KolmogorovComplicity
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User ID: 126
KolmogorovComplicity
1mo ago
BlackBerry's market cap peaked the year after the iPhone was introduced, and it took the market three or four years to really see the writing on the wall. The market still doesn't quite get tech disruption.
LLMs aren't going to remain distinct products that people have to seek out. They'll be integrated into platforms, and the natural starting point for any task, information retrieval included, will just be talking to your device. Many older people (and a surprising number of younger people, honestly) have never managed to form coherent mental models of current software UI, and thus commonly struggle to perform new or complex tasks. They'll greatly prefer this.
Most developed countries have laws that would prevent surreptitious product promotion in LLM responses. It's very possible LLMs will be harder to monetize than search, but Google isn't in a position to prevent their adoption, so that's just further bad news for them. They're essentially forced to enter this market, so others don't eat their lunch, but may be worse off than they are now even if they win it.
KolmogorovComplicity
1mo ago
Beavers are a pretty good fit. They claim and defend territory, they build, and they live in nuclear families, eschewing larger collectives.
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
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
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
The primary reason to buy name brands isn't quality per se, but predictability. The same name brands are available nationwide, and while they do sometimes change their formulations, they tend to do so infrequently and carefully. A given generic brand is often not available everywhere (many are store-specific), stores/chains may vary which generics they carry over time, and even within a single generic brand there tends to be less focus on consistency, because what's the point in prioritizing that if you haven't got a well-known brand people have very specific expectations of?
People don't want to roll the dice on every purchase. Will this ketchup be too acidic? Will these cornflakes be a little gritty? They're willing to pay a dollar or three more to reliably get the thing they expect.
KolmogorovComplicity
4mo ago
One of the Satanic Temple's causes is separation of church and state, and I expect part of what they're trying to do here is cause governments to decide it's too much trouble to allow holiday displays on public property at all. Vandalism of their displays, or Christians also using such displays in deliberately inflammatory ways, both make it more likely they'll get that outcome.
Meanwhile, I don't think the ideological faction represented by the Satanic Temple would actually care very much about the content of your proposed displays. If anyone did dramatically tear such a display down, it would almost certainly be some progressive activist, a distinctly different faction.
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.
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.
A fairly likely outcome is that the crazier edges of SJ will be filed off as media/political elites find they've become a liability, and the average member of Blue Tribe will simply follow along as when The Science switched from "masks don't work" to "you're a monster if you don't wear a mask on the beach." There won't be any great reckoning followed by explicit adoption of a new ideology. Any SJ gains that can fit within the "tolerance" model of '90s-style liberalism will be retained. Some true believers will carry on with the craziness, but institutions will mostly stop listening to them.
We may have just seen the start of this pivot. That's Fareed Zakaria on CNN yesterday succinctly laying out the situation on American college campuses, explicitly calling out DEI, racial quotas, the response to Floyd, the degrees in fake subjects, the implications of eliminating the SAT. The average member of Blue Tribe has never previously been presented with this narrative from a source they felt obligated to pay attention to; if Blue Tribe media now widely takes it up (which remains to be seen), it will be very easy for them to respond with "Huh, didn't know that was going on, obviously we should fix it."
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
9mo ago
How is a young man in his twenties, armed with a useless college degree and forced to work at a supermarket to get by, supposed to find purpose in what he's doing? How can he feel accomplished, or masculine, or empowered? He definitely can't rely on God or religion for that feeling. If he tries, he'll be overwhelmed by relentless mockery and cynicism from his society.
Your grocery clerk has failed to achieve social status in a world where that was ostensibly possible, where society inculcated a belief that he should pursue it, and where he did, in fact, invest considerable effort in pursuing it, in the form of 17 years of formal education.
On top of this, he has to contend with the fact that modern societies have broken down all formal and most informal barriers to mixing across status levels and have eliminated any material requirement for women to marry. As has been discussed ad nauseam at this point, in combination with female hypergamy this is very detrimental to his prospects with the opposite sex.
A final consideration is, to borrow a Marxist term, alienation of labor. Your clerk's job does produce value, but that value isn't some tangible thing. It's a benefit to the store in higher throughput or better loss prevention vs. self-checkout, on a spreadsheet he'll never see and doesn't care about because he has no ownership stake in the enterprise.
So, your grocery clerk is probably mostly sexless, and feels like an underachiever performing meaningless work, where, say, a medieval peasant farmer at the same age would be married, would have precisely the status society told him he would and should have, and would be engaged in work that directly, physically provided for an essential material need of his wife, his children, his aging parents. It's this difference, much more than any lack of a connection with the divine, that results in his dissatisfaction.
The idea of running your OS in the cloud is the same old "thin client" scheme that has been the Next Big Thing for 40 years. Ever since PCs started replacing terminals, some people have been convinced we must RETVRN.
The thin client approach seems appealing for two reasons. First, it centralizes administration. Second, it allows shared use of pooled computing resources. In practice, neither of these quite works.
A platform like iOS or modern macOS actually imposes almost no per-device administrative overhead. System and app updates get installed automatically. Devices can be configured and backed up remotely. The OS lives on a "sealed" system volume where it's extremely unlikely to be compromised or corrupted. There's still some per-user administrative overhead — the configuration of a particular user's environment can be screwy — but a cloud-based OS still has per-user state, so does nothing to address this.
Pooling resources is great for cases where you want access to a lot of resources, but there's no need to go full-cloud for this. Devices that run real operating systems can access remote resources just fine. The benefit of going full-cloud is hypothetically that your end-user devices can be cheaper if they don't need the hardware to run a full OS... but the cost difference between the hardware required by a thin client and the hardware required to run a full OS is now trivial.
Meanwhile, the thin client approach will always be hobbled by connectivity, latency, bandwidth, and privacy concerns. Connectivity is especially critical on mobile, where Apple makes most of its money. Latency is especially critical in emerging categories like VR/AR, where Apple is looking to expand.
The future is more compute in the cloud and more compute at the edge. There's no structural threat to Apple here.
If you want to use money to incentivize something requiring at least as much effort as full-time employment, you should expect to have to compensate people on a similar scale. As far as I know, no policy has come anywhere close to this yet. Before writing off carrots, try paying families 30-50% of the median personal income for each kid, every year, for the kid's entire period of minority. See what happens.
(I know, nobody wants to model parenting this way, because we like to believe it's some sacred endeavor set apart from crass commerce. But the reality is that it's in competition with the market for labor-hours, and it's in competition with everything supplied by the market as a source of utility. It benefits little from automation, so it's subject to cost disease, and becomes a little less attractive relative to alternatives that aren't every year.)
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