domain:web.law.duke.edu
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
2m ago
I would argue that this is a temporary state of affairs. Current AI coding is at the level of an over-caffeinated intern (who is very knowledgeable, but less than practical). Thus, a great deal of oversight is necessary to make sure they aren't shooting themselves in the foot.
But consider the potential SOTA in a year or two, when they're comfortably at par with mid-level coders. A senior SWE is usually happy to delegate to multiple experienced juniors, without worrying too much about the exact implementation details. My impression is that we're not there yet.
https://x.com/METR_Evals/status/1955747420324946037
Even when agents pass on all human-written test cases, we estimate that their implementations would take 20-30 minutes on average to get to a mergeable state—which represents about a third of the total time needed for an experienced developer to complete the tasks.
In other words, a lot (but not all) of the theoretical time savings are eaten up by the need to understand, edit and improve their code. At present.
ControlsFreak
7m ago
No, I showed that my point was coherent
We can just read the comments. You never told me what your terms meant, because you couldn't. Perhaps you missed my edit back then, even though I recall doing it quickly, so I'll repeat it here just in case:
Let's change the syntax to make it clear. Suppose you had said, "I know my values are just as blurf (or not) as everyone else's." Suppose I inquired as to what you meant by values being blurf or not, or multiple values being equally blurf. It's not really helpful to say that there is nothing objective about blurf. It still simply fails to tell me anything about what blurf actually means.
Not with you, I'm afraid. @Primaprimaprima is far more pleasant to talk to, hence I am more than happy to discuss that in detail with them.
I'm a pretty pleasant guy. What have I said that is not pleasant? I think you might be confusing a pleasant conversationalist with a pleasant conversation. Most people don't like conversations where large problems with their stated positions are brought to the fore. That's fair enough. But that's probably what you find displeasing, the clear and obvious feeling in your gut that you know your position has a problem, and that you don't know what to do about it. I sympathize; I've been there. Just a piece of advice, though; thinking that you're going to be able to avoid the problem by avoiding the person who points out the problem never works. Moreover, it's unMottely.
DefinitelyAnAlt
10m ago
I understand. But gotta have.OpSec.
I'm less paranoid on my main. That profile is as hidden as sydney sweeney's assets. I share revealing and intimate information on this alt, so I edit out my comments on a monthly-ish basis.
May start using my main here for innocuous life updates
roystgnr
14m ago
Do you believe that Israel would then come in with a Marshall Plan, like the US did after WW 2?
Just the usual billion dollars a year of international aid adds up over time (albeit not as much as it would have if Gaza still had 20% of the population), once it's not repeatedly reset, and sitting next to a Mediterranean beach can't hurt.
I'm not sure how much Israel would contribute, but they were selling Gaza a third of its power while still getting missiles fired at them; that's a lot better than the US would have treated any adversary in the same circumstances.
The big issue for decades has been that Israel does not trust the Palestinians to build up an economy and not use those resources to attack Israel.
Was my "several hours later" link broken? Ongoing attacks are very good evidence that attacks will be ongoing; that's not a matter of trust or distrust, just inductive reasoning.
More recently, Hamas proudly publishes video of digging up water pipes to turn into rockets. There's a weird example of horseshoe theory here, where fellow travelers sound affronted at "Hamas would do X" while Hamas brags "ha ha, look how awesome we are at X!"
This is why a surrender is a prerequisite to building up an economy. You need investment to support subsequent investment, not to be dismantled when there's enough of it to turn into another volley of pot shots.
Israel's policy has always been to attack innocent Palestinians and destroy their property, when even relatively minor attacks happened.
Is there an issue with hyperlinks here? I'm not sure you read mine, and I can't even see yours. This is the sort of thing that requires a source.
The childish fantasy
Or is it that you're under the impression that insults are appropriate on TheMotte but sources are not? The opposite is true.
I'd hoped you would find it valuable to learn that you were so wrong about Gazan overpopulation; that magnitude of error is often a good warning sign that you've been deriving facts from conclusions rather than vice-versa. Discovering that just once should provoke introspection akin to finding "just one termite" in your walls. But the correction doesn't seem to have nudged your perspective at all, and now we see it didn't even elicit politeness, so further corrections this far down-thread probably won't be productive either. I'll stop here.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
16m ago
· Edited 12m ago
I mean, LLMs have solved IMO problems. If that does not count as reasoning, then I do not think 99% of living humans count as being capable of reasoning either.
