sohois
1mo ago
I've been switching between o3 and 2.5 pro to vibe code a project, and it definitely matches the impressions of others regarding o3's hyperactivity. It feels like o3 was designed to be used by already experienced engineers - it races ahead, giving the next 10 steps all at once, but only in sparse detail. There seems to be an assumption that the user can just fill in the rest. Gemini is a lot more patient, easy to follow for the less experienced
sohois
1mo ago
I don't know if I ever thought of it this way, but now I kind of can't unsee it. I genuinely wonder if Zoomers will end up feeling bitter towards Millennials like me in much the same way we feel in many cases bitter towards Boomers, but instead of a grudge over amassing self-serving stock market wealth and monopolizing limited housing stock, it's despairing over the perhaps mishandled human-technological interaction surface that emerged after Millennial founders and users created the modern mobile-social-internet landscape.
You're skipping a generation there. While a lot of current addictive internet creations are millennial, the earliest examples are Gen X. Google, Youtube, and Myspace/Friendster were all Gen X. Ditto some of the early hyper-addictive video games like Call of Duty and World of Warcraft, and of course the smart phones themselves.
sohois
1mo ago
Didn't Sam Altman suggest that in Yudkowsky's efforts to inoculate against paperclipping AI he basically hyperstitioned the field into existence? The anti-human branches of AI researchers are almost certainly a rationalist-descended cult-like phenomenon.
I've certainly seen similar thoughts suggested in places. You can certainly question whether Musk would have helped create OpenAI without having encountered Yudkowsky's ideas, but it's hard to reason on how much OpenAI particularly pushed forwards the current AI paradigms. Would they have been discovered elsewhere? It's worth remembering that machine learning models had a renaissance several years before LLMs, with self-driving cars being the initial ignition factor. This was back when LessWrong and associated platforms were still super niche.
There's also the question for AI doomers of what the cost/benefit would be. Let's say that Yudkowsky's writing brought forward AGI by 10 years. However, what would be the state of AI safety if he never started writing? Having an extra 10 years for a far smaller AI safety movement could easily be a worse outcome.
Personally I think the question of what the purpose of rationalism is has been answered: it was to create the AI safety movement. Yudkowsky built up rationalism into a "big tent" to attract more interest and provide intellectual scaffolding. Over the years rationalism has splintered into various more effective sub groups, including AI safety but also EA and its associated movements. Rationalism was never coherent enough, but these smaller groups have accomplished important things.
Rationalism accomplished its job in creating these, and now the original husk still just soldiers on, oblivious to it's obsolescence.
sohois
1mo ago
As much as I hate journalists, they are quite good at writing. Some no-name journalist at AP has gone to school for writing and honed his craft for years. His writing is almost certainly in the top 99th percentile of writing skills, and certainly far better than yours or mine.
This is an absurd claim. We have to remember that at this point journalism has been a dying industry for decades. The aspiring novelist working on their book away from their day job at the paper is a relic of 50 years ago. Good and great writers nowadays will go to so many other places before they go to a paper.
There are only a tiny number of prestigious bylines at top newspapers. When was the last time you read a generic article at, say, some mid-tier US city paper? There are still plenty of positions rehashing whatever comes through from AP or Reuters, or working in industry publications or niche hobby stuff. And these are never noted for quality.
And even amongst good journalists, writing is not often a big selling point. How many people read Matt Yglesias for his quality prose compared to just finding his ideas interesting? Good investigative journalism can be performed independently of good writing.
sohois
1mo ago
Are normies, even somewhat intelligent ones, incapable of distinguishing the most obvious stinky smelly chatgpt output?
Alternative phrasing: are normie journalists, even somewhat intelligent ones, incapable of putting out articles better than even the most stinky smelly chatgpt output?
I mean, why is this a surprise development? Oh, the article has a bunch of made-up garbage, you mean unlike all the rest of journalism where everything is true and the media never truly lies?
Why should I give a shit if a journo "hand authors" his latest piece of crap or just pushes a prompt at an LLM? Text generation is their speciality, and at this point I'd be stunned if most of them weren't 90th percentile in general writing quality in comparison to humans. How many journalists do you even know of for their writing quality? Hunter S Thompson and ?? Hell, just prompt the LLM in the right way and I bet you could get to 99th percentile no problem.
Do you even have an argument here beyond just the words "aislop"? Can you articulate a point that taboos the phrase slop and similar terms?
sohois
1mo ago
From my experience (in the energy industry), Spain's reputation is fine for their admin competence.
Although maybe not so much anymore...
sohois
1mo ago
I got a similar score and have a similar ~1sigma lower estimate from correlated tests (although memory was my best individual score). At first I thought the whole test was just a bit biased towards higher scores as multiple posters got scores in 140-150 range, but there are a few lower scores so not sure
sohois
1mo ago
Don't buy anything new. I assume you'll probably have family and friends that will gift/loan you a lot, but even if not it's so easy nowadays to find second hand stuff for way cheaper, and it's probably been used liked 10 times total.
