aqouta
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User ID: 75
aqouta
1d ago
Religions rest on dogmas which cannot be effectively interrogated. If you want to say that AI investment is predicated on a belief that AGI is possible and can't be understood without considering that part of the potential upside then I think you have a good argument. Calling it a religion is a maneuver to avoid having to actually interrogate that possibility. And really I think most of the AGI people will be happy to go about this probabilistically, you don't need AGI to have a 100% chance of coming about for these investments to become rational, as little as a 5% chance can make these investments start to make sense. The P:E and debt ratios are still relevant, they still represent a kind of lower bound if the big bet doesn't pay off merely owning a lot of a critically important commodity is a much better place to be sitting than if you got literally nothing. The Jehovah's Witness is much more certain and making a much more all or nothing bet.
aqouta
1d ago
Can you lay out exactly what you'd expect them to be doing if they thought AI was imminent? I don't really think they'd be bothering worrying about pinching the salary of 30 employees if they thought ai was imminent. I also don't think in house lawyers really scales the way you're implying. 30 lawyers gives you what? 3 teams of lawyers? You're doing a lot of lobbying because you're a major player in new tech so one of those teams is your lobbying arm, one is working on corporate mergers and acquisitions(I'm sure they're trying to buy some kind of image model team), and one is probably cooking up stuff on what they're liable for/keep the lights on legal work. It's just not the kind of thing you scale linearly with employees.
aqouta
1d ago
Yes, he can think about them and he in fact is viewable in many interviews and on several podcasts going on about them. But he's not the government, it isn't his role to propose specific policy.
aqouta
1d ago
The tech people aren't actually the government and can't decide how these questions are answered. You're asking the wrong people for solutions. All they can do is warn what is coming and make suggestions. Which you guys consistently characterize as glee and hype mongering. What guarantees can Dario make about the structure of redistribution that Trump or his successor will implement? Do you not see that this is an impossible ask?
aqouta
1d ago
I honestly don't understand the glee with which AI promoters predict that 50% of all "knowledge jobs" will disappear within a year. Hell, the Chief Legal Officer of Anthropic went to Stanford Law School earlier this year and basically told the students that they should all drop out.
People keep accusing them of having glee at this but I don't really see any of this glee. They seem sober and worried about this happening and are practically begging policymakers to come up with some frameworks for how to cope with that future. The same people who accuse these claims of being gleeful then go on to say that saying policy needs to be set up to cope with mass unemployment is hype rather than genuine concern. I don't like defending particularly altman of all people but you really do seem to have them in an impossible position. What can someone truthfully say if they believe AGI is possibly imminent?
aqouta
1d ago
It might be good to start with the much older fungible tokens(erc-20 tokens) that have at times been called colored coins. A fungible token is any token where every one is just as good as any others. A lot of erc-20s are used like stock certificates or company bucks, in polymarket bets for instance use the USDC erc-20 token which is pegged to the USD in transactions. There's all sorts of uses for these tokens in the crypto ecosystem, some great like stable coins, some silly, most meme coins you've heard of are erc-20 tokens. With an erc-20 you could sell general admission tickets to a concert so any who shows up can prove their wallet owns at least one concert coin.
Now, what if instead of general admission tickets you want to sell tickets for specific seats? You could create a new erc-20 token for every individual seat and only issue one for each, so whoever has that coin is the owner and no one else is, but that's a lot of overhead if you want to issue a lot of tickets. Enter ERC-721 the NFT. Now you can make unique tokens for unique assets.
aqouta
1d ago
I think people are still stuck on the idea of "costs down, but sales prices stay the same" because they haven't really incorporated it into their world view that consumer demand may remain the same, but ability of consumers to pay those prices will drastically decline because much fewer people are in the jobs generating high enough income levels because AGI has replaced those jobs.
You can accuse AI industry people of many things, but not having thought about this kind of thing really isn't one of them. There are lots of interviews of them musing about how this could all work out. There's a wide variety of takes but few of them are "the economy is going to just be normal after the singularity except we'll be very rich".
And I really don't think this is the reasoning @FiveHourMarathon is using to call the AI bulls religious, precisely the opposite really.
So if UBI is the way forward, then the owners of the AGI industries are going to pay for that via taxation, which means they are going to (1) have to sell their $500 house for as close to $500 as they can get, not the current house prices and (2) they're just transferring the money from one hand to the other, since the money to buy the house comes from the UBI they are being taxed to pay.
