domain:eigenrobot.substack.com
With regard to point 1, I believe in the power of Straight Lines on the graph. Moore's Law and it's corollaries in flops/$ are remarkable, unprecedented achievements that are continuing unto this day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_point_operations_per_second#Cost_of_computing
This time it's different, digital environments are exceptions to the usual rules on growth. The internet didn't take 200 years to catch on, a computer virus doesn't need months to breed.
Intelligence is a problem that can be approached by 20 watt processors assembled with whatever proteins are lying around and coordinated by extremely lossy, low-bandwidth interlinks. Gigawatts and kilotonnes of liquid-cooled processors should be more than enough to overwhelm the problem.
The thuggishness and inelegance of the present approach feels right to me. We never figured out how birds or bees fly for our own flying machines, we never replicated the efficiency of ants in construction, never achieved symbiosis or oneness with the universe that let us live in harmony with nature.
We smashed flight with oil, aluminium and combustion engines. We paved over the ants with concrete and steel. We exterminate with pesticide. Smashing obstacles with scalable, ugly resources is how you win, not with sleight of hand or some deft intellectual performance. We celebrate the triumph of intellect but rely on leveraging force 98% of the time. Throw rocks at it until it dies, light fires to herd them off a cliff, mobilize enough drafted farmers and produce enough iron swords till you conquer your foes.
Advancing AI by throwing more compute at the problem, more R&D talent making incremental algorithmic improvements in parallel, more and better-sifted data (human or synthetic) and self-play per the Absolute Zero papers is the way to go. I sense that some people (Yann LeCun certainly) are waiting for some fundamental advancement as a sign that we've truly made it, some electric inspirational paradigm-changing moment where we finally know what the hell we're actually doing, understand the secrets of intelligence. But that never worked for chess, we forced it with compute and search, simple scaling techniques. You don't have to understand Go like a grandmaster, just find a way to throw firepower at the problem with reinforcement learning and self play, then you can snap grandmasters like twigs. Nobody understands how LLMs work, you don't need to really understand them to make them.
The hard work is already done, we already found the breakthroughs we need and now just need to apply more inputs to get massively superhuman results but in all areas of human achievement. It really is that simple: flight speed, payload and range isn't capped at some modest multiple above a falcon but by how much fuel you're prepared to burn and whether you're willing to use serious, atomic rockets. We already have very strong AI capabilities in a bunch of diverse sectors - cartoon drawing, coding, mathematics, locating places from images. Scale gets results.
The entirety of modern civilization is premised on the fact that we can dig coal out of the ground and burn it, boiling water and making power - this silly-sounding process scales nicely and lets you dig more coal faster and cheaper. If we can turn power into thought we can hook up our strongest scaling factor into another even more promising scaling factor and the results should be surreally potent. We're already living extremely different lives from the vast majority of our ancestors, AI should absolutely make a huge difference very soon since it works more along digital timeframes than analogue ones. I believe by 2027 the doubters should be silenced one way or another.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
3hr ago
A worse job market for women does just the opposite.
ThisIsSin
Cainanites and Abelists
3hr ago
and there's no obvious way to fix it
Sure there is: the old simply need to decide/be forced to pay their damn taxes.
The old in the US chose to pay their taxes: they, wisely, chose someone who campaigned on imposing them- he even managed to make them fun. And while the results of figuring out that new tax policy have been... interesting, especially because the reformers choose to televise negotiations (which I will point out was vital to making them fun in the first place), this is necessary for American society to avoid becoming too top-heavy and collapsing under the weight of its unpaid debts. Or in other words, "a deep-seated economic crisis at a structural level".
The old in the rest of the Western world, by contrast (and you can blame some selection effects- these countries define themselves by their social conservatism, Decorum, and Orderliness), have soundly rejected paying their taxes and, as provinces of the Empire, now need to be dragged kicking and screaming into doing so. "Muh Trump" is simply an excuse for this (and the fact that nobody in any one of these nations can articulate what is actually wrong with him besides righteous indignation reveals that).
