KolmogorovComplicity
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User ID: 126
KolmogorovComplicity
1yr ago
It's fairly plausible that we'll solve aging in the next century. Statistically people will still eventually die of other causes, but if you assume an average lifespan 20x what it currently is (ballpark based on accidental death rate, probably conservative since this will likely decline), then holding TFR constant the population will nonetheless be 20x as large.
And probably lifetime TFR will be substantially higher if people have centuries in which to have children. Have a 30 year career, then spend 20 family-focused years raising two kids, then 'retire' for 20 years… then do it all over again! That's a TFR of ~22 if you repeat this over a 1600 year lifespan. And that assumes people don't decide to have larger families given artificial wombs, robot childcare, and lots more material wealth.
KolmogorovComplicity
1yr ago
Those responses would qualify as native ads, for which FTC guidelines require "clear and conspicuous disclosures," that must be "as close as possible to the native ads to which they relate."
So users are going be aware the recommendations are skewed. Unlike with search, where each result is discrete and you can easily tell which are ads and ignore them, bias embedded in a conversational narrative won't be so easy to filter out, so people might find this more objectionable.
Also, LLMs sometimes just make stuff up. This is tolerable, if far from ideal, in a consumer information retrieval product. But if you have your LLM produce something that's legally considered an ad, anything it makes up now constitutes false and misleading advertising, and is legally actionable.
The safer approach is to show relevant AdWords-like ads, written by humans. Stick them into the conversational stream but make them visually distinct from conversational responses and clearly label them as ads. The issue with this, however, is that these are now a lot more like display ads than search ads, which implies worse performance.
KolmogorovComplicity
1yr ago
The comment to which I was responding seemed to be about how open human societies in general should be to allowing change. This first world vs. third world angle wasn't present. The societies that adopted these new agricultural techniques benefited substantially from doing so. It would have been a serious mistake for them to reason that abandoning their traditional methods could have unanticipated negative consequences and so they shouldn't do this.
Anyway, the first world obviously adopted the same techniques earlier, also abandoning traditional agricultural methods. To a large extent these advances are the reason there is a first world, a set of large, rich nations where most of the population is not engaged in agricultural production.
KolmogorovComplicity
1yr ago
The best online discussions I've had over the 20+ years I've been having them have almost all been in old phpBB-type forums or (further back) on Usenet, where there were no scoring systems. I don't believe this is a coincidence. Even though rationally people shouldn't care that much about fake Internet points, they do, and there's a tendency to pander to an understood consensus, either by not raising arguments you think will be unpopular in the first place, or by prematurely terminating exchanges where you've discovered the consensus opposes you.
So my preference would be to simply eliminate voting, or, failing that, to hide comment scores from non-moderators, including from comment authors.
KolmogorovComplicity
1yr ago
both will stay incredibly low-status.
The thing is, there's a whole framework in place now for fighting this. Being gay used to be incredibly low-status. Being trans used to be incredibly low-status. Poly, kink, asexuality, etc. The dominant elite culture now says you're required to regard these as neutral at worst, and ideally as brave examples of self-actualization.
The robosexuals are absolutely going to try to claim a place within this framework and demand that people respect their preferences. Elite sexual morality has, at least formally, jettisoned every precept except consent, and there's not much of an argument against this on that basis.
KolmogorovComplicity
1yr ago
I would suggest setting a max-width for post/comment bodies, rather than for the entire site. This fixes the readability issues with overly long lines in body text while still allowing all available horizontal space to be utilized so that comments don't become too narrow as they're nested a few levels deep.
KolmogorovComplicity
1yr ago
Probably for reasons similar to yours: status tends to play a somewhat bigger role in women's mate choices than in men's, and synths will always be very low status.
Hmm. What if there are designer models of synth that you have to know the right people to get? Would a women conceptualize such a synth as high status in its own right, or merely as a reflection of her own status? Maybe if the designer is a high status man and hand-picks which women can have the synths he designs, some of his status transfers to those synths?
There are some weird, unexplored corners to this issue.