Asserting AI inferiority based on the remaining 1% begins looking awfully like a caricature of a neonazi (unemployed alcoholic school dropout who holds himself superior to a white-collar immigrant because some guy of his ethnicity wrote a symphony two hundred years ago).
In general, I think this is in fact quite often the shape of the problem - AI critics don't necessarily underestimate AI, but instead vastly overestimate humanity and themselves. Most of the cliché criticisms of AI, including in particular the "parrot" one, apply to humans!
DefinitelyAnAlt
21m ago
Yeah. Remarkably senior team. No juniors. Youngest person is almost 30. Strong positive bias towards ICs rather than manager types.
Its still early, but digging it so far. Maybe less so if I get marked underperformer ☠️. Hoping I learn my way around to have impact before the first evaluation cycle.
srf0638
23m ago
Would you race?
I might try to throw down some big days, but I don't like recreational sleep deprivation, so not in a real serious sense. Maybe start with the Grand Depart, maybe not. You?
I've done a fair bit of solo travel both on and off the bike, never really struggled, but it's gonna be harder to schedule now that I have a serious gf. Or slow-play my hand and do it when I retire, there's at least one guy in his 70s on the Rigs of the Tour Divide series every year.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
24m ago
No, I showed that my point was coherent, it is beyond me why you don't see that. It's not really my problem at this point.
Would you like to take a shot at your negative claim with analogy to philosophy of mathematics? Any sort of clarity or argument there?
Not with you, I'm afraid. @Primaprimaprima is far more pleasant to talk to, hence I am more than happy to discuss that in detail with them. You're welcome to read that thread and make of it what you will.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
26m ago
· Edited 19m ago
BTW, did you not realize that @walruz was joking? What he linked is a fun Magic: The Gathering construction. If the Twin Primes conjecture is true, then the loop never ends. If it's not true, it does end, after 10^10^10^10^whatever years. It may be slightly optimistic to describe that as "paying dividends"...
I was leaning into the joke. MTG nerds are a different breed.
On the topic of conic sections, the poster claimed:
However most histories of Greek mathematics say that conic sections were invented/discovered by Menaechmus, as a tool for doubling the cube, which is of course a useless problem from our modern point of view.
EDIT 3. Parabolic mirrors is not a real application. Of course, this is a nice property of parabola, but conic sections have many other nice properties. The legend of Archimedes burning ships with them is a legend, nothing more
Conic sections and integral transforms are high-school or early university math
They very much didn't start out that way.
And non-Euclidean geometry is useful in many other realms than special relativity, like, oh, say, navigating the Earth!
That depends on how strict you want to be on the definition of non-Euclidean, spherical geometry, a limited subset, was used in celestial and terrestrial navigation as early as the first century CE, though real usage only boomed in the Age of Sail.
But that was for a very specific purpose, the idea that space itself was non-Euclidean came about much later. That is a lag of about 21 centuries.
While there is zero chance of any of the math I linked above being useful, I admit that cryptography isn't the only example of surprising post-hoc utility showing up. As theoretical physics has gotten more abstract (way way beyond relativity), some previously existing high-powered math has become relevant to it. (The Yang-Mills problem, another Millennium Problem, unites some advanced math and physics.) But I absolutely defy the claim that there is a "tendency" for practical applications to show up. Another way to frame the fact that 0.01% of pure math has surprised us by being useful over the last 2,000 years is... that we're right that it's useless 99.99% of the time. I wish I had that much certainty about the other topics we discuss here!
I am happy to acknowledge availability and recall bias here. If there are topics in maths that have remained utterly useless and purely theoretical to this day, I am unlikely to have heard of them.
My overall point is that:
-
Maths is incredibly productive on net.
-
Even if we do have "99.9%" certainty that a particular field is unlikely to have practical applications, the benefits in the unlikely case that it does are usually substantial. If I came across a normal lottery and saw that my ticket had a 0.1% chance of winning billions, then I'd be spending quite a lot of money on lottery tickets.
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Ergo, it is immensely sensible to subsidize or invest in maths as a whole. The expected value from doing so is positive. Our entire society and civilization runs on mathematical advancements.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
34m ago
People, not just you but in general, immediately leap from 'I don't like this opinion' to forming the worst possible interpretation of the post and then downvote.
It wasn't you who posted it, unless you're a corvid as well as a corvos. But the offending bit is:
Are red Americans irrationally attached to their weapons, attaching civilisation-preserving significance to them that they don't merit, or are the children wrong?
