aqouta
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User ID: 75
aqouta
7mo ago
Deepseek wasn't really a compute constrained thing and they did use ndvia chips. They basically did 2 things with deepseek.
- Trained a model using the nerfed nvdia chips but with some hacks that got around most of the nerfing. Nvdia basically half passed nerfing them to comply with chip export controls. This doesn't mean export controls aren't good, it means we need to actually enforce them in spirit.
- They were the first to release chain of thought scaffolding which isn't compute constrained but also almost certainly something western labs had in house but hadn't bothered to productive yet as evidenced by the release only a few months later.
They didn't use Chinese chips so I'm not really sure how it could say anything about Chinese chips.
aqouta
7mo ago
Didn't we have some china bulls in here just a few weeks ago talking about how good Huawei AI chips are? I personally don't buy it but we also have AMD and intel maybe a generation or so behind Nvidia, but nobody wants to use them because it's just more work and could run into unexpected hiccups.
Huawei chips are significantly worse than nvdia chips at a higher cost and lower yield. They're stuck on 7nms that actually compare to how tsmc's 3nm chips are made and some cope 5nms that use a layering technique that isn't worth the yield hit to use. America definitely has a big compute edge on china.
If you're at all serious about AI being a big deal in the next decade then maintaining this edge over our main geopolitical rival is actually really really important.
Currently China is gobbling up nerfed chips because qualitatively they're not that different from the latest and greatest. They'll be more power hungry and less cost efficient, but they are still capable of training a gpt-5 level model if needed.
Takingthe advantage to taking months VS years to train a model at this kind of cutting edge iterative process is difficult to over state.
aqouta
7mo 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
7mo ago
As long as mainland firms have access to TSMC fabs for their blackbox designs, China won't be lacking in compute.
Can you source this claim? It goes against a substantial amount of writing and commentary I've heard about this subject. China is significantly lacking in computer as evidenced by their attempts to get their hands on even the nerfed versions of chips and all the mainland labs use nvdia chips.
aqouta
7mo ago
I agree and have for some time agreed that Trump is an abomination and embarrassment to conservatives. The problem for actual conservatives is what is there to actually do here? Join the Democrats? There are some rational positions where that is the greater of the two evils. Perhaps this abundance agenda is the invitation they need to throw behind a Democrat side of the aisle that disavows a lot of the leftie fringe that the rest of the Democrats have been a little too beholden to.
aqouta
7mo ago
The point with the pipes is that obviously hamas is trying to make rockets and bombs using any material they can get their hands on. We're in agreement that they've dug up water pipes and made rockets out of them.This is the justification for blockading and inspecting things thing into Gaza.
It’s not unhinged to know, as a fact, the facts of the day: that many houses were destroyed by tanks, that a survivor testified to tanks firing at their house and killing their family, that many cars were destroyed which were on their way into Gaza, that there were instances of friendly fire. It’s unhinged to have any opinion on the conflict without knowing this, unhinged to hide from it because you find it uncomfortable to acknowledge.
Your claim is that you wouldn't be surprised if only military aged men were killed by Hamas. We have videos of the indiscriminate killing. Not that killing military aged festival goers is somehow justified. You're out of your mind here.
And while it’s not unhinged to distrust “footage” that came out weeks after the attack, I find it inadvisable, because every developed nation has the ability to fabricate footage
You're trusting hearsay about tanks but not video footage? For real? There is plenty of testimony of indiscriminate killing as well, do you trust that testimony or only the rumors spread by pro hamas accounts?
aqouta
7mo ago
This was debunked, I’m pretty sure.
There's video of it happening and hamas claims it happens. The only thing really up for debate is if they use specifically EU funded pipes.
But more to the broader point you understand they still regularly lobbed rockets at Israel right? You can't just let your neighbor that's doing that get easy access to more serious weapons.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/10/10/eu-funded-water-pipelines-hamas-rockets/
Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised if every non military age male was killed in the Hannibal Directive rather than by Hamas. Because I don’t think Hamas went in with the RPGs required to
Are you under the impression that most Israelis on October 7th died in cars on the way back to gaza? This is a totally unhinged thing to believe. There is footage, you can watch it. Should go without saying but very NSFW https://www.hamas-massacre.net/
I think so, yes
I genuinely don't understand how you could convince yourself of this. Hamas leadership had been very consistent in denying this.
