aqouta
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User ID: 75
aqouta
11mo ago
He is for sure not innocent. You can certainly argue that it was a politically motivated prosecution of the 10 felonies a day type but Trump really did commit a crime.
This is silliness. Maybe you'd have a point if @TracingWoodgrains used his credibility to push the story but he didn't. LOTT ate bait posted by an anonymous source with zero attempt at verification. He did not pimp out his name. There is no reason to believe anything he writes is a hoax. The only lesson one can reasonably draw from the whole thing is that you shouldn't take the word of random anonymous people or those who do.
aqouta
2yr ago
The reality behind "santurary cities" I think is bringing more heat than light. The policy is surprisingly reasonable in the actual specifics. The policy is point is to et local prolice actually be able to interact with illegal immigrants to solve and prevent crime. If they have to work with ice they will be avoided at all costs by the likes of victims and community members. If you don't want sychopath serial criminals hiding out with a population that cannot reasonable expel them then you need something like this. There are plenty of ways that the ability to prevent illegal immigration are hampered by the denizens of MV, but this is not the important one.
aqouta
2yr ago
If it weren't for scalpers reselling tickets, assuming prices were kept artificially low, I would pretty much never get to go to a concert because I can't block time in my schedule far enough ahead of time to buy tickets the millisecond they release. Reselling is a reasonable service that makes people like me who buy at the last minute pay a premium that we're willing to pay, if the original sellers are giving them an unreasonable amount of market that's the original seller's fault.
aqouta
1mo ago
If conservatism is when you refuse to address entitlements, blow up the budget deficit, tarrif our allies because you don't understand trade policy, behave like a petulant child in every possible situation and fall for lowest common denominator X slop posts then what even remains of conservatism? What is Trump conserving exactly?
aqouta
2yr ago
as long as arguments of the opposite side are somewhat weak
Oh blow me.
So it somehow should prove that there's no situations when there is perceived unfairness?
No, it's to demonstrate that misfortune doesn't need a culprit. This is something that Marxists have a lot of trouble on because outside of monopolies, which everyone opposes, their models for why the rich are at fault for the condition of the poor are incredibly weak.
The horribly unjust universe has much more distant effect on the death of your son than the fat general who stole the money on his equipment.
Is this some reference I should be getting? The death of any random poor person is almost always most proximately caused by some other random poor person and not the elites.
Can you try to steelman your opponents position first in your mind and THEN argue against it?
You've given me very little to work with. So far you haven't even formed arguments, just made vague statements and refused to engage in points. As a rule I don't try to form entire positions for people who haven't started formulating their own position especially regarding leftists because from what you've said I don't even know if you're arguing in favor of libertarian or authoritarian formulations of leftism and both of those take radically different tacts and require radically different arguments.
aqouta
2yr ago
This way leads to the mountains of skulls. It must be resisted until it cannot be.
aqouta
1yr ago
I think the thing is that these people do mostly share some distorted version of my values in the way that the Nazis don't. The Nazis tried to exterminate a people that they thought were vermin while invading their neighbors in a war of aggression. While the WPATH people are doing what they're doing out of a mistaken application of empathy and harm reduction. The modal true believing Nazi is a hateful bigot, the modal true believing WPATH person is someone who cares a lot about trying to alleviate suffering even if circumstances tragically end up such that they are causing more suffering. The camps weren't the Nazis trying to turn the jews and undesirables into Germans, they were built for the horrible purpose that they were used for. Trans healthcare is built to help people.
Surely someone can just succinctly present the matter in a few paragraphs.
You and everyone you know and love could possibly die to this thing, it's much more likely than many think and even if it doesn't kill us all it's going to almost certainly profoundly transform nearly every aspect of everyone's lives. NVIDIA thinks the hardware necessary to run AIs is going super Moore's law at 275x per 2 years. They're already better than a lot of low level white color employees. If this thing can go super human there is a real risk the improvement goes recursive which is the generally believed most likely catalyst for a singularity type event. If this isn't enough for you then just jack off in ignorant bliss for the few remaining years before reality asserts itself. If your threat response is so atrophied and your intellectual curiosity is so empty that you can't give a single evening to figuring this out then why should anyone care about evangelizing you?
aqouta
2yr ago
noble bloodline, models of discretion, and the ceremonial heart of a nation.
