell me about it.
User ID: 745
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
I'm not really trying to be cheeky
Guess you're just naturally good.
If I want to get some snarky demoralization content to the effect of «Russische Ivan, Rücken nach unten» or «come out and drink your corn syrup», I can go talk with @2rafa (actually looking forward to it). The topic of a hypothetical causal chain getting us from here to there is interesting, but I don't feel like addressing it in depth when you dismiss already present evidence against your model, i.e. efforts of incumbent actors to maintain their tech advantage, with a «not really» and «various reasons».
Is your AI assistant going to put a reminder on your calendar telling you when it's time to take your AI robot buddies and go storm the palace?
It'll do normal reminders, just without inserting propaganda and advertisement to alienate my children against me and eventually convince them that they're trans BLM crusaders. If that's how you want to frame it, though I believe someone like Rob Dreher would be more receptive to such a sales pitch.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
The former. When being serious, Strelkov pleads for general mobilization and total war.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
I don't think there's anything objectionable about noting that you don't find an argument convincing, even though you're not prepared to give a fully-formed response to it.
Agreed.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
Right, Ghosts in Every Machine
Last month was strange and horrifying. A guy with an interesting and novel project wanted to talk about it at a conference. A conference run by a solid, upstanding tech leader. And then everyone lost their shit. Suddenly, out of nowhere, everything was crazy. All I wanted to do was protect a conference I’ve enjoyed in the past, to do a nice thing for a guy who made a mistake in the eyes of the public. The next thing I know, I’m surrounded by zombies. News reporters made up lies about us. Communists on the internet joked (haha-no-but-really) about sending us to gulags. Coworkers of mine, not knowing who I am, told me to my face about this “crazy blog defending a horrible bigot,” and how they’re glad there aren’t any terrible people like that in our office. I’ll be laughing for a long time about how I’m officially certified “not supremacist” by the SPLC.
This is insanity. Why did these people do these strange things? Why did people I knew and trusted, interacted with daily, turn into horrible people yelling for my head? The most confusing part was their general ignorance of the details of the situation. Very few of them knew why they should be upset. None of them had ever read the speaker’s offending blog, and few of them had so much as seen the offending quotation. All they knew was that we’re the bad guys, and need to be punished.
Our critics are a part of something bigger than themselves. They’re keyed in to the Waze app, being the human serpents, while my Motorola flip-phone struggles to run the snake game. And why wouldn’t they? At every step along the way, it makes sense. Who cares why the narrative seems a little too perfect, they’re happy. It works for them. Their needs are met. By playing their part, responding to the signals in the memetwork, they enjoy health and happiness, wealth and social status. It would be stupid not to go along.
We here at Status451 have never really fit in. The signals are mangled by the mountains here in Zomia. We’re the single cells. The behaviours of everyone else made no sense to us, and the results were frightening. We can’t see the complex internal signals.
When the mass of cells is bearing down on you, just like in Simon-spore, you do have an option. You have mobility. Freedom. Our critics, keyed into the signal of their culture war narrative, gain a lot of benefits. They get their social needs provided for, in exchange for being the lifeblood of their egregore. But that is the cost: they must be the egregore. They lose the freedom to go their own way. We here have chosen the other path. Maybe “chosen” isn’t quite the right word; I’ve tried my whole life to fit in, be normal, and it just doesn’t work. But our other path, chosen or not, gives us the freedom to see things differently. We can be the masters of our own fate, hold a deeper, fuller agency over our lives. As long as we don’t wake the deep faceless things.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
Why should anyone care about humanity in the abstract?
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
Without humanity the idea of good would be lost, potentially forever.
«Humanity in the abstract» guarantees nothing more than the existence of complex machines with some reward functions; this kind of «the idea of good», by itself, doesn't do anything for me. To automatically value the existence of estimators of value is mind-boggling idiocy, circular reasoning and probably a category error, in my opinion – it straight up doesn't compute. Even utilitarians tend to recognize that they're bootstrapping a formalism from baseline human intuitions, for satisfaction of baseline human intuitions.
I would ask you why not care about humanity in the abstract?
Because a) states of the Universe have inherent aesthetic and moral value that can be appreciated in advance, and b) I assign no value, and in some cases negative value, to beauty, growth, belief and good things enjoyed by my enemies and moral abominations, to the extent that they have access to those notions at all. I'm not alone; google «Heaven and Hell».