You can stop blockading the Gaza Strip What do you mean by
blockading? Do you mean controlling what goes in to the territory where the governimg body uses the pipes meant for water supplies to make rockets? Yeah, no country is going to allow supplies in unexamined in that situation.
stealing land in the West Bank and illegally imprisoning
I agree, the settlements should not happen, but the Palestinians should have by now come up with state borders which would have prevented this rather than clinging to the delusion that they're going to retake Israel. We should have two people negotiate proper borders but the Palestinians are uninterested in this.
You can not use the Hannibal Directive, which killed some unspecified % of the hostages and civilians (it’s crazy we still don’t know the extent of this)
What percentage of the deaths on October 7th do you think died to Hannibal directive? The policy rescinded in 2016.
You can implement the most asinine security measures to prevent any future attack, starting with a common sense “don’t throw raves right next to Gaza”
Do you attribute any agency at all to Gazans? Are they just animals incapable of higher reasoning in your estimation? They can't be expected to differentiate right from wrong?
You can pursue diplomacy based on returning encroached land in the West Bank
Would hamas accept a two state solution on these borders?
aqouta
7mo ago
Falluja was fought against insurgents in Iraq. While 60% or more of the buildings in Gaza are destroyed, after this battle (the worst of the urban combat in Iraq) only 20% max were destroyed.
The battle of falluja was less than 2 months long and there weren't extensive tunnel networks dug out specifically to prevent the forces from being effectively routed. This is the type of war Hamas specifically prepared to fight and provoke. You need to deal with there being two agentic sides to this conflict.
even the comically worst enemy of history weren’t despised with genocidal intent as Israelis despise Palestinians.
This has a lot to do with holocaust justification for the war being post hoc and Americans just not really caring a much about a conflict half the world away as evidenced by the long resistance to entering it.
They launched an attack on American soil that killed twice the number as Oct 7. We went after Al Qaeda and Baathists as a result. We didn’t aim to starve them to death. This is the closest thing to a 1-to-1 comparison.
Afghanistan just isn't in any way comparable to Gaza.
This is unfalsifiable.
A call for an alternative strategy is definitely falsifiable although it's a weird term to use. The relevant question is what do you actually do if you're Israel and recognize that your neighbor is lead by a death cult that legitimately will go to whatever ends are within their ability to kill as many of your people as possible and have extensive tunnel networks that make actually rooting them out nearly impossible. Your options are basically extreme violence, as we see now, or just enduring regular attacks.
aqouta
7mo ago
I would think it would prove more salutary, they have air, sea and ground superiority and countermeasures against massed barely armed troops not present in the past. Of course a smaller version of the Palestinian strategy of being killed so hard and publicly that western people stop out of pity may work on Israel itself but I just can't see how Israel loses this one. Of course once that's on the table a lot of other actors might change their tune.
aqouta
7mo ago
Indeed, even today there are people who seek hormone therapy without shooting for a binary transition - starting with various non-binary/genderfluid types. I know many vaguely nonbinary transmasculines who are happy going by "he" or "they" but don't break off in hives at being "she"-ed. (As a matter of fact, Ozy is one.) Those people would still seek breast reduction and testosterone injections even in a world where there was no concept of social transition and they remained classified as women, which they'd be basically fine with so long as they got to be very butch women.
I'll note because others haven't that I don't know if I'm a conservative even if I often side with them on the trans question but I basically can get behind the "I just like it and it" justification for adult transition. It's the reality claims that I can't square with my other observations like the existence of some kind of gendered soul that make me get off the train. I do believe what follows from this formulation is no child transition, gendered sports and a fat maybe on trans people in women's restrooms depending on a lot of negotiated factors.
If America gets to "let's stay out of it" Israel is doomed.
I don't think this is actually the case. If America wasn't involved and Israel didn't care about appeasing western sensibilities at all they'd just behave like the other powers in the region and genocide their troublesome minorities.
aqouta
7mo ago
The destiny's crucible series by Olan Thorensen is like this. The writing is not amazing but if you don't care too much about that it scratches that kind of itch.
aqouta
8mo ago
Or he could just walk next to the person in the basket for as long as needed.
Possible murderer was getting onto a boat.
aqouta
8mo ago
We're going to have to have a special "I did my Asia trip writeup" badge at some point. Great write up, really enjoyed it.
aqouta
8mo ago
I'm retired, full-time research, theory, and writing since 2009, formerly 50/50 residential construction and corporate I.T.
