domain:questioner.substack.com
birb_cromble
21m ago
Especially in China, world leaders in personal surveillance?
Maybe my understanding is out of date, but I thought that China was also a world leader in bribing the people who interpret the surveillance footage as well
birb_cromble
24m ago
Where are the parentheses in that statement?? Which part is Scottish????
birb_cromble
32m ago
I’m in a building full of programmers
I'm also in software, and we've seen value in the following areas:
- Keeping juniors from completely stalling when unsupervised for a day or so (at the expense of going down a rabbit hole), like a beefed up search engine.
- Toy scripts to show management that we're "AI ready"
- Spinning up a lot of boilerplate on a Greenfield project that's similar to other pre-existing problems.
They seem to all be absolutely terrible for large legacy codebases. I've lost count of the number of times it spit out code in the wrong language entirely.
At this point, I don't think AI is a dead end, but I'm starting to think LLMs might be a blind alley for this particular application.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
38m ago
I’m expecting that most of the internet will be abandoned by humans by 2050 as bots, fake images and videos and so on continue to spread. Eventually “I read it online” will have the same effect on future generations as it did in 1995 — a sign of something that’s unverified and therefore suspect. The number of outright hoaxes is high enough now that I think most people have had tge experience of being fooled by a fake-news story, picture, or video, or reading or listening to someone who has. It’s crazy enough now, but give it 25 years and I think it will be so difficult to spot a fake that people will be forced by necessity to return to the equivalent of old school news sources, people they actually know or have good reason to trust.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
52m ago
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12334947/
This the one? It's mildly ironic I found it using GPT-5T, but it's food for thought nonetheless.
NunoSempere
56m ago
This is a good point. I consider the above an early draft, with fewer signposts, mostly pointers to the primary sources I'm using, because The Motte can take it. Maybe you might derive other interpretations from the primary sources than what I am getting out of them. The final polished version, read by about 3K people, is here.
A Chinese navy ship collided with a Chinese coast guard vessel while pursuing a Philippines coast guard boat. Subsequently, China claimed to have expelled US warships from “Chinese territorial waters” in the South China Sea.
The link under "claimed" links to a more neutral source, because in this case it remarks:
Beijing has also pushed back what it calls infringement of its airspace and maritime waters by the US and its allies, while the latter claims it flies and sails its military assets in international airspace and waters.
anon_
1hr ago
How much of this is attributable to the extremely low startup cost of an AI project? Having someone spin up a few Claude instances and seeing if that works can be surprisingly cheap.
Previous technologies have required far more initial investment, so this might just be “everyone can have $10K tokens to try whatever you want if you can write a half cogent proposal”.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1hr ago
I don’t find this compelling.
there's no lack of New Testament passages that identify Jesus as God, using theos (no definite article) as a predicate to describe the nature of Jesus — that is to say, Jesus is God, or divine, or of the same nature as The God, his Father. See, for example, John 1:1, 20:28, Romans 9:5, Titus 2:13, Philippians 2:5-8, Hebrews 1:8, 2 Peter 1:1, or John 1:18.
Even this is too much. John 1 doesn’t tell us what happened to the Word upon becoming flesh, or in what sense the word became flesh, or even to what extent it became flesh. The exclamation of Thomas is just as likely to be the exclamation of someone having witnessed the power of God in Christ, of referring to God generally due to the shocking experience (as we say “my God” today). Romans 9:5 is just as easily read as a doxology to God the Father https://biblehub.com/commentaries/romans/9-5.htm
There are similar interpretative issues with the other mentioned passages. Hebrews 1:8 is the most compelling, but it quotes a psalm which itself speaks about David. Jesus himself teaches us how to understand this, when the Pharisees falsely accuse him of labeling himself a god despite being mortal:
“Is it not written in your Law, ‘I said, you are gods’? If he called them gods to whom the word of God came—and Scripture cannot be broken— do you say of him whom the Father consecrated and sent into the world, ‘You are blaspheming,’ because I said, ‘I am the Son of God’?
Thus, the appellation of “god” applied to a mortal as used in the psalms should normally be intepreted as an exaggerated title of honor. This cannot refer to anything more, because “scripture cannot be broken”. The passage is telling: Jesus rebukes the idea that he is divine, and instead comes calling himself “son of God”. This was a title used to refer to those of supreme righteousness in the Book of Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus, which were important works circulating at the time. This is crucially important: no one at the time would have interpreted “son of God” as indicating a being as equally God as the Father is God.
