roystgnr
1yr ago
Chess AI took decades to go from "possible" to "superhuman" (where the best AIs outperform the best humans), and then a decade or two more to go from "superhuman" to "ultrahuman" (where AI-human "centaur" teams no longer outperform AIs without humans). We're barely reaching the "possible" stage with AGI. I'd still say "party", maybe take that big vacation now rather than in retirement, but don't blow the cash you were saving for the electric bill, just in case the lights don't go out for a few more decades.
Furthermore, it seems that there is almost no one pumping the breaks. We seemed doomed to an AI arms race, with corporations and states pursuing AI with no limits.
On the bright side, this also means there's likely to be no unexpected hardware overhang, because we're already throwing hardware at AI software as fast as we can. Imagine if we'd let FLOPs/watt and FLOPs/$ grow exponentially for another few decades and then discovered how powerful huge models can become. The AI arms race world is a world where a relatively slow takeoff, one where alignment failures occur on systems powerful enough to be educational but weak enough to be survivable, is conceivable. I'd say we're seeing the bare beginnings of that: the newest LLMs mostly don't pass the Turing test and mostly don't talk like psychopaths, but the exceptions are now common and blatant enough to get past the "nothing ever happens" bias of normies and the "my work just won't go wrong" bias of creators.
On the other hand, there's still going to be a software overhang, and I have no idea how big it will be. Some fields of computational mathematics in the last decades saw 3OOM of software speedup at the same time as they saw 3OOM of hardware speedup. 1,000 << 1,000,000, but if the first superhuman AGI can quickly make itself a mere thousand times faster just by noticing algorithms we've missed then we're still probably completely screwed.
roystgnr
1yr ago
national news
International news; that's a Daily Mail (UK) link.
Turning every negative interaction between different ethnic groups into a some kind of referendum on race relations is beyond frustrating
Compiling every negative interaction would be fascinating; I'd love to see a time series / geographic distribution / whatever you can process out of that data.
Letting individual negative interactions go viral depending on how disgusting they are or how good the video is or how editors feel about them or how slow a news week it is, on the other hand, doesn't produce the sort of unbiased sampling you want to try to extrapolate from.
roystgnr
1yr ago
What platform do all those frustrated users move to and will that platform just turn into another Twitter?
The "Math twitter" people I follow are either cloning their tweets to a Mastodon account or moving to Mastodon entirely. I don't think it'll supplant Twitter, but it might.
The free-speech-fan in me loves the idea of this genre of network application becoming mostly decentralized/federated. The schadenfreude-fan in me can't wait to see the cognitive dissonance when the "I can't use a system that won't censor other people enough" crowd realize how badly they have failed to solve that problem. The SpaceX fan in me is worried over how far Twitter's value might crash and how badly Musk might have trashed his future ability to raise investment for more important causes.
roystgnr
1yr ago
Are there really still left-wing tankies out there who are now in support of this invasion?
All of the Putin apologists I run across myself are right-wing. They have the same "the enemy of my globalizing enemy is my friend" justifications as a left-wing tankie would typically have had back when it was Hungarian blood greasing the treads, but these ones are clear that the type of globalization pissing them off is mostly LGBTQ+ ideology rather than capitalist ideology. (To be clear, most right-wingers aren't neo-tankies, and most left-wing thought I read from the Cold War wasn't by tankies, it's just that the exceptions were pretty one-sided in each case)
I don't know what to think of it, but I find it fascinating. I've barely gotten used to political principles "switching sides" in one direction, with left-wing beliefs like "people should be judged as individuals, 'blind' to their demographics", "electronic voting machines are an unacceptably insecure way to tally elections", or "people should be able to get and keep jobs regardless of their personal politics" that still seem smart today but that (sometimes after brief universal support, sometimes directly) changed to have right-wing valence. "Russian authoritarianism and oppression is bad" might be the first good right-wing idea I've seen move the opposite way ...
roystgnr
5mo ago
Anybody have any experience getting kids who can read but aren't very good at it interested enough in a book that they are willing to learn on their own?
What level are they at?
Comic strip collections (my kids liked Baby Blues most, IIRC) let young readers who aren't 100% solid manage to grasp more context from the drawings.
Children's science encyclopedias are great; if the kids have some obsession (space, dinosaurs, animals, whatever) then get one focused on just that to start with.
