sohois
4d ago
That there are some exceptions does not disprove the point that China places heavy restrictions on foreign businesses operating there.
sohois
5d ago
I can't speak for the US, but in the UK the Chinese manufacturers appear to be treating the market as very much a cash cow and not at all going for price competition. Their models are like 2-3x the Chinese price for the same cars.
They are putting out sub £10k garbage for £30k prices
sohois
5d ago
You've already got like a hundred responses, but none point out the obvious:
the problem is that Indians are poor, and there are more than a billion of them. When poor immigrants come to western countries, there is like a 1 in 2 chance that they will be Indian.
There's nothing particularly unique to India that makes them unpleasant that other immigrant nations lack. They are just the most populous by far.
sohois
9d ago
But none of the positive economic indicators apply to European countries? No shit Scotts article on the US doesn't apply! They haven't had years of strong GDP growth or wage growth
sohois
15d ago
I notice I am confused by your premise.
First of all I think it's a simplification.
there's a lot of people who are savagely agitating for a UBI on one side, saying we'll be post work. The other side of course says no that's not how it works
Are these the two sides? I wouldn't agree. I think you're bunching together a lot of disparate groups. I think the main group you are trying to describe are those who believe a high level of structural, technologically driven unemployment is coming and propose UBI as a way to prevent huge numbers from falling into poverty or rioting.
But when you see arguments in favour of UBI, plenty are more prosaic, liking it from a Friedmanite perspective as the most effective method of welfare.
Between the technological UBI and libertarian UBI enthusiasts lies the most populous group: the midwits. The standard reddit proponent, they are aware of some of the technological arguments, and some of the efficiency arguments, and are smart enough to know that communism is a dead end. Thus they attach to UBI as a way to sound smart while still pushing the type of left wing welfare they favour.
When you talk about left vs right, I think you are mostly seeing arguments from the latter group, and are ending up with a bunch of weakmen. Hence why you are arguing against "affordability", because you're seeing people whose proposals begin and end at confiscating all the money from billionaires worldwide. The reality is that there are costed UBI proposals, both for current welfare or post-AGI welfare.
but let's ignore all that. My second point of confusion is how you imagine this post-AGI economy at all. I'm assuming that we're putting ASI to the side, whether through slow-takeoff or because you believe it impossible, so AI that hits human level but no higher. Is this AI purely limited to the realms of current LLMs? Are you assuming no equivalent leaps in robotic technology? How long do you expect this period to last? What's the actual level of unemployment you are expecting?
I'm trying to imagine something like self-driving cars, level 5 with no requirement for human supervision. So you reduce the work week to a 30/20/10 hour max or whatever. Does it matter if no one ever needs a human driver again?
Is the assumption that AGI largely acts a super performance enhancer but generically, so that every current job can still be done by humans?
I'm not saying that this is an impossible scenario or we couldn't at least theorycraft some way that it works, but it seems like it needs a very specific set of future developments to make sense.
And this for me is the biggest reason why few people talk about work weeks and instead focus on UBI: it's simple.
Whether you have AGI LLMs, or robotics, or ASI; whether you have 25% unemployment, or 50%, or 100%, or even if it's all a big luddite fallacy and there are loads more jobs created, UBI still works as a method of welfare. You don't have to know the future path of the economy or technology to put forward a solution.
sohois
22d ago
Either that or they offer Korean BBQ and didn't bother taking the option off the delivery menu
sohois
26d ago
Enjoy is somewhat of a different experience than "the prequels are overall good". I enjoyed the prequels as a child and I expect I could rewatch them with my own children without complaint. They are certainly more interesting films than most of Disney's output. But good films? Nah
sohois
26d ago
Sorry but I can't take anyone seriously who believes this. There's a group of star wars fans who obviously like any Star wars content and have been suckered by memes and cartoons, but I doubt you'll find many who think the prequels are good movies. People can enjoy many terrible movies
sohois
27d ago
Secondly, Star Wars wasn't Rian Johnson's to destroy. On December 15, 2017, Star Wars meant something. On December 16, 2017, Star Wars was a joke
Does this post simply pretend that the prequels didn't exist?