Or in Mark 10
a man ran up and knelt before him and asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone. You know the commandments: ‘Do not murder, Do not commit adultery, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Do not defraud, Honor your father and mother.’” And he said to him, “Teacher, all these I have kept from my youth.” And Jesus, looking at him, loved him
Note that the man revises the title of Christ according to Christ’s teaching. Christ is Good because God is good, not because he is God/god/ sharing in the divine nature or anything else. This passage makes virtually no sense in a Trinitarian understanding, because if Jesus is equally God he is equally omnibenevolent, inherently good. Well, that’s obviously not what Jesus is saying. All mortals are good only insofar as we radiate the glory of God, allowing ourselves to be sealed by His imprint (Hebrews 1:3).
What you do not find — and would never find, in either biblical literature or in the writings of the Greek-speaking Church fathers, who were abundantly clear about the divinity of Jesus
The way in which Jesus is seen as divine (I would choose “heavenly”) is not as clear as you would expect. In the Shepherd of Hermas you find:
he is Lord of the people, having received all power from his Father. But hear why the Lord took his Son and the glorious angels as counselors concerning the inheritance of the slave. The preexistent holy spirit, which created the whole creation, God caused to live in the flesh that he wished. This flesh, therefore, in which the holy spirit lived, served the spirit well, living in holiness and purity, without defiling the spirit in any way. So, because it had lived honorably and chastely, and had worked with the spirit and had cooperated with it in everything, conducting itself with strength and bravery, he chose it as a partner with the holy spirit, for the conduct of this flesh pleased the Lord, because while possessing the holy spirit it was not defiled upon the earth. So he took the Son and the glorious angels as counselors, in order that this flesh also, having served the spirit blamelessly, might have some place to live, and not appear to have lost the reward of its service. For all flesh in which the holy spirit has lived will, if it proves to be undefiled and spotless, receive a reward. & Now you have the explanation of this parable."
This is divine in an adoptionist sense, though the passage isn’t clear about when this adoption takes place (some verses in epistles seem to indicate after death).
the Creed goes on to confess belief in the Son, who is of the same nature as the Father: That is to say, Jesus is divine in the same way the Father, who begat him, is divine — just as I am human in the same way that my father, who begat me, is human
This is not a good argument, because Jesus is clear that we are all born again from God, that we all become a son of God with the same oneness as Jesus is the son of God (John 17:22-23). Of course we are not turned into sons of God in the sense that we are suddenly turned into a divine being. Neither are we the preeminent Son of God, the firstfruits. But it’s totally anachronistic to make this into an argument for his being God, and it just reads as someone trying to trick those unfamiliar with how words were actually used at the time period.
Ultimately, the importance of adoptionism and “low Christology” is not because it’s the oldest and original, but because it’s essential for the religion to actually have an effect. The Christian must imagine Christ the Man tortured and slain. Truly dying. Truly identifying with him. Complicating this by turning the man into something unimaginable makes identification impossible, destroying the power of the cross. We cannot imagine a divine being with two natures dying on the cross and having this mean anything to us. That’s like telling us the Terminstor died for us. What do you expect the congregant to feel here? Does the mortal Christ have “locked in” syndrome as the divine nature impassibly does whatever is perfect without suffering? This does not inspire any feelings. It’s no longer a drama or tragedy, it’s just worthless philosophical syllogism.
KingOfTheBailey
1hr ago
I'd like to get as irritated as you (rather, I'd like to get things right and not irritate my readers), but my English education was terrible. Where can I learn the real rules?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1hr ago
You’re talking about putting a woman/minority in charge at the most superficial level, then doing business exactly as you were before, right?
I don’t see how you’d do that for producing a kid.
faceh
1hr ago
As far as I know, Coinbase still allows you to withdraw your coins to your own wallet whenever you want.
So you can, for most pursuits and purposes, think of those coins as 'yours' if you wanted to take them.
Unless your suggestion is that he find some dude to sell him BTC for cash, I dunno how else he would come to acquire the coins in his wallet.
JarJarJedi
1hr ago
Of course, the real situation is quite chaotic and a lot is based on a pile of ad-hoc decisions. FDA got lucky with Thalidomide - if you are very slow in approving everything, sooner or later some bad stuff will slip by faster regulators and it's time to uncork the champagne! - so they took it as the confirmation that not approving stuff is much better than approving stuff for many years after. But it's not based on some well-founded general scientific truth. And definitely doctors and what they think - at least if we're talking about rank and file doctors who actually talk to patients, not the ones that spend their days sitting in committees - have pretty little input into it and very little power in the process, as far as I know. It's not like "doctors were ruling it with their awesome knowledge and Trump came and started banning life-saving stuff because he's evil". It's "doctors did what FDA said to do before, and keep doing it under Trump, and will continue to do so long after Trump is forgotten".
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1hr ago
I understand your experience. There is something strange about certain versions H1B culture - zero pride in work, zero interest in getting something done in a final in production sense. It's like the only goal is just to generate more work - good, bad, repetitive, doesn't matter - so that the billable hours stay strong.