The housing situation could be solved overnight if you mass-mobilized your potential workforce; I'd leave my current job instantly if someone showed up at my door, thrust a journeyman ticket with my name on it into my hands, and said "we'll pay 1.5x your current salary, and guarantee you a single family home in whatever location you choose, to come build houses for us for the next 4 years", and I think a lot of teen and twentysomethings would be willing to do that too. If the political will was there, it would occur.
There's no way out of this mess.
Well, not until the war in Ukraine wraps up, at any rate. I wonder where that massive surplus of small arms is going to end up if the Ukrainian government wins but can't pay its soldiers (to say nothing of the Russian one)? I suspect European nations in particular are not going to like the answer.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
3hr ago
Obligatory John Adams quote.
Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
3hr ago
No, it’s bad because it takes women out of the home and pushes them into the workforce.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
3hr ago
I've used https://www.taydaelectronics.com for a few projects and found them to have a limited but pretty useful inventory at very reasonable prices, aimed at hobbyists rather than manufacturers.
TitaniumButterfly
3hr ago
Sometimes I like to imagine what it would be like if universities were actually calibrated for that purpose.
I asked ChatGPT to help me drop a bomb on Reddit that would cause a civil war and we settled on this after many back and forths. The idea is to drop it on /r/latestagecapitalism and watch the ensuing mayhem. But now I'm chickening out. So, I thought I'd share it here instead.
Title: What if Capitalism Made Everyone Gay? No, Seriously, Shut the Fuck Up and Listen.
Alright, /r/latestagecapitalism. I’m not high. I’m not trolling. I’ve just been sitting here watching this clownfuck society collapse in on itself and I’ve got a spicy goddamn theory.
What if the reason more kids are gay, trans, nonbinary, neopronoun forest deities or whatever—isn't just because they're finally free to be themselves—but because capitalism made them that way? Yeah. I said it. And no, this isn't a tradcath “return to tradition” screed. This is a fascist critique of identity as firmware, updated quarterly for market viability.
Let’s jack in.
(1.) Capitalism Needs You to Be Broken
Capitalism is a psychological malware that runs on alienation. It needs you to feel off-balance, insecure, incomplete—because if you’re ever actually okay, you might stop consuming. So it goes to work at the deepest level: your identity.
Your gender. Your orientation. Your sense of self.
You think the proliferation of labels and micro-identities is some grassroots flowering of personal expression? Fuck no. It’s capitalism running psychological A/B tests on the population to see which neuroses convert best.
(2.) Sexuality and Gender as Market Vectors
The rainbow is now a goddamn SKU. There’s a Pride version of every product imaginable. Queerness isn’t subversive—it’s a fully integrated revenue stream. You don’t come out of the closet, you onboard.
The LGBTQIA+™ community has become a lifestyle subscription service. Buy the aesthetic. Stream the content. Take the quiz. Choose your flavor. Get the merch.
This is identity in the age of the algorithm: endlessly refinable, infinitely targetable, frictionlessly monetized.
(3.) Traditional Institutions Were Just DRM
The family? Religion? Local culture? Those were all clunky, analog forms of user control—DRM for your psyche. Capitalism smashed them, not to liberate you, but to own your operating system.
So now, without those legacy systems, you’re adrift—and conveniently open to onboarding. You get your personality from social media and your worldview from brands. You’re not “expressing” yourself—you’re beta-testing identity presets rolled out via TikTok and Reddit.
You are the product and the lab rat.
(4.) Western Liberalism as Exploit Kit
The USA doesn’t export “freedom” anymore—it exports a cultural OS, bloated with identity plugins and DRM-crippled empathy. It colonizes not with guns but with Netflix, Pornhub, and fucking Instagram.
You don’t even know it’s happening. You’re the end user, clicking “Accept” on terms you’ll never read.