The straightforward interpretation is that either you accept the insulting characterization in the first part, or you're completely out of touch (note the URL). This absolutely deserves a downvote.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
37m ago
Wherefore do you need a corpse to present publicly at all? You presumably have been telling everyone for years that he suffered from a disfiguring illness which lead to his reclusiveness, he sure as hell wouldn't want an open-casket. Unfortunately in his disfiguring illness he turned to a lot of weird woo-woo spirit healing, and there are no medical records for several years because he refused to see a doctor. We're talking about billionaire local feudal lords here, the death certificate comes from the [Family Name] Building at the local hospital, paying off a mortician is the least of the concerns.
Keep in mind that the only cheated party is the government. All members of the family are presumably on-side, the hospital suffers no harm (in fact, under the new will, they're getting a new surgery wing!), the mortician suffers no harm. Even the local government suffers no harm. Only the Federal Government is concerned, and there's not actually much nexus for them to check if someone is alive.
Bonus Question: A 3 year old corpse of a 40 year old man. This is obvious if you think about the corpse of a young woman from the perspective of a necrophiliac.
Tree
46m ago
I know you’re not a mod, but the law casts a long shadow. Yeah, I agree with you, it is not ‘obvious’, only likely . It was a stylistic flourish, to accentuate the whiplash, scooby doo effect of that comment. At the time, it seemed like a good idea.
Corvos
50m ago
one could reasonably hold out for another five to eight years
I’m no doctor but you’re going to need a really oblivious mortician to present an eight year old corpse as fresh :P
Bonus question: if a man dies at 40 and gets WfB’d for another 3 years, is he:
- a 3 year old corpse
- a 40 year old corpse
- a 43 year old corpse
Genuinely not sure.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
55m ago
Something I feel has been under-discussed so far:
Estate planning, and assisted suicide as a tax avoidance tool.
Estate tax rates have been a classic political football for decades, with policy shifting radically between Republicans and Democrats. Republicans want higher exemptions, so that the tax starts at a bigger estate, and lower rates; Democrats want lower exemptions and higher rates. Republicans cry crocodile tears about family farms forced to sell; Democrats whinge about billionaire feudal dynasties. Each administration has made moves towards eliminating, or raising, the estate tax; often unsuccessfully but always attempted. It's reasonable for any wealthy American to be concerned about major changes in the estate tax system, they come around every decade or so, following party politics.
I've often joked that a particularly wealthy family I know would Weekend at Bernie's their patriarch if he died during a bad (Democrat) period for the estate tax, as one could reasonably hold out for another five to eight years and expect a better (Republican) estate tax law to pass. They could drive him around to various places where he could be "seen" in the window of the family Escalade with heavily tinted windows, and just keep it in the family until it was time to "declare" his death publicly and pay the taxes.
But with assisted suicide, new options open up.
It's November 2032. JD Vance has lost in a landslide to AOC, the Republican party having been crippled by a "True MAGA" independent run by Donald Trump Jr who claimed that Vance's administration had betrayed his father's legacy. AOC and her fillibuster-proof Democratic majority plan to increase the estate tax to a punitive 95% on all estates over $50mm. Does a 95 year old multi-billionaire decide to take a one-way vacation to Switzerland to avoid the tax? Do his children pressure him to take the trip? It's Succession supercharged. When death is a taxable event, you choose death at a convenient time for taxes.
But, for that matter, if suicide vacations become routine, then that makes for quite an opportunity for fraud, right? Ok, I don't want to get hit with the AOC taxes when I die, but I'm only 80 I've got years left to live, what to do? Well, Switzerland might be out, but Columbia allows MAID. ((I'll note I'm probably engaging in gross American racist stereotyping here)) I travel to Columbia, pay to obtain a death certificate from a MAID clinic to send back to the USA with the kids, and then I start a new life in Costa Rica, where my kids will send me cash to support my Jimmy Buffet lifestyle.
stuckinbathroom
1hr ago
Fair points, but verification is usually way cheaper than generation.
Not if P = NP
ControlsFreak
1hr ago
Fair enough on the positive claim concerning meta-ethics. If you'd prefer to leave that one in incoherence, you can leave that one in incoherence.
Would you like to take a shot at your negative claim with analogy to philosophy of mathematics? Any sort of clarity or argument there?
Corvos
1hr ago
I’m quite happy to take the actual point of the copypasta and accept that the wrapping is for dramatic effect.
Mostly I’m responding to the idea that the prior posts weren’t downvoted for being on the wrong side of the debate but for being rude.