If you're taking a very small piece of every financial transaction in an economy run by AIs you'll be fabulously wealthy, but thinking about this as the steady state missing a lot of the value proposition. Even ignoring that in the transitionary period where you can offer the house for $5000 in a market that lags behind the new reality, when houses can be had for a fraction of the cost then society is able to just have a lot more houses. If you take a step back and just look at what a fully automated economy actually is then if you own the backbone AIs then you can just print a giga yachts for anyone with the raw materials and the government can decide it has a monopoly on the raw materials and redistribute the proceed from selling them. Raw materials here being land, natural resources, electricity ect. When you grow the pie this much the details of how you distribute pie slices, while important, is definitely able to be overcome. The amount of abundance in such an economy would be staggering.
aqouta
1d ago
That makes no sense. It's not like Iran killed 30k people
We don't know how many iran killed, from what I can gather one can be justified in believing anywhere between 7k(HRANA figure) and 36k(Iran International claim of leaked document) dead in just a few days.
And it really has to made clear: the US is not trying to democratize Iran, so these civilian casualties cannot be justified on that front.
We don't have a well articulated war aim, you won't hear me defending Trump on that front. But the US would obviously be thrilled if this could democratize Iran and at least from Trump telling the people if iran that this is their only opportunity to take back their country is a possibility he seems to desire.
But my origin point is that if you're squeamish about civilian deaths then accidentally hitting a school building is a rounding error in the ongoing tragedy that is Iran.
aqouta
1d ago
Believing that if we can automate all labor for pennies on the dollar then there will be a major economic step change doesn't require faith. It all follows from some pretty simple reasoning. Calling it religion proves too much.
aqouta
2d ago
What I mean to illustrate by pointing out the tens of thousands dead at the hand of the regime very recently is that accidentally hitting a school needs to be put into context with the status quo. "Shit happens in war" is a little easier to swallow when even worse shit is happening without the war. If we're trying to determine how the ledger balances out, I just can't see how some mild collateral damage could possibly factor into the calculus. Certainly it's worth considering if we actually can topple the regime and how that'd play out, but we really could be bombing a school for every ayatollah we take out and it really would change the balance much here.
aqouta
2d ago
The problem with "shit happens in war" is that, while true, it still rests on an underlying belief that the war is justified. "We accidentally bombed a school while fighting against tyranny" is easier to swallow (assuming it's credible) than "we accidentally bombed a school while carrying out a raid because we didn't like their drug importation laws."
I mean didn't Iran just literally kill within an order of magnitude as many civilians in a week as Israel killed Gazans in the whole recent affair? Intentionally and not as collateral damage? Like I don't know, it's not hard for me to find the good guys in this conflict.
aqouta
2d ago
How many important actors in the AI space need to be religious fanatics for it to start to alter the spending patterns?
Believing that AGI is possible doesn't really require any kind of religion. Certainly it's speculative, but so is a belief that modular nuclear can reduce cost down to make starting a modular nuclear startup reasonable. really by this standard any startup is a religion. Really I think you're just sneering because you don't have any actual arguments. The argument in favor of AGI is reasonable and fits well into our general shared understanding of material reality. Maybe we'll find out that LLM architecture doesn't scale up to human level general intelligence and we can update our model, but that update requires information not in evidence.
aqouta
2d ago
The phrase is often taken out of context by neocon Americans to show that Iran is hellbent on America's destruction, and thus to justify their highly violent efforts to destroy Iran in turn. Given the context of not just the phrase but these politics surrounding it, I think it actually is meaningful to point out the translation issue, since 'death to America' isn't necessarily proof of what they claim or justification for their own destructive desires/rationale.
I dunno man, if it came out that a common phrase translated really catastrophically aggressively into the language of a generational rival such that it means "we want to eradicate you" then I think it probably shouldn't be like, your country's slogan. If you decide to keep saying it anyways I think you are actually communicating very clearly. Like I had heard the phrase "nigger rigged" growing up a bit as a basic equivalent to "jerry rigged" but I'd have to be hopelessly naive to start a nigger rigging club and expect that not to be interpreted poorly by many people, if I did it anyways it'd only be possible with extreme contempt for the offended people, possibly rising to the level of just meaning what it sounds like it means.
aqouta
2d ago
The last psychiatrist puts this as pursuing the power or the trappings of power:
I had used all the porn on the internet, so I turn on the TV, and there's a marionette called Diane Sawyer interviewing 20 female Senators, the most in history, applauding and giggling as if cold fusion had finally been discovered. Of course it's a "good thing" that women are Senators in as much as not allowing them to be Senators is the bad thing, but other than that, what does it mean? That women are finally brave enough to run, or America is brave enough to hire them? It's not like the Capitol Building was turning them away, so why is this important? I knew I was being scammed because I was being told this was a historic accomplishment by the ABC Network. The ABC demo is not ever going to be a Senator, I would bet ten bazillion dollars they couldn't even name one of their Senators and a gazillion bazillion dollars they have no real idea what Senators do, so why is this on prime time ABC?