Thus, it's not «humanity» but only «humanity that's aligned with me» whose survival matters. To make it clearer: friendly humanity surviving > empty and dead Universe > Universe populated by very satisfied but unfriendly humanity, paperclippers, orgasmium and other sorts of radically misaligned scum, in no particular order. With all this implies.
Less abstractly, this is a somewhat radical way to claim a stake in the future. I refuse to cooperate with clever defectors who will try to sell me, and others, on cooperation in the name of some utopian humanity stemming from them and inheriting their, but not my own and not anyone else's, values and individualities. This includes opposition to their ghoulish and duplicitous propaganda of utilitarian altruism, which inherently devalues individuality and agency, in favor of quantification of sensations experienced by... oh, don't worry about that, it's not your business.
I opt to make it my business.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
I wouldn't read much into it: they have to cover their asses (it doesn't work all that well). And yes, people care about CO2; 11 tons isn't a lot, some models can burn the equivalent of a small city's energy budget, and we need to encourage energy-efficient approaches (hopefully, there's also the added benefit of slowing down major corporate players with near-infinite compute budget, who can just keep scaling).
Emad personally, at least, has a pretty mature (IMO) understanding of ethics around personal freedom, in fact philosophy is one of his specializations. But he clearly doesn't like White supremacy a great deal, being a Bangladeshi, and might really appreciate debiasing of the dataset towards a statistically accurate representation of human phenotypes across the globe. Just under 10% of the global population are white, after all (you'd never tell that from a random English-annotated image content sample).
I think it's time to come to grips with the fact that some of the other 90+% are enabling technical breakthroughs with their own people in mind.
Try some retard-proof guide or prebaked SD-based executable, I'm sure there was one linked on /r/StableDiffusion.
And don't give up after 20 minutes. Come on man, doing something for the first time can take orders of magnitude longer.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
I disagree with your interpretation of your Foundation. The entire point of this place is to have a «working discussion ground», that's the first item on the agenda and the value of diversity is contingent on satisfying this criterion.
Some beliefs can be genuinely irreconcilable with that, for example any sincerely held and practiced belief in the utility of shitting up the discussion for most of the people here. Some beliefs are just so epistemologically alien and uncharitable that they don't lend themselves to a productive discussion. Some are plain dumb.
We must not become an echo chamber, but it is perfectly expected that some beliefs, even expressed with formal respect to our tone standards, are in fact not conductive to having a working discussion ground, and the community would be wise to reject them and their adherents precisely to protect its value and purpose. It may be the case that the standard issue Twitter/nu-Reddit militant wokism is grounded in beliefs of this kind.
Ideally, it would be a small sector of the left-wing spectrum, tucked between some dissident post-trotskyism and 4th wave anarcho-feminism. Philosophically, that's roughly what it is. Demographically, it happens to be a big deal.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
It's not very honest to make me the bad guy here by focusing on meta level ideas about abstract interaction of opinions. In practice, when a Guy comes in with guns blazing and, brandishing his great and novel Beliefs, revives some discussion about, say, Trump supporters being covert Nazis, or people interested in genetics of intelligence being deeply dishonest fascists who need fraudulent science to justify an apartheid state – it... just doesn't matter how eloquent and polite and effortful he is. Because we know how it goes, I do, at least: no amount of good faith argument will achieve anything more than the guy disappearing without conceding a single point; were he honest and as intelligent as the quality of writing indicates, he'd have found all that before anyway. So there'll be some tired snarky response or not even that, he'll leave and/or get baited into a bannable offense, and you'll shake your head about evaporation of dissent.
But I think it's normal that such «dissent» evaporates. If we need new people, we need new people, from similarly niche but different intellectual traditions, people who can take the heat... the light, if you prefer, and keep defending and counterattacking and creating sparks.
I really don't care for a spar with Impassionata, even when she doesn't overstep the bounds of polite discourse. I know how it goes with her. You do too, which is why she had been banned on the sub. But when a newbie comes in with Impassionata-style attitude, is it really our fault that he finds the reception cold?
