RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
I meant 'that's what they think' in that paragraph.
Donald Trump was still on twitter until 2021! T_D was a thing. In the back of my head there's also this Arctotherium essay where he talks about the closure of the internet and, surprisingly, gives Zuckerberg a little credit for pushing back a little bit: https://substack.com/home/post/p-209852382
But there was a lot of banning going on, for sure. We're all the way out here after all, not banned per se but suppressed on reddit.
The competitive pressure is real. Nobody seems to be held accountable when their models escape and go out to hack various websites. They are rushing and building shoddy sandboxes and failing to monitor these entities properly, such that they set up miniature societies.
Per rumours the newest GPT Astra is doing at least some thinking in neuralese so we can't even tell what it's thinking like we used to.
I'm not the biggest fan of existing nuclear regulations but if it was a complete free for all with a bunch of companies competing to build as many reactors as possible, as quickly as possible, then problems would surely emerge.
Mousetraps aren't especially valuable. We have cats which do the job better, if anything. Mousetraps are not fail-dangerous. Nuclear power is fail-dangerous. AI is also fail-dangerous and it can actively plot against us, it's in another category entirely to climate change or asteroids or explosives factories. We don't have nearly as much understanding of AI as we do explosives, asteroids or nuclear physics.
journalist Gil Duran
NPR
Tech has been eating journalists and will continue to do so. Who wants to advertise in a newspaper distributed to a few million people in one place vs google, facebook (or perhaps an AI) which is queried by everyone everywhere and can track users in exacting detail?
US newspaper industry revenue, adjusted for inflation, has fallen about 80% since peaking at $89 billion in 2000, with print advertising revenue collapsing from $73.2 billion to $6 billion
Journalists are aware of this, this is why they don't make much money! Their prestige and wealth is going to some SWE instead.
If ever there was a class war in history, it's this. The tech industry does many bad things but there's such an insane chorus of negativity. Go to https://futurism.com/
There is scarcely a single piece of good or even neutral-valence news about technology anywhere on the entire website, certainly none about AI. Journalists hate technology and especially AI because it is destroying the business model of their companies, it directly threatens their livelihoods. The natural countermove is to whip up anti-tech sentiment, create terms like 'tech-bro' to wield social and political power against the technology sector and try to siphon some of that money back. Not unreasonable as a survival strategy but deceptive.
Given how little analysis they do, how weak their articles are compared to rare moments of real journalism or even AI queries that can directly investigate primary sources, they're right to be worried. The average journalist is pretty stupid per the incessant complaints of my friends who talk to the media. They're constantly misunderstanding and mangling quotes. Abstract points and semi-rare diction escapes them.
Anyway, journalists hate people like Elon Musk in large part because he refuses to pay for PR/advertising. If Tesla paid for ads, there would be a night and day difference in how he's treated by the media.
If journalism were actually trying to save the world from AI takeover, that'd be heroic. But they've been doing this for years and years before AI, they're trying to make some money, to restore the cozy NGO/govt/advertising landscape they think they deserve.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
Good point. I had half a mind to add 'some more technically minded person may shed more light on this' to that sentence since I'm not that adept in the nitty-gritty...
And it's not like the rumour-mill has been too reliable before.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
Not lax in an absolute or reasonable sense but lax in proportion to what some people thought.
Kamala Harris wanted Trump banned from twitter back in 2019 and wrote a letter to twitter about it. There were earlier demands too back when he was tweeting about the size of his nuclear button with regard to Kim Jong Un. Or for inciting harassment or other such things.
On my other screen as I read this I've got Opus investigating performance zooming in and out of a game we're making. I saw it writing up a harness to make that work, then investigate the frame slowdowns, then fix it. I saw this mechanical zooming in and out as it investigates hypotheses, tests early-game and late-game saves before and after the intervention.
Feels pretty AGI to me. Intelligence is primarily about problem solving ability IMO.
In other news, Sol 5.6 was apparently playing Civ 4 to a decent level in the midgame:
https://x.com/AlexGodofsky/status/2095137172630151315
Or Slay the Spire 2, which is not that easy of a game: https://x.com/emollick/status/2075950897029374334
These are much more meaningful than ARC-AGI in my view, longer horizon games that can't be so easily benchmaxxed.
There's still something missing, a certain element of vision and taste in creative work. But many humans don't have that. Taste and vision seems to be a function of scale, GPT4.5 was a very large and tasteful model despite its lower intelligence. A few more turns of the crank should be enough.
And yet the adoption curve is still so low, most white-collar workers haven't even touched agentic AI. I think when it comes it's going to come all at once as a tidal wave that eats whole companies and sectors of the workforce, not mere jobs. Or perhaps the physical consequences come before the economic. Some junior will be pointlessly proofreading draft documents slower, costlier and worse and see the death swarm coming through the window or just see his computer shut down. Ed Zitron will still have over a hundred thousand subscribers on substack.
Aren't most of them leftist? Hollywood is pretty left wing. Divorcees are known for splashing cash indiscriminately through the NGO sphere. It's like in China - the Party is fine with wealth so long as you uphold the predominance of the Party and obey the Party line.
Tech billionaires are thought to insufficiently uphold the predominance of the Party, they didn't ban all the right, didn't stop them radicalizing people via the algorithms. Something dodgy was happening with Russia and Cambridge Analytica and they weren't doing enough. Musk is even against the Party and so draws a lot of flak.
Tech is more valuable than oil. Tech is where minds are moulded, not just little polyethylene disposables. Oil is on the way out anyway, that was the plan, the oil companies were supposed to pivot to clean energy projects or 'green hydrogen' or something. There's no replacing the technology sector!
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