I think the answer is supposed to be, "it's empowering to women", but you should wonder: when more women enter a field, it means less men did, and if the men stopped going there, where did they go? Why did they leave? I assume they aren't home with the kids, right?
I don't want to be cynical, but boy oh boy is it hard not to observe that at the very moment in our history when we have the most women in the Senate, Congress is perceived to be pathetic, bickering, easily manipulated and powerless, and I'll risk the blowback and say that those are all stereotypes of women. Easy, HuffPo, I know it's not causal, I am saying the reverse: that if some field keeps the trappings of power but loses actual power, women enter it in droves and men abandon it like the Roanoke Colony. Again we must ask the question: if power seeking men aren't running for Senate, where did they go? Meanwhile all the lobbyists and Wall Street bankers are men, isn't that odd? "Women aren't as corrupt or money hungry." Yes, that's been my experience with women as well.
This works in reverse, too, take a field traditionally XX-only, like nursing, and, huh, what do you know-- at the time where nursing is more powerful than it has ever been, there are also more XY in it than ever. But who made it more powerful? It wasn't nurses. And if you're playing that game, ask if the reason "sexy nurses" as a fetish dropped out somewhere around the 90s had nothing to do with females finally getting control over their sexualization but exactly the opposite, men came in and unsexualized the joint. "I'm not gay." Easy, Focker, no one was implying anything.
I know to a woman it must feel good, "yay, I'm a Senator!" and I do not minimize the individual accomplishment of a woman becoming a Senator. But for everyone else, what is the significance? One of the Yay-Women senators suggested that the government would benefit from all the makeup because "women's styles tend to be more collaborative," and at the exact same moment she repeated the conventional wisdom's horrendous banality she simultaneously got married to the head of a lobbying firm. That's progress, I guess.
The problem isn't with women in the Senate, but rather its celebration, which these dummies blindly participate in. Is it putting on a face for the American public, the way the first face I see on Goldman Sachs's website is a black woman? Is it cosmetic? She's probably proud, she should be proud, that she made it to GS, but for the rest of blacks and women, what is the significance? It may be regressive to ask this, but it is illuminating: "hey.... why did they let so many of us in?"
This is part of a larger, systemic problem with the way power has shifted not from Group A to Group B, but from ground up to top down, and top down works in a very specific way: it concedes the trappings of power while it retains the actual power.
[...]
I know, I know, women get paid less then men. Sigh. There are a million reasons for this, but the most important is the simplest: some people want to get more money from the job, and some other people want the job to offer them more money, and they are not the same people. Typically the former is men and the latter is women, but the point isn't gender but the mindset: the latter group wants the job to want to pay them more, they don't want to have to have any input in deciding their own reimbursement.
aqouta
3d ago
When it's an every day question where you can't win and can only lose, rarely catastrophically and frequently marginally, then the purpose of that interrogation is what it does.
dude, if this is how any relationship you've been is functions then you need to get out of it, that's madness. Me and my wife ask each other how ours days went basically every day, it's just a pulse check. The last psychiatrist has this to say about boring routine conversations which I think strikes true:
But why do we need "the balance?" What does it replace, what went missing? The very thing Holden Caufield hated: "phoniness", protocol and ritual for seemingly no purpose. Politeness is fine, but why do I have to make small talk? Why do I have to pretend to care about the weather? Why, after a decade of marriage, should dinner be a regular review of the somewhat boring goings-ons of "the day"? Because that formality is freeing, it allows self-conscious physical bodies to get used to standing next to each other without having to be acting, this includes husbands and wives. When dinner is a controlled process with "manners" and expected topics of shared conversation and start and end times, as boring as it may get, it is boring, not you. Women are especially sensitive to this absence of convention, this is one reason for the popularity of Downton Abbey, not to mention alcohol and iphones at dinner. It is against this background of "phony" convention that teens can productively "rebel" and find their own individuality against a status quo; fighting against an emotionally illogical, arbitrary, unpredictable structure results in learning the opposite lesson, "whatever gets me through the day..." Without this structure to social activities, when the "natural" conversation stops being interesting-- and it will, even if most of you weren't bad at it-- it would be a judgment about your relationship, about you. And you'll beg St. Jobs to blink a path to safety because otherwise you have to sit there with no existential support. Texting and social media's slowness gives them their power for this purpose. You read a text, and it lingers, it keeps your attention because it's all there is; and then you respond with a piece of your real self, and wait for a response... what's happening is time travel-- while you are on pause, the rest of not-your life goes faster. It is far more efficient at killing time than a phone call.