While working in corporate IT when you have a basically working system if someone came up and informs you that the silicon in all the electronics you use is susceptible to solar radiation that can occasionally make calculation incorrect and that you should consider alternatives to silicon what would you do? Maybe if you had the time to kill you could kick around the idea with them, the fellow may even be right about the silicon being susceptible to solar radiation, you vaguely remember that something like that can occasionally cause a bit to flip here or there. But really, how seriously are you going to take this warning? It's not really been a big problem before, you even had some redundancies set up so even if in a freak accident it mattered it'd probably be fine. There are some experimental alternatives to silicon materials, Germanium, Graphene, cubic Boron but it's not even clear if any of them solve the original problem and you manage tons of electronics. You realistically cannot even source a single Germanium chip, let alone replace your servers. You express skepticism and they accuse you of being negligent. That's kind of what it feels like to see you morally load this conversation by call capitalism psychopathy with a makeover. It just kind of comes off as silly and frivolous. Maybe there is an alternative and maybe we can talk about those alternatives but I live in downtown Chicago, I'm looking around at these sky scrapers and millions of people moving about keeping everything running and it may actually be easier to switch every electronic in the city to graphene then get this working without ownership as we know it.
I'm happy to talk about this, but don't call my a psychopath for being skeptical.
How can you understand an alternative if you bat the spoon away when someone says, "Here, just taste it" ??
We've been offered many spoons, some we have later verified were filled with dog shit.
That's the codependence talking. The ball is ALWAYS in your court unless you've given up your game to play someone else's. Let's just say it turns out I'm onto something here, and within the next ten years it will become common knowledge. Tomorrow I'm going to bike into town to food shop. Let's say I get hit and killed by a car, and you never hear from me again. Where is the "ball" then?
I think you're mistaken of the dynamics here. There are tons of courts. If discussing this with you is tedious I can go up or down a thread and participate in the forum's 800th discussion on whether Trump is good or bad, the 480th thread on whether lgbtq2s+ acceptance has not gone too far enough or even spicy new topics like the India/Pakistan conflict. This topic is of special interest to you because it's been a brain worm for you for years, it's of special interest to us because we do actually appreciate the opportunity to engage with new views. If the engagement is not forthcoming, if the ball stays in your court we can and will move on. As we were counting assumptions earlier the belief that your perspective will win out is is an assumption you're making and it's on you to convince us of that.
Societies have collapsed, of course, but give me just one example, just one, that collapsed as the result of a failed experiment in radical change.
Depends what your standard is for collapse. I'd argue maoist china collapsed in a way. The Weimar republic probably counts. The soviet union might count. Usually a society is able to survive and change course after the implementation of bad ideas, see Trump tariffs.
As far as Black, I promote him in the interest of expanding minds, not endorsing his views/"solutions". I don't think he has any solutions. He's an anarchist, we've corresponded, I've tried to engage him, but he demurs. That's basically when I realized I've gone far beyond anarchism.
I don't know if you've gone beyond anarchism, but I don't know much about your views.
Moore's law was originally a doubling every two years and has basically kept pace, although it may have slowed now to every 3 years in just the last few years. If the speed of ai progress continues at this trend for half a century and then merely 2/3rds this speed then we're hitting agi for sure.
I can't find this analog SF graph you're talking about and don't see how it's related to this prediction. We knew about brute facts of physics that would prevent ftl travel back then and know of no fact of physics thst would stop ai from gaining human level general intelligence. You think we're at the looking at cars and predicting ftl level when we seem much more at the looking at horses and predicting cars given knowledge of engines. Was it possible that engines were just too heavy and a functional car wasn't really possible? I sure, could have happened. And horses still outclass cars in maneuvering in some cases. But we did get the car, and they do dominate horses in most ways.
aqouta
8mo ago
We had that one anti-work guy around a long while back, any chance they're related? I don't remember much about that guy really but the philosophy seems similar.
aqouta
8mo ago
You write like you're an AI bull, but your actual case seems bearish (at least compared to the AI 2027 or the Situational Awareness crowd).
I was responding to a particularly bearish comment and didn't need to prove anything so speculative. If someone thinks current level ai is cool but useless I don't need to prove that it's going to hit agi in 2027 to show that they don't have an accurate view of things.