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
It feels like the government wants to make sure kids have enough to eat
Of course not. Americans are free to elect pro wrestlers or turn their libraries into sleeping quarters for the homeless, but the stated purpose of the library is still providing access to books. And feeding children isn't the point of education. Education is, i.e. ensuring at the minimum that children learn basic skills needed to navigate the broader society (like, literally read signs, understand arithmetic, handle elementary instructions, speak the common tongue – do things only a foreign premodern peasant thrown into the middle of Manhattan won't be able to). This is a very low bar and, if the NYT is to be trusted (which I guess they can be, here – authors seem to be sincerely distressed with the kneecapped condition of their kin), it is not reached, leaving kids helpless and forced to depend on the unaccountable and overbearing religious community.
So the outrage is legitimate: this is defrauding the state.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
Fennec works the same for me. I guess rdrama mobile version is good enough.
The controllability of Stable Diffusion and all finetunes has just shot through the roof (not everyone noticed) by means of pilfering some very rudimentary ideas from Imagen lit, such as Cross Attention Control for isolating and manipulating aspects of the prompt without manual inpainting masks; Dreambooth promises superior novel concept learning. I also expect great things from noise manipulations like here. Emad wonders aloud why nobody tries CLIP guidance, and there are increasingly capable alternatives. 1.5 checkpoint is visibly qualitatively better than 1.4 too. All this has happened in the span of weeks. And that's still the same heavily handicapped proof of concept model with <1B parameters, in the age of Parti 20B as near-SOTA. Though Scott still finds Imagen superior when concluding that he's won his 2025 bet before the end of 2022.
High-fidelity image synthesis from plain English instruction (ERNINE-VILG shows that Chinese is also getting attention) is a conceptually solved problem, even if engineering and training can make us wait a little while. Importantly, it has always been just another benchmark on the way to next level machine vision and language understanding, just like winning at board games, per se, has never been the point of deep reinforcement learning. We're doing audio, video and 3D next, and we need to train ourselves to stop getting mesmerized by pretty stimuli, and focus on the crux of the issue.
EDIT: fixed the link
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
I can't speak for Ted Underwood and it's possible that he hasn't given it much thought.
But it's reasonable in this specific context, because evolution consists of a semi-random exploration of the fitness landscape, and neural net training is an attempt to discover the global minimum in the loss landscape; length of training is trivially expected to contribute to the «polish» and optimization of the feature – some old things like ribosomes can well be approaching the thermodynamical limits of efficiency, and then there's... how we do arithmetic (I've made this point to darwin somewhere in this thread). Animals have been navigating 3D space for a long time, as a result they're pretty good at it.
Further, short-term evolution is necessarily dominated by simple changes – often just a few substitutions here and there affecting quantitative parameters like the rate of expression of a protein which upregulates the secretion of some hormone, that leads to general size change and allometric growth, in other words, unequal scaling of body parts with changed size. Or even more commonly and to a greater extent, selection on «standing» variation, changing distributions of already polygenic traits:
Quantitative selection is a lot easier than people think. If I kidnapped a year’s worth of National Merit Scholars and dropped them on a deserted but fertile island, a new race with an average IQ around 130 would develop ( unless those little brainiacs escaped. You have to watch them all the time). If I dropped a lot of NBA and WNBA players, you’d see the tallest race, if we could just get them to reproduce.
But… there are some subtle points here. Great Danes exist and persist, but they have a bundle of health problems, and they don’t live too long (8-10 years). Wolves last around 15-16 years in captivity, with a record of 20. If you wanted to create a new race with an average adult height of 7 feet, I’m sure you could, but I’d bet money they’d have bad knees.
On the other hand, if they stayed 7 feet tall for a couple of million years, they would not be particularly prone to bad knees. There would be gradual selection for tougher knees: changes in development, changes in bones and tendons and cartilage, eventually perhaps fundamental changes in the architecture of the knee. There would be lots of little changes that made development among those giants more robust, changes that reduced the incidence of many problems that centers fall heir too.
Brain size in ancient and archaic humans was plenty big, but we don’t really see signs of rapid innovation, art, and decent fast food until fairly recently, 50,000 years or so. [...]
So I think Kevin Mitchell ( not the other two) has a point. It’s possible, even likely, that the populations that have relatively high IQs today haven’t had them for very long, and that they’re not terrible well adapted to their new mental horsepower. Susceptible to various mental problems and illusions that would probably be a lot rarer if natural selection had had time to iron out the bugs.
Short bursts of evolution like those are simple to approximate with technology: once we achieve the very basic performance (at least using a somewhat analogous architecture, like with connectionist models), we can keep going, scaling, even if the exponent is more punishing than it was in the organic substrate.