By the time of TLJ, the past 5 movies in the Star Wars canon had veered from just about ok to downright garbage (technically there was that cartoon movie as well but I don't think anyone counts that). The series was batting 2 for 7
sohois
30d ago
Self-study? It's the same as any other language these days, grab your preferred app and go through all the lessons. Duolingo is shit for Chinese and I haven't really used many of the options myself, but I understand that DuChinese and HelloChinese would be good to get started with.
And the other thing about ubiquitous smartphones is that there really is no reason to learn hand writing anymore, because everything can be done with pinyin and copied if you have to write something.
sohois
1mo ago
The BBC are establishment progressives. They do largely adhere to the status quo, except on cultural issues where they are invariably well to the left.
That one of their editors appears to be a bit of Zionist apparently had no impact on their fawning coverage of Hamas talking points, as demonstrated in the reply right below yours. It's a similar argument that Davie and Turness are both Tory appointments with conservative leanings; somehow it didn't prevent the BBC from this blunder, or the hundreds of Gaza blunders, or their "LGBTQ desk" somehow getting veto power over any and all trans related articles.
sohois
1mo ago
I think you're overblowing the women's football stuff massively: you might ask who benefits from the addition of the Ethiopian league or the Romanian second tier or the myriad other tiny leagues you can rock up to as a manager. Adding women's football is largely a matter of expanding their database and I can't imagine it was some big programming challenge. Other than the dumb weight issue, I can't imagine any of their problems were due to women's football compared to the general engine change and their overall incompetence at designing a UI and graphics engine.
As for the why, then yeah I think you're correct:
idealistic projections of future female fanbases
Games like FIFA and FM have pretty much maxed out the male audience, so what better way to please growth hungry execs than promising a whole new female audience to exploit?
At least for FM, it makes sense because of the aforementioned matter of just expanding their database (compared to modelling hundreds of new players and new animations in FIFA, for example)
sohois
1mo ago
As far as I can see, a couple of posters have taken issue with your claims around territorial gains for Russia, with no posters suggesting that Ukraine will turn around and reconquer lost territory.
sohois
1mo ago
Was there a serious core of people who believed in a Ukraine victory though? And by serious, I mean people who don't solely read or work for the likes of NYT or BBC. Mottizens or similar. Outside of a hope that sanctions might eventually force Russia to the table, I would be surprised if anyone believed in a Ukraine military victory.
If by "Western Europeans" you're referring more to the governments than the people, I think the answer is less learning from history and rather the same as for every modern crisis: a large number of incompetent and completely bubbled officials, unable to deal with the complexity of modern life
sohois
1mo ago
It took Uber 15 years to record a profit and zero years to completely change the taxi market
sohois
2mo ago
Death Valley is sparsely populated: by your logic, we can assume it's a good place to live.
Plus, I daresay that many Indians would in fact like to live in Mumbai, more than are currently there
sohois
2mo ago
The examples we have of liberalised planning, both historical and current, are far superior to the examples we have of drug legalisation/decriminalisation, so it seems unlikely
sohois
2mo ago
Same, I've got nothing against the occasional pop banger, k or otherwise, but didn't land with me at all
sohois
2mo ago
Your first two paragraphs just appear to be quibbling over definitions. I don't really care what measurement scheme you use, abandon percentages if you find them useless. The point of the comparison is to show that the advancement in AI capabilities is on a completely different planet to AVs.
As for the comparison of investment, it seems trivial to point out that the difference in magnitude is due to the potential markets. If a company invented Level 5 self driving cars tomorrow, what would they get? You could take away human taxi drivers and truck drivers and some other logistics, and start taking a big chunk of the consumer car market. For a time at least, since other companies would be able to copy you pretty quickly. I'm assuming a lot of companies in that market plan to licence the technology for their revenues, rather than trying to take direct control. Certainly a big market, which likely explains a lot of the valuation for your Teslas and Ubers, but not unlimited.