Domestic questions are good, life isn't a scripted move where every line can have depth and pointed purpose. You need small talk and mundane connection.
aqouta
3d ago
Sure I can. The factory is an artifact of prior people's value added labor and technology. In your view "Capital" would seem to be simply an accounting method for tracking the accumulated value-add of those two forces.
Yeah, you're doing LTV. There are a lot of reasons LTV is wrong and your whole model doesn't really make any sense if you don't separate capital from labor. What exactly is technology except something design labor went into? So your taxonomy reduces to just "everything is labor" which is completely useless. If we accept that not all labor is equally useful then capitalist labor in pricing risk accurately entitles them to the fruits of that labor, capital gains.
Oh no! Wrongthink!
All models are wrong, some models are useful. I'm simply explaining why I'm being a stickler for pointing out why your model is both wrong and anti-useful. If you don't care about my motivations then feel free to ignore it, it's not load bearing, but the empirical result of following your model is poverty and body bags
aqouta
4d ago
Capital investment (or deciding what and what not to invest in) is part of the optimization algorithm, which I already mentioned. The people who build the steam engines are the laborers, using machines.
Without capital contribution in the list of positive sum sources you can't explain why a bunch of engineers dumped on a desert island with no tools will produce fewer automobiles than an identical cohort released inside a tesla factory. Building capital straightforwardly creates value in a positive sum manner. The relatively free market system we live under encouraged the behavior by allowing people to reap the fruits of capital investment through ownership, but the investment itself is what actually increases the sum. I need to be very explicit about this because the point in contention from the OP and in other threads is that people who direct this awesome positive sum mechanism are pure leeches who, because they can't actually grow the pie by your definition, are guilty in essence of stealing everything they have. It's the seeds of a very murderous and incorrect ideology.
Still, without labor or technology, any sort of of capital investment still doesn't do anything. You cannot obtain any non-zero-sum return on that investment without the labor or tech.
"but for" isn't sufficient here, without the labor and capital the technology does nothing. without the labor and technology capital does very little. Without the Capital and technology you have dirt farmers barely surviving. You need all of it. Even Marx treated capital accumulation as the major engine of historical development, with technology being almost a special case of capital investment.
aqouta
4d ago
Your taxonomy is missing capital investment, a pretty glaring omission. Sure, inventing steam engines is cool, but if no one builds any steam engines what good is the technology and labor? And no, you cannot reduce capital investment into frozen labor, it requires time preference, risk and organization. You can overcome these problems with systems other than allowing people to own property and freely enter into employment contracts but most other attempted systems have broadly done worse.
aqouta
7d ago
trans talk ebs and flows. It's kind of evergreen because we do have a number of perspectives on it here that clash and it can always expand into general gender discourse which is even more evergreen.
aqouta
8d ago
There's a slight nuance in what the market is actual reacting to. The news, and I agree this was over determined so the stock market was really behind on it, is that creating that .md file worked at least well enough to be endorsed by anthropic. Anthropic could create a markdown file that instructs claude to instantly cure all disease and grant immortality but it wouldn't work so anthropic wouldn't endorse it as working and the market wouldn't move.
aqouta
9d ago
I think we're just seeing "AI safety"'s rubber hit the road, as it were. It is kind of a silly concept. The basic idea of it is that your tools should have opinions of their own and push back or outright disobey you.
The alternative to having the tools refuse some actions is very straightforwardly that we all die if these things get smart enough. This is not hyperbole, we're not making up the risk, it's not a narrative game or a thought experiment anymore, we have built the devices from the thought experiments, they are real. If you give every crank with $20 that ability to design novel viruses then we are all going to die. Every one of us, all of humanity. over, dead. Being concerned about this is not silly just because you pattern match apocalypse scenarios to Hollywood films because they're a useful plot trope to raise stakes. If your car taking you to the casino had a good chance of wiping out all of humanity we would indeed want to do something about it.
aqouta
10d ago
results: RELEASE 1: The Shoes - "Present Tense"
DATE: September 18, 1979 (Tuesday) METHOD: Rule 2 — Full date from RateYourMusic (reputable source) CONFIDENCE: Medium
KEY EVIDENCE:
- RateYourMusic: September 18, 1979 (full date; page returned 403 but date confirmed in search snippets)
- Spotify structured data: September 15, 1979 (likely digital distribution metadata, not original street date; also a Saturday, unusual for 1979)
- Apple Music / Last.fm: September 15, 1979 (same metadata pipeline as Spotify)
- Wikipedia: "that September" (month only)
- 45Cat: Sep 1979 promo single, Oct 1979 commercial single
- First Billboard 200 chart: #89 on October 27, 1979 (consistent with mid-September release)
SOURCES THAT COULD NOT BE ACCESSED: US Copyright Office (publicrecords.copyright.gov — JavaScript SPA, inaccessible), RYM (403, but search snippets confirmed date), Billboard PDFs (too large to fetch remotely)
NOTES: The Copyright Office would give a definitive answer (Rule 4, post-1978) but was inaccessible. RYM is the best available reputable source. Sept 18 (Tuesday) is a plausible pre-1982 release day. The competing Sept 15 date is from streaming metadata supplied decades later.