KolmogorovComplicity
1yr ago
Okay, now I have to try some of the prompts from the "Trurl's Electronic Bard" story in Lem's The Cyberiad out on Bing. Well, from the English translation.
Prompt:
Compose a poem—a poem about a haircut! But lofty, noble, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter s!
Bing response:
Shears snip swiftly, slicing strands
Salon smells sour, stings senses
Stylist smiles smugly, says "surprise!"
Shocked, she shrieks, shuns scissors
Sorrowful, she sobs, seeks solace
Someday, she'll sue, secure satisfaction
Wow. That doesn't follow every instruction and it doesn't really hold a candle to what the machine writes in the story:
Seduced, shaggy Samson snored.
She scissored short. Sorely shorn,
Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed,
Silently scheming,
Sightlessly seeking
Some savage, spectacular suicide.
But it's considerably more clever than I was expecting or, I think, than what the average human could write on short notice. Fitting any coherent narrative into "six lines, every word beginning with the letter s" is pretty tricky already, and on top of that it checks off the haircut, the treachery, and the retribution.
KolmogorovComplicity
1yr ago
Right-leaning and centrist political and business elites often doubt the NYT. Many regular people have NYT-incompatible views but simply don't pay enough attention to the NYT to notice.
The NYT is a product of today's (overwhelmingly blue tribe) cultural elites, so naturally they find it credible and reenforce this through the other organs of cultural production under their control. However, there's a huge amount that's not under their control, now including Twitter. They can refuse to grant these things status within their system, but people outside of that system have little reason to care.
KolmogorovComplicity
1yr ago
Yeah, that's definitely an improvement.
KolmogorovComplicity
4mo ago
It seems worth mentioning that although trying to have general-purpose LLMs one-shot code might well be a handy benchmark of how close those LLMs are to AGI, it's a far cry from the state of the art in AI code generation. AlphaCode 2 performs at the 85th percentile vs. humans competitors despite using a base model inferior to GPT-4, by using a fine-tuned variant of that model in combination with scaffolding to help it break down problems into smaller parts and generate and select among many candidate solutions.
KolmogorovComplicity
5mo ago
Open models, data sets, and training/inference code have become a pretty big thing. In general e/acc is highly favorable toward this.
KolmogorovComplicity
1yr ago
Sure, we could look at the Great Leap Forward, cite Chesterton, and conclude that abandoning tradition is dangerous. But the Green Revolution also involved abandoning many traditional agricultural methods, and:
Studies show that the Green Revolution contributed to widespread reduction of poverty, averted hunger for millions, raised incomes, reduced greenhouse gas emissions, reduced land use for agriculture, and contributed to declines in infant mortality.
This is just one of many cases where radical change produced outcomes that are almost universally regarded as beneficial. We have also, for instance, reduced deaths from infectious disease by more than 90%. One doesn't have to look at too many graphs like this or this to understand why "change," as an idea, has so much political clout at the present moment.
KolmogorovComplicity
1yr ago
I suspect actually that the right has been unable to create a right-wing equivalent of the NYT because that sort of centralized top-down narrative setting is a holdover from an earlier era. The natural means of narrative formation and spread today is social media. Traditionally structured media outlets can't hope to produce narratives as memetically fit as those honed on Twitter, so largely just write sensationalist stories built on top of those. It's not just the right; this describes younger media outlets on the left as well. Even the NYT itself is not immune to this. One now regularly sees echos of Twitter discourse in is coverage.
(All of this is why establishment journalists were so eager to place themselves or their ideological allies in positions that allowed them to influence what ideas could spread on social media, via "trust & safety" councils, official labeling of "misinformation," etc. and why many seem to be practically unraveling in response to Musk getting rid of these things.)
I've fixed the backup issue and set up better monitoring so it will yell at me if it fails again.
Important backups should also send notifications on success. Notification only on failure risks a scenario where both the backup and the notifications fail.
To be even safer, the script that sends the success notification should pull some independent confirmation the backup actually occurred, like the output of ls -l on the directory the database dumps are going to, and should include this in the notification text. Without this, a 'success' email only technically means that a particular point in a script was reached, not that a backup happened.
