Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
#209, #StandUpLocust, #MurphysFerry, Surah Yunus 10:71
User ID: 2418
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
6hr ago
Try reading On Pain by Junger. That’s one of my favorite short-reads of all time. Storm of Steel was the first work of his I’d ever read and I was hooked after that.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
6hr ago
I’m trying my hand again at A Fire Upon The Deep. I made an attempt at it some years back, but it’d always been one that remained in the back of my mind and I’ve since had a commitment to myself to eventually return to it. I think what may be key to it is to go slower than my usual reading speed.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
6hr ago
In what ways though are these truly augmenting and improving the development process on your end apart from simply being a more advanced way of “Googling the answer;” and one you don’t have to stop to verify and audit at each stage of its code generation?
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
6hr ago
I always viewed the Turing Test similar to Moore’s Law (which isn’t really a law at all; in some areas it’s already stopped; in others it’s expected to stop very soon if it hasn’t very recently). A useful empirical regularity or heuristic, provided you don’t put too much weight on it.
Just because he used the word “perfected?” I don’t like it when colloquialisms get verbally captured by their misuses in the history of a discipline. That’s the only thing that leads me to make that comparison. I was taught in a way similar to you from the sound of it, but I’m not really seeing the problem here. I think the passage is going a little more work for you than it otherwise should be.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
7hr ago
Vonnegut’s non-linear storytelling never appealed to me one bit, but reading Slaughterhouse 5, I could understand why people were drawn to him.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
15hr ago
No formal diagnosis here either, but if Beavis and Butt-Head could ever fit the diagnosis that surely would’ve been me as a child. I somewhat felt like I was being targeted in goose’s rant several years ago, taking shots at my personality, :/.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
16hr ago
Oh yeah? Well I would have you know my IQ is 20/20, 😤.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
17hr ago
I have not, but I’m 90% to completing my future-proof desktop. Sounds like I’ve got a new overclocking benchmark to test.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
17hr ago
Reminds me of the joke, “Shit. If I can load this MySpace page I can probably run Crysis.”
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
17hr ago
That trend already began years back when you look at comparative salaries year-by-year. The salary even a new graduate would command 10-20 years ago was far higher than some of the low balls I’ve seen people get within the last 5.
#1 is a big one in relationships that people greatly undervalue. If you can’t be a safe space for your spouse or partner, then you’d better start working on it very seriously. Trust is foundational for relationships of all types, and without it, what do you really have?
To point #3 as well, having a solid group of friends or family members helps with this a lot. There’s a very small group of people in my life for which we’d practically been each other’s therapist for 30 years. We grew up in the same environment, similar conditions and all had something to offer for how we made it through things, owing in no small part of the amount of support we showed for one another.
A lot of people get robbed of developing the psychological resources in their youth to be able to deal with tough living conditions and circumstances. It’s a major reason why so many people turn to drug use. It’s not really about the cool experience of “changing your consciousness,” the way people like Joe Rogan would tell you. No. The reason they take drugs is because it’s a form of escapism. It’s how rappers would relate to the pain of people in the hood. Developing the mental tools to navigate crushing hardship isn’t easy at all, and it takes a lot of time; but it can be done. I tend to think professional therapy is something of a racket, but in my case it wasn’t the ‘kind’ of thing I needed to make things better off.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
1d ago
Never been accused of writing like an LLM, no. Maybe it’ll happen one day though. People have said I tend to be overly descriptive or over explain things. It’s become a necessary habit overtime after seeing more than a few pseudo-intellectual jackasses “ackshually,” their way through your argument, as if they’ve said anything meaningful or substantive against point. My natural writing style takes the form of shutting off and closing the door to objections I’m anticipating, so it rigidly keeps my interlocutor on track and focused on what I’m saying. It’s a fairly well known phenomenon in the psychology of argument that people tend to ignore all the strong and conclusive evidence you can muster, then pick on the weakest point in your argument, writing an objection against that and then ignore all the rest of what you’ve said. That kind of behavior annoys me as well. It’s also why adding a bad argument to your armamentarium of good arguments actually worsens your case. Because when people think they can refute your bad argument, they automatically assume they can do the same to the rest of your arguments and don’t bother to address it at all.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
1d ago
I have multiple opinions about UBI.
