domain:nfinf.substack.com
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
Sturgeon's law really does apply to every genre of media in existence. AI generated videos are probably 99.9% slop, because of ease of generation compared to the old way of filming and recording, and because the average user has negative taste. It'll only get better, those lambasting it because of a lack of consistency, weird physics, poor audio etc will be in for a bad time when it's all fixed. Who am I kidding? They'll probably retreat to every more nebulous concerns such as "effort" or "artistic intention".
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
1d ago
Yeah, as I said in my comment below the OP here is doing a sort of maximally uncharitable reading. From subsequent responses, he clearly has contempt for Christianity and Thiel so, not shocking.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1d ago
In a mathematical sense you can't simultaneously maximize two preferences unless they have a perfect correlation of 1.
Suppose we give this person a choice. Option 1 will make others very happy and well off and prosperous. Very very happy. It's basically a lifetime worth of doing good in the world. But will cause this person to lose all of their wisdom. They will be unwise and make bad decisions the rest of their life. The total good from this one decision is enough to make up for it, but they will sacrifice their wisdom.
Option 2 will not make people happy, but will make the person very wise in the future. They can spend the rest of their life making good decisions and making people happier via normal means, and if you add it all up it's almost as large as the amount of good they could have done from Option 1, but not quite. But they will be wise and have wisdom.
The kindest most loving thing to others is to choose option 1. The most hedonic desire for a person who values wisdom in its own right in addition to loving others is Option 2. Depending on how you balance the numbers, you could scale how good Option 1 is in order to equal this out against any preference strength.
U(A) = aX_1+bY_1
U(B) = aX2+bY_2
Where a and b are the coefficients of preference for loving others vs loving wisdom, X and Y are the amount of good done and wisdom had in each scenario. For any finite a,b =/= 0, this has nontrivial solutions, which implies either can by larger. But also for any finite a,b =/= 0 you can't really say both have been "maximized" because one trades off against the other.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
I watch the majority of movies and shows on my phone. I'm also not a heathen, so I use decent enough headphones or earphones. The only time my phone speaker gets any use is when I'm in the shower.
And it's perfectly fine. I own a goddamn OLED 4k HDR high refresh rate TV, it's not like I don't have options. My phone also has a large, high res, HDR HRR display, and - when it's held up at a comfortable distance - it takes up enough of my visual field to give a comparable experience. And the taller refresh rate means less letterboxing when in landscape watching things shot wider than 16:9.
I'm not missing out on anything, and the convenience alone is well worth it.
He already has the downside risk of losing his job.
That’s not really a downside risk (i.e., a risk of negative payoff), that’s just a risk of getting zero payoff.
Yes, sure, fine, if you account for opportunity costs, then losing a CEO job might be net negative (depending on base salary, length of and compensation during a post-termination non-compete period, if any, etc.—and, of course, on the value of the next-best alternative to being CEO)
But there is still a principal-agent problem here. The shareholders want (or should want, under homo economicus assumptions*) the CEO to be an agent who only takes +EV actions, where the “V” in “EV” is “market cap”. The more diversified the CEO personally is, the less he will personally care about declines in the value of the company’s equity—sure, if he makes some decisions which go south, then his equity compensation from this job might only be good for toilet paper, but if he’s already amassed a generational fortune and socked it away in a well-diversified portfolio, then a bet which is zero or negative expected value for the shareholders might very well be positive expected utility for the CEO. It’s just like how you’re much more inclined to go for a YOLO all-in with a questionable hand in poker when playing with Monopoly money than when playing with real money.
*There are some interesting ways in which homo economicus incentives break down when the shareholders themselves are all massively diversified; in the extreme case (which may no longer be all that extreme, now that everyone and his mum has piled into market cap-weighted index funds), everyone has the exact same equity portfolio, so all shareholders of company A are also shareholders of all of its competitors (B, C, D …). In such a world, it no longer makes sense for company A’s CEO to prioritize increasing market cap by any means; if he increases A’s market cap at the expense of B’s, the shareholders are no better off! But that’s a story for another time.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
And that's why people hire general laborers or do it themselves. If you have to hire an electrician, a plumber, a roofer, and a drywall contractor to put in a simple bathroom fan, it's going to cost you thousands.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
Your boss has a point, at least in my opinion. If you're using a good LLM, like GPT-5T, hallucination rates are close to negligible (not zero, so for anything serious do due diligence). You can always ask followup questions, demand citations, or chase those up yourself. If you still can't understand, then by all means ask a knowledgeable human.