At a higher level, Harry Potter is a classic for this. My eldest went from "slowly moving through 100 page books together because that's what mommy or daddy were pushing" to "finishing 500 page tomes by herself because nightly reading time with daddy wasn't long enough or frequent enough" astonishingly fast.
roystgnr
1yr ago
"I always want to say to people who want to be rich and famous: 'try being rich first'. See if that doesn't cover most of it. There's not much downside to being rich, other than paying taxes and having your relatives ask you for money. But when you become famous, you end up with a 24-hour job." - Bill Murray
roystgnr
1yr ago
turn themselves into GMO experiment
pure humans
mRNA vaccines do not modify your genome. They trick your body into turning genes they carry into spike proteins, just like the virus does, but they don't replace your genes, and they don't make more of their own genes to repeat the process at exponentially-increasing scales like the virus does.
This stuff isn't as clearly against the rules as the "anyone with a certain brain processing power" above, but it is a good time for "proactively provide evidence" to come to mind.
-injections do not protect from getting the disease
They had better than 90% protection from disease in the first RCT. That dropped with time and with new variants, but even if it had had zero lasting protection, the temporary protection still would have been worth taking a chance for by vulnerable populations in the first megadeath-scale waves.
have negative side effects in a % of the pop
This is trivially true because "ow my arm" is a negative side effect, but for any serious claim you'll need specific side effects and numeric percentages. It didn't have as many negative side effects as getting Covid-19 one extra time. The trouble with trying to avoid risk here is that Covid's spread was so extensive that there was no way to avoid risk. There was just "risk exposing your body to a carefully metered dose of Covid spikes" versus "risk exposing your body, with your immune system unprepared, to an exponentially reproducing dose of Covid viruses".
including fertility
And this is at least true because zero is a percent?
This is an especially weird one for me, because actual testosterone decline has been going on for 50 years, sperm quality included, with no complete explanations, and even the incomplete explanations don't seem to be engendering much concern from anyone. If one side of the Culture War wants to go all Buck Turgidson, couldn't we at least get some good out of it, and focus on an actual measurable corruption of our precious bodily fluids?
below a certain age the disease itself is basically not deadly
This is true or false depending on your definition of "basically" and "a certain age"; risks did rise pretty much exponentially with age, but there were still a few hundred pediatric deaths and tens of thousands of hospitalizations in the US. If you look at excess death counts Covid starts clearly showing up in the 25-44 age group; not kids, but not exactly great-grandma either.
-governments prevented travel
-colleges prevented attending
-some companies prevented holding a job
This is all true (and more: some companies were forced to prevent holding a job, to remain federal contractors), and in hindsight (or maybe with foresight, from anyone who didn't see any a priori reason to expect long-lived sterilizing immunity against a disease not obviously more static than influenza) it was questionable to bar people even temporarily from half of society under the desperate belief that this was going to be the final step to push R below 1 for good.
roystgnr
1yr ago
who uses Twitter even semi-professionally and posts pictures of a computer monitor instead of screenshots?
Incompetent computer users ... or competent whistleblowers? I was under the impression that these releases are all of management-approved, post-Musk-buyout results of trawling through historical archives, but if I'm wrong and any of the data were amassed contemporaneously, then it would just have been good personal security to collect them via "the analog hole" rather than via a screenshot that could be more easily logged and reviewed.
roystgnr
1yr ago
We were taught about the Hollywood blacklists in school in the 90s, not long after the Berlin Wall fell, when the full extent of Soviet deprivation and historical oppression was becoming clear, and I thought it was so noble of everyone in these more enlightened times to be willing to stand up for the political and economic freedoms of even such dangerously foolish people. The architects of the Holodomor and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had been slipping spies up the ranks, trying to subvert Western governments and culture, and acquiring nuclear weapons secrets, but if we couldn't ferret out the evil people without doing evil things ourselves, hurting innocent and merely-mistaken people in the process, that was too high a price to pay.
It's been so dismaying, in the decades since, to discover what fraction of the modern population loves blacklists after all. Of course you're supposed to boycott anyone who would hire someone with bad politics!
Were we actually enlightened before but we fell so far in a single generation? Was so much of the "opposition to blacklists" never truly more than a love of communism, reexpressed in a way that wouldn't spook idealists like me who bought the cover story?
roystgnr
1yr ago
And yet, if any series were to race-swap a minority character, especially if to replace them with a white character, this would presumably be seen as blatant erasure and grounds to protest and boycott whatever media company did it.