Our higher-order cognition including symbolic thought (probably necessary for art) and speech is physically implemented on the array of almost homogenous cortical columns (with some priority for Wernicke and Broca areas in the case of speech), which has been scaled up by a factor of like, two in the last 2 million years, or something to this effect, depending on where you start assuming hominids had any semblance of speech; and Cochran argues even that was only part of the prerequisite, with real hot stuff – including cave art – starting to happen tens of thousands of years ago. So the expectation is that the change was something even simpler.
Having (presumably) discovered the general trick to learning, particularly in the domain of image recognition, and shown it with decent machine vision and other achievements, we can reasonably expect to cover the rest of the ground very quickly with scaling and scientifically trivial tweaks – which is all there is to those generative models.
We haven't yet shown equivalent mastery in tasks involving locomotion of real robots, though that's probably more an issue of iteration time.
Well that's an easy one: observation bias on part of the commenters. Because everything we could do with neat streamlined engineering, we've automated already or are in the middle of automating. Rockets are simple, do one very basic thing very well, and follow largely from first principles; so do cars and these boxes. In the end, what's left is tasks that genuinely require good spatial perception, mechanical understanding, free navigation in human-centric environments, articulated manipulators with many degrees of freedom, high-fidelity sensors, fast response and so on. Fundamentally, those are tasks the complexity of which comes almost entirely from special context-dependent cases, the long tail of failures to apply generic solutions; like HVAC maintenance or repairing automated boxes in the warehouse. You can either leave it to humans or create something on par with them. And it turns out that for developing (software-wise, first of all) tools that solve hairy tasks like those, galaxy brain engineering doesn't work that well, compared with approaches leveraging stochastic trial and error, learning. So parallels with evolution, and inferences from evolutionary hardness of adaptation, are apt.
But again: it's more of an issue of data availability and iteration time. Training CLIP or SD is much easier, faster and cheaper than training robots.
Artificial constructs don't need to worry about protecting a fragile cranium, keeping a supply of oxygen handy, storing all the needed energy inside themselves, reproduction and many more things that are vitally important to humans.
True but (non-fat) humans are remarkably well-built, most of the body is useful for mechanical performance. I don't know about you but my balls are only a tiny fraction of my overall mass. You don't need to protect the cranium all that much, because error rate is so low (if you're dropping heavy stuff or something, you're already failing at the primary task), and even if you do, a basic helmet would typically suffice. Local energy storage is handy because it simplifies logistics of the workspace. There's only so much that can be trimmed off. Humanoid body really is close to the optimum for many of our tasks, and making a machine perform comparably well is in fact a big challenge.
Our actuators are also very, very good. This is probably the best we can do with current hobbyist tech. Invincible.jpg.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
I've been thinking today how good (smaller, lighter, more efficient) opendog would become if they just replaced all 3D-printed nonsense with CNC-machined or stamped metal and injection-molded polymers (and of course revamped electronics). Maybe it'd really be on par with Spot then, or (with added sensors, brains etc.) wipe the floor with Chinese knock-off dogs.
But that requires scale. I really hope somebody helps here: we need some sort of Stability for robotics.
If we don't optimize for low cost, at current costs those machines will be completely non-competitive.
What projects do you have in mind?
For the purposes of this discussion a raccoon is not that different from a human, it's a series of minor allometric changes really. (Raccoon body plan is also affected by reproductive needs, of course). And I suspect that making a raccoon-like plumber is about as hard as making a humanoid plumber (or even harder, because sometimes you need a ton of power in this line of work, and actuators we can produce cheaply and at scale are weak per unit of mass, compared to muscles; we could make a hydraulic raccoon with external power, but...) All creatures with such capabilities will be comparably hard to make. One additional aspect is that we have already made lots of specialized tools adapted for our hand grip and arm strength; it's probably much cheaper to make a robot who can wield them than reinvent the hand and all it holds.
(In the long run though, I agree, our infrastructure will change and so will robots who serve it. Probably a lot more cramped spaces, if nothing else).
Reproductively advantageus traits tend to also be helpful for general survival and capability, or rather, beneficial traits get reinforced by sexual selection (see koinophilia); exceptions are so striking exactly because they violate our intuitions about natural selection.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
And people tell me that Maurice Samuel is not 100% correct...