I think this is true too, in a decade. The white-collar job market will look quite different and the way we interact with software will be meaningfully different, but like the internet and the smartphone I think the world will still look recognizably similar. I don't think we'll be sipping cocktails on our own personal planet or all dead from unaligned super intelligence any time soon.
well yes, that world is predicated on what I think is a very unlikely complete halt in progress.
aqouta
8mo ago
It's sensitive to context and prompting. When having it write bash scripts have you consider just dumping the man files into the context? Don't bother actually formatting them, just dump anything that could possibly be relevant into the prompt.
aqouta
8mo 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
8mo ago
Ok, taking all this in good faith then I think the only real shot at overcoming deprivation is by pushing forward. Continue expanding productivity through capital investment. Make more and more things too cheap to meter. Ownership isn't the source of deprivation really, only the shape it takes, it's scarcity that would need to be defeated. In practice, at least in the west, we've basically defeated scarcity on things like foodstuffs. Our poor suffer from obesity and not really hunger. Our poor mostly don't lack for running water, clothes on their backs, even shelter for most of them although I do have particular changes I'd like to see on this subject.
The chronic homeless wither not because society is unable to house them but because our sense of individual freedom won't allow us to commit those that can't function without aid. This example muddies the issue. The deprivation here might appear to be proximately caused by ownership of homes, trivially if homeless people could just go in and occupy anyone's home then they would be cured of their homelessness but this wouldn't really solve the underlying issue. I don't know how you could prevent self imposed deprivation, or at least how you could do so without forfeiting freedom.
Cool! Then notice that an ability is not a right, and let's keep them straight. I'm talking about a preemptive principled right to universally deprive. I can deprive every single person in the whole world of a $100 dollar bill by burning it to ash. Totally my right as an owner (ignoring the complication that money is not something we "own" strictly speaking) but impossible if I ain't got no matches. Right vs. ability.
Alright, then I revise what I said to "My conclusion is that the right to deprive is probably necessary for any social system that scales past around the Dunbar number and depending on how you operationalize "deprive" maybe far below that number."
Is this the world you want your loved ones and great- and great-great offspring to live in? Is this or something resembling it as good as you want it to get? My answers to those are resounding NO FUCKING WAY! Settling for better-than-worse to avoid the possibility that you might break something by attempting good-as-we-want has never made sense to me.
I do want things to improve. I observe the history of society and see that as we build out new technology and capital infrastructure we increase abundance and things get better. I would like to separate the concept of "things being better" into things made better systemically and things made better by material progress. We don't need to change the system for things to be made better by material progress. It's genuinely incredible how much better things have been made by material progress. I don't have to worry about infections. I can spend a Wednesday evening relaxing in a comfortable chair listening to tunes on high quality wireless headphones eating good food in a large air conditioned house responding to people on the internet. I am the envy of kings of old. I'm more skeptical about things being made by, radical, systemic changes.
Still I would like things to improve. I'm never sure if I should call myself a liberal or a conservative. I'm freedom loving and optimistic. I think if we mostly leave people alone and minimally adjust the system things will simply get better over time. So I oppose rash and under thought out changes to the system. You could say I conserve the system. I'm not opposed to all change, in fact I fiercely support some changes and updates as the material conditions change. But I find radicalism off putting, ungrateful, pessimistic and short sighted. You're not only risking what good we have, you're risking the good that the current system will produce if we only allow it to. You may see ownership as a rotten board of a rotting house, but I see it as a vital component of a prosperous and growing society. So from my perspective it really is on you to explain why and how we should get rid of it or I'm going to default to declining. If that's conservative then I am a conservative. If it's madness then I am mad.
It's been known since the 80s that the worst thing you can do in a brainstorming session is criticize the ideas that arise instead of accepting and exploring them. (de Bono's Serious Creativity is great on this point.)
I'll note that this is the culture war thread, we're here to discuss the culture war. The default valiance anyone will approach any underspecified idea with is that there are culture war/political implications to what you propose. I know you directly said in the OP that you were looking to brainstorm and it can be exhausting to have to overly signal that you're not advancing any particular objective but your OP would have been much better received if you had put some effort into making it clear that you didn't have an axe to grind.
aqouta
8mo ago
Have you actually used the latest tooling? What tasks have you actually had it try? This seems incredibly unlikely to me.
aqouta
8mo 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.
It is indeed a meme, The thirty year old boomer
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