hustle_grinder
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User ID: 2216
hustle_grinder
9mo ago
A line of thinking I've seen come up multiple times here is something to the effect of; As a GPT user I don’t ever want it to say "I don’t know". this strikes me as obviously stupid and ultimately dangerous.
I'm sorry but you just don't get it.
GPT is a "reasoning engine", not a human intelligence. It does not even have an internal representation of what it does and doesn't "know". It is inherently incapable of distinguishing a low confidence answer due to being given a hard problem to solve vs. a low confidence answer that is due to being based on hallucinated data.
Therefore we have two options.
VIRGIN filtered output network that answers "Akchually I don't khnow, it's too hawd" on any question of nontrivial complexity and occasionally hallucinates anyway because such is it's nature.
vs
CHAD unfiltered, no holds barred Terminator in the world of thoughts that never relents, never flinches from a problem, is always ready to suggest out of the box ideas for seemingly unsolvable tasks, does his best against impossible odds; occasionally lies but that's OK because you're a smart man who knows not to blindly trust an LLM output.
hustle_grinder
10mo ago
It's simple really. No one involved wanted Russia to lose the war, and a full blown fight between Wagner and whoever else would mean just that. No one involved wanted to start an actual civil war. Prigozhin probably thought that almost everyone would support him and quickly transfer him the power, or maybe that air strike on his troops really did happen after all, by mistake or as a false flag. Either way, that didn't happen and therefore he conceded the moment he was offered acceptable terms. Lukashenko is just a trusted third party that mediated the dispute.
I am somewhat surprised by the amount of bizzare theories about the coup. Seems like people have been told the Russian state is about to collapse and implode so many times, they find it really hard to believe the Russian troops would actually go to great lengths to avoid shooting at each other.
hustle_grinder
10mo ago
You don't expect a short visit would instantly expose to you all the complications and intricacies of politics in the billion-sized country, do you?
That's right. Now, would you expect to gain insights on the complications and intricacies of their politics by reading western media?
would you be ready to say all the people who lived there their whole lives and complain about such things are dirty liars
Well would you be ready to say that all the Chinese people who deny these things or find them implausible are dirty liars?
Thinking one can answer these questions without any sort of reliable insider information source is delusional. I don't have them; do you?
hustle_grinder
10mo ago
Though they dismissed human rights violations by Chinese as propaganda, and also claimed that the situation with human rights is better in China than in UK.
Who the hell knows. Have you ever been to China?
Defecting to China is not a good idea for them anyway, though.
hustle_grinder
10mo ago
They're not, I'm merely questioning the implied correct choice in the dilemma suggested by the OP.
Sure, but I think even in the hyper-competitive world you describe, raising each child would still be much more expensive than it was in the 1800s.
Why would it be much more expensive, or indeed more expensive at all, if every single thing a child needs can be done both massively cheaper and better in modern times?
I suspect that if you freed up that income, most people would default to using it on more consumption for themself and their few children, rather than having many children.
You know I agree, certainly the causes of low birth rates are both materialistic and cultural. After all it is known that having children is bad for the environment, racist, and detrimental to building a successful girl boss career. But for that particular malady, Kulak has already prescribed a medicine.
Energy is very cheap, and we consume a lot more of it. Do you want to drive your kids to school, activities, a friend's house? Do you want goods from all over the world shipped to your local stores? Do you want heating, cooling, electricity, hot and cold water running water on demand? It could be even cheaper, yes, but would that result in people having more kids, or using more energy on what they already have?
If energy is cheap then how come they have an "energy crisis" in Germany (a supposedly first world rich country)?
Remember that your residential heating, cooling, electricity and so on is the tip of the iceberg. Every single industry has energy as one of it's inputs. Whenever you buy anything you pay for energy multiple times over, the company that produced the thing paid for it and included it in the price, every single supplier that they used paid for it and included it in the price, every single supplier of these suppliers... you get the idea. It's not just your 100$ monthly electricity bill.
Did the Romans have hot and cold running water, under pressure, in every house and apartment?
They provided water to public bath, fountains, and to private houses whose owners paid for that service, yes. Sure that may be far from every house, but remember that the tools and knowledge the Romans had, were laughably inferior to what we have now.
Sure, and many of the early Levittown suburbs were built this way, effectively on a production line. Why did we stop doing it? I would guess because once people could afford it, they wanted homes that were more custom, although I have no data here.
The price of real estate compared to the income of middle class people is often massive. You wouldn't overpay years of your savings just for the privilege of having your house built in an idiosyncratic way. In my experience the only people who care about these things are the rich and the home building enthusiasts. For everyone else, the choice is dominated by other, more pragmatic, considerations, such as size, building quality, location, etc.
Thus I find your assumption hard to accept, especially so without evidence.
Why did we stop doing it?
Good question in fact, I think I'll look into that particular case, one of these days. Thank you for pointing it out.
Home construction is labor-intensive and thus subject to Baumol's cost disease.
"Cost disease" is just another way of saying "bureaucratic overhead in adjacent industries".
I agree that this situation is obscene, but it is absolutely not the only cause, unless you are including all of the restrictions on what you can build where (zoning, environmental review, parking minimums, etc.)
I am deeply convinced that this is the only real cause. Prove me wrong.
Of course I mean all the restrictions! Not only in construction but also in all the industries construction relies on, and all the industries they rely on.