I don't have the link, but in some ACX comments a few months back someone linked a blog series on back sleeping for babies. The conclusion was that the evidence for the benefits re:SIDS was extremely weak, while there was some good evidence that back sleeping has quite negative effects in other domains. We've slept our child on front, back and side, but she falls asleep really easily everyway so for us it's been less important, but could be useful when yours arrives
sohois
1mo ago
Oblivion. Might be strange to mention one of the highest rated games of all time, but nothing else captures that bizarre terrible film feeling. The incredibly ugly characters, litany of bugs, weird system choices, and of course the Radiant AI system form a perfect storm.
I have little hope that a future Oblivion remake would be anywhere near as good because they will simply sand away all the interesting parts
sohois
2mo ago
Are you turned off simply because there is a scene with dancing in it, or that some "stupid SJW" shared it approvingly?
sohois
2mo ago
Not to put words into the OPs mouth, but that's not what I took from the post. Rather, tariffs are an example of a generalized anti-automation protest which will provide an example for future PMC types to follow when AGI or similar eventually arrives
Just look at this sentence:
If you're worried about how the PMC will eventually sabotage the progress
Not how the PMC are sabotaging progress, but will do so in future
sohois
2mo ago
German issues now are largely a product of the past few years of policy, not any long term failures.
They elected the Greens, who promptly exploded their nuclear power sources and left them entirely reliant on natural gas from Russia. Now they have the highest electricity prices on the continent and vast swathes of industry are completely unviable.
sohois
2mo ago
My newborn does not do this often, but she does take a while to accept moving from one of her parents to her bed when sleeping
sohois
2mo ago
Bioshock Infinite was a financial disaster because Ken Levine was completely unable to run an effective development team, it's really not any more complicated than that.
No publisher recoiled from failure; they were compelled to chase the live service riches all the way off a cliff.
sohois
2mo ago
I'd say it's not so much his libertarianism as the fact he is solely a libertarian, he's not really right-wing culturally at all. His aims have always aligned with right-wing voters so he's always courted them but it's pretty clear he doesn't care much about things like immigration
sohois
2mo ago
Mercantilism as it was pursued - and it did not improve prosperity or any metric you care to measure - relied somewhat on colonialism. The colonial nations could tariff away as long as they could go and directly secure the materials they needed from conquered nations.
sohois
2mo ago
But then, are these benefits greater than the costs? That was the question, do you believe this will be good or at least not on-net bad?
sohois
2mo ago
I'm not sure this really maps to right-wing growth in Europe. Le Pen's economics are close to Trump in her economic nationalism, but Farage is an old school libertarian who wanted to make the Brexit campaign all about opening up free trade outside of the EU. Meloni has retreated pretty quickly into bog standard neoliberalism. Can't comment on Wilders or the AfD, but there's nothing to suggest that wider right wing movements are an economic protest
sohois
2mo ago
Who do you think is voting for all those far right parties in Europe?
People that don't like immigration.
Why do you think Brexit happened?
Immigration.
sohois
2mo ago
For whom? Anyone who relies on the global economy for their livelihoods, which is approximately everyone on earth. Trump doesn't need to care about the wellbeing of foreigners of course, but I'm not sure how Juche thought with American characteristics will produce the desired results of Trump and his team
sohois
2mo ago
I'm sure posters here could provide a reasonable steelman for Trump's position if asked, but forget about providing arguments for a second: are there any Trump supporters here who genuinely believe this is a good set of policies, or even a not-disastrous set of policies?
I can't imagine this will be the final thing to break support for Maga types, but I would give strong odds that this goes down as a major black mark on Trump's eventual record, and a potential torpedo for any future Maga candidates
sohois
2mo ago
But the the rest boils down to where do my kids go to start making money?
This answer depends a lot on how old your kids are, no? If they are 16 and looking at university pathways, then there aren't clear answers. If they are 6 and still dreaming of being astronauts etc., then you're just going to wait and see. If AI progress stalls soon, then you'll know that coding, graphic design, and most "writing" occupations are a no go, but there will still be plenty of other positions. Nothing wrong with the old middle class staples like accountants, architects, maybe lawyers if AI doesn't get good enough.
sohois
2mo ago
Syracuse informed me that in China, Coke is called "happy drink for fat people," fair enough.
I wouldn't translate it like that. A simpler translation would just be Mouth Happiness, but the impressive thing about Coke's localization is that it's pronounced Ke Kou Ke Le, so they managed a name which is both phonetically accurate and still has a useful meaning. Most Western brands just go for a rough transliteration without a clear Mandarin meaning.
I don't want to get into a debate about what "exceptionally deadly" means, but I don't think this is true. Spanish Flu was exceptionally deadly, COVID was largely on par with the Hong Kong and Asian Flu epidemics of the 60s, but in a much more globalised world.
I'm not really sure what prompted this article from Scott, but it does kind of follow the path the lockdown skeptical have been saying, that of the Iraq war. You start with enthusiastic support from all sides. Later you get "with the evidence at the time, support made sense" ( we are here). Then it's "I didn't support it, but I understand those who did". And finally you get to "No I never supported it and all those who did were clearly in the wrong/outright evil".
More options
Context Copy link