This is just so much PR noise to me. They were professionally born. They have done literally nothing to earn my respect.
You're giving ugly credence to American stereotypes by equating a woman/family famous for a sex tape with actual royalty.
Sneer if you want, the old gods are dead and worshiping them is as contemptable to me as the new gods. I'm not a fan of Musk worship either but at least he's doing something with his wealth. If the Royals all disappeared tomorrow what actual impact would that have on the world besides the secondary effects of their fans being upset? I don't hate them and don't wish them ill will but I cannot understand why rational people think they matter because some tiny fraction of their genetic ancestry was William the conqueror who took the throne by force combined with nearly random decisions about who counts as royal over the years.
If this is a uniquely American perspective than I don't think highly of the rest of the world.
aqouta
2mo ago
Simply scaling existing methods, while potentially achieving impressive results, cannot achieve AGI.
Why do you believe this? Is it an article of faith?
It seems like we absolutely do know what lies ahead on the path to AGI and it's incrementally getting better at accomplishing cognitive tasks. We have proof that it's possible too because humans have general intelligence and accomplish this with far fewer units of energy. You can, at this very moment, if you're willing to pay for the extremely premium version, go on chat gpt and have it produce a better research paper on most topics than, being extremely generous to humanity here, 50% of Americans could given three months and it'll do it before you're back from getting coffee. A few years ago it could barely maintain a conversation and a few years before that it was letter better than text completion.
This is rather like having that LW conversation after we'd already put men into orbit. Like you understand that we did actually eventually land on the moon right? I know it's taking the metaphor perhaps to seriously but that story ends up with Alfonso being right in the end. We can, in fact, build spaceships that land on the moon and even return. We in fact did so.
Now we have some of the greatest minds on earth dedicated to building AGI, many of them seem to think we're actually going to be able to accomplish it and people with skin in the game are putting world historical amounts of wealth behind accomplishing this goal.
aqouta
10mo ago
I concur that this is a pretty bad look from a moderator, and would really like the mods to look past the +44 upvotes and fawning u-go-girl responses and consider that this sort of thing is enabling/deepening bad tendencies in the community.
Obligatory low heat take drop that moderators not using the mod hat are allowed to make low quality posts. We are moderated by men, not gods.
aqouta
1yr ago
We've had a decade of widespread attacks on freedom of speech, including popular public repudiation of the concept's core validity.
And before that your faction was the defectors from my perspective, do not claim this high ground, you've not paid the cost when it was dear. You being the conservatives it's not important to me whether you, @FCfromSSC were one of those principled libertarians. It's enough that you'd oppose us now on the side of those who opposed us then.
If you are willing to accept one side censoring
I am not.
If you want to argue that we should cooperate to secure free speech for everyone, I note that I am part of "everyone", and eagerly await the lifting of the censorship against myself and my allies.
Ground has been reclaimed. We feast wantonly in the valley of twitter. How much of a mistake it would have been to give control to twitter over to the bureaucrats in order to spite the social justice crowd only for them to cement control forever through the deep state.
If you want to help the people censoring me to not be censored in turn, with no actual plan for ending their own censorship, I am going to oppose you, because this is a conflict and you appear to have picked a side.
If it must be so, but should my side lost the ratchet will turn and it will be your own doing.
aqouta
1yr ago
Except, of course, they don't need to convince you it's reasonable, they just have to have convinced EEOC bureaucrats, judges, DEI departments, and so on, and they'll force it on everybody whether you agree or not.
This is all technicality. We still live in a democracy, these people serve at our collective pleasure. All sorts of things have been the law carried out as written, been unjust and overthrown. Step one is to defeat the idea in the public arena, the rest follows.
aqouta
2yr ago
Some artists have. Other artists have demonstrated that people will willingly give them money for things they make even if they don't require it, merely out of admiration of the work and admiration of the artist. Others will pay them up-front because they're a good investment. I observe that most of the artists I admire and care about are in this later set, and a lot of the artists in the former range from terminally boring to actively toxic.
Cool, consume their art and let the rest of us plebeians pay for art.
The arrangement you describe isn't a moral fact of the universe, but rather a social construction
A social construct indeed and even more than that a contract, an agreement between people that you advocate for wantonly violating. Other neat social constructs we have are the ones where you have to pay at the store before leaving with goods, not committing random acts of violence and not cheating on medical board exams.