The impact of a company announcing AGI tomorrow would be unimaginable, even if we assume a slow takeoff with limited recursive self-improvement.
sohois
2mo ago
AVs seem like an incomparable category. I couldn't pinpoint the beginning of AV hype the same way you can point to the Transformer architecture for LLMs, but the early examples of AVs 10-15 years ago I recall were pretty impressive. It was like 80% of the way to human parity right from the get-go; it made sense that people were predicting a rapid replacement of human drivers, because they'd made such an impressive start. (I appreciate that AV efforts probably existed long before this but I think it's a fair starting point)
And then over the next decade AV capabilities crept up to human levels at like 1% per year. There were no significant breakthroughs, no evidence of rapid progress, and as you state it is only now that we're getting commercially available taxis in specific locations. Even when Waymo started rolling out proper AV taxis in some cities, it did not signal a sudden leap forward in capabilities as you might expect.
Contrast to LLMs. GPT-1 came out in 2018, a year after the Transformer paper, with GPT-2 following a year later. GPT-2 was impressive compared to previous language generators, but still only perhaps at 33% of the level of an average human. with 3 it jumped up to 50%, 3.5 went further, while 4 was perhaps at the 80% level that AVs started at. Every few months since then has since more and more large leaps, such that current models are winning mathematical competitions and are measured at PhD level in a huge variety of domains.
Chart the progress of both technologies, and they'll look completely different. It's fair to think at some point natural limits will stop the endless scaling of LLM capabilities, but thus far extrapolating a straight line has worked pretty well. AVs never even had a line to extrapolate from.
sohois
2mo ago
Do people pick these up and read forever though? A lot of these webfics are serialized, people reach the end and then just read chapter by chapter.
One of the big draws for me with webfiction is that I am a very fast reader, and if I was buying everything it would bankrupt me. A million word story can give me a nice week of reading, but I wouldn't be spending more than a few hours of leisure a day, and most of the time keeping up with ongoing web releases is ~1hour a week
sohois
2mo ago
I can't believe this Reddit tier joke has made it to a motte thread. Aside from being a decade old and barely funny the first time, it's not even accurate.
sohois
2mo ago
Saudi Arabia takes its biggest step yet into the biggest of culture war arenas:
EA Announces Agreement to be Acquired by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners for $55 Billion
Electronic Arts has been bought up by the Saudi investment arm PIF, alongside Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners and PE giant Silver Lake. The trio paid $55Bn for EA, albeit in a leveraged buyout involving $20Bn of debt financing(!).
On the surface, nothing too interesting, perhaps another example of the incredible growth in private equity. And that might be all there is, just 3 funds thinking there is untapped potential in what was an often poorly run gaming giant. However, PIF is almost certainly the largest owner, and AP News identifies the deal as part of the Saudi strategy. I expect Kushner is either wetting his beak or acting as a lightning rod for the Saudis, while Silver Lake probably needed no encouragement to get in on the deal.
The Saudis appear to have identified major cultural industries in Sports and Gaming as prime opportunities for...something? "Sportswashing" makes sense for the tiny nations and city states like Qatar and Abu Dhabi which have no real power outside of their resources, but it's not clear what Saudi Arabia gains from pumping hundreds of billions into these industries. Much has been said of the desire of MBS to diversify Saudi Arabia, and at least with this deal there is room to move EA functions into the country, but it's a drop in the bucket. The leveraged nature of the deal is also unusual; that's the kind of option you typically pursue when asset stripping - neither the Saudis nor Silver Lake needs that kind of business.
I can't speak for continental Europe, but a public communication like that would be easy grounds for gross misconduct in the UK, so wouldn't make much difference
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