It is a mistake to take what LLMs say as gospel truth. It is also a mistake to reflexively ignore their output because you "wanted to know the answer, not get something plausible which may or may not be correct". Like, c'mon. I hang around enough in HN that I can see that even the most gray bearded of programmers often argue over facts, or are plain old wrong. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence.
Human output, unfortunately, "may or may not be correct". Or that is true if the humans you know are anything like the ones I know.
I even asked GPT-5T the same question about TCP parallelism gains, and it gave a very good answer, to the limit of my ability to quickly parse the sources it gave on request (and I've previously watched videos on TCP's workings, so I'm familiar with slow start and congestion avoidance. Even I don't know why I did that).
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
My standard encourages nitpicking, yes, but it's often not useless. Your standard encourages putting one over on people by allowing the use of implicit assumptions while getting the benefit of the statement without the qualification.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
If they're actual plumbers/electricians/whatever, then no they won't.
You are correct that illegal general laborers will do whatever they're paid to do, often quite badly. But they are not actual licensed tradesmen, and the state requires licenses for plumbers and electricians and the like for reasons relating to insurance regulations and not unions. I won't tell you not to use an undocumented handyman to change a faucet but for a major plumbing job, there is a reason your insurance company and city permitting department expect a plumbers license.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
I agree with you that's a really interesting and important question, especially for Christians who want to welcome the gay moneychanger as a fellow traveler.
Granted, but it does seem so to me. I observe that my consciousness exists, and that nobody can tell me how this is so. 'It's just a property of complex systems' seems like a non-answer to me, spoken in a very confident tone of voice, and being entirely too vague to be useful. How do complex systems produce this property? Does it only happen if those patterns are in a meat brain? Are AIs conscious? PCs observing themselves via their antivirus software? Rocks?
It's like Sophism. Yes, we cannot prove that the world exists. But it seems to me that it does. Likewise the assertion that humans beings don't have free will, to which I can only note that for all intents and purposes I seem to. Assertions to the contrary seem essentially to be faith-based to shore up a particular conceptual model and don't really help at all to make sense of the world. Even the people who claim to have become enlightened by discovering that their own ego doesn't exist just act just like everybody else, right down to the sexual harrassment scandals. At least if we discovered that the entirety of human consciousness was powered by fairy farts we might be able to get somewhere new with that.
I recently saw a clip of David Lynch speaking some time before his death. In stark contrast to his usual affable, Jimmy Stewart-esque demeanour, Lynch sounds not merely exasperated, not personally affronted, but positively wounded by the recent trend of people watching films and TV shows on their phones. He patiently explains that his films are designed to be watched on a big screen with a real sound system: how can you possibly expect to experience the intended emotional reaction watching the film on a screen smaller than your hand, using the integrated speakers which can't reproduce any frequencies lower than 200 Hz? He practically begs the viewer to watch his films the way they were intended to be seen. Boy, can I ever relate.
Personally, I cannot fathom the idea of watching a movie or TV show on a smartphone. I recall exactly one instance in which I've done it: myself and the girlfriend were on a long train ride through Italy and had neglected to bring anything to read, so we watched The Collector on her iPhone, each wearing one of her Airpods. (I think the movie was mixed in mono, thankfully.) The only kinds of videos I'll watch on my phone are ones devoid of aesthetic merit: YouTube reviews, Instagram reels and so on. But perhaps people like me are going the way of the dodo.
zPvQINBQvfFR
1d ago
Lots of materialists attempt to resolve this by saying that neural patterns are subjective experience, but this doesn’t actual solve the problem, it just declares it not to exist.
I think there's a symmetry here. One side just declares a problem to exist without any convincing argument other than "it seems so to me" and the other declares it not to exist without any convincing argument other than "it seems so to me". (I'm with the eliminativists, btw.)
Corvos
1d ago
Agreed. Materialism is a prescriptive hypothesis about how the world is that can be disproven without invalidating the empirical process. Indeed, materialism as conceived in the 19th century has taken a certain number of knocks in the last hundred years with the discovery that the universe has a specific start point and that the location and behaviour of particles and waves is fundamentally undeterministic.
GoofyGoose
1d ago
Science is naturalist, rather than materialist. To a naturalist, the existence of non-material entities or phenomena does not invalidate science. There might still be laws that govern those entities; independently of our ability to learn those laws.