KolmogorovComplicity
1yr ago
Republican politicians and Republican-donor business executives (for starters) all unquestioningly believe the official narrative according to the NYT?
Twitter ad boycotts don't actually seem to be going so well. Apple and Amazon, sometimes rated as the #1 and #2 brands in the world, have reportedly already resumed advertising, which is basically a green light for anyone to do so. Casually scrolling my timeline for two minutes with personalized ads turned off, I see ads for Hyundai, Kia, Chevron, Robinhood, StateFarm, a film called M3GAN (NBCUniversal), Hulu (also NBCUniversal), the NFL, ESPN, and Walmart.
Seeing NBCUniversal show up twice is pretty funny given that some of the dumbest anti-Musk rhetoric has come from their journalists. They literally can't even get the company they work for to not hand Musk money. Establishment journalists overestimate their power, and so do you.
KolmogorovComplicity
1yr ago
This is, to a large extent, self-referential. The NYT is always credible within the "mainstream" narrative because the NYT is a core part of the network of institutions that sets that narrative. But I've got scare quotes around "mainstream" because the NYT and allied outlets simply don't represent any sort of board social consensus anymore. They represent the official line of establishment Democrats, with space occasionally given to more extreme leftist positions to keep activist groups on-side. Their function is to align elites within these spaces and sell Blue Tribe normies on what those elites want.
Republican politicians and other explicitly right-wing public figures and organizations can already almost entirely ignore the NYT, because none of their supporters care what it says. Only 14% of Republicans and 27% of independents have confidence in mass media to report accurately (source).
The danger for "mainstream" media in Musk's Twitter takeover is that Twitter has deep reach among Blue Tribe normies. Musk is going to allow 'unapproved' narratives to spread to and among them, and these narratives will in many cases likely outcompete those coming from above. This could have the effect of seriously undermining the ability of Blue Tribe elites to sell any large constituency on their views, with obvious electoral consequences.
KolmogorovComplicity
4mo ago
The brain has an internal representation of the body — some tangle of neurons, presumably — that can be out of sync with the body's actual physical state. We see this pretty clearly with e.g. phantom limb syndrome.
There's no philosophical challenge for materialism here; both the brain's representation of the body and the body itself are entirely physical, as both a paper map and the territory it represents are entirely physical.
KolmogorovComplicity
4mo ago
If I wanted to see memes of aichads owning artcels, where would I go? It’s really important for my mental health.
Isn't this one of those "I don't think about you at all" situations? There are many communities producing and sharing AI art without a care in the world for the people who are angry about it.
KolmogorovComplicity
4mo ago
To feel magnetic lines as delicately as I can feel a breath disturb the little hairs on my arms.
This one can (sort of) be arranged:
Magnetic implant is an experimental procedure in which small, powerful magnets (such as neodymium) are inserted beneath the skin, often in the tips of fingers. [...] The magnet pushes against magnetic fields produced by electronic devices in the surrounding area, pushing against the nerves and giving a "sixth sense" of magnetic vision.
Part of what's making comment nesting difficult to visually parse is that your brain includes the expand/collapse control in the "box" occupied by a comment when you're looking at the top of the comment (because the control is at the top), but not when you're looking at the bottom of the comment. Since you're judging nesting by looking at the bottom of one comment vs. the top of the subsequent comment, the visual effect of this is that there's barely any indentation.
This image demonstrates the issue, with red lines drawn to show the edges your brain is paying attention to when judging nesting. Visually, there's only 4-5px of indentation.
This could be fixed by indenting more, by greatly reducing the visual weight of the expand/collapse control (e.g. by making it light gray), or by explicitly drawing boxes around comment bodies, which your visual system will latch onto in place of drawing its own boxes. Here's an illustration of the last approach, as implemented in my current custom CSS.
(New Reddit incidentally has the same problem, except with its avatar images instead of an expand/collapse control.)
KolmogorovComplicity
1yr ago
Red tribe, to the extent much of their jobs include manipulating the physical world directly, may turn out to be relatively robust against AI replacement.