It seems to me there’s a charitable and an uncharitable way to read any of these posts and that the ‘wrong’ side gets less charity by and large. IMO the same copypasta would be downvoted to hell if it was an anti gun message in the same format.
Don’t have any actual action items I’m pushing for here, I just think the phenomenon is obvious and worth noting.
SnapDragon
1hr ago
That's a good question. I'm not sure of the exact reason quaternions were invented - you can indeed stumble on them just by trying to extend the complex numbers in an abstract way - but the Wikipedia article suggests they were already being used for 3D mechanics within a couple of years of invention. (BTW, "number theory" involves integers, primes, that kind of thing, not quaternions. Complex numbers do show up though.)
You could ask the same question about complex numbers too, but they originally arose from the search for an algorithm to solve cubic equations, which is a fairly practical question. That they later turned out to be essential for electronics and quantum mechanics is a case of some new applications of an already useful math concept.
ChickenOverlord
1hr ago
"Are the children wrong?" is not on par with "Listen up, you dumb motherfucker" in terms of rudeness.
Sure, but I was quoting a well-known 4chan copypasta, not actually calling the poster I was replying to that.
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
1hr ago
If you see Israel for what it is, a society that aims to be racially pure
I do not see Israel as a society that aims to be racially pure, because Jews pretty transparently aren't of one race.
What about things like quaternions, which suddenly became relevant when we needed to interpolate 3D transforms and do rotations without Gimbal lock? The current best process for calibrating cameras is to use dual quats, which also means needing dual number theory. Were those areas originally expected to be useful for engineering? My understanding is no, but I'm not a mathematician.
No, I'm sorry, but you really don't know what you're talking about here. The field of pure mathematics is much larger and stranger than you know, and it takes years of intensive study to even reach the frontier, let alone contribute to it. Conic sections and integral transforms are high-school or early university math, and knowing them makes you as much of a pure mathematician as knowing how to change your car's oil filter makes you a CERN engineer. (And, for the record, conic sections were certainly never useless - even other people in that thread you linked called out that ridiculous claim. And non-Euclidean geometry is useful in many other realms than special relativity, like, oh, say, navigating the Earth!)
While there is zero chance of any of the math I linked above being useful, I admit that cryptography isn't the only example of surprising post-hoc utility showing up. As theoretical physics has gotten more abstract (way way beyond relativity), some previously existing high-powered math has become relevant to it. (The Yang-Mills problem, another Millennium Problem, unites some advanced math and physics.) But I absolutely defy the claim that there is a "tendency" for practical applications to show up. Another way to frame the fact that 0.01% of pure math has surprised us by being useful over the last 2,000 years is... that we're right that it's useless 99.99% of the time. I wish I had that much certainty about the other topics we discuss here!
BTW, did you not realize that @walruz was joking? What he linked is a fun Magic: The Gathering construction. If the Twin Primes conjecture is true, then the loop never ends. If it's not true, it does end, after 10^10^10^10^whatever years. It may be slightly optimistic to describe that as "paying dividends"... (Also, the construction only exists because of a card that specifically refers to primes in its rules. You can't claim that math has practical application because it's used to answer trivia questions involving that same math!)
John_Doe_Fletcher
anarcho-heretic, Quokkit guy
1hr ago
How about revealed (or implicit) tolerances? Downgrades the intentionality of wanting implied by "preferences" to simply "acceptable results" .
Corvos
2hr ago
when someone posts some shit implying me and anyone who shares my views is as out-of-touch as Principal Skinner from the Simpsons
The 'children' in this case are all the other countries in the First World. The point is that American disputes tend to act as if the rest of the world doesn't exist, hence cject's OP implying that nobody anywhere has any trust in their fellow citizens except in certain parts of the US and in the Third World, which I find frankly ridiculous.
And this is in fact my point. People, not just you but in general, immediately leap from 'I don't like this opinion' to forming the worst possible interpretation of the post and then downvote. Meanwhile they apply much more generous standards to people who agree with them. This is Confirmation Bias 101, everyone knows humans do this. These are such sensitive issues and the resultant standards are so strict that, in practice, (and, yes, in my opinion since as you point out I am not Tzar of internet points) there is no meaningful gap between "a complaint about different standards" and "downvoted for merely making an argument".
This certainly seems like a salient point (though of course, from my perspective the problem is that you are underestimating humans when you say this). I could not disagree more with your assessment of humans and our ability to reason. And if we can't agree on the baseline abilities of our species, certainly it seems difficult for us to come to an agreement on the capabilities of LLMs.
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