VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
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User ID: 64
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
16hr ago
I think there are plenty of examples of internecine purges on the far right as well. The Night of the Long Knives is probably the most obvious example.
Honestly, I suspect it's a generic hazard of being a moderate in an extremist organization.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
The UBI skeptic's worldview is a fundamentally aristocratic one which does not share your faith in the average individual.
I will observe that the tension between "libertarian" (people flourish best left to their own devices) and, for lack of a better word "progressive" (we can steer people to be better souls) long predates AI. I don't think either side has clearly won there: drug addicts living on the streets of San Francisco are, IMO, pretty clearly neither living their best lives nor making the world a better place for the rest of us. I'll leave aside religious discussion of the innate value of human souls here.
The failures of the opposite extreme, trying to "immanetize the eschaton", as it were, are also pretty well documented in these parts. But this also isn't new with AI: it's the same argument as for alcohol prohibition a century ago. Ditto for similar vices throughout history. While I can accept universal Maslow-style enlightenment as an ideal post-scarcity society, I'm not convinced that it's possible to push people into that. That said, I think part of the role of a successful society is to achieve that self-actualization more broadly, although the methods for doing so are left as an exercise for the reader.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
The future, I think may well be East Asian much like tge seat of civilization was Islamic after the collapse of Rome.
If you're looking to the East because of concerns about TFR and population collapse in the West, I have some bad news for you. China's median citizen is already older than the median American, and is only getting moreso every year. I'm not going to count them out, but an arc like Japan (which was taking over the world in the '80s according to pop culture) seems quite plausible: the country and government are still there and a major power, but rent in Tokyo is no longer the highest in the world and economically has grown slower than it's competitors.
China has a much larger population to work with, and probably still has a moderate decade of growth left, but there are already signs of slowing.
Observation: Child rearing expenses are cumulatively huge, and there's a bit of a One Weird Trick to stop having kids and spend that money on growth elsewhere. It works in the short term, at least. US total education spending is around $1.8T annually, enough to close the budget deficit, although I would distinctly caution against doing so.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
I don't think there's any way out of this problem for Western civilisation as we know it. The cost of children is not only financial, but also biological, social and emotional.
I think one problem is looking at it as a purely financial issue. Sure, that's an element of it: families unable, or sometimes just unwilling, to take on the financial burden of child-rearing, which we've managed to raise in various ways like requiring car seats and larger vehicles or an expectation of how many kids fit in a given room. But it's also a cultural one: we need to convince people that the costs and burdens of raising kids are worthwhile. Governments like to treat every problem as a financial one, and that's certainly one facet to approach, but I think culture leaders and trendsetters need to play a part too. How many kids does the average popular fiction character have? Of the 7 hero characters in The Avengers (2012), one is shown to have kids. I realize child actors are difficult to work with (for well-intentioned reasons), but I feel like there's a big space for positive portrayals of "family" (maybe I'm ignoring The Fast and the Furious franchise?) in the stories we tell each other beyond kids movies.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
There is a name for a language which does not have 'just trust me bro' sections. It is Java.
If I had a nickel for every java.lang.NullPointerException I've seen in the wild, I'd probably have at least a few more bucks, and I don't use that many Java applications.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
We even have fancy new tools for this like Compiler Explorer, which is great for answering "does clang vectorize this like I want it to?".
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
Of course, the US has its own excuse (WP):
The US excuse also includes (has since 1996) that they only prohibit anti-personnel landmines "outside the Korean peninsula", which would otherwise AFAIK prohibit them from being a party to the treaty. It looks like the last few administrations have gone back and forth on expanding or contracting that condition, though.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
It strikes me more as a B&D C++ alternative than a C alternative,
If you are really into this sort of thing, you should consider Ada/SPARK: Rust is cavalier enough to let the programmer engage in potential integer overflows (in default production mode) and doesn't support specifying custom valid ranges (type my_integer is range -3 to 11).
In actuality, I like what they're aiming for, but I expect most of the benefit I'll personally see will be from upping the safety game of C++ (and C, to a lesser extent) via language extensions, automated tooling, and general best practices. I reflexively write tests, use C++11 pointer types, check pointers for nullptr before dereferencing, and use the .at() bounds-checked methods for container elements unless performance is impacted. That said, I do occasionally cause segfaults, still.