Russia, China, Hungary—these places look at our gender politics and don’t see liberation. They see a psyop. And honestly? They’re wrong about the moral panic, but maybe not wrong about the mechanism.
(5.) Everything Becomes Aesthetic Garbage
You think identity is deep? Capitalism thinks it’s just themed UI skins for your meat. Something to optimize, decorate, and throw in the cart.
Gay? There’s a starter pack.
Transmasc? There’s a Discord server and an Etsy pin set.
Neuroqueer lunarwitch? Here’s a Patreon to support.
We’re not people anymore. We’re marketable vibes.
(6.) Divide, Distract, Demoralize
The beauty of this system is that it keeps you fighting over who gets to exist while the billionaires strip-mine the fucking biosphere.
Bathroom bills. Pronoun discourse. “Is X valid?” Meanwhile, Elon is launching space dildos and the Earth is on fire.
Capitalism doesn’t care what color your flag is, as long as you’re too busy waving it to notice the extraction happening behind the scenes.
TL;DR:
No, capitalism didn’t invent queerness. But it absolutely hijacked it. Refactored it. Wrapped it in HTML5 and sold it to you as “authenticity.” It’s not liberation—it’s feature creep.
We are no longer gendered. We are versioned.
ABigGuy4U
3hr ago
If the current state of the international arms market is any indication, large, relatively respectable countries like the US and Russia will give them to smaller sketchier allied countries like Pakistan and Iran, those sketchier allied countries will then give them to terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Lashkar-e-Taiba. So it might be pretty difficult to prevent. Also you have the problem of private firms in Europe and Asia selling them to rouge-ish nations like Lybia.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
3hr ago
Incredible post, thanks for taking the time to write it all out. Do you write anywhere besides here?
Escapement
3hr ago
A tumblr post I quite enjoyed:
Certainly! Here is a tumblr post to get rich white champaign socialists riled up:
The reason AI is the Current Thing for libs to get mad at is because it puts the ability to have someone ghostwrite your college essays into the hands of poor people.
I generally agree about your fourth point: More than a decade ago, one of the better professors I had at university was an English teacher; she was young enough and new enough to not have been worn down by the grind yet. A large part of the grade for her class was in the exam portion, where we were given ~4 hours of proctored exam time to (mostly) write several short essays in person by hand, without electronics. We were allowed copies of the literature involved and no other aids, and basically given "choose 3 topics from this list of 10 to write essays about", where the topics were things like "compare [work A]'s [element x] to [Work B's]." etc. I imagine she could simply load more of the final grade on that final exam, and the similar but shorter midterm, rather than homework essays, and still be able to assess/grade students' abilities in the era of ChatGPT.
Instead, it largely seems like universities have mostly tried nothing, and are all out of ideas. The remarkable fatalism I've been seeing about it is amusing.
yofuckreddit
4hr ago
Just replying to point out this is an insightful take, thanks for making it.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4hr ago
Even before ChatGPT many humanities students were super-lazy and didn't bother to do even a very dumbed down amount of work. Nor were they prepared to put even a mild effort into pretending they'd done so. If they ask you to read a huge amount of text, you can just read some of it looking for a question based on that info to ask, ask the question and it'll seem like you've done the reading. But there were many who couldn't even be bothered with that, even when the lecturer tacitly encouraged us to do it.
It was quite awkward when someone from outside uni came in as a guest teacher and expected students to actually do significant amounts of reading for a course.
People go to university as a cultural ritual, I only really learned anything from one unusually hard course.
anti_dan
4hr ago
I’ve always found it amazing just how out of touch the intellectuals in university are about what their institution actually means for students. To be blunt, college hasn’t been about education for a very long time, and it strikes me as hilarious that anyone who attended one writes these sorts of handwringing articles bemoaning the decline of education in college. 99% of students who were ever in university (perhaps with the exception of tge leisure class) have ever gone to college seeking the education for the sake of education. For most of us, it’s about getting job skills, getting a diploma, padding a resume, etc. if learning happens on the side, fine, but most people are looking at college as a diploma that will hopefully unlock the gates to a good paying job.