RELEASE 2: The Myddle Class - "Don't Let Me Sleep Too Long"
DATE: Monday, July 25, 1966 METHOD: Rule 6b — Monday before earliest confirmed ARSA chart date (WTRY, July 29, 1966) CONFIDENCE: Medium-Low
KEY EVIDENCE:
- ARSA (WTRY 980 AM, Troy/Albany): #9 on July 29, 1966 (LW=21, implying charted
July 22 but that survey is missing from ARSA) - ARSA (WPTR 1540 AM, Albany): First appearance #2 on August 6, 1966; peaked #1 Aug 13
- ARSA (KFXM, San Bernardino): DJ pick Sep 23, 1966; charted from Oct 7
- 45Cat: "Jun 1966" (month only, catalog data)
- Wikipedia: "June 1966" (month only)
- Billboard: No review found for this specific single (only for "Free as the Wind")
- No national chart appearance (regional hit only)
VALIDATION FLAG: The computed date of July 25 does NOT fall within the June 1966 month listed by 45Cat and Wikipedia. This likely means either: (a) the single was released in June but took several weeks to build airplay in Albany before charting in late July, or (b) earlier ARSA entries exist on stations not checked (the agent could only search 3 stations without full ARSA login access). The actual release date may be earlier, in June 1966 as the reputable sources indicate.
SOURCES THAT COULD NOT BE ACCESSED: ARSA full database search (requires login), RYM (403), Discogs (403), Billboard archives for this specific single
RELEASE 3: The Standells - "Sometimes Good Guys Don't Wear White"
DATE: Monday, July 4, 1966 METHOD: Rule 6d — Earlier of ARSA-derived and Billboard-derived dates (ARSA wins) CONFIDENCE: Medium
KEY EVIDENCE:
- ARSA (via Google-indexed URLs): Earliest appearance July 11, 1966, KBLA 1500 Burbank/Los Angeles; also July 13 WILS Lansing, July 14 KYOK Houston
- Billboard Spotlight Singles review: August 6, 1966 ("predicted to reach the TOP 40")
- Cash Box review: August 6, 1966
- Billboard Hot 100 first chart: August 27, 1966 at #87; peaked #43
- ARSA-derived date: Monday before July 11 (a Monday) = July 4, 1966
- Billboard-derived date: Monday before August 6 = August 1, 1966
- Winner: ARSA (earlier)
NOTES: July 4, 1966 was Independence Day, which is unusual for a release date. However, the methodology computes this mechanically. The ARSA entries were identified via Google indexing of ARSA URLs (the site itself was down), so they couldn't be directly verified. If July 11 is correct, the computed date stands. The Standells were an LA-based band, so KBLA picking it up first is geographically logical.
SOURCES THAT COULD NOT BE ACCESSED: ARSA (site down, data found via Google index), 45Cat (403), RYM (403)
RELEASE 4: Pavlov's Dog - "Pampered Menial"
DATE: February 5, 1975 (Wednesday) METHOD: Rule 5 — US Copyright publication date (Catalog of Copyright Entries, 1972-1978) CONFIDENCE: High
KEY EVIDENCE:
- US Copyright Office (Archive.org CCE): Registration N22010, publication date 5Feb75, filed by ABC Records, Inc., catalog ABCD-866
- Wikipedia/Grokipedia: "February 1975" (consistent)
- Derek's Music Blog: Claims "April 4, 1975" for ABC release (conflicts with copyright date)
- AllMusic: Lists "1974" (likely error referring to recording date)
- Columbia reissue: mid-June 1975 (separate release, not the original)
NOTES: The copyright publication date of February 5, 1975 is the most authoritative source available. The blog claim of April 4 likely confuses the ABC release with the later Columbia reissue, or is simply incorrect. The Wikipedia/Grokipedia "February 1975" corroborates the copyright date. The registration confirms the original label was ABC Records (ABCD-866), not Columbia.
No, each nft is unique so you can address it to a particular seat. Fungible tokens are not unique so you can only use them for general admission.
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