The interesting question is if those jobs need to be so obviously unnecessary.
I think this may be one of those "exponential curves are self-similar" things: if you pulled up an administrator for Hammurabi and described the state of modern farming, I'm sure they'd look at you agog and ask what you do with the idle subsistence farmers. And the story there is that "division of labor" led to a centuries-long Renaissance in terms of pretty much every human endeavor that isn't "scratch out a living on a small plot by hand". For all the claims of "singularity", indefinite exponential growth seems an equally valid outcome.
So I guess I'm on team "we're pretty good at finding new ways to keep ourselves busy", with a look of part dismay at "consoom content slop" trends (as if alcoholism and other vices haven't been with us for ages too).
Part of it is just how you look at the economics: you can exchange money for goods or services, but when you buy goods that money isn't expended in the production and distribution of that good, and it at the end of the day it ends up in the accounts of one or more actual humans. Automation can reduce the number of humans in that chain, but the prospect of eliminating it completely seems pretty far off: "my car, fashioned from steel mined from land I own by my own robot army, fueled by gas my robots extracted and refined".
I agree there are reasonable concerns about the concentration of capital, but the free-market endpoint of "Scrooge McDuck holds all the dollars" is a self-defeating liquidity crisis where nobody can exchange goods or services (even spending from the gold pile ends the condition), and other than inflationary threats, the market is typically ambivalent about a huge hoard of unmoving currency. "Bertrand Russell's teapot, but it's a quadrillion US dollar bills that I own" is at best a way to start a religion, unless the astroid mining folks strike it rich, but even then it'd only directly hit goldbugs unless they have actual US dollars, which are a social construct.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
I think you're probably right here about actual attacks here, but I suspect the threats start appearing at much smaller levels of celebrity. I have noticed that lots of small-ish YouTube creators have subtly started upping their opsec game as their channels have grown. I'm not trying to stalk anyone, but if you're watching, a public "I moved houses" followed by no longer showing the exterior is a fairly common arc (one runner I follow concurrently started driving to different places to start even short runs that previously left from home). Maybe some are just as paranoid as I am, but I'd bet it doesn't take much Internet fame on average for the crazies to start DMing you (or your own thread on KF).
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4d ago
Like the double edged sword of the Internet more broadly --- the crushing dichotomy of endless slop and almost the complete collective knowledge of mankind at your fingertips --- the tools are there for you and a couple friends to go produce, say, movies with effects that surpass Kubrick's with a much larger budget. Blender is free (and Academy Award winning!). Camera equipment is smaller and lighter and cheaper. LED lighting can run on batteries.
And yet, nobody that I've found is producing well-written, compelling movies on shoestring budgets that actually get eyes, while Netflix keeps churning out heaps of slop with the odd gem tossed in (KPop Demon Hunters was enjoyable). I'm really not sure what to make of it: maybe there is a stochastic element of movie magic that requires the stars to align for a good product and lots projects to produce a hit, or maybe it takes the collective will to power and collective experience of something like the Hollywood juggernauts to push to finish projects well. Or maybe it's happening, but not in genres I follow: are we in a low-budget horror Renaissance? Or it's a change in dynamic to creators of short-form videos?
And the same is true of other mainstream media. I suppose there are a few breakout hits on Substack or various podcasts, so maybe it's happening and we're just not noticing.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4d ago
I'm not the biggest fan of Rand as a writer, but Atlas Shrugged and friends are generally considered right-wing and at least consider the idea of active hostility.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5d ago
If the smarter kid will always do better, then why work harder ? Why put in effort ?
"Success" is generally a function of both effort and talent. Anecdotally, I'm aware of lots of cases and situations where "smarter" isn't enough alone, and often loses to someone willing to work harder. The folks at the very top have both, and outcomes generally scale with effort at all levels of talent, although there are levels where "have you considered trying something else?" becomes a reasonable question.
Was that before or after Venezuela took six Citgo executives hostage in 2017?
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