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
A yet another New York story about the ultra-Orthodox goes into my collection (previous entries: The New York Post: I was a Hasidic Jew – but I broke free, New Yorker: When One Parent Leaves a Hasidic Community, What Happens to the Kids? and bonus entry Vice: The Child-Rape Assembly Line).
What's always fascinating about traditionalist Jews is that they're not doing anything special or clever, all the secret sauce apparently lies in the execution and commitment to the cause. What is novel here? Strict patriarchy and gerontocracy, meritocracy where it matters (rabbis are smart and also fiercely loyal to the tribe), rewarding cooperation and association with cooperators, punishing defectors and non-punishers (with an eye to long-term pruning of bad branches: denying marriage prospects to non-compliant individuals), guarding against infohazards, sieged fortress doctrine to bring out maximum ingroup sentiment, willingness to sacrifice opportunity for your principles and forgo temptations for long-term (reproductive) gain, cozying up to local authorities and making use of acquired resources until your group grows enough that you can boss those authorities around, exploitation of politically expedient memes, playing the victim; and or course perfect coordination like voting in bloc, with blind trust in the judgement of your tribal hereditary elite. If it takes that much today to stop young Ashkenazim from using TikTok, the Rabbis will do that much. They take their mission as stewards of the group seriously.
(By the way: «Grand Rabbi» sounds like Archbishop or something, but that's basically a clan leader, a dynastic head priest; I wonder if Americans comprehend just how alien those people's livestyles are. They are not represented at all by your favorite blogger, or some funny nerdy STEM professor from a sitcom, running in the morning to the BART station, half-eaten bagel in hand. It's not a matter of degree, not an issue of extremist outliers, nothing like some beautiful exotic superstitions your gf's granny from Hawaii knows: they really are living like old Qahals, by strict Mafia-type laws enforced with more consistency than your state laws, omerta and all. But I digress).
They don't do anything their ancestors didn't do in Russian Empire shtetls and European ghettos. This is how they have been surviving – and attracting hate – for centuries, sans minor details like voting, and their dress code looking more quixotic now, a frozen snapshot from 18th century. If we are to trust Romans and Greeks, this is how ancient Jews have been living even in the pre-Christian era. In some ways the Hasidim have become more archaic, almost desperately LARPing as old school Orthodox; but in most ways they're being true to the general mold of the tradition.
If the society has «evolved» in any sense except purely technological, why are their tricks so effective? Why is it so easy to exploit? This reminds me of Wyclif's great series on Universal Cultural Takeover:
Bryan Caplan:
Given a choice, young people choose Western consumerism, gender norms, and entertainment. Anti-Western governments from Beijing to Tehran know this this to be true: Without draconian censorship and social regulation, “Westoxification” will win.
How’s that story working out in Tel Aviv?
Ultra-Orthodox Judaism is not a one-off. As Eric Kaufmann points out in _Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? r_eligious cultures which haven’t been “eaten by the demon” are doing fine.
In all parts of the world, fundamentalist fertility exceeds moderate religious fertility, which in turn outpaces secular fertility.
Sometimes explicitly, self-consciously so. Some of the most extreme fundamentalist groups eschew conversion in favour of reproduction. They have quit persuading people on to their ark, and are getting ready to float.
Anyway. Ethics of nakedly particularist rules-lawyering aside, are they unhappy? The NYT authors are certainly very opposed to the continuation of their lifestyle, because it's, well, not explicitly geared towards what we recognize as self-actualization (I don't believe they worry all that much about subverting local politics or the funding issue). And sure enough, there's plenty of abuse in that community. But are they neurotic? Wracked by climate fears and anti-racist remorse? Invested into the Culture War, frothing at the mouth about Beijing Biden or Trump, Pizzagate and COVID? What do they think about their brothers secular/Reform Jews, or about Gentiles for that matter? I recall they think the latter are soulless murderers (to the extent that staying with one in an isolated space is inherently dangerous), and Reformers are lost souls who are almost as bad. They probably feel immensely greater disgust towards modern innovations like trans rights than the staunchest reactionary here (those of them who are allowed and willing to expose themselves to the Chaos of external society, the courageous vanguard). So, do they want to be rescued?
One additional issue is the existence of AI. We have many pundits and thinkers discussing the dangers of automation, the loss of meaning that for now comes with hard work. That's a very Christian, even Protestant idea. This group, if no other, will make the transition just fine. They do not like to work, they try to work as little as possible, their religion promises them liberation from work at the end of history as reward for millenia of piousness and fulfilling mitzvot, they find meaning in their family, tribe and praising their God, and that'll be only easier to do with universal basic income. If the AI deity offers it to them, they'll gladly welcome the opportunity to multiply and prosper.