I just can't imagine the mentality of this. Zero personal pride, zero interest in personal development, hyper autist levels of emotional disinterest in other people.
Throwaway05
1hr ago
That has long been the case. There are a number of medications which are approved in Europe but not in the US, for example.
While true this gets considerably confusing. Sometimes the more expensive drug is approved in the U.S. sometimes Europe. Sometimes the "more dangerous" drug gets approved here, sometimes there. Political considerations of all kinds pop up (like childhood vaccines). It gets weird.
Compounding matters is the fact that sometimes things are not approved for an FDA indication, unlikely to get approved by insurance, unlikely to get approved by your hospital/pharmacy, scheduled, totally legit but 100% sure to get you sued if anyone complains and so on...
My favorite example is Gabapentin, which has thirty seven million off label uses but only two official uses - and 9/10 competent physicians will get it wrong if you ask them.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2hr ago
There are two companion articles of late that I'd add to comment on this.
This one is pretty short and to the point. LLMs, without any companion data management component, are prediction machines. They predict the next n-number of tokens based on the preceding (input) tokens. The context window functions like a very rough analog to a "memory" but it's really better to compare it to priors or biases in the bayesian sense. (This is why you can gradually prompt an LLM into and out of rabbit holes). Crucially, LLMs don't have nor hold an idea of state. They don't have a mental model of anything because they don't have a mental anything (re-read that twice, slowly).
In terms of corporate adoption, companies are seeing that once you get into complex, multi-stage tasks, especially those that might involve multiple teams working together, LLMs break down in hilarious ways. Software devs have been seeing this for months (years?). An LLM can make nice little toy python class or method pretty easily, but when you're getting into complex full stack development, all sorts of failure modes pop up (the best is when it nukes its own tests to make everything pass.)
"Complexity is the enemy" may be a cliche but it remains true. For any company above a certain size, any investment has to answer the question "will this reduce or increase complexity?" The answer may not need to be "reduce." There could be a tradeoff there that actually results in more revenue / reduced cost. But still, the question will come up. With LLMs, the answer, right now, is 100% "increase." Again, that's not a show stopper, but it makes the bar for actually going through with the investment higher. And the returns just aren't there at scale. From friends at large corporations in the middle of this, their anec-data is all the same "we realized pretty early that we'd have to build a whole new team of 'LLM watchers' for at least the first version of the rollout. We didn't want to hire and manage all of that."
TLDR for this one: for LLM providers to actually break even, it might cost $2k/month per user.
There's room to disagree with that figure, but even the pro version of the big models that cost $200+ per month are probably being heavily subsidized through burning VC cash. A hackernews comment framed it well - "$24k / yr is 20% of a $120k / yr salary. Do we think that every engineer using LLMs for coding is seeing a 20% overall productivity boost?"
Survey says no (Note: there are more than a few "AI makes devs worse" research papers floating around right now. I haven't fully developed my own evaluation of them - I think a few conflate things - but the early data, such as it is, paints a grim picture)
I'm a believer in LLMs to be a transformational technology, but I think our first attempt with them - as a society - is going to be kind of a wet fart. Neither "spacing faring giga-civilizaiton" nor "paperclips ate my robot girlfriend." Two topical predictions are 1) One of the Big AI companies is going to go to zero. 2) A Fortune 100 company is going to go nearly bankrupt because of negligent use of AI, but not in a spectacular "it sent all of our money to china" way ... it'll be about 1 - 2 years slow creep of fucked up internal reporting and management before, all of a sudden, "we've entered a death spiral of declining revenue and rising costs."
Markass
2hr ago
Why would anyone let their kids just hop onto these websites without doing basic due diligence or educating them on the reality of predators?
See downthread. There is a pervasive culture of letting your kids have unrestricted Internet access, it's hard to change, and anybody going against it will be seen as overly paranoid.
If a platform provides robust parental controls then they've done enough, full stop. The baton of responsibility is passed.
They should also ban pedophiles when they are reported and proactively look for them too.
iprayiam3
2hr ago
Most office work is fake email jobs. 10x'ing the productivity of fake is still fake. I do think that AI is going to roar on the margins. But the average office working is doing very little productive in the first place.
A lot of AI is helping write emails on the front end, and then summarizing them on the backend. Nothing of value is being added.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2hr ago
So you are high-openness in all the ways that doesn't involve interacting with people.