I would think these kind of essays, which a genre older than I am, are defensive in nature. Lets be honest, the more an institution is a skinsuit, the more defensive it is going to be of itself. If Harvard was a bunch of white boys from Boston's upper class playing squash for bragging rights against Yale and their rich New Yorkers they would feel no reason to pen such an essay. But since universities have been transformed into giant apparatuses whose purpose is hoovering up federal funding, they will be very defensive.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4hr ago
From my point of view it's that you have degenerated into kanging and chimping from cognitive dissonance, like unfortunately many in the American sphere of influence. It seems Americans simply cannot conceive of having a serious or superior enemy, they grew addicted to safely dunking on premodern peoples in slippers or nations with deep structural disadvantages like Soviets with their planned economy and resource-poor, occupied Japan with 1/3 of their population – even as they sometimes smirk and play the underdog in their ridiculous doomposting. They feel like Main Characters of history, who are destined to win for narrative reasons and therefore can afford arbitrary foolishness in the midgame – at it will amount to is a few extra lines in the moral takeaway in the epilogue. Karl Rove's famous quote is quite apt.
China is not unbeatable, China is not stronger than the (hypothetical at this point) US-aligned alliance of democracies, and they're currently behind in AI. But you cannot see when I say this, because it would legitimate my positions that are less soothing for your ego, and instead you are compelled to default to these whiny complaints that are just a demand to shut up. Were you living in reality, you'd feel more incensed at nonsensical, low-IQ-racist boomer copes that keep undermining your side's negotiating position.
Accordingly I gloat that much harder when you lot suffer setbacks, because I strongly despise delusion and unearned smugness and believe they ought to be punished.
In what sense wasnt this already demonstrated by Germany buying russian gas?
It's a matter of degree. Pressing Germany to move away from Russian energy supply could be easily justified in the world where the US was a credible guarantor of German security, as indeed Russia tried the gas card to dissuade Germany from supporting Ukraine, and now German industry which grew dependent on Russian gas is contracting. True, Germany showed independent (and faulty) decisionmaking then. But this was all in the realm of politics as usual, rules-based international order, and German choice was business as usual too. Now we see a test of naked American authority in Trump's exploitative trade war, in “DO NOT RETALIATE AND YOU WILL BE REWARDED” bullshit. Faceh explicitly says “Honestly I can say I thought there'd be more capitulation by now”, and that's exactly the spirit. This is not normal politics, this is a desperate shit test: will you cave, or will you resist? Are you a country or an imperial vassal? Getting refusals in this condition is decisive, and clearly the US side expected to get fewer of them.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4hr ago
Any advice on getting one?
There are many ways, but in my experience the most decisive step toward getting paid large sums of money to tell other people to do things they would do better without your interference is to get an MBA.
Look buddy, if Pastor McGee’s sermon ever causes me to have a late night premonition about the Whore of Babylon, it’s going to be a sweet wholesome REAL AMERICAN Jezebel harlot like Taylor Swift playing her, not some E-lectronic Celebrity from “California” who posts naked tik-toks on the OnlyFans.
hydroacetylene
4hr ago
Is AI safer per mile than a slightly above average driver?
It's a legitimate question because it's entirely possible that the vast majority of traffic accidents are caused by unlicensed drunk drivers texting behind the wheel. AI does not do that, and it's kind of hard to see how it even could.
hydroacetylene
4hr ago
Give Pinochet an AGI 500 times smarter than a human and it will absolutely harm humans in service of tge directive of keeping Pinochet in power.
Pinochet stepped down from power voluntarily. Like as a factual historical matter he clearly had goals other than 'remain in power at all costs'. I would point to 'defeat communism' and 'grow the Chilean economy', both worthy goals, as examples of things he probably prioritized over regime stability.