One rationale for it that I see was it would replace much of the piecemeal welfare system we already have, and offset its net cost. Not just dollar for dollar, but also with every dollar moved, the administrative costs of those other programs will be eliminated. And as those tend to be conditions based, their overhead (in vetting and auditing) is much higher than a simple UBI program’s would be. The cost of even basic UBI is nevertheless quite high. And I think this is the only real criticism of it that holds up; like all the useful luxuries of civilization, a thing you should have, you only should buy only when you can afford it. We should as a community fund fire fighting, for example; but only if we as a community generate enough wealth that we can safely afford it. And so on down the line of every wise move civilizations have made.
It’d replace roughly $800 billion in other programs (from welfare to unemployment insurance), but it’d also replace about $800 billion in social security expenditures (since social security payouts wouldn’t add to UBI, but only make up any difference in average monthly benefits, which are already above $1,000) so UBI’s net cost in the U.S. would be “only” $1.4 trillion. But that’s without a national healthcare system, which we also should have, and also has to be paid for. That would cost roughly another 2 trillion dollars (after offsets and such are tabulated, e.g. such a system would replace medicare and medicaid altogether). So actually, we’re looking at $3.4 trillion a year in new spending, for a standard social safety net every other first world nation already has, and UBI.
If you calculate from IRS data, the entire collective incomes of the top 1% of earners (which means roughly everyone who earns more than half a million dollars a year) is just over 2 trillion dollars. If we surtaxed all income above half a million dollars at a flat rate of 50% (which means in addition to existing income taxes subject to deductibles and so on, etc.) we’d bring in new revenue of about $1 trillion dollars. And a national sales tax (VAT) of 15% could raise about 1.73 trillion a year. There are other successful nations that have just such a tax, so we know its effects on economies aren’t prohibitive. So those two revenue streams alone would make up all but $670 billion of the dollars needed. We already know improved enforcement of existing tax laws would bring in hundreds of billions a year, [about] $500 billion (according to a study I saw). That then leaves only $170 billion to account for. So the question then becomes, is it reasonable to gain the corresponding national benefits with a 60% “insane income” tax instead of only 50%, adding another $200 billion dollars to our national revenue?
The already existing budget shortfalls of almost a trillion dollars a year would gradually be made up if we returned to a pre-Reagan income tax regime (canceling all Republican tax cuts then and would also raise over $380 billion a year in current dollars), and greatly cut our spending on useless foreign wars (to the tune of $300+ billion a year) and corporate welfare (by the narrower definition, in adjusted dollars, gaining us some $70 billion), and enacted a reasonable drawdown in overall military spending (earning back $100+ billion).
It’d also replace roughly $100 billion dollars in federal employee costs by simply not duplicating UBI to federal employees and pensioners (i.e., if a federal retiree is receiving a pension of $1,500 a month, or a federal worker is receiving a salary of $1,500 a month, they would continue receiving ‘that’, instead of UBI). UBI would simply be part of the already agreed upon compensation package.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
1d ago
Business interests more generally are a natural part of society. Commerce is an unavoidable system of interaction between humans. The more complex it becomes overtime, you begin to see the formal institutional emergence of functions and bylaws that specify purpose and regulatory guidelines for the expectations of how businesses are supposed to behave.
You’ve sort of weaved multiple questions here into a single thread that doesn’t make it easy to answer. As it relates to AI specifically, it could entirely turn out to be the case that significant sectors of the industry become nationalized outright or fall under a strong regulatory regime that changes the nature of the industry entirely. People have said for a long time for instance that ISP’s should be nationalized as a public utility, and the same has been said of our industrial control system network (which a lot of it is actually in private hands). But a lot of the AI speculation is all predicated upon the assumption that the day is coming when it’s going to hit us, and its arrival will be unmistakable once it’s here. I’m still skeptical of that.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
1d ago
… I've seen good arguments that the secrecy around Mythos is at least in part due to Anthropic hyping up their own work, but most importantly due to a massive compute crunch on their end...
That’s exactly what it is. Behind the marketing department though, there are still interesting things to see with Mythos.
Anthropic’s model is really good at finding software vulnerabilities, but so are other models. GPT-5.5, already generally available is comparable in it’s capability. The company Aisle also reproduced Anthropic’s published results with smaller, cheaper models.
One of the problems with Mythos is that it’s very expensive to run, and the company doesn’t appear to have the resources for a general release. (What better way to juice the company’s valuation than to hint at capabilities but not prove them, and then have others parrot their claims?)