What you are describing is a very narrow set of dogmas that are heavily enforced in Anglo academia, and to a lessening degree as you move further away from the Anglo academia. Many educated people in these circles will indeed be quite good at reciting the dogmas and recognizing that blasphemy is being committed when a dogma is directly challenged. However a very select few 1) can actually work out how the dogma applies to their real life and 2) detect acts or words that undermine tenets of the dogma without explicitly challenging it. This is absolutely crucial to understand if you want to socialize with this crowd (i.e. Western PMC, but not literally sociology grad HR lady) without giving in to their class dogma.
Just... don't talk abstractions. It will almost never come up. If you find the opportunity (typically when in small groups of high-T men), you can bring up some specific minor heresy points (crime, Joe Rogan, taxes etc) and you will quickly get a sense of which ones are true believers and which ones are just pretending to avoid any trouble. Even the most true believers usually cannot tie specifics to the dogma on their own and will easily commit heresies. That is why there needs to be HR commissars at every corner. Absolutely avoid discussing abstractions until you create some rapport and understanding over the minor heresies. If you are not very good at figuring out who to trust, just give small signals (i.e. deniable jokes) and let the more confident take the steps. You are hardly the first person who likes politically incorrect jokes. This is a basic but very effective formula.
Overall I suggest you to stop imagining yourself to be the first person to discover Twitter, or a lone-wolf in a debate club.
Markass
2hr ago
What is the alternative to an opt in system?
Banning pedophiles from the platform as soon as they are reported, and proactively looking for them too.
How about parents take responsibility for their kids instead of imposing restrictions on all the rest of us because of their laziness.
Easier said than done. There is a pervasive culture of letting your kids have unrestricted Internet access, and I have a feeling that any parent who goes against this norm and, for example, stringently monitors their access or even prohibits them from using the Internet entirely (because arguably, kids shouldn't even be on the Internet at all) is going to get looks from other people, or at least their kid will say "Billy gets to use the Internet, why can't I?" Unless everybody in a community agrees that the Internet is too dangerous for kids to be used unsupervised, reasons like "but predators are online" sound a lot like "I don't let my kid outside after 3 o'clock because a stranger might come and snatch her."
functor
2hr ago
The true benchmark is GDP. If LLMs truely can boost productivity in most tasks except for pure manual labour we would see GDP roaring. If we saw a 10-40% increase in productivity among the majority of the labour force it would be like an industrial revolution on steroids. We are seeing lackluster economic growth, clearly production isn't booming.
Some how tech has the ability to radically change how people work and provide people with amazing tools without boosting productivity much. We went from type writers to Word to cloud services that allow us to share documents instantly across continents. We really haven't seen a matching boom in productivity. The amount of office workers wasn't slashed with the propagation of Email, excel, google search or CRM-systems.
Markass
2hr ago
So then would you agree that Roblox has said or implied "vigilantes" are just as bad as predators?
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
2hr ago
I think they are thinking Project Manager or Customer Pleaser-type stuff. Which does tilt mostly female from what I have seen but isn't super automatable yet.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
2hr ago
I edited it on him. He is. Correct
Markass
2hr ago
Why else would they entertain weird nonsense from a stranger unless they're getting something out of it?
It's not just currency. They can want the approval of adults, the satisfaction of curiosity, or simply somebody to talk to. Many groomed kids have a tumultuous home life and are extremely lonely, for example. My point being that it shouldn't be thought of in pure economic terms, so predators doing this to children is (or should be) unacceptable and predator catchers finding predators this way is (or should be) acceptable.
If this was the immovable force you assert it is we wouldn't have this problem, since in that case children would always listen to authority figures that tell them not to do this.
Again, it's oversimplified to think this way. Being impressionable goes both ways. Sure, some will listen to authority figures and not do this. But some will not, for many reasons such as a preconceived distrust of authorities, being curious thinking "what could go wrong", or simply not knowing of the dangers.
And this is unique to online gaming... how, exactly?
It's not. But Roblox is uniquely refusing to ban predators when people report them.
The mitigations around it can't be solved for through technological means alone.
Yes, but you can just ban predators who are reported to do this. You can at the very least also not ban people who find predators and get them arrested in real life.
While it may be true that Roblox should ban people more frequently, that wouldn't actually fix their PR problem
It's not just "ban people more frequently", it's not banning people who find predators too. I feel like the latter is the biggest cause of their recent PR problem. Their tendency to not ban predators has been reported and documented before but it hasn't caused a huge media circus. Going after people who find predators is just a huge WTF moment.
I do agree that it's impossible to rid platforms of pedophiles before they strike but I'm willing to bet a lot of money that if Roblox suddenly reversed course, unbanned Schlep and started banning reported pedophiles, that their PR problem would virtually disappear overnight.
Lol I mean I maintain shit ain't ready yet like I always have - it's very common for diseases to present atypically and even more common for patients to poorly explicate things. Neither of these is well captured in the literature and therefore the data set.
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