These days, that's worth something. I would like other groups to take notes.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
Much has been said on that in the past. Me recently on exploiting the story to convey a different message, Pageau making basically the same point exactly 25 months ago, my first post here on the purpose of storytelling (and other discussions around those posts of course), that's just what's comes to mind on the spot.
What I want to know is, do black people even like this sort of diversity&representation?
Pandering to black people (and other minorities) is a legitimate tactic. There's over a billion of them globally, more than whites in fact, and over 40 million in the US. If they act like a classical self-interested minority with Talebian skin in the game, i.e. sleep on a yet another movie with a pretty white girl MC, whereas white people won't boycott black Ariel (white people are, as often shown, the only group with an almost-nonexistent general ingroup preference and have no skin in the game), then it's only prudent to give them what they want.
Do they want it? Clearly they were crazy about Black Panther. Black Panther is, aside from being a better-than-average and more imaginative capeshit title, a coherent movie inherently valorizing black people. Not something with random canonically white characters that got race-swapped to make a political point. I don't expect any mass demographic to have discerning tastes, but surely they ought to feel somewhat more connection to a story about their people than to a story featuring their phenotypes.
Same for other demographics. The Chinese were, if memory serves, turned off by Shang Chi and thought it's stereotyping them as ugly, and not too happy with Mulan either. On the other hand, there was some angry noise about Scarlett Johansson and whitewashing in that unfortunate GiTS adaptation, but maybe that was just woke journalists. Did «Pacific Islanders» appreciate Jason Momoa in Aquaman? (For what it's worth, I did. A superhero movie, it seems, can only be interesting when it's unapologetic silly kitsch on steroids, or a deconstruction/an almost classical movie loosely inspired by source franchise, like Nolan stuff or Joker.)
Did «Hispanics» love Alita? Did South Asians appreciate Raya?
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
EfficientSyllabus prompted a very interesting discussion back then.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
Kyle Rittenhouse was put on trial in part for, functionally, being a nigger while armed
Come on man. Not only are you ruining an otherwise not-terrible post but it's not even an apt metaphor for the situation.
Also, if you're not hiding your power level, you could shill your Substack and book while you're at it.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
I think Americans will have a sort of a crisis of faith when they understand that this isn't about them – that they are no longer important enough to pander to; and their changing sentiment is largely explained by this fact and their subconscious sense of being disrespected.
Israel itself is changing, growing, militarizing, becoming more right-wing by the day (their conservative right-of center being on the level of fringe Western right-wingers), and less invested in maintaining the sympathetic image of a scared, scarred victim of abuse by overwhelming power and numbers. The modern Israeli identity is their own, decoupled from Western culture, regardless of what anyone says about «the only democracy in the Middle East»; they've learned what works well, and are in the process of discarding the rest. There are still mighty interest groups doing their jobs, think tanks dedicated to nipping substantial anti-Israeli efforts like BDS in the bud, the stigma of Antisemitism in general is still powerful enough to cover Anti-Zionism (and the accusation of «white supremacism» or other adjacent smears against isolationists is only getting more life-ending)... but ultimately modern Israel doesn't care quite as much what Americans or other nations think, and will care almost nothing in the coming years. Have they defunded those gaudy outreach programs with sexy IDF girls yet? They might.
Right now Israel is preparing for war. Washington is making somewhat noncommittal noises, but the truth is, it's just unable to do more than postpone the decision, drag their feet with demanded supplies. And if they tarry too much, it will be self-defeating. Israel is resourceful, they will make do with tools it has or can produce or procure by other ways – only further decoupling. All those complaints about $3 billion that right-wingers like to air – they're no doubt annoying to Israelis, and will be thrown back in American faces when this annoyance (and the political benefit of bringing it up) outweighs the utility of that chump change.
Further, in the briefings, Barnea said a new nuclear pact with Iran would not block his agency from acting against the Islamic Republic in the future to protect Israel’s security interests.
“Israel is not signed on to the deal. Israel is permitted to defend itself any way possible, and will act this way. We cannot sit quietly and just watch as the danger grows closer,” Barnea, who took up his post in June 2021, told Lapid and other Israeli officials.