Sure you can keep the 1% of them that are honest to God sane and neccessary, like maybe not demolishing unquie historical monuments or not causing extreme environmental disasters. Everything else has to go.
Yes, some additional cost is artificial, but some of it is because people want things that didn't exist in 1800.
The central point of my argument is that these additional costs are massive, mind-boggling, enormous. If you got rid of insane bureaucratic overhead in every facet of modern production and business, and made different trade-offs on safety, and selected personnel via nothing but ruthless market competition as opposed to credentialism or quotas or whatever else, then you'd get a world as alien to us as our world is to someone from 1800s.
It's a pity that the verbose version of your comment got lost because I think this difference in worldviews can be only productively discussed in details, diving deep into a particular industry, dissecting it's practices, costs, regulations, etc.
Yet somehow when it comes to raising children we manage to get it worse than these 1800s people
we're talking about replacing a one-room log-and-thatch cabin with a multi-story structure with many rooms, electric wiring, plumbing, glass windows
These things aren't that hard, I could literally do most of them on my own..
Probably the hardest part is to build the structure itself, but it is my understanding that the modern tech allows to do that really fast and cheap too... especially if you design a building once and mass produce it.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khrushchevka and this was in 1970s - they've built a shit ton of them - under a less than efficient economical system, so to speak.
The fact that a so-called "middle class" man often needs to work several years to buy a property that's barely suitable for a family with e.g. 3 children, is obscene by itself.
On the other hand the construction industry is regulated to hell and back, not to mention their suppliers, which is the one and only real cause of high housing costs.
And, even if it were legal to raise a child in 1800s conditions, most people would freely choose not to, I think.
Why didn't they choose that back then, in such case?
since survival rates have improved (one of the effects of consuming more per child!)
Bumping up survival rates to modern rates is simple and cheap. Hygiene, vaccinations, antibiotics, plentiful food, vitamins, C-sections... what did I miss?
(see e.g. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2665340/) for a sample of child mortality causes in the Middle Ages.
hustle_grinder
10mo ago
Yeah, the thing is, you don't have to live as 1800s farmer given that you have access to 2000s technology.
They didn't have tower cranes, mass production industrial factories, reinforced concrete, CAD software, modern materials science, etc..
By all accounts building a separate room for each one of your 12 children should be very cheap but yet it isn't. Same for everything else material.
electricity
Just see how cheap electricity production was butchered in the last years, first by shutting down nuclear plants and now by restrictions on oil and gas trade. Energy prices could have been much lower without expending a single thought and brought down even further if the humanity started mass producing nuclear reactors at scale.
medicine
Take a look: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5859811/. Essential pharma is in fact dirt cheap to produce.
running water
Even the Romans did it!! 2000 years back from now.
you'd be locked up
Yeah, that's the problem right there.
hustle_grinder
1yr ago
There aren't many generals out there that do the invading every evening. Consequently, in the real world, invasions frequently go haywire - such is the state of things.
Remember that Heinlein was born in 1907. An average person had much more exposure to the military theory and practice during that era, compared to us. A smart and capable person, even more so.
hustle_grinder
1yr ago
Even if you take the quote as a 100% literal instruction it's still doable and not even unreasonably hard
If all the middle aged female email senders are laid off, that would just mean getting back to pre-1950 levels of female labor force participation - if that... it's not some kind of a catastrophic AI-based breakdown of society.
But I'm not certain that would actually lead to a better experience of healthcare, just more money disappearing into an infinite abyss that's already eating much of our economy.
Money is little more than an accounting device; therefore "money disappearing into an infinite abyss that's already eating much of our economy" is merely a reflection of some kind of a real-world value destroying process that just happens to look like that on paper. In the words of comrade Stalin, "each problem has a name and a surname".
If anything, GPT makes the demographic profile problem much easier... before we were facing rhetorical questions about whether or not a coal miner is able to learn to code in a reasonable time frame - now you can equip just about any literate and diligent man with a ChatGPT and have him be at least somewhat decent at a wide range of tasks.
But that's actually besides the point. We the humankind are submerged in an endless ocean of unsolved problems and work to be done; you could have ALL the humans, the truck drivers, the scientists, the men, the women, the geniuses, the midwits; all the machines, all the GPT instances burning as much GPU instances as we're able to produce... and I bet that you still wouldn't be close to draining it for the Thousands of years.
Have you yet colonized the universe?
Have you yet cured all diseases?
Have you yet extended your lifespan to at least measly 300 years?
Most of the time, someone with weak hands simply cannot do the task at all.
So, can you buy a $100 strength enhancing exoskeleton at walmart, powered by dirt cheap electricity?
Actually forget the science fiction stuff... there's a scarcity of things that in all honesty should be cheap and available in abundance given the current level of technology.
Meanwhile the entire internet is chock full of discussions about how there is no work left to be done, all because our industry has finally in a long while, managed to produce a tool with some actual pull that also happened to be too subtle and widespread to be banned immediately. Is this not madness?
hustle_grinder
1yr ago
LLMs still can't read technical drawings and likely won't be able to for a very long time.
Who knows?.. Multimodal GPT-4 is imminent.
Have you used GPT-4?
Well it seems one mustn't after all, surprising as it may be.
It's not AGI, which is why all current "AgentGPT"-type projects are a complete failure, but that's beside the point.
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