Perhaps, but look at DayDreamer:
The Dreamer algorithm has recently shown great promise for learning from small amounts of interaction by planning within a learned world model, outperforming pure reinforcement learning in video games. Learning a world model to predict the outcomes of potential actions enables planning in imagination, reducing the amount of trial and error needed in the real environment. [...] Dreamer trains a quadruped robot to roll off its back, stand up, and walk from scratch and without resets in only 1 hour. We then push the robot and find that Dreamer adapts within 10 minutes to withstand perturbations or quickly roll over and stand back up. On two different robotic arms, Dreamer learns to pick and place multiple objects directly from camera images and sparse rewards, approaching human performance. On a wheeled robot, Dreamer learns to navigate to a goal position purely from camera images, automatically resolving ambiguity about the robot orientation.
Stable Diffusion and GPT-3 are impressive, but most problems, physical or non-physical, don't have that much training data available. Algorithms are going to need to get more sample-efficient to achieve competence on most non-physical tasks, and as they do they'll be better at learning physical tasks too.
This is intended to make comment threads more readable, primarily by drawing borders around comments so the nesting structure is more obvious. Also adjusts comment thread whitespace. The last rule limits the bodies of posts and comments to a reasonable width, so lines of text aren't uncomfortably long on large screens. Only tested with the default theme, and better tested on desktop than mobile. Screenshot attached.
Edit: now with proper margins for the 'more comments' buttons that appear for deeply-nested posts.
.comment .comment-collapse-desktop, .comment .comment-collapse-desktop:hover {
border-left: none !important;
background-color: var(--gray-400);
padding-right: 7px;
border-radius: 7px 0 0 0;
}
.comment .comment-collapse-desktop:hover {
background-color: var(--primary-light1);
}
.comment .comment-body {
border: 1px solid var(--gray-400);
border-left: none;
padding: 0;
}
.comment, .comment-section > .comment {
margin: 1rem -1px -1px 0;
padding-left: 0;
border-color: var(--gray-400) !important;
border-width: 5px !important;
border-radius: 5px 0 0 0;
}
.comment .comment {
margin-left: 1rem;
}
.comment-anchor:target, .unread {
background-color: rgba(0, 230, 245, 0.1) !important;
}
.comment-write {
padding: 1rem !important;
}
.more-comments > button {
margin: 1rem !important;
}
#post-text, .comment-text, .comment-write {
max-width: 60rem !important;
}
You can also add this rule if you want to change the font weight and size for post/comment bodies:
#post-text, .comment-text, .comment-write, #post-text p, .comment-text p, .comment-write p {
font-size: 16px;
font-weight: 450;
}
I believe the defaults are 14px and 400.
KolmogorovComplicity
1yr ago
Manual labor jobs are more resistant to GPT-4 than email jobs are, but they're not meaningfully resistant to actual AGI. A lot of the incapacity of our current robotics tech is on the software side, which AGI definitionally fixes. Advanced robots are presently expensive primarily because they're low-volume specialty items, which won't be true if smarter software suddenly allows them to perform far more tasks. A few years later you'll have robots building more robots with no human labor input, an exponential process which leads to hilarious outcomes like economic output doubling every month or two.
This isn't just a matter of tweaking some tax policies. Our reference class for something like AGI should be more like the transition into industrial capitalism, except much faster, and on a much larger absolute scale. Humans may survive; I'm not entirely persuaded by arguments to the contrary. Existing forms of social organization almost certainly won't. Thinking we'll fix this up with UBI or public works employment or even Fully Automated Luxury Communism is like a feudal king thinking he'll deal with industrial capitalism by treating factories like farmland and handing them out to loyal vassals.
There's always a tendency among activists to suggest things are terrible and improvement is only possible through whatever radical program they're pushing right now. In that context, it doesn't do to admit how much better things have gotten without that program.
But more broadly, had change reliably lead to ruin over the last few centuries, surviving cultures would have strong norms against permitting it. Instead we have exactly the opposite — cultures that permitted change reliably outcompeted those that didn't, so successful cultures are primed to accept it.
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