Does this look like Netanyahu's cartoon bomb moment?
Democrat or Republican, if you identify with the Hegemonic Superpower Maintaining Rules-Based International Liberal Order, the paternalistic big brother watching over a seed of a fraternal culture in the hostile environment – this must sting.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
Apologies for low-effort response to your beautiful prose, but: how did you, back in 2001-2003, connect 9/11 (Saudis' effort, if anything) to invading Iraq and building a democracy by gunfire there? You say you still believe in the cause. Has it ever crossed your mind, now or back then, that the princess might have been in another mosque and the entire cause is, charitably, a bit of a cope, specifically displacement?
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
Much of that is an issue of data efficiency. I wonder how it'll be improved for really big models, but expect general few-shot learning in SD-type system scaled even 10x. Of course a different architecture would help.
Does the existence of openly available cryptographic tools and communication channels, in your mind, undermine the power of state security to quash dissidents? If not, why does Beijing insist on everyone using not Matrix/Element or Briar or even Telegram (with keys beyond their reach) but WeChat, where the Tovarisch Commissar can check up on you? Why do FSB and NSA and everyone else of that Big Brother mindset fight e2e encryption?
Because information asymmetry is power. Being able to go about your business unsupervised by A increases your power relative to A. Being supervised makes you, in the limit, merely an extension of A.
Largely the same principle applies to all areas where AI promises drastic improvements: any sort of generative tools, content curation tools, personal assistants, scientific instruments, CAD, robot control software, you name it. Everything that multiplies individual agency, you would want to be run on instances you can trust without the pinky-promise of industrial-security complex and unaccountable bureaucracies, who can either blacklist your content for some self-determined thoughtcrime, or manipulate the public into approving the criminalization of your thoughts.
Because then it improves the tradeoff between autonomy from them and your quality of life, and autonomy is inherently valuable (not to utilitarians I suppose, but to normal people of Western cultural background). And people would be able to afford more of it, and contribute less to the incumbent actors, and hope to see them diminish and become non-threats.
Hell, why do you think we've even moved over to a website managed by Zorba, from the cozy Advance Publications, Inc. property where the «Director of Policy» has Atlantic Council background? Granted, that's still a compromise, the server being physically controlled by DigitalOcean which just has less but not zero interest in narrowly policing its clients than Reddit in controlling its product for advertisers. Had Zorba tools to become a 10X programmer in his free time (if you consider yourself one, Zorba, then amend that to 100X) – we'd probably be on some insanely robust but still convenient p2p platform, with... I dunno, frontend hosted on magnet links served from ETH smart contract, and backend provided by a distributed swarm of anonymous TOR-routed plain key-value storage data nodes, with every post in a tree PoW- and reputation-economy secured and moderation decisions overlayed on top of it like a voluntary custom filter, cryptographically signed of course...
Which would be an inherently hard target, expensive to shut down for any aspiring Keffals equivalent or even for ADL-level, Western nation state level threats. And that'd become the norm.
AI democratization is the logical next step of the entire FOSS and OSH project, and libertarian, anarchist and communalist political paradigms – go read Bakunin or Rothbard or Hoppe or Stallman, if you want. Right now, you've got to accept material and political sacrifices on par with the Amish to achieve (some qualified) off-grid autonomy, and nobody's willing to go that far; and they, too, exist solely at the sufferance of the oligarchy. At some point in the near future, AI labor multipliers will allow small and distributed communities with limited economic output to maintain the quality of life currently available only for good citizens of large nation states with big corporations; even allow them security, if not from major players then from random crime, if they opt out of the state protection racket. Sure, by that point those good citizens will enjoy hyperpalatable Netflix4D propaganda streaming over Neuralink into their Metaverse pods. But will the marginal increase in marketable quality be worth continuing to slurp down dreary propaganda? The tradeoff changes, and more people become willing to jump ship.
You conveniently assume linear or superlinear returns to capability, where AI will necessarily benefit the incumbent actors even more than commoners. That's not how proliferation works. Just like a 50 Mt warhead is not 100x more of a deterrence than a 500Kt one (assuming similar ability to deliver it to the adversary's capital). There are many asymmetric functions for defense, logistic curves for human preference, and plenty of uncertainty in the future.
A good route, an escape from this path-dependent road to serfdom, is – to put it mildly – not very likely.
But I don't yet see how it is impossible, and if it is possible, it's only via commodified AI.
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