Modern generative AI system (not just Anthropic’s but OpenAI’s and other open-source models) are getting really good at finding and exploiting vulnerabilities. I don’t want to say I was a complete naysayer originally (because I wasn’t) but the rate of advancement has raised my eyebrow a few times along with some of the economizing factors.
There is no discrete ‘you’ riding around in the operating theater of the brain, or some sense of “extra” physical perception. I still draw from the Daniel Dennett side of the force on this one. There’s a limit to the precision with which you can meaningfully specify the time and place where for instance, an image from your retina passes into your consciousness. You can’t exactly “pin down” the millisecond when it occurs, or the cubic millimeter of brain matter “where” it occurs, because there is no such precise time and place. The physical processes themselves that implement consciousness are sprawled over many simultaneously operating modules of the brain, and their operation takes at least a substantial fraction of a second.
Every cognitive event by itself is devoid of consciousness. What there is, is an internal memory system which records a stream of selected mental events (perceptions, thoughts, etc.) that the machinery deems salient. Any recorded mental event can be played back and ‘‘watched’’ by other parts of the cognitive system, either immediately or much later; this process turns out to be what consciousness consists of. The event of ‘‘watching’’ the playback is itself a cognitive event that can be recorded and played back (just as, with a literal camcorder, you can shoot a video of yourself watching a previous video). It’s somewhat of a different emphasis but it’s consistent with Dennett’s multiple-drafts view of consciousness. It doesn’t record or play back raw pixels or sound amplitudes and frequencies, it records events at a higher level of abstraction. The cognitive system parses sights, sounds, and other perceptions into representations that correspond to physical objects, persons, etc.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
2d ago
Try doing complex mental computations off Roman numerals. It’s even harder. I used to wonder how the artisans and craftsmen of the time made such beautiful architecture and how they performed their measurements to calculate things. It’s always baffled me.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
2d ago
He's hella autistic. He needs his own entry in the DSM-6.
Level 6, huh? Damn. He’s way more advanced than me then. But I highly doubt LW was ever more autistic than StarCraft Battle.net channels back in the day.
One movie I really enjoyed watching years ago was The Man From Earth. There’s a line in that movie that goes (I’m paraphrasing), “The people back then [in ancient times] weren’t any more or less intelligent than we are. They just didn’t know as much…” We tend to look back on history as if the human beings who lived then weren’t really humans but were some kind of aliens. It’s why I’ve always rejected the whole “… everyone before ‘us’ we’re all ignorant and bigoted savages…” notion that pseudo-intellectual blowhards love to lead with. Of course they laughed. Of course they had sex. Of course they had institutions like the military, marriage, inheritance, etc. even Joseph wanted to divorce Mary in the Bible because he knew perfectly well where babies come from. These people weren’t gullible fools. Look around and consider all the things in the world that for all intents and purposes you lack such sufficient knowledge that you’d conclude, “This thing here works by magic.” Beneath it all you surely know there’s something mechanistic to it, but the world is still a very mysterious place.
The questions they would ask would likely be very different but I think on a basic level they’d acclimate over time. I tend to think we’ll always be slightly more well adjusted to adapt to the future than if a hard reset took place and we had to go back living in the distant past.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
2d ago
<- You’re talking to a case study right here, :/.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
2d ago
Away from me, spirit of Satan!
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
2d ago
Ah, that makes sense. That’s foundational to digital imaging. Working on raster images is a gigantic pain in the ass, but multiplying coordinate vectors to digitally allow for infinite scaling makes the job so much easier (zero pixelation) once you’ve got it nailed down. If I was learning it for the first time, I wouldn’t want to be under that kind of pressure either.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
2d ago
I was always very attracted to the humanities and religious studies departments, but fortunately also had a very strong autodidactic education in various scientific fields. The increase in tuition costs should signal to parents and young students to spend more time charting out a sufficiently defined and pinned down career path, before blindly entering campus and assuming student debt chasing general education courses and hoping you’ll eventually find an interest in something.
I don’t know why that is either… Because I’m not a usual fiction reader, but I love stories like that. For some reason it just never clicked with me previously. One thing I will say though is audio productions of all the old classics have offered me a great deal of renewed enjoyment to re-experience. I’d recently listened to the Dorsai series a couple years ago after I’d read the books even years prior to that, and it was a great experience.
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