BinaryHobo
hauling up the data on the Xerox line
4hr ago
Almost all regulatory complexity is the result of closing loopholes lawyers found in earlier, simpler regulation. Congratulations to them, because all the legal specialists in each regulatory area will be poring over any new, ‘simplified’ regulation with the religious fervour of a leading Talmudic scholar to find out exactly what is implicitly allowed until enough bad news comes out that the current regime is restored.
I feel like we need something roughly equivalent to a doctrine of "oh come on". I realize I'm only gesturing vaguely towards a large area of idea-space, but it seems plain at this point that humans will game any system made of rules made of words until it's completely corrupted.
I'm not a believer in the ability to computerize law, so the only way forward seems to be to rely on the restraint of lawyers...
...ok, well that's obviously not going to work. We need to give them some sort of skin in the game. Something to lose when it goes wrong. As such, I propose, roughly, the following system:
Whenever an argument is deemed "clever", either by a judge or a panel that reviews cases, it goes in front of a jury of 10 randomly selected people from the voting public. If less than 50% of them respond with "oh come on", nothing happens. If more than 50% of them say "oh come on", the lawyer making this argument is shot. Less than 70%, they're shot in the foot. Less than 90%, they're shot in the chest. If it's unanimous, they're shot in the head.
hydroacetylene
4hr ago
I'm doubling down on my prediction that AI will replace any white collar job which a mentally ill person can do acceptably well, but never perform well enough at sanity-requiring tasks to replace people. What this means for the workforce in practice is probably that the professional class sees stagnant wage growth and relies more on unpaid internships for building work experience.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4hr ago
I think that American complaints over Trump are warranted but disproportionate, that's why I spent so much of that post comparing to foreign countries.
The Australian government works in a totally responsible, law-abiding, careful and considered way like you're calling for. But the results are a complete disaster and there's no obvious way to fix it. This is paywalled but it tells you the story in the http address.
Productivity is in the doldrums. Energy prices are rising despite the government's promises, the only thing they successfully did is provide subsidies for power to make the price seem lower. All major cities are ludicrously unaffordable and more people are constantly imported to make it even more unaffordable. Industry is a shambles, we're constantly bailing out what little remains due to the terrible energy policy. To top it all off they've proposed unrealized capital gains tax on superannuation, there's nothing they won't stoop to.
And the Labour government that oversaw all of this just got their biggest majority ever for seeming to be less like Trump than Peter Dutton's Liberals... who weren't really like Trump in any significant sense and basically offer the same thing as Labour albeit slightly moderated. There's no way out of this mess.
There are way worse things that could happen to the US than tariffs or Trump, you could have a deepseated economic crisis at a structural level, not a mild stock market shock that's easily undone at the executive level.
The EU loves stable, boring governance. But just being stable and predictable doesn't work very well if you're stably and predictably doing the wrong thing all the time, that's why the US is rich and relevant while the EU is not.
Stability and effectiveness is of course good. Australia did a good job of blocking illegal immigration. Violent crime is still fairly low despite the best efforts of the drug legalizers and policing reformers. But the hierarchy should be:
- Stable and wise (lee quan yew)
- Chaotic but more or less wise (Trump)
- Stable but unwise (George W Bush, Clinton, Obama, EU, Australia)
- Chaotic and unwise (Pol Pot as an extreme example)
Without Trump, there's a decent chance that the net closes and it becomes effectively impossible to contest the deep-seated institutions and lobbies that want to wreck the economy so they can maximize their control and security, turn the US into the EU, shut off any dissent as hate-speech... Before Trump, what legal victories were there where people convinced others to moderate the madness? Were there many such victories? Were they permanent wins or temporary compromises? The net is closing in the EU, they're moving slowly to ban the AFD and any alternative to managed democracy and permanent decline/replacement. Vote poorly in Romania and your election will simply be undone.
If there's a high and specific mens rea requirement like "corruptly" or "willfully," you can get away with less specificity in describing the actus reus
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