Well, you don't need a media company to do that anymore, just a GPU cluster. But that might still be grounds to get your Twitter account suspended? I'd like to hope that Twitter doesn't actually have a "making the Little Mermaid a redhead is evil" policy, rather that people who gloat over a redhead Little Mermaid are just also likely to commit violations of some serious policy as well ... but I'm not optimistic.
roystgnr
5mo ago
roystgnr
6mo ago
Reddit followed his steps by shutting off the APIs, and YouTube is trying to block the adblockers.
I don't think this is a "Reddit follows where Elon leads" thing, I think they're all reacting to the same root cause. Borrowing suddenly became more expensive than it had been for a decade and a half, during which time a whole bunch of business plans involved loading up on cheap debt and playing with business models and focusing on growth with a vague notion of getting profit margins in the black eventually, and now those have to get replaced by flailing panicky attempts to make businesses profitable soon instead. Spending a bunch of money offering free services for years may just have been what the kids call a "Zero Interest Rate Phenomenon".
I don't think the rebranding hurt the company, but I have no idea what was the point of that.
He's been wanting to brand his stuff as "X" for decades. It seems pretty stupid to me. But Musk's life story is a series of "everybody told him that trying to do a thing would be stupid, then he did the thing and made billions of dollars from it" chapters, so I'm only like 90% confident here. On the other hand, this isn't a "make Starship from carbon fiber" sort of stupid idea, where you can test it and discover its flaws and pivot to something smarter without much loss; marketing is a lot more fuzzy than engineering.
roystgnr
6mo ago
If there are any other interesting connections across distance or time, share them here! I’m an avid collector.
Is it safe to assume you're already familiar with James Burke's documentaries and books? They're mostly focused on causal webs with technological rather than military or political roots, but it's all definitely got this same flavor.
roystgnr
10mo ago
a repurposed game controller
This was an excellent decision. Using the two millionth product of some mass-manufactured part, under shirtsleeve conditions like those where the part has already been heavily used, is almost always going to be more reliable than using the first or second product of some custom design.
it doesn't give me a good impression of the entire operation.
The stories from David Lochridge and David Pogue, on the other hand, suggest many other much, much less excellent decisions. Normalization-of-deviance is a slippery slope.
roystgnr
11mo ago
Where is your evidence that they are anti-Catholic? You linked to their website
I'm guessing you didn't notice the non-underlined space in-between "and" and "mock"? The "mock catholics" link is to video of a man pole-dancing on a crucifix.
roystgnr
1yr ago
Based on the post-PhD applied math careers I've watched, it's easy to get tenure-quality researchers without offering tenure; you just have to do what the private sector does and offer double the salary. (Less than double can also work but then they start scrutinizing the rest of your work environment very closely)
That said, I do not expect Texas to double any salaries.
roystgnr
1yr ago
the person who kidnapped you owes you something
So ... that's a "yes chad" to the question of Norman Conquest reparations? If so, there's going to be a long line behind the Anglo-Saxons.
Perhaps a statute of limitations of mere decades isn't the best idea, but isn't punishment at least a little tricky if you and the person who kidnapped you have both been dead for a century or two? We tend to laugh at the idea of posthumous execution in modern times, but that at least seems more just than "take it out on the great grandkids".
roystgnr
1yr ago
No particulate emissions
This needs an asterisk after it. My gas stove doesn't measurably raise PM2.5 levels ... until we make something like fajitas, and then the smoky sizzle which gets past filters sends PM2.5 through the roof.
It would be funny if this was a confounder to any studies: people who really want to sear meat get gas stoves, searing puts a ton of PM in the air, and yet they'd be breathing the same PM after a switch to high-powered electric.
Before we look for subtle confounders, though, I'd first like to see some reassurance that we aren't really ignoring obvious confounders too.
roystgnr
1yr ago
A bizarre narrowing of language.
Bizarre? It's quite straightforward. General terms get applied to an extreme/taboo/embarrassing/private/insulting specific case, then they get avoided in other cases to avoid confusion, and eventually the vicious cycle causes them to almost exclusively be applied to the specific case, even if their older broader meaning is still recognizable in other contexts or with a little thought.
Loss and distortion of meaning this way is tragically common. It's impossible to fix language in time and only change it productively. I shrink with quiet sadness at each unproductive euphemism's development, but if someday we freed our intercourse from the taint of these boners, I would stand erect and my ejaculations would be gay!
roystgnr
1yr ago
Plenty of powerful people make contemptible mistakes, they tend to stick to affairs with consenting adults for a reason.