Science appears materialistic because of a desire for parsimony and the extraordinary success of materialist theories. But the principles of science do not depend on a materialist world.
phailyoor
1d ago
A 10 minute walk is chill but a 10 minute walk carrying tons of groceries in my bare hands is not chill
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
The problem of "towering luxury apartments" can't be fixed by building more. Nor can the problem of filling places with people. Nor can parking; transit is so bad that the only way to get people to take it is to make driving worse, and the only way to do that is to allow driving infrastructure to become highly oversubscribed.
Corvos
1d ago
You are both trying to achieve diametrically opposite things. Clearly, it's not possible for CEOs to be seriously concerned about downside risk so that they are responsible stewards, whilst also making them feel safe and detached enough to comfortably take serious risks.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
1d ago
Is there a tactful way to ask your boss to lay off something? My boss, a smart guy whom I respect, has become obsessed with LLMs. Literally every conversation with him about work topics has become one where he says "I asked (insert model) and it said..." which adds no value to the conversation. Worse, he responds to questions with "have you tried asking AI?". For example the other day I asked him if he knows why multiple TCP streams are faster than one (when you would naively think they would be slower due to TCP overhead), and he asked if I asked AI. Which of course I didn't, because I actually wanted to know the answer, not get something plausible which may or may not be correct. And he's like that with every question posed lately, even when we had legal documents we had questions on he was like "did you try feeding it to Gemini and asking?"
It's frankly gotten incredibly annoying and I wish he would stop. Like I said, I actually have a lot of respect for the man but it's like he's chosen to outsource his brain to Grok et al lately. I suspect that my options are to live with it or get a new job, but figured I'd ask if people think there's a way I can tactfully address the situation.
Skeletor
1d ago
Tubi is where I learned that there's a series of like twelve movies about a possessed bong that kills people, and ten more about an evil gingerbread man that kills people, and they have crossovers and shit. I've seen movies on there worse than what I'm convinced I could make on my own with no money or experience.
I've watched a kaiju movie so cheap it used painted cardboard boxes and someone's collection of model 1950's classic cars to make the city. They used a model steam locomotive to represent an urban elevated train, complete with a 19th century looking engineer who I think is just there because it's his model and he screams stuff like "Whoa Nelly!"
And these are all relatively modern American productions. That's not even going into like weird decades-old Italian B-movies about hot women who fuck snakes and turn into monsters and shit, etc. etc. It's a goldmine. They even have famous RedLetterMedia stinkers. I've seen Suburban Sasquatch and Last Vampire On Earth on there.
Tubi is manna from heaven for people who like weird stupid bullshit.
He already has the downside risk of losing his job. You're not supposed to invest in a company you work for unless you don't mind losing your job and your stock at the same time; diversification is a thing and investing in your own company would be opposed to diversification.
Or, more or less equivalently, a tradition of letting shareholders pierce the corporate veil and personally sue the CEO in civil court for securities fraud or breach of fiduciary duty in the event that the share price declines too much
That's a great way to make sure companies never do risky things. Also, to be fair, he should be able to sue the bureaucracy of his own company and the voting stockholders when they get in his way, since he faces personal liability when they fail.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1d ago
On October 1, four members of Caricom (the Caribbean Community)—Barbados, Belize, Dominica, and St. Vincent (total population 900,000)—implemented full freedom of movement. Under this arrangement, a citizen of any of those four countries can reside and work indefinitely in any of the other three countries, without a visa or a work permit.
This arrangement is an extension of existing freedom-of-movement provisions for all holders of bachelor's and associate's degrees and workers in certain other skilled professions. The other members of Caricom are expected to join the full implementation eventually.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Sure, the source is hostile.
But as @FiveHourMarathon points out, he self-identifies as a Christian. 14% of US adults believe that we are living in the "end-times" and that Jesus will return to Earth.
If someone was arguing for "punching Nazis", the motte would not give him a pass because he only meant that figuratively and is obviously not in favor of punching any real people, unless he provided context which made this very plain, because there is a background of a culture which believes that literally punching Nazis is a fine thing to do.
If Thiel had called Greta Sauron, priors would strongly indicate that he is very unlikely to believe that she is really the Maia who had the one ring forged. By contrast, if he speculates about her being the antichrist, and one in seven or so Americans would entertain the possibility that a human being living today could be the antichrist, it seems much more plausible that he is being literal.
Again, I lack the context, perhaps his four lectures on the antichrist were really only using theology as a metaphor to make a point about worldly technological progress. It would still feel like Jesus packing his parable of the sower into a four-part lecture series called Agriculture 101, but it is possible.
The term usually includes mainline and most disorganized protestants, who may or may not have bishops.
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