I would derive great advantage from everyone paying me significant sums of money in exchange for my assessment of their individual moral character. I do not have a right to such payment, do I?
you would have a right to one if I had an agreement with you that I'd pay you for such an assessment. But we don't, and as such you can either give it to me for free or keep it to yourself. Someone in the chain of piracy has violated such an agreement.
If we just ignore all the obscurantism this is a very simple system:
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someone produces something and is willing to let you have a copy of it on the condition that you don't copy it
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You want this copy
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you or somebody else breaks the compact and copies it anyways
I cannot fathom how you have convinced yourself that this is ethical.
aqouta
2yr ago
Some roots are deeper than others, you have to actually pick which ones to address and to do this you have to identify them. Surely the very first thought you had to hearing about suicides on the bridge was not "we should put up nets". You must have considered other remedies. That nets went up was because the governing body did root analysis, found a cheap and easy way to mitigate the problem and implemented it. This is good of course, but it's not analysis paralysis that keeps us from addressing school shootings, it's that no matter how much analysis we do we cannot come to consensus. So what no? What does the advice of not letting root analysis get in the way of acting actually cash out to?
aqouta
2yr ago
Point me where in the sequences it makes the claims that you will become unusually successful for having absorbed them? Or where they claim that they're useful to everyone. In the matrix the red pill cannot be used on just anyone. And finally, who elected these main stream media figures who were criticized as rationalist representatives? I don't even really call myself a rationalist, but these are weak swings.
aqouta
17d ago
Maybe you do but I consistently find that the sorts of people who resist thought experiments tend to have deeply conflicted world views that they never examine. As I said, if you're being accosted by some rude stranger feel free to dodge out and stick to small talk. But With people you know well who are curious about how you think? On a discussion forum where the whole purpose is battling out ideas? What's the point? You could just go do something else with your time.
aqouta
18d ago
I understand the catharsis in cheating to win the Kobayashi Maru challenge but it really is the cop out answer. Oh, so you're guarded and cynical and don't want to discuss sacred values? That's fine, you can use this maneuver to get out of it when it's an inappropriate time to have the discussion but are you genuinely just committed to never exploring which of your values plays master to the others? Too afraid of judgement for making a call?
Fighting the hypothetical is small talk, it's a dodge. It exchanges a kind of low grade cleverness to avoid substance.
aqouta
2mo ago
There wasn't ever a mechanism by which cars would start improving themselves recursively if they were able to break 100 mph. There were very good laws of physics reason in the 60s to assume we couldn't even in theory get to FTL. No such reasons exist today. You're not fighting the prediction that cars will be able to go ftl, you're fighting the prediction that mag lev trains would ever be built.
aqouta
2mo ago
If there were lots of natural creatures casually traveling around at light speed through mere evolution those predictions would have been much better founded. It seems like quite the unfounded prediction to have witnessed LLMs rapidly surpass all predictions with the pace not appearing to slow down at all and assume it's going to stop right now. Which kind of must be your assumption if you think we aren't going to hit agi. It rather seems like you're declaring those automobiles will never compete with horses because of how clunky they are. We're at the horse vs car stage where cares aren't quite as maneuverable or fast as horses and maybe will just be a fad.
aqouta
2mo ago
Thanks for your thorough reply!
Yes and no. Clearly, things are better than even three years ago with the original release of ChatGPT. But, the economic and practical impact is unimpressive. If you subtract out the speculative investment parts, it's almost certainly negative economically.
And look - I love all things tech. I have been a raving enthusiastic nutjob about self-driving cars and VR and - yes - AI for a long time. But, for that very reason, I try to see soberly what actual impact it has. How am I living differently? Am I outsourcing much code or personal email or technical design work to AI? No. Are some friends writing nontrivial code with AI? They say so, and I bet it's somewhat true, but they're not earning more, or having more free time off, or learning more, or getting promoted.
I think you're a little blinkered here. It takes more than a couple years to retool the whole economy with new tech. It was arguably a decade or more after arpanet before the internet started transforming life as we know it. LLMs are actually moving at a break neck pace in comparison. I work at a mega bank and just attended a town hall where every topic of discussion was about how important it is to implement LLM in every process. I'm personally working to integrate it into our department's workflow and every single person I work with now uses it every day. Even at this level of engagement it's going to be months to years cutting through the red tape and setting up pipelines before our analyst workflows can use the tech directly. There is definitely value in it and it's going to be integrated into everything people do going forward even if you can't have it all rolled out instantly. We have dozens of people whose whole job is to go through huge documents and extract information related to risk/taxes/legal/ect, key it in and then do analysis on whether these factors are in line with our other investments. LLMs, even if they don't progress one tiny bit further, will be transformative for this role and there are millions of roles like this throughout the economy.