Did Epstein's targets all initially know that his victims weren't consenting adults? I thought the scam was that there were "hostesses/masseuses/etc" around with a mix of ages so it would appear plausible they were all of age, but if an underage girl had sex with a target in one of the rooms wired for video then the pictures+video end up in Epstein's safe labeled "Young [name] + [name]" and that target ends up owned. From a consequentialist standpoint, a target keeping silent about someone pimping out children for blackmail material is enabling future rapes, doing something even more contemptible than a single deliberate statutory rape ... but if the alternative to deliberate statutory rape is "just don't fucking do that" whereas the alternative to giving in to blackmail is "get outed as a rapist but whine about how it wasn't so bad because she looked 18 and you thought she was asking for it" then I'd bet there are a lot of people who wouldn't be evil in the former case but would make a deal with the devil in the latter case.
I might naively suspect that even evil people would rush to be the first to squeal, lest someone else get that whistleblower credit while federal agents discover the non-whistleblowers in Epstein's sex-recordings safe anyway ... but since the exact titles in that safe still haven't been unredacted, perhaps the evil people understand feds better than I do.
roystgnr
1mo ago
I think there were also post-sex scenes in both Iron Man and the first Guardians movie
The post-sex scene in Iron Man was preceded by a more graphic (though still PG-13) pre-sex scene, even. I don't think they were even aiming the MCU at kids until they realized what a cash cow it was going to be; otherwise they'd have toned down the bloody opening scene a bit, or at least given it more of the cartoonish flavor that later MCU battles are full of.
The sex stuff in Guardians was much more clever; kids old enough to understand why he forgot that lady was on board his ship are old enough to watch it, and if there are any kids old enough to understand the "under a black light this place looks like a Jackson Pollack painting" joke then they're old enough to shudder at it.
Of course, with Eternals they were more clever still: if nobody can muster up interest in the movie for long enough to get to the adult elements, then they don't have to worry about exposing kids to adult elements. I'm not even kidding here; I tried to watch that movie and I tuned out before making it that far. I had to hit up YouTube just now to see the (not even prelude-to! thrusting! the only non-R-rated thing here is the camera angle!) sex scene.
roystgnr
1mo ago
I almost wondered if he was trying to goad the government into claiming that it actually has the same right to bully and coerce news outlets.
It would be in character, right? I guess it was too much to hope that we'd get another win that easily, though.
"You can't handle the truth!
Son, we live in a world that has mass media, and those media have to be guarded by men with banhammers. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Justice Alito? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for the publisher, and you curse the Congress. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know -- that chilling effects, while tragic, probably saved elections; and my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves elections.
We use words like "fact-checking," "regulation," "trust." We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punch line."
"Would you order the book ban?"
"I do the job..."
"Would you order the book ban!!?"
"YOU'RE GODDAMN RIGHT I WOULD!"
roystgnr
1mo ago
Though I agree it comes from people generally associated with the right the actual policy feels very liberal to me.
It is very liberal, philosophically; it's just not inherently left-wing.
Principled right-libertarians exist (though in insufficient numbers...), and many other modern right-wing people have been pushed to adopt liberal philosophies, at least out of expediency, since liberal philosophies are the ones that still let you coexist when (like the modern right) you're not powerful enough to expect to come out on top in an illiberal system. @ArjinFerman is probably correct below when he writes "Politics is not about policy as it relates to various philosophies, as nice as that would have been." I fear many supporters of school vouchers would never give the idea a second glance if only control of their public school systems was still in their allies' hands rather than their opponents'.
Politics have strange coalitions I guess
There's this too. Schizmogenesis is a powerful force. I never imagined I'd see leftists defending the unimpugnable integrity of pharmaceutical companies and voting machines, or rightists becoming pro-Russian tankies, but maybe that's just what happens when the vibe of "not only am I not like Them, I'm the most not-like-Them it's possible to be!" gets socially rewarded.
roystgnr
4mo ago
Is the New York Times wrong?
Dismayingly frequently.
Not about this, I believe, but since the history of the NYT being bafflingly brazenly wrong about things extends from over 90 years ago to under 2 days ago, it still feels weird to cite them as an authoritative source.
Quoting myself from several years ago:
But you're right to point out that the important thing here is the change, the increase - why wasn't this as big a problem thirty years ago? My first guess would be that it's some combination of massive polarization and growing gerrymandering. Even when partisan voters lacked any motivation to replace their own representatives from within their own parties, there would frequently be some sway in the weaker partisans and independents that forced them to accept a replacement by the other party, and then when the first party had a chance to win back control they'd naturally try to do it with new blood. I'd love to hear other theories, though.
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