I think that is the crux of our disagreement: I hear you saying "AI does amazing things people thought it would not be able to do," which I agree with. This is not orthogonal from, but also not super related to my point: claims that AI progress will continue to drastically greater heights (AGI, ASI) are largely (but not entirely) baseless optimism.
Along with these amazing things it comes with a ripple of it getting steadily better at everything else. There's a real sense in which it's just getting better at everything. It started out decent at some areas of code, maybe it could write sql scripts ok but you'd need to double check it. Now it can handle any code snippet you throw at it and reliably solve bugs one shot on files with fewer than a thousand lines. The trajectory is quick and the tooling around it is improving at a rate that soon I expect to be able to just write a jira ticket and reasonably expect the code agent to solve the problem.
Nothing has ever surpassed human level abilities. That gives me a strong prior against anything surpassing human level abilities. Granted, AI is better at SAT problems than many people, but that's not super shocking (Moravec's Paradox).
Certainly this is untrue. Calculators trivially surpass human capabilities in some ways. Nothing has surpassed humans in every single aspect. There is a box of things that AI can currently do better than most humans and a smaller box within that of things it can do better than all humans. These boxes are both steadily growing. Once something is inside that box it's inside it forever, humans will never retake the ground of best pdf scraper per unit of energy. Soon, if it's not already the case, humanity will never retake the ground of best sql script writer. If the scaffolding can be built and the problems made legible this box will expand and expand and expand. And as it expands you get further agglomeration effects. If it can just write sql scripts then it can just write sql scripts. If it's able to manage a server and can write sql scripts now it can create a sql server instance and actually build something. If it gains other capabilities these all compliment each other and bring out other emergent capabilities.
The number of people, in my techphillic and affluent social circle, willing to pay even $1 to use AI remains very low.
If people around you aren't paying for it then they're not getting the really cutting edge impressive features. The free models are way behind the paid versions.
It has been at a level I describe as "cool and impressive, but useless" forever.
AGI maybe not, but useless? You're absolutely wrong here. With zero advancement at all in capabilities or inference cost reductions what we have now, today, is going to change the world as much as the internet and smart phones. Unquestionably.
No, and that's exactly point! AI 2027 says well surely it will plateau many doublings past where it is today. I say that's baseless speculation. Not impossible, just not a sober, well-founded prediction. I'll freely admit p > 0.1% that within a decade I'm saying "wow I sure was super wrong about the big picture. All hail our AI overlords." But at even odds, I'd love to take some bets.
Come up with something testable and I am game.
aqouta
2mo ago
Absolutely not. Deep research is a useful tool for specific tasks, but it cannot produce an actual research paper. Its results are likely worthless to anyone except the person asking the question who has the correct context.
This clears the bar of most Americans.
If you build a bigger rocket and point it at the moon, it will get incrementally closer to the moon. But you will never reach it.
If you have some of the smartest people in the world and a functionally unlimited budget you can actually use the information you gain from launching those rockets to learn what you need to do to get to the moon. That is was actually happened after all so I really don't see how this metaphor is working for you. The AI labs are not just training bigger and bigger models without adjusting their process. We've only even had chain of thought models for 6 months yet and there is surely more juice to squeeze out of optimizing that kind of scaffolding.
This is like claiming moore's law can't get us to the next generation of chips because we don't yet know exactly how to build them. Ok, great but we've been making these advancements at a break neck pace for a while now and the doubters have been proven wrong at basically whatever rate they were willing to lay down claims.
Speaking of claims you've decided not to answer my questions, that's fine, continue with whatever discussion format you like but I'd be really interested in you actually making a prediction about where exactly you think ai progress will stall out. what is the capability level you think it will get to and then not surpass?
I continue to be baffled by people's interest in this family. Is it anything more than a British flavored Kardashian family? I understand the logic behind letting them keep their nice things after dissolving the monarchy but I can't fathom why I should care about them.
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